Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   3/3/2021

Good afternoon everyone.

I call the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors to order for our March 3rd 1 p.m.

meeting.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 20-A16, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Liz Palmer of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District, Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District, and myself, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District,

The opportunities for the public to access and participate in the electronic meeting are posted on the Albemarle County website on the Board of Supervisors homepage and on the Albemarle County calendar.

Participation will include the opportunity to comment on those matters for which comments from the public will be received.

Also with us today, our County Executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, our County Attorney, Mr. Greg Campner,

our board clerk Ms.

Claudette Borgeson and our senior deputy clerk Mr. Travis Morris.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

Thank you, everyone.

Okay, thank you everyone.

And board, we're going to adopt our final agenda, but we do have a handful of changes here, and I'll go through them here.

Number 16 matters from the board, not on the agenda, and 17 from the county executive.

We're going to move that to the afternoon just based on the timing of the agenda, and we have a little bit of a light item.

So that'll be placed after item number 10, which is the school board report.

During matters from the board, we're going to add a discussion about subcommittee meetings on non-county Zoom platforms.

And that's at Supervisor Palmer's request.

And we will also add a discussion regarding Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center receiving the Lewis and Clark statue from the city to item 16.

That is at Supervisor Malek's request.

And on number 17, we're adding the Blue Ridge Health District COVID-19 update to item number 17.

Also, as part of the agenda, we're going to have one of the proclamations, and I'm going to ask that Supervisor Price speak to this at this point, just so we're clear what's coming up on the agenda.

But there was, and I think supervisors have had a chance to review some suggested amended language to that proclamation.

Yes, thank you, Chair Galloway.

I had asked a question and just believe that a little bit of a clarification of the actual language from the proclamation might be that revision put into the proclamation.

And so there's no objection to that.

When we come to that proclamation, the idea would be we would make that with the suggested change and then vote on that proclamation.

Are there any other changes or additions that need to be made to the agenda?

And if someone would like to make a motion to approve as amended?

So moved.

Second.

All right, the motion has been made and seconded.

We can call the vote.

Ms.

Ms.

Ms.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

Very good, thank you.

The agenda is approved and that will take us to number five, brief announcements by board members and we'll go in our speaking order for today.

Only one thing I've heard of some encouraging internet possibilities that could go vis-a-vis

a large disk.

And I've talked with staff about that, specifically Mike Culp.

And that's something that could get into the rural areas relatively quickly.

So we'll be pursuing that.

So fingers crossed, maybe we can get at least internet up and running in some areas prior to fiber.

So that's it.

Yes, I have some.

It's almost spring, which means spring cleaning.

And so I want to just let everybody know that at the IVMUC, we are going to have household hazardous waste.

I'm going to go through all the dates because nobody will remember.

But please go to the Rivanna website to find out.

But April 30th, May 1st, you can check the Times.

and that's to drop off all those old chemicals and stuff that you don't know how to get rid of, garden stuff and whatnot.

And then later on in May, we are having the bulky waste amnesty days.

The first one will be furniture and mattresses.

The second weekend is gonna be appliances and that next weekend is gonna be tires.

So all those people who are wonderful and collect the tires along the side of the road and in creeks like we do here sometimes, you can drop them all off at Ivy for free in May.

And I also wanted to tell the board

about something the SWAC committee has finally been able to do, even in spite of COVID.

You'll remember that education is one of their

things that they're supposed to be doing.

And we've finally gotten the ambassador program going at McIntyre.

They have, excuse me.

And we have volunteers out there trying to explain to people what they can and they can't put in the recycling bins.

This is really important because it increases, not only does it increase the recyclables, but it also increases the price that we get for the recyclables.

So that's a really important effort and if anybody listening or you know of anybody, they can check the Rivanna website or email ambassadors at Rivanna.org and see if they would like to join the folks that are doing it already.

We have one person from the Rio district involved and we have another person from the Scottsville district.

They said it was quite fun and people were very appreciative of the help.

and that's got it for me today.

Thank you.

I just have one announcement.

The Climate Collaborative, I think most of us know that organization as the C3, has up on their website right now

A community survey.

The survey is geared at transit needs in the Charlottesville and Albemarle

Community.

And so it would be very helpful if as many folks as possible can go in and take this survey.

I did that yesterday, and it's a really quick survey.

I'm not sure it even took me five minutes.

But it is helpful to get as many people as possible.

So the simplest way to access it is simply to go to the Climate Collaborative

website and it's right there and you can click on a link to the to the survey and it will be live until March the 28th so we pretty much have till the end of the month 28.

So participation would be greatly appreciated by board members, staff, as well as community members.

Supervisor Brinks.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

The only thing I have right now is looking to try and schedule a virtual town hall for to go over the budget.

And so just be paying attention.

There may be more of us that are looking to, you know, have these interactions with our constituents.

So just be on the lookout for when we're going to have those take place.

Thank you.

All right, Board, I do not have any announcements today, so the next item is number six, Proclamations and Recognitions.

I'm sorry, did I miss you, Supervisor Malek?

And I realized I was an idiot.

I had questions about the item on the consent agenda.

And I realized I should have said something about that when we were adopting rather than waiting until the consent agenda item.

But if I have to hold them, I was going to just send them in, but Greg said to raise them.

Were there other announcements?

Yes, I do have a couple of announcements.

Thank you.

And I will be also signing up for a town hall coming up.

The first is about water testing and the Virginia Cooperative Extension annually does a drinking water clinic if you have a well.

You can get more than $300 worth of water tests done for $60 and lots of explanation to go along with it.

I will share this email with all of the supervisors so if people can reach out directly to the Virginia Cooperative Extension and get information sent to them.

or they can go online to the extension.

and order up their kits.

And we can also connect people if they have trouble doing that.

So I will have that ready.

Also beginning on February 15th and going through April 30th is the spring burning ban in effect.

And while it feels like it's been raining so much that nothing could ever burn, surprisingly with winds, things can turn around very quickly.

So we are not to be burning anything before four o'clock in the afternoon in hopes that that is when the wind will slow down.

and no burning also within 300 feet of a woodland or brush land and must be attended at all times.

So, and there's more details as well that people can get from the Department of Forestry.

And my last item is, as we all know, communication with our constituents is the most important and most fun and sometimes most difficult aspect of our job being representative.

And I want to give a thank you to all of our radio hosts in our area on our many stations who provide us with a chance to reach out more in depth than a quick clip to take questions and to provide extra information.

And Les Sinclair is one of those hosts who has worked in our radio here for 25 years.

I've sat in his interview chair many times and hope to again, either by phone or in person.

So thank you to Les and to all of his news colleagues and congratulations on his 25th anniversary.

All right, very good.

Thank you.

Just to make Ann's point, yesterday Ann, there was a brush fire reported.

Okay.

To make your point come home.

I mean, seriously.

How could we have that?

All right.

The first is the Proclamation Celebrating Liberation and Freedom Day.

We have Yurta Fabente-Farid with us today.

Good afternoon.

Very good.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

It is my pleasure to make a motion to approve a proclamation celebrating Liberation and Freedom Day.

Whereas the County of Albemarle, in keeping with the core principles of our great United States of America, believes that all persons are created equal and possess unalienable rights to life,

Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

And whereas, on the 22nd day of September in the year 1862, a proclamation was issued by the President of the United States containing, among other things, an emancipating declaration.

and whereas on the third day of March in the year 1865 liberation of the estimated 14,000 enslaved persons or almost 52% of the total population in the Charlottesville Albemarle area was enforced

and whereas the Board of Supervisors recognizes the enduring cultural and historical significance of emancipation, acknowledges the universally cherished values of liberty and justice, and emphasizes our common humanity,

Now, therefore, be it resolved that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, do hereby recognize today, March 3rd, 2021, as Liberation and Freedom Day and celebrates the joy of the people finally being free.

Second.

Ms.

Malle?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Palmer?

Yes.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

Very good.

The motion carries.

Good afternoon, Supervisors.

This is Erta Fab and the coordinator for Equity and Accountability.

Today it's just me.

On behalf of the Office of Equity and Inclusion, I wanted to thank you all for acknowledging and celebrating this important day in local history.

We know that the road to emancipation was long and complicated and that freedom didn't come to all at the same time, which is why it is especially important to take a moment to celebrate the liberation of our local community almost three years after the Emancipation Proclamation was actually issued.

Our office is pleased to continue the board's community remembrance project and support our community partners in celebrating Liberation and Freedom Day 2021.

The organization of the prolonged virtual events this year has been led by the Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center, and they span from February 28th to March 7th, so upcoming Sunday.

In addition to Albemarle County, the events are being sponsored by the UVA Office of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,

UVA Democracy Initiative Memory Project, UVA's Office of Engagement, Lifetime Learning, the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, as well as the Descendant Enslaved Communities at UVA, among others.

In addition to this proclamation, the county is supporting the keynote address, which is going to happen this afternoon, by Christy Coleman,

the Executive Director of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation and former President and Chief Operating Officer of the American Civil War Museum.

She's a tireless advocate of the power of museums, narrative correction, diversity, and inclusiveness, and we're proud to sponsor her speech on behalf of the board's Community Remembrance Project.

Like I said, the speech itself is at 6 p.m.

this afternoon, so I know you will not be able to attend, but it will be recorded, so you will be able to watch it later if you want to.

And if you haven't had a chance to participate in any of the events yet, as I said, there'll be upcoming ones all the way through March 7th, and you can find a schedule at the Jefferson School website.

Do we have any Supervisors wish to make comments?

And the next proclamation, thank you again.

The next proclamation we have today, recognizing March 13th through the March 26th, 2021 is the 27th annual festival of the book.

We have the director of the Virginia Center for the Book, Jane Culo with us this afternoon.

Good afternoon, Jane.

I would love to read this proclamation and this is one of the festivals that by virtual it can reach even more people so it's just really great.

All right, with that proclamation, Virginia Festival of the Book.

Whereas the County of Albemarle believes that literacy is critical to active and engaged citizenship, and is committed to promoting reading, writing, and storytelling for all, both within and outside its borders.

And whereas reading stimulates the creative and intellectual growth of individuals, while also building community through shared experiences

discourse and understanding and whereas in 2021 Virginia Festival of the Book as an all virtual event draws attendees and attention to Albemarle County from around the globe while providing all programs free of charge to attendees and offering greater accessibility through live captions.

and whereas Virginia Humanities, the Virginia Center for the Book, University of Virginia, local businesses and schools, and cultural and civic organizations collaborate with the Virginia Festival of the Book to explore the world through reading, foster empathy for the stories of others, and promote literacy for all.

Now therefore be it proclaimed that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, do hereby recognize Saturday, March 13 through Friday, March 26, 2021 as the 27th annual Virginia Festival of the Book.

And we encourage community members to participate fully in the wide range of available programs and activities.

All right, we can call the vote.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Comer?

Yes.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Good afternoon.

Chair Galloway and supervisors, thank you so much for that proclamation.

And thank you for your longtime support of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

This will be our 27th outing.

This year's festival runs two full weeks, Saturday, March 13th to Friday, March 26th.

It is all virtual, it is all free, and it includes books in all genres and for all ages.

We will present two to four events a day.

So this is the first time we won't have any overlap.

And most of these events can be viewed on video afterwards if our schedule doesn't actually work for yours.

Almost all of these events include closed captions.

So we believe we've found a way to offer some of our best features and make the festival more accessible than ever.

And we invite you and everyone to explore the schedule and find events to attend.

Thank you, Jane.

I appreciate the innovative approach to

to the virtual presentation here, I would imagine that a lot of us will be able to take advantage of it in that regard.

So good luck to success for this year's festival.

Let's just have a quick question for Jane.

In thinking about the new virtual or not, you know, this format and thinking about our schools and how at least

Many of the schools right now in Albemarle County have Fridays more open, and I guess I'm connecting and more availability.

Sure.

And that's a very important part of our outreach.

We knew going into this year that we could not do what we typically do, which is book authors into those classrooms directly.

But we work very closely with a Young Readers Committee that includes educators and school librarians to help make sure we are doing everything we can to provide access.

Also,

And this is post-festival, but I will write you about this later.

This summer, we will launch a weekly series of book discussions that are targeted directly to the young reader and will provide access to that, we're hoping, across the state.

But certainly, you know, we'll be in touch with all of the local educators.

and make sure they know about it and see that that's coming their way.

