Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   6/2/2021

Albemarle County Board of Supervisors to order.

This meeting is being held pursuant to and in compliance with ordinance number 2816, an ordinance to ensure the continuity of government during the COVID-19 disaster.

Supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, 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 Donna Price of the Scottsville District.

At the present time, our Chair Ned Galloway of the Rio District is not in attendance.

He will, however, be joining us later today.

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.

I would also like to note at the present time we are experiencing some intermittent difficulties with our Granicus broadcast, however

This meeting can still be accessed through the Albemarle County Zoom link.

At this time, we would stand to do the Pledge of Allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

We will now adopt the final agenda.

However, before doing so, I do want to mention that we have an addition of a National Gun Violence Awareness Day Proclamation that's being added to item number six.

And do I have a motion to adopt the final agenda as amended?

And superintendent?

Yes, I just wanted to add a short discussion at somewhere right in around the first public hearing on amendments to the budget to get some feedback from the board on the ACE program for this coming year.

Staff has been discussing this and they are prepared to give the board some information at that time.

And to clarify, ACE is the Acquisition of Conservation Easements program that we generally participate in each year.

And because of COVID,

We did not put funds aside.

And so staff is going to be talked to our county executive and staff is prepared to give us some information on what's in the budget now for it from last year.

Thank you, Supervisor Palmer.

In addition to, or those two items, are there any other requested amendments to the agenda?

Hearing none, do we have a motion to adopt the final agenda as amended?

So moved.

Second.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Ms.

Bea LaKirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Ballard?

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

We'll now hear from members of the board.

Yes, thank you.

Monday there was a very well attended and lovely event orchestrated by the American Legion Post 74 to add the recognition plaques for the local members of the armed services who had been awarded the Medal of Honor.

and it was grand.

July 3rd is the bringing back of the Crozet Fireman's Parade which has been going on for about 50 years except for last year and also the year of the derecho which wiped everything out about eight years ago.

So that is July 3rd the Saturday before the 4th and then on the morning of the 4th at 10 a.m will be the Earliestville Community Parade.

We're bringing that back after a year's loss last year due to the

and everybody should think about getting their children and bicycles and dogs and come out and walk in the parade.

Thank you.

Oh, no announcements, but thank you very much.

Thank you.

No announcements, assuming that Donna is going to talk, Supervisor Price will talk about the Beto Festival in Scottsville because it also starts, stops in Howardville.

And since it's in Scottsville, big stop, I'll leave that to her.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I just wanted to remind folks that May the 30th marked the centennial anniversary of the public library system in Charlottesville, the Charlottesville area.

And I'm learning a lot more about the history of our public library.

We didn't have a truly integrated library until Gordon Avenue branch was opened in 1966.

And so I'm going to try and remind folks that they might want to go in July to the central branch of JMRL because they're going to be doing an exhibition and they're going to have a lot of information about the history of our library system.

I think it will be real interesting for all of us to hear.

So I don't have a date, it just says look for it coming in July, just to put it on our radar screen.

Thank you, and I have a number of announcements.

First off, following in the chronology that other two supervisors have mentioned.

As Supervisor Palmer mentioned, the Watteau Festival is returning to Scottsville on June 23rd.

It's one big stop the boats make on their trip from Lynchburg down to Richmond, so we hope everyone will join us down in Scottsville.

and on July 3rd we will be having the 4th of July parade down in Scottsville as well.

I'm really excited to see people back out in town and enjoying what we have to offer here in the county.

I have a number of other announcements to make.

Most close in time

is that the Republican Party has already elected their statewide slate of offices by convention, but the Democrats are having a primary next Tuesday, so if you're interested in voting in that primary and have not already early voted, remember Tuesday is primary day.

We have a lot of activity that's happened down in Scottsville.

It's really an exciting place to be right now with a lot of new openings of businesses and some relocations of others.

The Bend BBQ has opened a storefront shop so those of us who have enjoyed their fare at the farmers market can now get down into their establishment and pick up some of their delicious BBQ.

We Grow Florist has opened in a former storefront church space.

Kathy Mars Pet Grooming has moved next door to a larger space and they're able to add boarding now, which they did not previously have.