It's going to be done with Mack McClellan and it's going to be called Mack's World.

Thank you.

That's really great.

Good to hear.

Any other questions or comments?

Well, I'll just pile on to say Jane will remember that out at the Crozet Library, they have had their Teen Book Club has been one of the most popular things for decades.

And so I'm really glad that you're starting up this ongoing thing.

My kids were glued to reading Rainbow as Little and now they're 38 and 45.

So it's time to start again.

Well, thank you again, Jane.

And again, great

wish you great success for your upcoming festival.

All right board next number seven from the public matters not listed for public hearing on the agenda or on matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board.

Thank you Chair Galloway.

During the time set aside for matters not listed for public hearing on the agenda individuals may address the Board of Supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board other than items listed on the agenda for public hearing.

Individuals are allowed three minutes to speak and a sign-up sheet is managed by the clerk's office.

Timekeeping is conducted through a timer.

The timer will commence when you begin speaking and this begins your allotted time.

You will be notified when the three minutes are up and you are requested to bring your comments to a close as your microphone will be muted after about five more seconds.

In order to give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the board requests that speakers adhere to the following guidelines.

When called to address the board, please state your name and, if you live in Albemarle County, your magisterial district.

Address your comments directly to the board as a whole.

If you have written statements and other supporting material, you may email them to the clerk to be included in the record.

If you represent a group or organization, you may identify the group to be recognized.

If you exceed your allotted time, you will be asked in your comments, and as mentioned, your microphone will shortly thereafter be muted.

If a speaker does not use all allocated time, the unused time may not be shared with another speaker.

Speakers are permitted one opportunity to comment during the public comment period, and back and forth debate is not permitted.

You are reminded that all comments are live streamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website.

If participating by phone, please press star nine to let us know you want to speak.

By zoom, please remain muted until you are called to speak.

Thank you and

I'm Gary Grant from the Earliesville area of the Rio District.

Do you six supervisors know that since the year 2012 you have dealt with the policy matter of your rules of procedure

at least 14 separate times, always in open meetings and not once in a closed meeting.

Do you six supervisors realize, however, that on February 17th of this year, for the first time in a decade, you thumbed your noses at the public on this policy topic and took your policy discussion about your rules of procedure into a closed meeting?

so that the public could neither hear nor see you conduct the public's business on this policy.

For full disclosure board, I'm a member of the Virginia Coalition for Open Government, but I speak for myself here, and I'm kicked.

I'm kicked at a jerk, allegedly named Justin Miller, who spoke at your February 3rd meeting spewing depraved

hateful and transphobic allegations at Scottsville Supervisor Donna Price.

But I'm also ticked at all six of you and at your county attorney.

On February 17th, you used Jerk Miller's despicable comments to take cover behind closed doors, away from the public's ears and eyes to discuss the policy matter of your rules of procedure.

A policy topic you have a long-standing record of dealing with in open meetings, again, at least 14 times over the past 10 consecutive years.

You mean not one of you six Democrat Albemarle supervisors, including one of you who is an attorney, has the courage to say, hold on, rules of procedure are a policy matter and don't meet the standard for closed meeting discussion.

Shame on this board for unanimously voting on February 17th to discuss policy in secret.

And shame on your county attorney for offering the bogus secrecy motion.

You also use the excuse of attorney-client consultation to hide a policy discussion on your rules of procedure that again, you have a historic public record of dealing with in open meetings at least 14 times over the past decade.

I know.

because I researched the past 10 years of your meeting minutes to prove this.

If your chairman or your county attorney won't apologize to the public for your bogus meeting of February 17th in closed session about your rules of procedure, which of you other five supervisors has the courage to say this was wrong?

I'm ticked, but I still thank you for spending money to stream your meetings.

All right, thank you.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon.

Can you hear me?

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

Neal Williamson.

I serve as the president of the Free Enterprise Forum, a privately funded public policy organization focused on Central Virginia governments.

Later today, you'll be receiving a presentation on the proposed community development increase in fees.

At the outset, I want to thank staff for outreach to the development community in discussions about these proposed increased fees.

It is our understanding that this fee increase is a band-aid, and a full fee study is in the offing within the next 24 to 36 months, or at least it's going to be proposed.

With that being said, I think it's worthwhile to ask a couple of questions.

Number one for the results for FY21.

We saw in FY21 the applications go pretty much steady and community development was running seven, count them seven positions down.

This is a fee-based organization.

One would think there was significant revenue increases there.

We've asked for this information broken out and we have not yet received it.

Hopefully we will see that before this goes to public hearing.

In addition, I've asked twice about the cost share.

Recently, the Commonwealth of Virginia passed the stormwater ordinance that calls for the cost to be borne by the applicant to be 60% and not more, not less than 60%, not more than 62% of the cost of administering this fee.

I once had a boss who told me you should always know whether you're the buyer or the seller in any transaction.

In this case, I think it's important to recognize who the beneficiary of the regulations are.

It's hard to argue that the beneficiary 100% of a new ARB fee is the person sitting in the building.

I think the community definitely derives benefit.

I think there should be a cost sharing for these new fees and a cost sharing

for the increase in fees.

Finally, the fees may seem de minimis in percentage of the overall project cost, but in my discussion with the development community, there have been big concerns raised regarding the interest rates ticking up slightly, as well as just 1% change in project costs.

Combined, when you put in the carrying costs of these fee increases, you may actually reach that 1%

And as you supervisors know, if a project doesn't pencil out, it doesn't get built.

So yes, these fees will harm affordable housing.

That being said, I again thank staff for their outreach, and I look forward to your conversation later today.

Thank you.

And I believe that was all of our speakers.

Thank you.

At this time we will now close matters from the public.

I understand Supervisor Mallek, if you had questions here, I think it'd probably be best we go ahead and put the motion on the table and then just ask some questions and have the conversation during the discussion period.

Mr. Campner, is that appropriate?

That'd be fine.

All right and it's been made and seconded and further discussion.

And let me start by saying I'm heartily in favor of this.

I just thought that there was going to be a chance between today and later to bring these things up.

And then I learned that today was when things should be brought up.

So these are clarification things more than anything else.

And I don't expect answers to all of them today, but at least Frank and Greg or Annie will have

ideas about other information that could be provided to everybody because some others may have the same sort of questions.

And I've done this according to the pages, so I don't know if that's the detail we want to use, but in definitions and things like that, I'm really hesitant to go through every single one of these things because it'll drive everybody crazy.

I guess, first, what is a critical resources plan?

because that is mentioned in there, but I don't see it.

I don't think it was in the definitions.

So that's something that we can learn about going forward.

And under VESCP, what does minor mean when it comes to a minor disturbance around a house construction?

Because those are other things where unless we know what it means, it's going to be harder for staff to interpret

what's going on.

On page five, I was very glad to see, and I'll forward all this to people so you don't have to write it all down.

On page five, I was so glad to see about in Schedule F, exemptions are limited to agriculture and agriculture operations because that's very different from a residential property who parks out of large acreage of woodland

to make it look prettier, but it has nothing to do with agriculture.

So we need to make sure that we're able to distinguish those two activities to protect our waterways.

Under all the Schedule F, the construction of agricultural roads is supposedly exempt until a plan of development is submitted and the road is no longer exempt is what it says.

Now, this is very confusing because

There's a great temptation, as we found out with Advanced Mills Village, to put in a farm road and then immediately after the erosion has happened, turn it into a subdivision.

So I understood several years ago that there was a time delay that had already been put in.

But I don't see that in here anywhere.

It was either two years or five years that a farm road had to be in existence before it could become

considered for residential roads.

There is a there's a 24 month delay and that's in a section of the ordinance that of chapter 17 that is not being amended today.

Right, to have that added here too would make it even clearer for people who only look at one chapter.

That's always been my confusion when I'm trying to research things by myself, so please consider that.

Exemption shall not apply to the harvesting of forest crops unless the area on which the harvesting occurs is reforested or turned into pasture.

So I guess I thought we had a 12 month requirement or a nine month requirement that that permanent pasture happen.

So I guess it'd be nice to know a little more about that too, just to be able to provide good understanding

for interpretation with how these are going to be carried out so public will know when to call and bring something to our attention and when not.

Under Section G, there are lots of agricultural engineering operations listed, but one of them is land drainage.

And I'm quite sure that Virginia frowns upon channelization, which is when people may be used to make really big ditches to draw the water away so that they could grow corn right up to the edge.

And certainly in our would be very much negative points as far as our WIP3 work for the state and Chesapeake Bay rules.

So if that comes out of state law, then we may be stuck with it.

But it is a great concern that it looks like it's something that's okay when it really should not be.

Okay at all.

Under 17303, Section C, it says single family residences separately built and disturbing less than one acre are exempt.

So what happens when they have a five acre yard?

That should not be exempt, but I don't know what happens.

It's not spelled out about what's going to happen.

And also, I don't know exactly what the timeline is or the channel chain of command is when

Without a management plan in place, someone claims that they're going to be farming and they're going to build a barn and then it turns out to be just residential.

But a lot of damage might be done in the meantime because proper information wasn't given.

So in that way, the takeaway there that I would love to get response to is does as Loudoun County requires a farm management plan for anyone participating in their land use taxation program, do we have

The authority and our willingness to say that we should have a management plan for agriculture uses whenever soil disturbance is going to happen over the 2500 square feet because, or maybe for all of them, because then that gives our staff some really good information about what's going to happen and we are less apt to be catching up.

We could be staying even or staying ahead.

So I'm going to stop there and I will promise to send Frank and Andy this cleaned up version in writing here so that they would have something to respond to.

But those were the things that I was most concerned about.

Oh, I do have one other question.

I'm sorry.

Partial release of bond.

It says partial release is given for partial stabilization or partial completion of the project.

Could someone please explain later

that how do we avoid having this just encouraging people to cut corners and say, well, I'm only going to do 30% of it or 60% of it and get that money back.

When with erosion control, I think it's really important that we get 100% of a project because we know so many of the standards aren't really catching 100% of the dirt anyway, and that's what we have to work with from the state.

So I need some extra explanation about that as well.

Stream crossings, I know that that rule has changed because it was more strict 20 years ago.

So I would like to know about stream crossings and why we're allowing, I guess, why we're allowing so many of them now that we didn't use to.

All right, I'm zooming through here.

I just want to thank Ann for that.

I had a few questions, had to go back and read all the information from the last time we discussed this.

I did not realize that this was the time.

I won't go, I don't have my questions prepared.

I was assuming I would go ahead and ask at the public hearing.

So thank you for clarifying that.

And please, would you share your questions with the entire board?

Because I'd like to

go through that list.

Yes, I just wanted to ask Supervisor Malek regarding the stream crossings.

I think that where I'm seeing these lots put in is in the rural area where it used to be that when someone was laying out a subdivision, they had to find a way to get in without crossing a stream.

And so what people are telling me about now is all throughout the district, there are places where lots are being put in and people are just choosing to put in a culvert

because it's cheaper than making a decent dry land driveway.

So this may be something where we are doing the best we can and so I would just like the board to learn more about that in general.

It used to be if you were going to buy a property, you had the obligation to make sure that it actually

could be built on.

Okay, and I guess I take it the size of the stream would decide whether or not it should be a culvert, should be a road going across, or should be a bridge.

I'm not an engineer, but I would say we shouldn't have any fords at all because forwarding is just so dangerous to the environment.

But certainly bridges or culverts, it depends on the velocity and Frank can tell us all about that.

But I mean, we used to have culverts and after the May 29th, 2018 flood, we now have a lovely bridge to give the water lots and lots of room.

to go if he wants to because our culvert got a big tree jammed right through the middle of it during that flood.

It was out of commission.

Thank you.

I saw a lot of faces pop up on the screen.

So before this turns into a full blown agenda item, I think what's best is the questions that Ann had and the comments that come out that can be sent out to the whole board.

And if we need to place this on the agenda before the public hearing or something to address some of that, then we can discuss that and

the pre-agenda otherwise we can address it the night of the public hearing because that's what this action is is to schedule that public hearing.

Mr. Campner am I misunderstanding anything here?

No that's a good summary.

And with that then I mean because we do have the motions on the table to approve the consent agenda and it was seconded are there any other things we need to throw out there supervisors to

Load up here for this and then if any come from the emails then these will be shared with everybody and we can add in there if needed.

All right, very good.

So I'll go ahead and call the vote for the consent agenda.