Riverbend Boutique has opened in a long vacant space.

James River Outdoors has opened this spring.

I bought my new fishing pole and gear down there.

Looking forward to taking it out on the James and Rivanna Rivers.

And as you can tell, Scottsville is a happening place and the place to be.

I think we're all excited now that the pandemic is largely behind us, but we also know we still have to be careful.

So if you haven't been vaccinated, we encourage you to get your vaccinations.

If you have, you're still welcome to wear masks if that makes you feel more comfortable.

And that's all that I have right now.

But there's a lot going on.

As we do know, there will be a select DMV opening in Scottsville as well in Victory Hall.

Yes, speaking of new businesses, there is one in Keswick.

It's the Mary Mill Farms.

It's a winery.

and children are welcome.

It's eclectic in its decor.

Very nice.

Good food.

They have a charcuterie plate along with hummus and chicken salad and good wine.

And it's very pleasant to be there.

So there's like three different areas to sit in inside, outside.

And it's very pleasant, beautiful, beautiful little historic farm.

So I encourage everyone to go out there.

Merry Mill.

Thanks, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

Albemarle County is the place to be.

Any other announcements by Supervisors?

We have two proclamations today.

Yes, with pleasure I get to read the proclamation celebrating LGBTQ Pride Month.

Whereas, Albemarle County's stated mission is to enhance the well-being and quality of life for all citizens.

through the provision of the highest level of public service consistent with the prudent use of public funds and whereas the Board of Supervisors is committed to supporting through its actions and its partnerships the promotion of an equitable and inclusive Albemarle County that allows all members of our community to grow and thrive

and whereas Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, LGBTQ Pride Month is celebrated annually in June to honor the 1969 Stonewall Riots and works to achieve equal justice and equal opportunity for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and questioning LGBTQ Americans and

Whereas on April 11, 2020, the Virginia Values Act was signed into law, making Virginia the first state in the South to protect LGBTQ people from discrimination in their daily lives, including discrimination in housing, public and private employment, public accommodations, and access to credit.

and whereas LGBTQ individuals have shaped, advanced and enriched the fabric of Albemarle County and our nation by making immense contributions to all areas of life including government, business, arts and sciences, medicine, law enforcement, technology and the military.

and now therefore be it proclaimed that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, continue to affirm our commitment to our stated mission to enhance the well-being and quality of life of all members of our community and recognize with pride the rich cultural diversity and contribution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning LGBTQ residents to the vibrancy

of Albemarle County.

Okay and I apologize I skipped over Ms.

Binta-Fereed to start off and we went straight to the proclamation so let me go from the motion on that and turn it over to you for comments.

Okay so I don't need to read it again do I?

That I actually am here just to introduce the person who will accept the proclamation.

Yep.

OK.

Well, let's go ahead and vote on it first, then we'll deliver it.

OK.

Ms.

Price.

So we have a motion.

Ms.

Price.

Do we have a vote?

Aye.

Ms.

Ms.

Mallek.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel.

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

All right, now we have a motion to deliver.

So thank you.

So, Erin, Ms.

I just wanted to introduce her very quickly.

And just before we get there, I just wanted to thank you all, supervisors, for taking the time to recognize and celebrate such an important month for so many in our community.

And as you know, we as an organization have been trying to be more intentional about centering equity and inclusion, not just in the programs and services we're offering to the public, but also in the support we offer to our colleagues and employees.

And on that note, I'm very happy to introduce Erin, who is actually part of DSS.

Erin is an adults

benefits specialist at the Department of Social Services here in Albemarle, and she's the co-chair of our LGBTQIA affinity group.

So Erin, thank you for being here today.

Thank you.

So I'm honored to accept this proclamation on behalf of the LGBTQ people that live and work in Albemarle County.

While Pride Month is derived from a painful part of our history, it's also important, it's important to remember that history, but for me it's also a time to celebrate how far we've come

and to have pride in who we are.

We definitely have a long way to go, don't get me wrong, but I want to recognize that having acceptance and support coming from the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors is a big step in doing just that.

While preparing for this, I read the proclamation to my wife and she was moved to tears.

We've never lived in a place where a local government declared support and protections for the LGBTQ community.