Ms.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Palmer?

Yes.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms.

All right, the next item, number nine.

This is our community development fees review.

And I saw Steve and others joining.

So good afternoon, Steve.

Thank you, Chair Galloway, members of the board, Steve Allshouse, Department of Community Development.

Please bear with me for a minute while I bring up my presentation.

And please let me know when you can see this.

Yes, sir.

Very good.

Well, today I am going to be talking about the proposed CDD fee updates.

I will start off by giving some general background information about what I'm going to be speaking about.

I want to talk about some of the staff work that staff has done on the fees update as of the end of February.

Also wanted to do a bit of a comparison of proposed fees with some of the fees that exist in other localities.

Wanted additionally to speak about the impact of the proposed fees on development in Albemarle County.

In particular, I'm going to be going through a few case studies that we've compiled here in CDD.

Then I'd like to talk about the remaining timeline, what's ahead of us for the next month or so.

And then after I'm done, I'd like to open up the discussion to questions.

I know there will probably be many questions about what I'm going to talk about this afternoon.

So I would like very much to have those at the end of the conversation.

So as you're watching and hearing, please take notes and please let me know any questions or comments that you have toward the end.

Let me move on then to general background.

The fees that we're talking about are covered in chapters 5, 14, 17, and 18 of the county code.

Back in 2007, some of you might be aware that the county hired a PFM group out of Arlington to do a fee study.

This was a comprehensive look at the CDD's fees, what we were doing, what we were charging.

And out of that study came a set of recommended fees, which the board adopted, I believe it was in 2008,

And at that time also the board adopted a policy whereby every two years, based on board adopted staff salary changes, the fees were also supposed to change according to and at the same rate of the changes in staff salaries.

Now that being said, the policy has not been routinely applied.

Most of our fees have not been increased since 2015.

A number of them, fewer or lesser amount have been last updated in 2014, and a handful, very few of them, were last updated in 2018.

But for the most part, most of the fees have been the same since 2015.

You might be asking yourself, why is that?

Why has this policy not been routinely applied?

My recollection is that in 2010, which would have been the first two-year block after the fees were adopted, of course we had the Great Recession.

My recollection is that politically,

The thought was it might not be the best time to adjust fees.

I can't speak for the period from 2010 onward, but I do know that things have not been updated since 2015.

The issue for us in CDD is that the lack of an increase since 2015, for the most part, has increased the disparity between what we take in in CDD in terms of revenues and what our costs are.

Fundamentally, the point I'm trying to make is that we in CDD are providing services in 2021 and we're charging the 2015 price for the most part.

So just within that context, keep that in mind.

Now, the other point that I would like to make, and this was alluded to earlier when you heard from a member of the public, what we're talking about today should be seen as an interim step.

That's to say we're going to be proposing fees, but really in what we think should be going on eventually is a fee study similar to what the county did back in 2007.

And we likely will come to the board sometime in FY23 asking for funding for a study of that sort.

The idea would be the study would be done and we would be looking at potentially implementing a new fee structure in FY24.

That's some time off in the future.

What I'm going to be talking about is the immediate proposal.

We transition then to the work that we've done as of the end of February.

You have in your packet a set of tentative calculations for updates to existing fees using the 2008 board adopted policy.

As I mentioned,

Most of these have not been updated since 2015 and by that policy, mostly increases that we're proposing would be around 10% or a little bit over.

Some would be higher, some would be lower depending on when the last time was the fees were updated.

Additionally, staff has looked at some of the services we provide, particularly in reference to architectural review, building inspections, and WPO-related activities, and we are proposing new fees based on the relative time that it takes to do the tasks at hand.

Finally, I do want to point out that we are proposing a technology fee, and I want to talk a little bit about that.

This proposed technology fee would be a mechanism, a way to fund the replacement for the county's CountyView system.

Now, perhaps not everybody listening to this presentation is familiar with CountyView, but what CountyView is, is a software package that the Department of Community Development and the public can and does use to track development activity in the county.

The problem is that CountyView, or CV as I've labeled it here, is very old.

It's 16 years old.

Some of you might be thinking, is it really time for a replacement?

Well, if you put it within the context of what the county did recently with its website, I would make the case that yes, it is time we begin to think about replacing CountyView.

We replaced the website, and likewise, it's CountyView's turn.

Another way of looking at this within a historical context is in 2005 when County View was being developed and implemented.

We did not have smartphones.

We did not have tablets.

We were talking about an era when the technology was flip phone and laptop.

And so when you think about that in that term, this is a very old technology that we're talking about.

Let me talk a little bit about some other work that staff has done as of the end of February.

I want to talk about our outreach efforts.

Our goal here was to get community input about our proposed fees and about the processes that we're looking at.

The first thing that we did was we sent out an email blast to everyone who subscribes to the county's email system.

We also sent out an email group to anyone who has done business either building or planning work with CDD in the past two years and in both cases we were alerting people to the fact that we were proposing changes

We were referring them to our website.

They had a link to the documents underlying the proposals, as well as giving people an opportunity to leave feedback via a feedback box.

Now, the deadline for leaving feedback on the website was February 26, 2021.

The last count I had for the number of unique web page visits was 650.

And of that, we had exactly one comment.

We did not have more than that.

This is a relatively recent attempt to get feedback.

I'm not sure how many people felt comfortable leaving feedback on the company's website, but we did get one comment of 650 visits.

A second outreach effort that we made was this past January.

We met on January 19th with members of the Blue Ridge Home Builders Association, Jeanine Tapscott, the Free Enterprise Forum, Neal Williamson, from whom you heard earlier this afternoon, Southern Development, Charlie Armstrong, and Great Eastern Development, David Mitchell.

Additionally, on January 21st, we met with representatives from the Southern Environmental Law Center, Travis Attila, and also the Piedmont Environmental Council, Mr. Christopher Hawk.

Now, several themes emerged from these outreach efforts.

One was that the group of builders and developers really did want to see some sort of comparison with what other jurisdictions were doing.

And this makes perfectly good sense.

So we agreed to do that.

And they're going to talk at length about that later in the presentation.

Participants were also wondering about the impact of these fees on projects.

And so they were looking for case studies.

And I'm going to talk some more later about what we did in that regard.

Another issue was about the cost recovery percentage.

Would it be the same for the new fees as for the old?

And this touches a little bit on what Mr. Williamson was talking about earlier.

But as defined here, the idea is this.

Of those services for which Albemarle County CDD provides and charges a fee, what percent of our costs are covered by those fees?

I've done some research into that and it turns out that by that definition the number is about 40% and as I'll say and I'll say it again in the future, the ratio for the new fees is about the same as the old.

There are other ways you can look at this issue.

I'm happy to look at it from different angles, but by that definition, they have made some progress in research.

Well, let me transition.

I do want to talk about, first, fee comparisons with other jurisdictions.

And so let me move on to that slide.

What we've done is we've looked at other Virginia jurisdictions' development-related fees in order to determine if the updated levels of existing fees

and proposed new fees are reasonable.

We looked at a number of jurisdictions, some with a specific idea of looking at a portion of their fees that were most relevant to what we were proposing.

For example, we looked at Fairfax County and Montgomery County, particularly because they have a technology fee.

It turns out that Roanoke County also has a technology fee, but we'll talk about that in a minute.

We also looked at the city of Alexandria because Alexandria has a certain number of ARB type fees and we thought that those would be relevant for the work that we do here in CVD.

And we also looked at Charlottesville because it's our neighboring jurisdiction and I just wanted to check in and see what's going on with the city and their fee structure.

After meeting with members of the building community and developers, we also took their suggestions to heart and generally looked at fees in Hanover and RICO, James City County, and Roanoke County.

These were jurisdictions that were identified to us as being comparable and so we wanted to see how our fee proposed fees would compare with these existing fees in other jurisdictions.

Now before I transition on to the next slide, one thing I do want to mention, excuse me, sorry, is that it's very difficult.

It's a little bit tricky to compare fees across jurisdictions.

And there are three main reasons for this.

The first reason is there's no set format for

the taxonomy or the way that fees are presented across jurisdictions.

So you have to kind of glean, you have to kind of do a little bit of detective work to make sure that you're comparing apples to apples.

The other issue is that practices might and can and do vary across jurisdictions in terms of how they apply fees.

So there's that issue.

And finally, this is a major, major methodological issue.

Many jurisdictions are in the same boat we are.

They have not updated their fees in several years.

And so when I'm talking about fees that we're proposing in Albemarle County and comparing them against fees that exist in other jurisdictions, one major point you have to keep in mind is that the fees in the other jurisdictions have not been updated as of 21.

They're all running behind.

So

Our fee for a particular function might be X, it might be less than X in another jurisdiction, but please keep in mind that other jurisdictions have not updated their fees recently either.

That being said, let me transition on to the next slide and I will walk you through this.

What I was asked to do as part of this comparison is to look at several major categories of fees.

I looked at building permits, because everybody does those, site plan fees, rezoning applications, and then subdivision fees.

And what I've done

For our purposes is I've gone through and I've looked at what are arguably major fees that everybody charges for and has somewhat similar methodologies for applying these fees.

And I've looked at what we've proposed and you can see those differences here in this column.

And then I've taken the average in this column of non-Albemarle fees.

I've tried to keep as little clutter on this page as I could.

By the way, I'm going to be sending to board members the spreadsheet that underlies this slide because I know you'll want to look at it in more detail than I'm going to at this time.

But what I've looked at is the average for the non-Albemarle fees.

And these averages include the city of Charlottesville and then the four jurisdictions that we're seeing as being broadly comparable to Albemarle County.

So Hanover County, Enrico County, Roanoke and James City County, Roanoke County and James City County.

And you'll look at these and you'll see, well, gosh, Steve, you know, our fees look like they're higher pretty much across the board with one glaring exemption.

And what's going on with that?

Well, again, what I would come back to is be very careful when you're looking at this column, because these fees aren't necessarily updated.

In fact, if you'd like some examples, I can rattle them off.

What was interesting to me in

The city of Charlottesville, for example, subdivision fees had last been updated in June of 2014.

In Roanoke County, certain building fees, believe it or not, had not been updated since September of 2004.

And in Hanover, there were building fees that had not been updated since July of 2016.

Amazingly, one set of fees in Roanoke County had not been updated, apparently, since June of 1990.

So, just bear in mind these are not necessarily comparing apples with apples.

Now, you're probably looking at this and you're thinking, what the heck is going on with commercial building?

You've got 2,000 listed for the proposed fees to build a building.

And by the way, I had to make certain assumptions about what we were building if we were going to compare fees.

What I looked at in this particular case was a 10,000 square foot building of stated value of about $3 million on one acre of land.

and the big discrepancy here that you see, this 10,000 figure versus ours is this.

In a number of jurisdictions, let me check my notes, Hanover, Henrico and the city of Charlottesville, the localities would charge fees according to the dollar value of the structure of what was being built, whereas we were charging or we're charging an Albemarle based on the square footage.

So that can and does make a big difference.

If I look at the localities that don't charge by dollar value, I'm looking primarily at James City and Roanoke Counties and their fees would be 1,000 for the city of James, excuse me, for James City County, the comparable fee would be about $1,365.

And for Roanoke County, the fee would be about 3,320.

So you can see this number really does skew to the high end because of the fee structure in three of the jurisdictions.

So overall, yes, we are talking about higher amounts here, but I've given you the caveat that these aren't necessarily current, and I've explained the huge differential that exists here.

If I were to take an average of all this, our fees would come in at about $2,000.

If I took the average of these comparables over here, including this admittedly inflated figure, it would come to about 2179.

I am fully cognizant that this number is a bit misleading.

However, again, I think I've explained the difference between these numbers and also why these numbers apparently look so low.

I'll move on and again I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have about this comparison.

Again, this had to be done at a fairly high level and I had to look at fees that were pretty much charged across the board by all and were somewhat comparable and somewhat in terms of business practices similar to what we do in Albemarle County, but even with that it was still a very tricky task.

Let me transition on then to some of the case studies that we looked at.

This was instructive as well.

We examined a set of six recent developments in Albemarle County.

We looked at the fees that historically were charged on these projects.

And by the way, these are all projects that have been done either completed or underway in the last couple of years.

These are not projects from 10 years ago.

For the most part, these are things that are either completed or underway in the last two years.