Our dream is that our son grows up feeling that acceptance is the norm,

and that our world is made up of all kinds of people and families and that love is love.

I hope that more places begin to recognize and show that support to their community members.

It's so important to build the momentum of change and fight against the mistreatment of so many people.

A lot of us have faced outright discrimination and hate in our lives, but it's not just the extremes that I want to talk about.

It's also about all the little things.

Too many people have had to move through everyday situations,

Feeling shame in something as simple as partaking in a workplace conversation about their spouse or their children.

Introducing their partner where they may not be sure how they will be received.

Kids participating in school and feeling uncomfortable sharing about themselves or their same sex parents, their transgender siblings, or even being transgender themselves.

Hearing that recognition from their own local government helps build the confidence

and creates the support that many people need to be proud of who they are, who their family members are.

It normalizes being comfortable talking about your own life.

It's such a simple thing that's often taken for granted by those who don't have to live with that discomfort.

The community that Celebrating Pride has built is incredible and has allowed people to find acceptance amongst a melting pot of others that like them have had to hide who they are in some way, shape or form.

It's created a place where people can build new families even when their own have turned their backs on them.

They hear this proclamation from the board will build on this community and can affect change not only on LGBTQ people, but maybe even the people that have lived in ignorance.

It can inspire people to educate themselves to be more open, accepting and understanding of people that may not be the same as them.

It might even inspire them to see how their words and actions or lack thereof can affect people that are often their coworkers, their neighbors, and even their family members.

Finally, I want to say thank you.

Thank you, Ms.

Buchanan.

Those were very, very moving words.

Do any supervisors have any comments that you would like to make at this time?

Well, I'm going.

Yes, I have many friends that I'm honored to say that are LGBTQ.

I love them dearly.

You're right, Ms.

Buchanan.

You said love is love.

And to me, that says it all.

Love is love.

And good people are here all over.

And they contribute in such important ways.

And it means so much to me.

Thank you.

Any other supervisors?

Just want to thank you for coming today and I am just so pleased that reading a proclamation like this is just part of our standard business practice.

I've been around long enough that I remember years ago

The school board voted to allow teachers to put a rainbow sticker on their window in their classroom door to show that that room was a safe place for children.

And it's taken a long time.

And Ms.

Buchanan, I echo what the other supervisors have said.

Your words were very powerful.

They were very moving and they actually affected me deeply.

And I appreciate you having the courage yourself to openly speak of your situation.

As the only, you know, LGBTQ member elected to Amherst County as a transgender woman on the board of supervisors, I not only thank the county, I thank our voters.

I thank our community members who have demonstrated a degree of acceptance and that love is love.

Virginia is love that other communities really should emulate.

Traveling from vacation this weekend, I watched a movie called Pride.

And if you haven't seen it, I encourage you to look it up.

It's about gay and lesbians support minors in 1985 in Wales when there was a coal mine strike.

And not every battle results in victory, but there are victories that come out of every battle.

And I really encourage you to watch the movie to see how two different groups that had been targeted and abused came together to support each other and watch it to the end.

It will amaze you the very ending of it.

So thank you both for being here and participating in this very important proclamation.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley?

I just have to say that I'm in the position I'm in right now as a supervisor because I had three gay friends

that forced me into this position.

They're the ones that made me run, supported me, and I'm here today because of them.

I thank them.

Thank you.

I think we have another proclamation.

Yes, thank you.

This is, all right, let me get the print up here where I can see it.

Very good.

Thank you very much, and thanks to the Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, local of Crozet chapter, for bringing this to our attention.

A proclamation, National Gun Violence Awareness Day.

Whereas every day more than 100 Americans are killed by gun violence, and on average there are more than 13,000 gun homicides every year, and Americans are 25 times more likely to die by gun violence than people in other high-income countries.

Whereas Virginia has 992 gun deaths every year, with a rate of 11.4 deaths per 100,000 people, the 34th highest rate of gun deaths in the United States and communities across the nation, including Almaro County, are working to end the senseless violence with evidence-based solutions.

Whereas protecting public safety in the communities they serve is the local government's highest responsibility and support for the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens goes hands-in-hands with keeping guns away from people with dangerous histories.

Local officials and law enforcement officers know their communities best and are the most familiar with local criminal activity and how to address it and are best positioned to understand how to keep their citizens safe.

And whereas the pandemic facing America has drastically impacted communities and individuals sheltering in place, which may result in situations where access to firearms results in increased risk in intimate partner violence, gun deaths, suicide by gun, and unintentional shootings.

And whereas anyone can join this campaign by pledging to wear orange on June 4th, the first Friday in June in 2021, to help raise awareness about gun violence.

By wearing orange, Americans will raise awareness about gun violence, honor the lives of gun violence victims and survivors, renew our commitment to reduce gun violence, pledge to do all we can to help keep firearms out of the wrong hand, and encourage responsible gun ownership to help keep our children safe.

Now, therefore, be it proclaimed that we, the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, declare Friday, June 4th,

2021 to be National Gun Violence Awareness Day and encourage all citizens to support their local community's efforts to prevent the tragic effects of gun violence and to honor and value human lives.

And signed this second day of June 2021, Ned Galloway Chair.

I make this as a motion.

Second.

Thank you.

Please call the roll.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Ms.

Ms.

Baldwin?

And do any supervisors want to make any comments with regard to this proclamation?

I will just relate that even in Texas, a place where there seem to be many more people supporting guns, there were gun owners today described on the radio as saying, I don't want to look at every person as a potential threat.

And they were very against, even as gun owners, very against the permit without permitless open carry that Texas is

just passing because I'm looking forward to our discussion locally to create the safety that we need to have at our meetings and our public buildings as well.

Thank you.

I do have and I always resist just reading the statistic because I think at some point we just have all gotten numb

with the statistics about gun deaths and gun violence in this country.

But it jumped out at me over the last couple of weeks, this 400 people were shot and killed over the Mother's Day weekend.

There were 12 mass shootings over the Memorial Day weekend.

Gavin Newsom said it right when he said, what in the world are we thinking?

And I agree.

I look forward to further discussion about what we can do locally.

Thank you.

I'm a gun owner.

And I believe that there should be regulations, reasonable regulations for safety purposes.

I own a vehicle.

We have reasonable regulations for the operation of a vehicle.

All right, we will move on to matters from the public.

And I understand that we do have someone signed up.

Thank you, Vice Chair Price.

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.

A sign-up sheet is managed by the Clerk's Office.

During public hearings, the Board will acknowledge speakers addressing the item listed for public hearing.

Speakers are limited to one appearance of three minutes per public hearing item.

The Clerk's Office will identify each speaker.

Applicants are limited to a 10-minute presentation of their proposal and are allowed a five-minute rebuttal at the close of the public hearing.

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 seconds.

In order to give all the 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 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 to end your comments and the microphone will 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 each of the public comment periods permitting.

Back and forth debate is not allowed.

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

If participating by phone, please press 9 to let us know you want to speak, then 6 if from a landline to unmute.

Thank you, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

I understand we may actually have more than one speaker.

Go ahead.

Good afternoon supervisors, county staff, and members of the public.

I'm Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I'd like to speak briefly about an item that's on the consent agenda.

It's a report from Tim Padolino which describes a five mile extension of the Old Mills Trail from I-64 to Melton.

If you're not familiar with the Old Mills Trail, it's truly one of the hidden gems of the area.

It's sort of the county's analog to Riverview Park.

It currently follows the east bank of the Rivanna River from Darden Tow to I-64.

The extension that Tim's going to be talking about will add an additional five miles and

resulting in an eventual 10-mile greenway connecting Darden Tell to Glenmore.

Along the way, it'll pass Pan Tops, Riverview Park, Woolen Mills, Martha Jefferson Hospital, Thomas Jefferson's birthplace at Shadwell, Stone Robinson Elementary School, Clifton Inn, and the list goes on and on.

It would be on the par with anything in the Commonwealth, only this one will be located right here

where many people live and work.

It's in the background of why I speak so passionately about the Rivanna River pedestrian bridge connecting Pan Tops to either the Willow Tree site or to Riverview Park.

These two projects add up to much more than the sum of their parts.

The pieces are falling into place, particularly the right of way.