And what we did is we calculated the levels that would have been charged or actually were charged under the existing fee structure.

and then we compared that with what would have been charged or what would be charged under the proposal fees that you see before you.

And then we determined the difference between the two.

Well, what projects did we look at specifically?

And again, I'm gonna be sending you this spreadsheet as well as part of a packet after my comments today so you can have a little bit more time to digest this.

But we looked at some that should be familiar to you.

I believe one was 999 East Rio Road, a well-known project.

So it was a rezoning.

Looked at some residential development.

These two properties here, which were both in the rural areas and both about 2,500 square feet.

This Oak and Croft properties, if you've been in the area a long time, you know that this was the old Oak and Croft winery.

There are some houses that are being built out there.

This four-house road project is also in a rural area.

It sits on about 22 acres of land.

This next project is quite key.

We were asked to look at the impact on an affordable housing unit.

Stargazer Lane is part of the Emerson Commons project in Crozet.

It's a townhouse as seen as being an affordable dwelling unit.

And then we looked at some commercial projects, these two down here.

This one, 601 5th Street Landing, is down at 5th Street.

It's also known as the Starbucks Project.

It sits on a personal land that's distinct from the rest of 5th Street.

And it's a commercial building that contains a number of tenants, is my understanding.

And finally, we looked at 1576 Avon Street extended, another commercial building that's out on Avon Street.

I think the use there, if I recall correctly, is some sort of collision service that's going to be going in.

In any case, what we did is we looked at the total fees that were charged under the current regime.

You can see those here.

And the total fees that would have been charged or would be charged under the proposed structure.

And then finally, this last column lists the differences.

Now, there are a number of ways you can look at this data.

You could look at this in percentage terms and be thoroughly shocked, maybe in some cases or maybe not.

What you'll notice right off the bat is that it's not simply a 10% increase.

Why is that?

Well, yes, most of our fee proposals for existing fees are

InVision to increase by about 10%.

But we have also on top of that some of the new fees that we're proposing.

So in some cases, these are more than 10%.

When I was looking at this, I wanted to put this into a larger context about the overall cost or overall value of the projects being effective.

And so if you'll bear with me, I've added on this last column.

And what I'm looking at here

is either the assessed value per the January 2021 reassessment or the estimated assessed value.

What do I mean by estimated?

Well, in some cases, some of these buildings have not been completed.

So I've got the construction cost data from our building permits.

I've added those on to the currently

assessed value of the properties, and I've come up with these numbers.

So some of these, the majority of them are actual numbers, they're not estimated.

For example, Stargazer Lane, the affordable townhouse that I mentioned earlier, has an actual assessed value of $308,700, for example.

So what I wanted to look at was these increases in dollar values

and I wanted to put them in context of the overall value of the project and that's what this last column does.

So, for example, with 999 East Royal Road, this rezoning, the increase in the cost would have been $1,812 by our reckoning.

The assessed value of the property is $448,000.

That would translate into about four-tenths of one percent additionally.

for

is familiar with development and is very knowledgeable about things like carrying costs.

What this person said to me is that these dollar increases might in many cases be charged up front and it might be a while before the developer or the builder gets that money back.

I'm aware of that.

I'm fully aware there are a number of different ways you can slice and dice this data and look at it.

But for my purposes, for the purposes of this discussion, I wanted to stick with the results in this column.

And again, I was sending this to you as a spreadsheet.

So I want to transition now to our next slide.

But what we've done so far is I've looked at the general background regarding CDD fees update.

I've talked about the staff work that's been done.

I've talked about comparisons with other jurisdictions.

And I've talked very briefly about some case studies.

So what I want to do next was lead you through the remaining timeline.

and that's this.

We're here on March 3rd.

I'm giving my presentation to you today.

On March 23rd, the Planning Commission is scheduled to have a public hearing on Chapter 18 fees.

I believe it's also going to be including some fees for Chapter 14, which is our subdivision ordinance.

And then on April 21st of this year, we're coming back for a public hearing on the fees that you see before you today.

That being said, if anyone listening to this podcast, this broadcast has any additional information that they would like to get about the fees, we have, as I mentioned earlier, on our website, you can go to Community Development and go down here where it says Community Development Fees and click the link and that will give you links to the underlying documents, which contains a wealth of information.

All right, thank you very much.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, you're up first.

Not at this time, but thank you very much.

First, I have a clarifying question.

When you were giving us the information about the commercial building permits for non Albemarle County projects, and you had the 10,000, I think it was 124 or something like that,

Yes, absolutely.

It is a bit confusing and thank you for the question.

Basically, some of the other jurisdictions were looking at the total building value.

So you might have, say, a $3 million building that's being put up, and they were charging, according to a formula, for example, X number of cents per square foot.

And as I was looking at what that would have done with a hypothetical case in Albemarle versus the other jurisdictions,

You could get a wide variance between what the average was in these jurisdictions that were employing that methodology versus our methodology, which is looking at the cost per square foot.

And this brings up a really good point.

Practices are not consistent across jurisdictions.

So I don't know how, for example, Henrico County came up with, you know, 13 cents per square foot or whatever, 13 cents for every thousand dollars of value.

I really don't know that at this point, but it does make a difference.

So what you did was you looked at, you averaged all these different things together to get that 10,000.

Exactly.

So I looked at other jurisdictions, including the city of Charlottesville, what they would have charged under their fee regime, counties of Hanover, Henrico, Roanoke, James City County.

And then I took all that information, what each jurisdiction would charge for that particular hypothetical building, and I took the average.

Let me ask the question this way that might help.

Give us an example of a county that charges by the total cost of the building of a commercial building and something that is like Rio 999, for instance, something we're all familiar with.

What kind of cost would be

And that will be on the spreadsheet that I'll send to you.

But let me just throw one off the top of my head.

For example, Hanover and Henrico, I think in Hanover County, if I'm remembering correctly, and this will be on the spreadsheet, the cost would have been something like $20,000 for the building permit.

So that's just an example.

You'll see more when I send you the spreadsheet, but that would be an example.

And again,

The numbers that were showing you, the averages were being skewed up highly by these three jurisdictions, Hanover, Henrico, and the city of Charlottesville that were doing it that way.

Okay, thank you.

And the one thing that was puzzling to me was I didn't see, maybe you talked about this, a comparison of the total number of permits that we require versus, you know, how are we as compared to other

counties, when I was reading through these lists of all the permits we require, I was surprised by some of them.

Just for instance, apparently we're supposed to get a permit to put in a wood stove.

Unfortunately, no, that's beyond the scope of what I'm looking at.

Although I certainly think that at some point, if there's general board interest, we might be able to take a look at that.

So if somebody is building a house in Albemarle County and they need a building permit, that does not cover

Obviously, it's not going to cover the plumbing and the electrical and mechanical.

Is that true, the permitting?

No, I didn't see any jurisdiction combine them into one major fee, for example.

They were all listed separately.

It's really interesting to me how little uniformity there is across jurisdictions in terms of what's being charged and sort of the descriptors that go along with the charges.

I was talking with somebody recently who had tried doing something like this several years ago and this person ran into the same problem.

He said it's very confusing.

It's almost Byzantine.

I'm sorry, we have a little chat from Michael Dillinger.

Thank you.

In our single family dwelling permits, oops, I lost it.

That might be the fee does include the trade permits.

Okay.

And that would mean the electrical and plumbing and mechanical, I'm assuming, per single family dwelling.

Okay.

So anyway, my next question, and I think that's all of my questions for right now, this one is, what percentage are we trying to cover with our, what percentage of the activity building and permitting activity are we trying to cover with our fees

of our cost, obviously community development does some other things besides building permits, et cetera.

And also how does that compare?

The answer to your first question is we're not shooting at this point for a particular number.

I can tell you that, again,

For the activities for which we charge a fee, I've calculated about 40%, but we're not shooting necessarily for anything higher or lower than that.

That's what I believe we're currently covering.

The other way you could look at this is you could say, okay, of all of the

of all the activities of our entire budget, what percentage is being covered by fees?

That would be lower because we're not charging for everything we do.

And I think that's more like 30%.

Again, we're not shooting for a particular threshold level.

To answer your second question, I'm not aware and I've not looked at this question.

I don't know what the respective percentages would be or are in other jurisdictions.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much.

I think we're in asking questions right now and I just have one basic question to clarify.

But then I think, Ned, we're going to have the opportunity to come back and talk about this again and do another round robin, it would seem like.

So this is questions.

I think it's really important

for the public and for us to understand exactly what these fees, if we raise them, and in general, what do the fees cover?

I mean, what does that

What is the reward for those fees?

Does it go back and pay for positions in community development?

Does it pay for people?

I would be happy to report on that.

I didn't actually cover this because, really, you're talking about the expenditure side of the equation, and I was focused on the revenue side.

Well, I mean, I'm not asking percentages.

Well, I mean, you're certainly covering—

You're certainly covering some of your staffing costs because we are a service organization.

And last time I checked, 92% of CDD's expenditures were related to staff salaries and benefits.

At least that's my read of our budget.

So you are covering staff salaries.

And I see that Ned, that Jody's popped up and said she, I'd like Jody to speak to this if that works, because Jody said she could speak to this issue.

Thank you, Supervisor McKeel.

Just wanted to let you know that any fee increases that we would realize should these fees be adopted simply goes into the general fund.

So that will help us across the entire board for the county.

And to a point that both you and Supervisor Palmer made earlier, when Steve had opened, he had shared that this is an initial approach on fees.

The percentage of cost recovery for each type of fee was set in the 2008 adopted fee plan.

And we're thinking that it's time to re-examine that and take another look at that.

And so what is our hope is that for fiscal year 23, we plan to bring forward a proposal to the board asking for a fee study at that time.

So this is a tide us over based on the previous fee approach, which was using

salary increases from the staff that have been approved by the board of course as a proxy for cost increases.

So while Supervisor Palmer had asked, you know, what percentage are we going for?

We really are looking at about a 10% increase in simply staff salary costs from 2015 forward.

So we're looking to bring that forward and we are hoping to add a couple additional fees as Mr. Allshouse had mentioned to cover prospectively things like technology, which we're very interested in upgrading on behalf of staff and on behalf of our customers as well.

And I think I just heard Steve say, and I just want to make sure I'm accurate on this because I wrote it down, that we are covering about 40% of our cost right now and 30% of what we're doing.

What I said was, for the services for which we charge a fee, we're covering about 40%.

If you were to look at the department's budget totally and then look at what we're taking in terms of fee revenue, the number is 30%.

Thank you.

I have no questions and we'll wait, I guess, my turn to do comments.

Supervisor Price?

No questions at this time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Alshouse, for your presentation.

All right.

I've heard it twice.

I just want to make sure I've got it right.

The 40% number that then goes to the 30%.

I get that logic.

No, we're not.

However, as a public institution, there's a philosophical question about the extent to which we should be recouping our costs.

And this sounds like, and Jody, you, well, let me just ask the question.

If we had applied the previous policy,

and did not sometimes do it and sometimes not.

All this is in place and we followed it.

Is that what you're suggesting the new fees will be?

Well, the fees were last updated as of 2015.

I was not part of CDD at the time, so I don't know what the methodology was.

I'm assuming that, and this is an assumption, I'd have to go back and look at the actual history, but it's possible that the fees were updated.

Per increases in staff salaries, although, again, I would have to verify that.

And what we're proposing for existing fees is an increase based on the change in staff salaries since 2015, if that's the last time that the fees were updated.

And in cases where they were updated more recently than that, the increase would be less.

And in cases where the fees were updated before 2015, for example, some fees were updated in 2014,

So I guess as we head to the public hearing I think that to me I'd like to know if the policy was implemented in 08 and followed.

I understand why it wasn't but I just guess for me to help wrap my head around this

The technology point, I certainly would be in favor of having technology improve systems and understand that there's a cost involved up front.

but eventually that should result in some savings and I don't think that's a point that should get lost in the conversation because it could be a way to help with I mean I get how fees are going to be concerning to different people that have to pay them but if ultimately there's a savings in that via technology then this board should be clear in deciding well either we're going to help reduce the cost of the fees or we're going to retain that money as revenue

I look at this kind of like the dealer processing fee.

I get that while we compare ourselves to other localities, really it's regional, right?

If somebody in Charlottesville charges a processing fee that's too high compared to everybody else, that can dip into their revenue.

So they kind of, you know, there's a reason Northern Virginians are higher than what we have here in this area, Richmond, etc.

but it is a revenue generating fee.