However, the conveyance does come with a deadline.

The trail will need to be built this decade.

There are grants and a private actor is ready to help.

And actually, just because of the flat topography, it's actually going to be pretty affordable and something that can be done.

It won't be a heavy financial lift.

And it can open at a low level and be upgraded over time like the rest of the Old Mills Trail.

That's one of the things that I love about that trail is the county has just, you know, plugged away over time, opened it as resources have been available, and now it's really shaping up into something wonderful.

And it'll soon be something that's world class.

I think the best thing that the board can do to help this move along would be to make sure that the Greenways coordinator position gets filled, because that individual will be able to assist with

permitting and grants that will bring resources back to the county.

The city has had the experience with Chris Ginsig being a real net positive.

He brings in far more than his own weight and resources.

And I think the county can use a similar approach to get the Old Mills Trail extended.

I'd like to invite everybody to stop by the Old Mills Trail this weekend, Saturday from eight to 10 for a cleanup day

That'll be at Darden Tell Park.

There'll be information about recycling and opportunities to clean as well as I think Tim will be there to talk about this trail expansion.

This is so exciting and thank you for your good work.

That's all I have for today.

Thank you.

I understand we do have a second speaker signed up, but we've not been able to identify through the people who are logged in who that individual is.

I believe it has to do with the homestay that is on our agenda for later this afternoon.

So if you are that individual and you have logged in, if you could somehow through chat or somehow let us know that you are here so that we can give you an opportunity to make your message heard.

And the chat, I understand, would be the appropriate place to do that.

So we hear you, but there's a pretty significant echo there.

Can you hear me, folks?

Yes, that's better.

Okay, I'll take it on the phone.

I apologize for that.

Should I continue now?

Yes, please do.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

My name is Vipul Patel.

I continue my 40 years residency in Charlottesville-Almore County.

And for this specific hearing, my property is in the Scottsville District.

Irrespective members of the board and planner Rebecca Ragsdale, I'm thankful of the opportunity towards a homestay use at Beauchamps, located at 943 Jefferson Lake Drive.

Home sharing is here for good, and I'm seeking your special exception approval to permit five desk bedrooms on the basis of the county's 2019 homestay regulations.

Your duties to serve the county allow this process, and I'm certain you have concerns related to my property.

To begin, the entrance of Route 53 directly across Mickey Tavern onto Jefferson Lake Drive leads you to two separate dwellings, 941

and 943 Jefferson Lake Drive.

941 is not part of this home-stay application.

The unit is fully renovated and is served by its own well, septic and utilities and will remain as a long-term residential unit, which is part of the occupant.

943 Jefferson Lake Drive is intended for home-stay use

is unoccupied and undergoing full renovations.

Jefferson Lake Drive is a shared driveway amongst the three of us.

In Cam, B&B, Monticello, and Memory Garden Cemetery.

The driveway has served its capacity since Go Champs was built, is my assumption.

The entrance is a bit challenging,

to which in 2019, I contacted VDOT, and they simply indicated that it is an approved entrance.

To this date, I'm not aware of any incidents in or out of the property.

Homestate use at 941 Jefferson Lake Drive is for five guest bedrooms, each with its dedicated

Life safety boundaries are absolute, and each unit will have smoke detectors, fire extinguishers, and approved egress.

Since each of the units are dedicated, there's no large central indoor gathering space, which will deter large party gatherings, which can be an issue.

However, we do provide outdoor space

and for clay gathering for our guests at the gazebo and numerous swing and bench areas on the property.

Parking is also ample, safely allowing 8 to 10 vehicles to maneuver within the property.

In charge of resident manager, my long-term residence of 15 plus years at 943 recently shifted to the

fully renovated unit at 941 until I complete the renovations at 943 and at which time they will move back in and take full responsibility for the home stay facility.

Since my ownership in 2015, I have entrusted them to my property and I see them as owners of the property.

Thank you.

So at this time, we will move to the consent agenda.

I do have a couple of comments to make with regard to that.

There are a couple of errors that need to be corrected.

On item 8.7, the Rivanna Greenway project update, the Old Mills Trail extension attachment D,

referenced incorrect dates or deadlines by which Albemarle County needs to begin development and to complete development of the Old Mills Trail section of the Rivanna Greenway.