And is it appropriate and what is it going to and all of that is an important part of the question.

So, you know, I think that, I think Supervisor McKeel and some others were getting at that.

It's like, well, what is this going to?

Just like we do with anything else.

It goes into the general fund understood, but theoretically, I think we could say, well, here's how much of the cost it would cover because that seems to me to be the first

That's more of a comment than a question.

Did you have reactions there?

Right.

The estimate of the 4% fee that we're proposing was based on a placeholder number that we had looked at.

And again, a placeholder, a very tentative number we had thought about in terms of what the system might cost us.

The idea would be that this replacement for County View would be something that could be shared among departments in the County of Albemarle.

We looked at what we thought might be the useful life of that system, and then we looked at our

our estimated fees, and we came up with a number of 4%, which we think would be reasonable.

And by the way, when I looked at technology fees in other jurisdictions, the three that I'm aware that have them, 4% was right in line with Fairfax's fee, for example.

I think Roanoke's was 3%.

So it's not unusual for other jurisdictions to have a technology.

I mean, let me rephrase that.

So I don't have any other questions at this point.

Yes, thank you very much and thank you Steve.

I do have a concern, I know in one of your earliest slides you mentioned that the need to increase the fees because of the fact that more was coming in and you didn't have the staff.

So I'm wondering if you did have the staff

would those fees need to increase?

That's one thing.

And I'm sure they need to be reviewed, but I'm also worried about the fee increase.

I'm not saying we don't need it, but I'm worried about that regarding affordable housing, its effect on affordable housing.

And I'm wondering if there's a question whether or not the fee

the increase is due to the fact that maybe the time that we're taking in approving applications.

Now, if a developer doesn't turn in everything, didn't dot their I's, cross their T's, that's one thing.

But if they did do that, do we have people that look at applications that are maybe more efficient than others?

Because I think time is money.

So I can speak only to the methodology for the recommendations and that's based on overall staff salaries.

Okay, and what about I mean, if we were to get a better IT system going, would that then bring savings that then we could have

Potentially.

And I wouldn't want to speculate too much, although I will tell you that anytime there's an increase in productivity, or anytime you're talking about an increase in your IT infrastructure and it leads to an increase in productivity, that would tend, holding everything else constant, that would tend to bring your costs down.

And I think, if nothing else, if we were able to streamline things through, and this is

Speculation on my part, but if we were to streamline our operations through the use of an enhanced IT system, then we know that in the development community, time is money.

That's pretty much an established point.

Yes, thank you, Chair.

I just wanted to share that these fee increases are based on costs of staff salaries and benefits.

So it isn't really the processing time, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, it's really the cost of people and benefits in processing all these things.

So that's thing number one.

Point number two is absolutely we are looking to improve technology.

And with technology, we are looking to dramatically improve our processing efficiencies so that we can do a faster, better, cleaner job for all of our development community, both single family residences that are being built by individuals all the way through to large scale developments.

Because right now, the tools that we have are very clunky and cumbersome for both staff and for

our development community to try to use.

So we're really looking to build a better future for the county that's a much more sustainable, efficient, effective process.

Do we have an IT system identified so that we can, the board can in its budget look at purchasing something like that?

You are absolutely teeing up all the right questions for the County Executive's budget presentation for later today.

So you will be hearing more about that later.

So we're on it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Why don't we go ahead through?

Supervisors, it sounded like they had comments to make just in the interest of the timing of this agenda item.

So I'll go through our round of comments.

Well, I want to make sure we get this agenda item going.

If it sounds like we're going to be discussing this at a different point.

Can I please remind everyone the chat is there that if you want to chime in and talk, don't put information out in the chat, please.

This is a public meeting that all information should be put out on the record.

Supervisors, it gets difficult to be following the chat and what people are saying live.

So please raise your hand either via the chat or to speak.

The question was about fees for ADUs.

Is this something that's going to come up at another point in time for conversation, or do we need to address it?

It sounds to me like it can come up during the budget and other conversations.

I mean, the point here is to get to the scheduling of the public hearing, if I'm not mistaken, which was already even scheduled, right?

Yes, sir.

Do you have any other comments here, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

I do have some comments.

Thank you.

And I'll try to be brief.

Years ago, the Albemarle County Service Authority developed a policy where growth pays for growth.

And what they did was the finance department got a formula together to figure out how much connection fees would be for new buildings.

and for instance, if you're going to put a sewer interceptor out 29 North to a new development like North Point, that infrastructure needed to be paid for by connection fees.

And the idea was that the people that have been on the system for years, they've got to cover all those maintenance costs, all the renewal, all the replacement, all that sort of thing.

which was huge.

and we didn't want to burden the folks that had been on the system a long time with the growth costs.

Got a lot of pushback about that, but I'm very proud of the Albemarle County Service Authority for keeping that system in place all these years.

And the question came up, well, are you making, you know, if water becomes too unaffordable, you know, what do you do about that?

Well, that's a subsidy issue aside from how you structure your fees.

When you're extrapolating that kind of situation to our system here, I mean to general government, I think that we should be figuring out what percentage of these new construction should be covered by permitting fees because we know that the people who have been living here already, already have to cover the cost of schools and infrastructure and all the fire, rescue, all those kinds of things.

They do end up paying the cost of growth because our system doesn't allow for impact fees, etc.

So I would

encourage, I would really like to see the CDC, CDD to come back and say this is the kind where we would suggest this policy as an amount that we would cover for new construction.

I fully approve of rates going up.

I think affordable housing is incredibly important, but it has to be subsidized.

and I don't really see how these fees, I don't think we should be considering that in the context of this.

This discussion, I know Jeff Richardson apparently is going to talk about this later and maybe he's got a much better idea.

But I would encourage us to try to cover new construction with our fees.

And that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And it's funny, Liz, because I was thinking exactly that, that when you talk about growth, covering growth, right?

So the fees being able to cover growth.

I agree.

And

While I don't think Albemarle County and government should be making money, I do think that we have to be able to cover the cost.

If not, exactly what Liz is referencing happens and the folks that aren't even involved and have nothing to do with this end up in a way covering the cost.

And so I think I'm pretty pleased about this.

I really appreciate that you went to like businesses.

I like some of the case studies that you showed us.

So as far as I'm concerned, I want to hear from the public, but we hear constantly from the developers that we're too clunky and we're too slow.

and if you keep doing the same thing and don't change anything, you can't expect a different outcome.

And so I think this could move us forward.

I'm excited about the technology.

Any technology in this day and age that's 16 years old needs to be replaced, period.

Done with that.

So having said all that, I think you get the idea of where I'm going with this.

I certainly would support taking this to public hearing and then coming back for a discussion.

Excuse me, thank you.

Having been involved in the 2008, 2009, and 2010 discussions about fees, there was a big debate about whether to be at 80% or 100%

Cost Recovery.

And there were arguments, some of our current speakers are among them who said, well, there's some public benefit for this process, therefore the public should pay a little bit of it.

But I am shocked to find that it's only 40% that the growth industry is providing when this is half of what I was anticipating based on what we had adopted back then.

So I encourage you to go forth and

Keep modernizing here.

The technology is something that will help everybody, and so I'm looking forward to that.

especially I'm sensitive to Liz's example about the growth, paying for growth because those were terms that were used during the boom in six, seven and eight when people were absolutely tearing their hair out about the long time residents were getting completely clobbered by carrying the cost of everything.

So I'm very much in favor of getting this back on track and I do remember there was a temporary delay in 2010 for the

I appreciate Steve's dilemma about it being tricky to look at jurisdictions and a perfect example of that is when I was new on the board.

I talked to Pat Cofield, who was the manager over in Augusta, and I said, why are your community development fees so much lower than our numbers, staff numbers so much lower than ours?

And he laughed and patted me on the head and he said, look at your book.

You have five departments in that one department.

Duh, you have that many people, whereas mine are five different departments.

So that's always an example that pops to mind when people are trying to say, well, you shouldn't charge more than XYZ County.

I'm really taken by the 0.4% increase based upon the increase in assessed value of the project.

That is so clinical and

I like things where you can use numbers to have to do something and evaluate something so I like that.

So I will stop talking because I think I've done everything but we're in the minimum wage situation here where our cost of living has gone up 55% and our wage is still $7.

Supervisor Price.

You're muted if you're speaking.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

I will largely echo the comments of the other supervisors and Mr. Halshaus, again, thank you for the presentation, but also Ms.

Falardo, the work that all of your department has done to prepare for this and work forward.

I think what we all see is that something has to be done

and we recognize that this is going to be an interim step into what is much larger and more complicated process.

And in that regard, Mr. Allis-Hels, I think the way that you have been able to go to other jurisdictions and identify both the difference between a square footage

Fee versus a value fee really helps us to understand better really how complicated this is.

One other area that I would be interested in is whether it's possible to differentiate the fees for new construction versus rehabilitation or remodeling.

One of the areas of deep concern that I have in my district are the residents who are in existing buildings and existing homes and are struggling to afford to maintain them.

So whereas a lot of expenses, and I'll just use that rather than fees, a lot of expenses on new construction can easily be rolled into say a 30-year mortgage and not be as significant.

If you're already living in a home with a mortgage,

trying to make some errors or improvements and you have to get an additional loan on that.

I believe that that is an aspect of affordable housing that is often perhaps not given the same attention it might need.

So as we move forward, I would really appreciate what considerations can be made in that regard.

But otherwise, I really have no other questions right now.

Again, I thank you for the work you've done.

I look forward to the public hearing.

I do believe that we must approve some measure of interim relief at this point while you undergo the broader study, which we know will have to be delayed in some respect because if nothing else, our comprehensive plan is under review.

So I do recognize the other responsibilities that you have.

All right.

I don't have any additional comments at this time.

I mean, I can make those at the public hearing.

So I'm good with no questions.

Well, that's all we can ask right there.

That's what everybody should be setting out to do today.

So thank you for that.

And thank you for everybody that was here to the resource as we work through the item.

So it is scheduled for, just to remind, it is April 21st.

April 21st.

I had it in front of me and then it went away.

And that is when the public hearing will be there.

So, of course, those who wish to send in comments or words to the supervisors, you can certainly do that and or participate in the public hearing.

All right.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you.

So the next

The next item here is our number 10 board to board, our February 21 quarterly report from the Albemarle County School Board to the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors.

And we have with us Chair Graham Page of the school board.

Good afternoon, Chairman Galloway and to the supervisors.

I have probably four main items to report to you today during our board to board meeting.

The first item is about the 2021, or 2021-22 rather, budget presentation.

On February the 18th, Dr. Matthew Haas brought his funding request before the school board.

We have held two work sessions on the budget so far.

On tomorrow night, we will hold a public hearing and a third work session on the proposed funding request.

At our March 11th board meeting, we will approve the request.

As the board has been involved in developing our budget, we have discussed examining our hiring market data since it has not been revised for 10 years.

We lose employees to Charlottesville because of the city's higher pay grade.

An examination of our hiring market could possibly include more localities that are similar to Albemarle, instead of primarily including the localities that surround us.

On March 15th, I will be back with you to present our funding request.

Secondly, I have an update on the board's plan for reopening our schools.

We will open in stage four on March 15th.

This move was approved by the board on February 11th.

In this stage pre-K to third graders will be able to receive four days of in-school instruction each week and grades four to twelve will have two days of in-school instruction.

We expect approximately 7,600 students to receive in-person instruction with nearly 6,000 other students opting to receive virtual.

This move will help to alleviate the problems with internet access for some of our students.

Even though the division distributed hotspot devices for homes without sufficient internet access for virtual learning, only 60% of respondents to a division survey reported that the access they have at home enables them to fully participate in synchronous virtual learning.

A third matter to inform you about is the departure of one of our valued employees.

I regret to report that Dr. Nick King, former Director of Student Services, has left our division.

Dr. King left in January to relocate to his native North Carolina.

He accepted the position of Chief Academic Officer for Johnston County Schools, a school division of 37,000 students.

We miss Nick very much, and although we will not be able to replace him, we hope to find someone who can fill that role for the school division.

Finally, I have an update on the renaming process for two of our schools.

Virginia L. Murray Elementary School is the fourth school in the division to have its name reviewed following the school board's 2018 decision to evaluate all schools named for individuals.

More than 92% of local school community residents responding to an online survey said that the current name of Virginia L. Murray Elementary School should remain the same.

The survey was conducted by the school's Community Advisory Committee as part of their review of the school's name.

Committee members were chosen from those who expressed interest in serving, and the committee consisted of school and division staff, parents, community members, and full Mary School alumni.

Additionally, two committee members are leading a parallel student committee that is working closely with the advisory committee and is intended to ensure that student voices factor into the name review process.

The Student Committee designs activities to keep students informed of the Advisory Committee's progress and elicit name suggestions.

On February 10, the Advisory Committee hosted a public meeting to hear from community residents about the online survey, which drew 458 responses.

While the large majority of survey participants supported retaining the school's current name, the most popular suggestion for a new name was Ivy Elementary School, a reference to the school's location in the western part of the county.

The latest updates regarding the Murray Elementary School naming review are available on the school division's school naming review website, along with current information on all school naming reviews.

The committee's recommendation on a school name will be provided to Dr. Haas, who in turn will make recommendations to the school board.

The board will make the final decision, which will take effect hopefully on July 1st, if the name is to change.

The other school that is undergoing a name review is the Lab School for Student-Centered Learning, formerly Murray High School.

The new school was formed last year when the school board approved the merger of the charter middle and high schools to form one school.

The school is currently serving 158 students in grades 6 through 12.

Murray Community School was a name preferred by 59.9% of survey participants, and the Community School of Albemarle was supported by 33.2% of those responding.

Other names in the top five included the Lab School of Albemarle with 30.1%, the Community School of Innovation, 21.7%, and Rivanna Community School, 20.2%.

The advisory committee will follow the usual procedure of recommending a name to Dr. Haas, who will then make a recommendation to the board.

No questions at this time.

Thank you very much, Chair Page.

Really appreciated the update.

Sounds good.

Thank you.

No, I have no questions.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you very much for the presentation.

So I thank you very much for that.

Graham, I also want to really thank you because often we have questions from the community and they go to both the school board and the board of supervisors.

And I really appreciate that when you reply to the individual with an answer, you include us in that information, what I call that information loop.

Bye-bye.

I have no questions, but I will just report to Chair Page that the Crozet community is hopping up and down with excitement for the expansion of CES.

because there's so many kids who are going to be going there and already thinking about sidewalk improvements and things leading to school.

Alright, Supervisor Price.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Chair Page, thank you very much for your presentation.

I have no questions.

I have nothing but, you know, praise and

Adoration for what the public schools have done over the last 12 months.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, Dr. Haas and our staff have really done a tremendous job in planning for all of this and also our teachers because they have had to quite often change very, very quickly in order to adapt to any new changes.

Well, thank you again, Chairman Page.

I don't have any questions for you today.

We appreciate the updates and look forward to seeing you here shortly, in a few weeks with the budget work.

Right, March 15th.

See you then.

Board, if there's no objection, just we did get behind schedule a little bit with the community development fees based on what we had plotted or attempted to do.

The Blue Ridge Health District update as part of number 17, the county executive, was kind of on tap for three o'clock.

If it's all right, I'd like to go.

If no objection, we can adjust to go to that update and then we'll loop back to our supervisor matters.

I'm sorry I missed it.

No we were we were scheduled to get through to if we followed the order we'd be from the board so this would be the items that we parked and then we had the county executive and part of his report would be the Blue Ridge Health District COVID-19 update.

That was kind of

Can we do a five minute break?

I'm fine with that.

We can do that and then come back with Blue Ridge Health District because we don't have a recess and that's the request.

No objection?

All right we'll be back at three and hear from the Blue Ridge Health District.

Thank you everyone.

We're going to go to from the county executive report on matters not listed on the agenda to accommodate the Blue Ridge Health District in their COVID-19 update.

I appreciate you all being here today to update the board.

Dr. Bonds, I think I'm handing to you, yes?

We cannot hear you if you're talking.

All right.

All right.

So I'm delighted to be here today to update you about where we are with COVID-19.

I'll present some slides today and then Ryan McKay is here to answer any questions that you may have.

All right.

So as of today, the district has just over 13,000 cases.

The County of Albemarle has had just under 5,000 cases.

With regards to hospitalizations, the district has had just over 500, with the County of Albemarle just under 200.

For fatalities, there have been an unfortunate 151 deaths due to COVID in the district.

69 of those deaths were citizens of Albemarle County.

On the right hand side, you see a couple of graphs.

The first is the daily case count for Albemarle County.

And you can see that we did have a pretty big spike here earlier in the early February time period.

Students came back to UVA and we had a fairly large outbreak at that point in time.

It's since tapered off and we're having much smaller numbers at this point in time.

The cumulative cases by locality is here below.

We continue to see overrepresentation.

in primarily hospitalizations for Blacks and fatalities for Blacks and cases and hospitalizations for the Latinx community.

You can see 12% of our cases have been Black or African American and 12% have been Latino.

For hospitalization 31%

We do have a very low

positivity rate right now.

I just want to remind everyone that positivity rate is both the number of positive cases, but also the denominator, which is the number of cases or the number of tests that are actually done.

And because of UVA's ongoing monitoring of their students,

Every day they do a large number of saliva samples.

That means that we have a huge number and you can see that represented here by these bars of

Test that are done every single day, which results in a very low positivity rate.

So 2.3% for our area right now.

So just need to remember that this is a ratio that there are two components, both the number of positive cases and the number of tests that are being done.

When we look across the state, we are seeing an improving trend in all of the regions of the state.

We are here in the northwest region and although our activity level is still high, it is in decreasing mode at this point of time, and we are beginning to see regions of the state, specifically northern and the most

Southwest area that have low activity levels.

So overall, a really encouraging trend with regard to cases.

And you can see that this is lagging.

This is actually data from about 10 days ago now.

So I think that that's a great sign that things are improving over the previous very high surge that we saw around the holidays.

We continue to have outbreaks in this area.

These are the facility outbreaks that we see.

Many of these are, if you look down on the dates that they were notified, are from 2020.

And so they've either been closed or a pending closure.

We had a couple in late January, but really nothing since then.

And that's a great sign as well.

We have been able to

pretty much complete vaccination.

We broadly, we're locally not involved in the vaccination of long-term care facilities as done by a federal pharmacy program.

But for the most part, long-term care facilities have been received vaccination.

There will obviously always be new staff members that need to be vaccinated and we're working on a process at the state level for that.

and then there will always be new residents that need to be vaccinated and again the state is trying to come up with a fairly seamless process for that ongoing.

But generally we're seeing improvement in the number of outbreaks.

So let's talk about vaccine and where we are with that.

So the state of Virginia is currently in all districts vaccinating people in Phase 1A and 1B.

And just to remind everyone, Phase 1A was healthcare personnel and that's very broadly defined as anyone who is in a front-facing position that works in some form of patient care.

doctors and nurses, but also receptionists at hospitals or in the doctor's office or staff that clean hospital rooms, kitchen staff that serve meals in hospitals, all of those qualified under 1A.

Residence of long-term care.

As I said, this was actually done by a federally run pharmacy program using CVS and Walgreens.

And so they have come in and for the most part done the three visits that they were contractually obligated to do.

And we see really good uptake of the vaccine amongst our long-term residents and pretty good uptake amongst all of the staff as well.

Phase 1B is frontline essential workers, and there's a more comprehensive list on the BDH website, but it's essentially police and fire and hazmat crews, K-12 and preschool and daycare teachers, individuals who work in manufacturing or agriculture, grocery store workers, public transit workers,

other government officials that have front-facing type of positions that are necessary to keep business going.

Additionally, 1B was expanded to include anyone over the age of 65 and anyone between the ages of 16 to 64 with an underlying medical condition and people in correctional facilities, homeless shelters, and migrant labor camps.

Phase 1C has other essential workers and then Phase 2 has the rest of the population.

So where are we at right now with regard to our plan for vaccination?

We are currently vaccinating with Pfizer and Moderna, and starting on Friday, we will be vaccinating in this district with Johnson & Johnson.

Johnson & Johnson was just approved last weekend by the FDA for emergency use.

It is a single-dose vaccine that is based on an adenovirus platform, which is the more traditional vaccine platform that we use for other types of vaccines.

As you recall, Pfizer and Moderna are a two-shot regimen.

Pfizer is three weeks apart, Moderna is four weeks apart, and they are based on an mRNA platform, which is a very new platform.

Lots of research history, but this is the first time we've used vaccines that have been manufactured on that platform.

We have done a large number of people, I'll show you that in just a minute.

We are vaccinating in this district out of several locations.

The first is the hydraulic road tent.

We have vaccinated a large number of phase 1A.

We still have a few stragglers that we're trying to finish off this week, but hopefully we'll be through the vast majority of 1A healthcare.

and then Phase 1B frontline.

We have really focused on teachers to make sure that our kids could go back to school and that our teachers and staff felt safe teaching in the classroom.

So we wanted to make sure that we got all of the school teachers, at least they had an opportunity to get vaccinated and for the most part they have been done.

We are working with a few chain pharmacies and

For those that are working directly with us, we started by asking them to vaccinate their employees.

Most of these were grocery store based pharmacies and grocery workers are phase 1B.

And then we're giving lists as well to those individuals.

More recently, the federal government has started programs that are independent of our efforts with chain pharmacies.

The only one that we have in our health district is a CVS on Fifth Street that is vaccinated at a federal stockpile.

So it doesn't come from our allotment.

It comes from the federal allotment.

There are a number of other pharmacies that are also participating in this, but none in our health district.

We vaccinate in each locality.

It's generally a fixed location, although for some of them we rotate to make sure that we're giving good geographic coverage.

We have partnered with both of our healthcare systems.

UVA obviously vaccinated all of their healthcare personnel, and they have worked very closely with us to make sure that individuals over the age of 65 who had pre-registered have had an opportunity for vaccination.

We're still trying to work through that list, but we've made pretty good inroads into that.

and then UVA has been really great partners to go and do specialty vaccination clinics with vulnerable populations.

So individuals that might live in congregate care settings or live in subsidized or public housing situations, individuals that are at high risk because of other issues associated with them.

So lots of those are typically very small and go out and do in the living situation, for example, so that people don't have to travel.

Santerra Martha Jefferson did a lot of vaccination early on, their healthcare personnel, and they assisted with other phase one healthcare personnel.

And that

They ran out of vaccine and took a little bit of a break, but they've been back in touch and are willing to come back in and help us with vaccination.

And so we're really looking forward to continuing partner with them.

So that's where we're at at this point in time and then as I said we're doing Johnson & Johnson this weekend and I mean we in the broadest sense it's really being run by the Emergency Operations Group here with EMTs providing the vast majority of the vaccination and

More of the logistic organization front end work being done by the health department.

So we're very excited.

We'll be able to vaccinate 2,000 people with J&J this weekend.

So where are we with regard to vaccination?

This box gives the state statistics.

So there's been over 2 million doses administered.

We have had at least 1.3 million that have gotten one dose and another 700,000 and change that are fully vaccinated.

That is about 16% of the population have been vaccinated with at least one dose of a COVID vaccine.

So pretty good.

Not herd immunity, certainly, but we're making inroads in it.

Here in Albemarle County, 40,000 doses roughly have been administered.

We have about 14,000 people who are fully vaccinated now in the county of Albemarle.

24,000 have gotten, sorry, 24,000 per 100,000 have gotten one dose with 13,000 per 100,000 fully vaccinated, if you want to look at the rates.

For those of you that were watching this webpage very closely, you would have noticed a change in those numbers.

And the state is moving from mapping just by address to a more correct geocoding address, which meant that a large number of some individuals who had been coded to Charlottesville actually got moved to Albemarle, which was their correct physical location.

So there was a jump in the last week or so in these numbers.

You can look at the state and see, and in comparison to other parts of the state, we're doing pretty well in this district in getting vaccine out.

I think we have some great partnerships and that has resulted in some really rapid vaccination.

So overall, I think we're doing reasonably well here.

Obviously, we want everyone to get a vaccine and we're working as quickly as we can to do that.

You can now look on the website, the state website, at demographics by locality.

So here we have the vaccination, the absolute numbers and the rate per 100,000.

This is by age group, by gender, and then by race and ethnicity.

So a couple of things to note here.

We are spread out over all of the different age groups.

and I just remind everyone that people are eligible either because of their age so right now we're really focused on people over the age of 65 or because of the job that they did and many of those individuals that worked in those professions were quite young so we did have individuals that were 18 and 19 who serve as EMTs

in our either volunteer or paid crew.

And that made them eligible for vaccination, but they are in this very young age group.

And many of the healthcare personnel that work in our area, again, are going to be in these younger age groups.

That also accounts for some of the disparity that you see by sex.

We have a lot of nursing personnel and other support staff that work in healthcare and those individuals tend to be predominantly but not exclusively women.

So that accounts for some of that differential.

You can see that we have

had individuals at all different race and ethnicity groups.

I will say that we are making some focused efforts to try and do very targeted vaccination events for communities of color.

We have an equity planning group.

that meets on a regular basis that has representatives from both the city and county government, from our healthcare systems, and from the health department.

And then there are community groups that interface with that planning group in all of our localities so that we can bring special events that are really targeted at the individuals that we see are overrepresented in hospitalizations and deaths.

And that is our

our communities of color.

So those events have been ongoing.

We have done them in the city of Charlottesville at the Carver Rec.

Yancy again was trying to target the Black and African American population.

We've done similar ones in Louisa and we'll be targeting other groups, other localities as we go on.

That being said, vaccination is great, but we still have COVID in our community.

And so we continue to offer testing every Monday and Tuesday.

It's hosted by UVA, Monday at the Church of Incarnation, Tuesday at Mount Zion, First African Baptist Church.

The health department does testing at Charlottesville High School every Friday in the late afternoon.

I will let you know there's a new state hotline, 1-877-VAX.

That's V-A-X in VA.

It is manned.

It's a state hotline.

It has hundreds of operators that will answer it.

It is manned from 8 a.m.

to 8 p.m.

We continue to have our local hotline because there are a number of questions that are really very local and that require local expertise.

The one thing the state hotline can really assist in is helping people get into the vaccinate.virginia.gov preregistration system.

So you can go to vaccinate.virginia.gov and register yourself as being interested in obtaining the vaccine and that will put you on the list and that is how we draw individuals to invite to the vaccination events.

If you don't have internet access or

Don't want to go through the internet process.

You can call the 1-877-VAX in Virginia and they will help you get registered over the phone.

So either of those two ways, either through vaccinate.virginia.gov or 1-877-VAX in Virginia.

We really encourage everyone to go and get that pre-registration into the system.

If you have already registered in one of our surveys, your information is there.

It's all been transferred over.

And soon, if not today, you should be able to go in and edit your information.

to make sure that we have all of the relevant data that we would need.

So they've been tweaking that to make sure that it could be done in a safe manner to preserve your privacy and I think they're very close if it hasn't been rolled out today.

So I'll just end with this slide that I end lots of presentations with.

COVID is not gone, unfortunately.

It's better than the surge was that we had earlier, but if you look at the numbers, they're still pretty high.

So we need to continue to keep our distance from each other, that's six feet, to wear masks,

If you haven't gotten COVID-wise on your phone, I really encourage everyone to have that.

It's a way to get notification if you're a close contact of someone who is infected.

Stay home if you're sick, and if you don't feel well, get tested.

And I'll end there and would be happy to answer any questions that you all may have.

Thank you, Dr. Bonds.

No, thank you very much, Dr. Bonds.

Really appreciated learning even more, and thank you very much for all you're doing.

Thank you.

I think I have one quick question.

I was over, I was bringing my 92 year old grandfather-in-law over to get to UVA to get his second vaccine last week.

And we were the only people there getting, he was the only person getting a vaccine.

So we got a chance to talk to the people administering the vaccines for quite a while.

And we were told that they only were doing second vaccines and they were closing down that clinic very soon after that.

So apparently that was just one clinic and they're opening up others.

How are they continuing to do that?

So were you at the hospital?

Yeah so UVA has moved all of their vaccination efforts to the old big lot store that's in Seminole Square.

Okay great thank you and I have no other questions.

Thank you and thanks for the great presentation.

I have what I think may be a couple of quick questions.

So I'm hearing from constituents, folks in the community, that they keep looking at all of the chain pharmacy,

Yeah, so that's really challenging for people.

The chain pharmacies are really operating under a different vaccination program for the most part.

I mean, well, so there's two parts to this.

There are the CVS and Walgreens and now Walmart and a whole host of other chain pharmacies that are all getting vaccine through the federal program.

and it's great because it's a lot more vaccine that's coming into our state than we had before.

The problem with that is they each have their own individual registration system and it is very frustrating because there's not a centralized system and we did try with CVS to have them come under our umbrella and they tried really hard.

I've got to give the state a lot of credit.

They worked really hard to make that happen and it just couldn't.

CVS just wouldn't.

There were too many barriers.

So it is really frustrating.

The vaccinate in Virginia will at some point when we have unlimited vaccine, you should be able to go in and find an appointment

yourself anywhere in the state that's a health department affiliated clinic.

We're not there yet, so you can't do that today, right now.

But that's the long-term goal.

But I don't think that those chain pharmacies will ever be tied into that because of lots of privacy and IT issues.

So, and this is maybe a specific question, but so if someone managed to get an appointment and a vaccination at a chain pharmacy because they had, say, vaccines that they didn't want to have waste, right, then do they need to go into your site and edit their information?

Well, if they got it as a chain pharmacy, the chain pharmacy should have made a secondary appointment.

I know when you go into CVS, you have to register for both of your appointments.

Now, if they happen to be in CVS wandering through the store at the very end of the day and they had three doses left and they qualified and got one of those, I don't know, CVS should have made that second dose appointment at that point in time.

Your second dose follows you wherever you went.

So if you went to an event in Buckingham, your second dose is in Buckingham.

It's not with me right now.

There are some workarounds.

If someone got vaccinated out of state and then came back to Virginia, a snowbird, for example, there are some ways that we can help them get their second dose.

And so maybe, and I guess my question is, would you tell them to go in under this edit and update their information that they've gotten?

The first, I'm just trying to tie it into this edit.

Yeah.

No, they don't need to go in and do that.

If they went into the system and registered

The only time you'd want to edit it is if your contact information changes, obviously if your phone number or address change, or there's more health information in the state system than we collected locally.

And if you want us to know about your other health conditions, you can go in and edit that.

But if you got one dose at CVS, you don't need to go in and do anything to that.

That was helpful, thank you, because I know I was hearing at one point that when people initially went in, some of the systems were asking a lot more questions about health than with the other systems.

So this would be a way to update your medical situation specifically.

Thank you very much.

So two questions, I guess.

Do you have any information about the turnaround time?

When someone fills out the state registration at VA, VAX, whatever, which was pages and pages of questions and different health risks, et cetera, but then crickets ever since.

And not even a confirmation saying, thank you very much for registering or anything else.

So then when I tried to do something on the county email and it said, click here and have you received a response from whatever the letters are?

And if you didn't get a chance to do that, you were out.

So I don't know if that's what the deal is with that.

Or do you already have those all full already?

Yes, so for this weekend we're pulling names from the list of 65 and above and we will communicate to those individuals that there are appointments available for the Johnson & Johnson vaccine and we'll work through that list until we have 2,000 appointments filled, 1,000 for Friday and 1,000 for Saturday.

And then in terms of the communication back from the state system, the pre-registration survey, I'm not sure

if there's supposed to be a confirmation email that you've registered or not.

Yeah, I thought the state was sending a confirmation email back, but do look in spam and junk because it often gets diverted off.

depending on your internet provider.

In regards to the time between when you pre-register and when you might get a vaccine, that's very dependent on individual circumstances.

So if you are a grocery store worker, for example, and you go in and register, that's a group that we're going to be targeting very quickly.

We've already done some grocery store workers and need to work to get the remainder vaccinated.

As far as Ryan's list for this Saturday, so how does one get on that list of 2000 people that you already have?

So they likely would have registered or completed one of the surveys that we had sent out way back in January.

And so we have a large list that we're working off from.

It's the same list of names that we provide University of Virginia Health to invite for vaccination.

And so we're continuing to chip away at that list.

So it's names we've already collected.

As citizens call and say, well, my circumstances have changed.

How do I change?

When I said I wasn't in a hurry right now, but now somebody's, my neighbor's positive.

And so now I'm scared that they can amend their original survey with you.

If they filled out something in January with us, they hopefully today that the state will now be able to provide them the opportunity to edit their profile in the state system.

I'll try to pass that along.

Supervisor Price.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

Dr. Bonds, Mr. McKay, thank you all.

I really appreciate the information.

The complexities of these multiple systems for obtaining vaccinations is something that is very difficult, but your explanations today I think will really help some of our constituents understand how they can best get registered and get their vaccine.

It is a very confusing system.

We recognize that.

I think if people have questions, calling the state hotline about the best way to get registered is probably the go-to source.

But as more commercial pharmacies come on board in our area, we will try and make that information known so that people can go and register.

And I was just expressing appreciation for your helping explain that to our community members.

All right, Dr. Bonds, Ryan, thank you very much for being here and providing the board with the update.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Future update, I am sure.

Thank you again.

Since we are in the County Executive Report, why don't we continue and just finish up the stuff here from the County Executive.

We'll call on Assistant County Executive Trevor Henry.

Thanks, Mr. Richardson.

Good afternoon members of the board.

I'm just coming in front of you to do a quick update this afternoon regarding a request that came to the board on December 30th from the electoral board.

Board members, you may recall a request came in from the board asking for a joint meeting to discuss concerns around logistics for

for voting for the election season here in 2021, as well as some budgetary concerns.

The board directed the chair to pen a letter that went back to the electoral board, I believe it was on January 6th,

to basically kind of push that work back to the staff level.

And I'm here to report out on that today.

So some great work by our Facilities Environmental Services Director, Lan Start, working in collaboration with Jake Washburn around the logistics.

Fez drafted a logistics plan that will take them through the 2021 voting season.

That plan, I was part of a few of those meetings where it was reviewed.

Jake presented that to his electoral board and the board responded approving the logistics plan recommendation on February 16th.

And so the logistics side seems to be in really good shape.

that will continue to use our county office building at Fifth Street, much like we did last fall.

And I will share that email from Jake that has the endorsement from his board and the plan to the board of supervisors here this evening.

Additionally, in that email, Jake noted that the board of the electoral board still is interested in meeting with the board of supervisors regarding some concerns around budget.

and in talking with Mr. Richardson, we would suggest that that be an invite to one of the upcoming Board of Supervisors budget work sessions for FY22.

I do know that our Finance and Budget Office has been working closely with the Registrar's Office, really trying to understand the requests and meet those needs, but it would be an opportunity to bring in the Electoral Board Chair.

I'm not suggesting it's a joint meeting, but

at least the electoral board chair and Jake to answer questions and express any concerns that they have.

So I just wanted to provide that update.

Questions here?

There may be some financial help coming from the state but I don't know what the final things are that far down in the weeds in the budget.

I know they did approve

All right.

Thank you, Trevor.

Thank you.

Mr. Richardson, any other items here?

Okay board we will move to our matters, committee reports and matters not listed on the agenda.

The first topic we parked was a conversation about subcommittee meetings on non-county Zoom platforms.

Sure, thank you.

So this came up because the SWAC committee, a very active committee, how they operate is that they have an education committee, a subcommittee, they have an operations subcommittee, and they had a vision and planning subcommittee.

And how they've always done this is that they've, because there's only an hour and a half in the general meetings,

they have always had these subcommittees and then brought back recommendations to the whole committee.

They've been trying during COVID to kind of work around this and this situation where we've had limited staff time to be at the subcommittee meetings and to run them on county zoom.

and so the committee members have been asking

if they can use their own work Zoom usually and you know it's a UVA Zoom or their company Zoom account or their personal Zoom account as long as they follow all the FOIA requests that are put before them and they have looked at those.

Greg Campner has gone over those with members and they have agreed that they can follow all those

recommendations in noticing the meeting, recording the meeting, sending it in to staff to be put up on the website and also not to run chat.

Most of these most of these subcommittees are three people in a subcommittee.

I have talked to Jeff about this and the county staff has basically an SOP to keep things consistent, to run these on the county zoom.

and but because there simply isn't the staff time to be able to do that this has been a request of committee members and I do have Teddy Hamilton who serves on the SWAC committee asked me this morning if if she should get on and speak.

to this and I said why don't you write me a very short email and I'll simply read it to the board so the board understands why so if you give me just a moment I'll read through that and then I'll just open it up for comment um and she has the SWAC committee maintains three subcommittees each of which work on separate segments

of Sustainable Materials Management in Albemarle County.

Planning and Vision looks at our long-term plan and evaluates what policies and programs are most relevant and necessary to incorporate in the near term.

Operations helps to implement policies, programs working with RSWA, education and community outreach,

provides the educational component to the community with regards to policy and programs.

These three subcommittees work separately, but are unified in the committee mission.

They do the real work and then report back in a monthly committee meetings.

When the committees cannot meet, it makes it hard to impossible to get work done.

COVID need not further slow or stop progress we need to make in addressing core government services and related climate action policies.

It's incumbent on the subcommittees to meet FOIA requirements, which everyone is happy to do in order to continue our work.

and so that is the request if the board, and I do know that Ann has a few things to say about this because she is working with the Natural Heritage Preservation Committee and is running into similar issues with trying to accommodate these committee meetings.

So that's my request.

Jeff has requested that I bring this up at the board for board discussion.

Thank you.

Just want to go through the order here.

Were we going to hear from Ann as well?

That's a good idea.

Thank you only to add that

I think we're in the process, I hope, of getting clarity so that each committee has the same rules because that's really important.

My experience last week, I think, was in the middle of the rollout of the clarity.

So on Monday, the CVB had one set of operating rules and Tuesday, the Historic Preservation had a different set because the message hadn't quite gotten down there.

But separate from all of that, which I think will work itself out,

is the ability for people to have these small meetings on Zoom who are just getting together to hash out different suggestions that they would take to their larger group.

It's not possible for the Historic Preservation Committee to have a five hour meeting in which all the work of the people who have been working on the historic markers, which was an assignment that was given to them by this board and the county executive to work out the wording to choose to recommend different markers to apply for which ones should be state and which ones should be local.

We would have nothing else that we could accomplish if that was because we have three or four people who have taken different tasks and worked on that for the last six months.

So when this all began to unravel last week, they were told, well, you can't even talk to each other.

And so this, we have to find a way to keep people working and to be able to take the benefit of all the work that our citizens are happy to do.

and making sure that as they have all said to me at different committees around, five or six different committees for the last month or so, we're not voting on anything.

We're not even in the position to do that.

We're in the position to do our best to make a recommendation to our bigger community who will then maybe decide to take it to the board or maybe not.

So I really hope that we will find a way to accomplish that.

Secondly, just to remind

People who may not have been involved in this, there used to be county planners, one for each development area way back when, but went before the recession.

And when 2010 hit, the committees were told, well, we don't have a staff person to help you, so I guess we're gonna have to stop meeting.

Quite a few of the organizations said, that's fine, we'll carry on ourselves, just tell us exactly what to do.

and Greg and his predecessor wrote out a list of rules, exactly what to do, how to notify, how to advertise, how to take the minutes, exactly what to do and the only one that I attended every month for the entire seven years in between was the Crozet advisory committee who has luckily had an attorney who could take minutes but anybody can take the minutes and put them together to be approved by the group at the following

meeting everybody who was present, that is, and then have them recorded by staff.

I think an effective and fair way to go forward is to say, we have these rules, and if you abide by these rules extra, extra carefully, you are permitted to do this.

And if you mess up, you can't do it anymore.

and it's very simple I think with that kind of preparation that we should be able to allow our folks to continue working along.

They can be very effective on Zoom and just as I personally have found my own productivity to be tremendous to be able to do a workforce meeting in Richmond from 9 to 11 and then turn around five minutes later and have a meeting by Zoom in Crozet.

I could never accomplish that if I had to be in all those places physically.

So I do hope that we will loosen the leash just a little bit, but only according to having very good rules laid out ahead of time so that people can follow them and continue to work.

Let me just clarify just for a minute, because I'm not talking about the whole committee meetings and the CAC meetings.

I'm talking about the subcommittee meetings that are not making

All the general committees and the CACs are still occurring with staff on county Zoom going about doing that.

What I'm talking about is these smaller meetings of three people wanting to get together.

They got together before COVID all the time.

They announced their meetings.

They noticed the meetings.

They came to the county office building and they had these meetings.

they took minutes, they went back to the larger committee and then those minutes were taken care of.

I am just talking about these smaller three people getting together to discuss individual smaller items and to bring back to the whole committee.

I was only giving the previous example to show how well it worked for seven years prior but I agree it's a subcommittee issue whether it's the CBB or any of the other committees who need to have people spending the extra amount of time to prepare something for the larger group.

So, I mean, Mr. Kamner, do you need to weigh in here?

I'd have to defer to somebody else.

I wouldn't think subcommittees would be staffed.

So, but the requirement here is the staffing is needed for the Zoom capacity.

Is that my understanding?

Emily Kilroy, Director of Communications and Public Engagement.

Thank you, Mr. Gallaway and members of the board.

So in the virtual environment that we're working in, the requirement to have a publicly available link that is posted and then recorded and posted to the video recording is posted in a publicly accessible manner.

make it a little more complicated if we have public meetings being operated outside of the county's Zoom account.

And the folks that are trying to do this now, that's one of the qualifications.

They have to be able to post that publicly available Zoom account.

I'm sorry, I don't have my words properly, but they have to be able to do that.

That's one of the requirements of doing these subcommittee meetings is to meet all the county requirements and all the FOIA requirements.

So, Mr. Chair, I think, and you probably know this, I think that what the board needs to contemplate is, and Supervisor Palmer did a good job of teeing it up, is would this board be comfortable allowing the two subcommittees that were outlined to go ahead and move ahead on private Zoom.

Mr. Kappner has spoke to that and said there are no legal issues with that, but would the two committees be allowed to move ahead as

Supervisor Palmer outlined to do private Zoom to meet all of the requirements that were laid out and to give this try because we're in this challenging world of virtual meetings

and the staff continues to do what I think is an admirable job trying to support all of the meetings.

I believe Ms.

Kilroy at the end of the year close up for 20 reported that we support reported that county staff supported 255 meetings in 2020 virtually.

So that was quite a gear up and our focus had been public zoom and all of the prerequisites

the how-tos, if you will, of how to go through that process and what the requirements are.

If this moves to this subcommittee format and they take on this responsibility, I was just wanting the board to give us guidance that that was okay for us to proceed as Supervisor Palmer laid out.

Thank you.

I'll loop everybody else in.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, any

I think it's a good way to do it.

Sorry, trying to unmute myself.

I'm surprised that we have subcommittees.

I didn't even know we had any subcommittees meeting, number one.

That surprises me.

I think my CAC wanted to get together with a quick little

meeting at some point a few people and they were told no.

Now that's neither here nor there.

I'm not complaining about the no.

What I'm surprised about is that we even have subcommittees that I was not aware of.

I'm hearing that the reason is that it's Zoom, but at the end of the day, or that this is all about COVID and that Zoom.

At the end of the day, COVID is under control.

We're still going to be using Zoom because of its ease and the way

People like it, right?

And I'm trying to sort out in my head whether or not this is really about COVID and Zoom.

My sense is, I understand the Zoom capacity, but I think this is about staff capacity as well.

I think I'm correct on that, Jeff or Emily, because we've been hearing for a good while that there's an issue with staff capacity.

Having said that, we have boards and commissions work happening right now.

I am very uncomfortable with taking something right now outside of that work because it almost seems as if this is a workaround.

for actually the hard work we need to do around our boards and commissions work.

And we've all talked about how many committees we have.

That gets to staff having to report all of these committees, right?

No one is trying to just throw out all of our committees, throw out all, but we do have

A number of committees, more so than many communities do, and we had agreed it was time to sort of look at those committees and to have this happen outside of that work, I find a little concerning.

Now maybe what we should do is say, and another quick question is, at one point I heard there were three committees we were gonna do this for, and now I'm hearing two committees.

So I'm not even sure if it's two or three.

I heard the historic group, and then I heard two SWAC groups.

I mean, I guess I'm not even sure how many we're talking about here.

but if you go back and say well we're doing the boards and commissions work would we want to pilot this idea perhaps through that work but first establish what their SOPs would be so standard operating procedures which is what Ann and Liz are talking about so that we know that and we all agree and we know what's happening

Seems like to me that process might work with what Ann and Liz are seeking.

I was just looking at my notes here.

Do these subcommittees have an elected official?

So it's just three people meeting but then there's an elected- So let me just clarify on my situation when I say subcommittees and one of the committee members went through and looked at all the minutes of all the when we actually formed the subcommittees in SWAC because we simply couldn't get everything done in an hour and a half meeting once a month and so there was never a formal

Never a formal vote.

The committee's just decided, okay, we'll take these three people go and work on education.

These three people go work on ops.

These three people go and work on visioning.

And I go to all the ops subcommittee meetings because it's operations and I'm on the RSWA, as does Phil McKellip.

from RSWA, and as does somebody from TJPDC often, depends on what you're working with.

And that has, this is a very, I mean, it's been a pretty productive use of, you know, of county residents who are professionals in these things.

And I will mention, just let me say one more thing.

And so any committee that gets together where there's three people, they can't do that, right?

Because that's against the FOIA requirements.

So in the past, when three people in a committee have decided to get together, what they've done is they've gone ahead and noticed that they were getting together.

and come to the county office building and done this.

We have the SOPs because Emily actually provided those SOPs and that the emergency management team developed at the very beginning of the whole COVID thing for Zoom.

And please correct me, Jeff, if I'm incorrect.

but those were developed so that there would be standard operating procedures.

So what I'm trying to do is get a very productive committee with people that know an awful lot about solid waste management and let them continue to go.

The operations committee, not to belabor this too much, but the operations committee right now, we're working on glass recycling getting from wineries.

and we're doing trips out to, you know, I've gone out on Saturday morning to, you know, to the King family vineyards to look at their dumpsters.

I mean, this is, you know, we're trying to get this glass recycling going at no cost to the county.

and which is something good for wineries and it's good for the environment and strategic materials down south needs that.

I'm sorry, I'm getting into too much of the weeds, but these are groups that are trying to get something done and we're trying to just make sure that we meet all the FOIA requirements and that we follow the county's SOPs.

and for doing these.

And if we can't do that, we can't have the meetings.

And so I'm trying not to get this too complicated, but this is a committee that is trying to get something done.

And I don't think this is one of the committees we're gonna try to eliminate.

I think Donna serves on this committee with me.

I think she can speak to that.

Yeah, thank you very much.

So Liz, please don't frame this as if I'm trying to keep you all from doing your work.

That's not the point.

Yeah, I'm not framing it like that.

I'm trying to explain.

...process and I understand you all are doing great work and I want you to continue to do great work.

I just have some concerns about doing it this way.

You have a committee of three.

I didn't hear an answer about, so what I'm hearing is in fact there are sometimes that committee of three includes an elected official.

and I guess my question would be two people can't do some work which still falls within the existing policy, the FOIA laws.

I'm just concerned and I'm concerned that we're taking this outside of the work that we've already said we were going to do and

And I'm sorry, but I feel that way.

I just feel like this has been sprung on us pretty quickly.

That's not a reason not to agree to it.

Maybe we establish one of them.

Maybe we, you know, and say we're going to try one as a pilot.

And then we look, and I've belabored this enough, but I have concerns about this, this

taking it outside of our work and this change to our practice.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

I think we have several issues here, but what I want to focus on is particularly the use of a non-county platform for a meeting.

because I think for the moment that is the principle issue while I also acknowledge that there are collateral concerns some of which do fall under the work that the board will be undertaking on our committees and commissions.

So the first one is that I accept the limitations of county staff hours and do not in any way question that.

So to me the question is these subcommittees have been meeting.

How do we allow them to facilitate their work in this virtual world that we're in?

And the thought that I have, and it's not mine original, but I would share is that a pilot program

and I would ask that we identify the existing subcommittees.

We not allow additional subcommittees to be formed.

We allow a pilot program for subcommittees that are in existence and identified to utilize a non-county platform provided that they meet all of the legal requirements as our county attorney

and our county executive experientially are able to ensure and that we provide that guidance to them.

And I don't know what time period we put, six months or whatever, to allow us for the work to continue to meet the legal requirements and allow the board to continue the work that we are going to be undertaking on overall the committees and commissions.

And that's what I was getting at, Donna, was sort of a pilot that would be happening while the boards and commissions work was happening.

I would love to provide a little clarity from just the little bit that I know.

The Natural Heritage Committee and the Historic Preservation Committee have been in the business for 20 years.