To clarify, the following dates or deadlines are the correct dates.

The county's development on the Greenway Trail on Lego Farm must begin by August 16, 2027

and the county's development of the Green Whale Trail on Lego Farm must be completed by August 16, 2029.

So August 16, 2027 to start and August 16, 2029 to start.

These dates were corrected in the online agenda packet on Thursday, May 27.

We have a motion to adopt the consent agenda as amended.

So moved.

All right, thank you.

Ms.

Price?

Aye.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

Moving on to item number nine.

We have an action item, fiscal year 2022 resolution of appropriations.

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Slow to get into the meeting.

But I'm going to turn it over.

Andy's probably joining us now.

Sorry about that.

And while he pops up the presentation, we are

going to appropriate the FY22 budget this afternoon.

And Andy Bowman, our chief of budget, has a few slides to walk through to orient the board to this discussion.

And I believe this is also where we will be discussing the acquisition of conservation easements program.

I think it's this and not the afternoon or the 6 p.m.

session.

So please correct me if I have that wrong, but Andy is ready and able to tee up that conversation once we get through the appropriations discussion.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, I'll just wait one moment.

I can see it on my screen.

Heather on our team pulls this up.

It's what I can see, Heather, if you just put it in slideshow mode, it may just be everyone's connection catching up.

If I could just get a thumbs up from people when they can see the presentation.

Andy and Heather, we can see the presentation.

It's just in edit mode.

There we go.

Great.

I don't know if you're on the right slide, but it is now in the slideshow.

As Ms.

Birch mentioned, I'm Andy Bowman.

I'm the chief of the budget division and department of finance and budget.

I'm here today for three action items that are shown on the slide.

There is the adoption of the fiscal year 22 resolution of appropriations, which is attachment A to the staff report.

There is the adoption of attachment B, which is a resolution of official intent to reimburse expenditures with proceeds of borrowing.

That's a long title.

I'll explain what that means in just one moment.

And then third, there is a fiscal year 2020 budget update in direction for July 7 supplemental appropriation.

We'll talk through these first two items rather quickly.

I just want to just a couple of slides.

I'll pause for a board discussion and then we'll move on to the third item.

So we'll go ahead to the next slide.

and for the past several months, the board has been, oh, sorry, one second.

For the past several months, the board has been developing the budget for fiscal year 22.

That was adopted on May 5th.

The public listening may be aware and adopted, but it is just a plan.

The act of appropriation is the official legal authority to spend funds during fiscal year 22 is the primary purpose of today's item.

Attachment A is the resolution that provides that authority.

I'm not going to cover the information in the resolution or staff report in detail, but I will hit some highlights from attachment A. First is that the resolution reflects the budget that was adopted by the board of supervisors on the fifth.

Second, in addition to that budget, there is an amendment from the school board's action on May 13th, where there is additional funding that was included in the school board's budget that is primarily an additional 1.4 million in state revenue that's included in this resolution.

Third, we call this out every year.

In the appropriation of resolutions, there are times where we'll come back to the board for supplemental appropriation.

There are also times where through authority granted to the county executive, there's authority to transfer the funding for purposes identified in the resolution, which is done kind of in an administrative basis and then reported to the board through the quarterly financial reports.

In the past year, our team has been reviewing practices of other AAA bond rated localities.

and we've expanded or proposing to expand that authority in this year for the dollar amount of changes that are allowed.

Practice stays the same in terms of the types of circumstances where this may be used.

It didn't generally tend to be administrative nature rather than items that are appropriate for the board, which would be the policy oriented or legislative terms.

Here to try to reduce the number of items that are administrative nature that come forward on the board agenda, could be administrative streamlining of our processes.

The fourth thing is that this also sets requirements for external funding recipients, those of the 60-some community partners who receive funding through one of the county's review processes.

Attachment A. Attachment B has a long title, but in short, this really allows the county to use proceeds in the future to reimburse itself for capital program expenditures.

This is just a routine item that's included in every annual appropriation for when the time comes when we do actually borrow funds, this allows us to have that in place.

So that's the summary of these two resolutions.

And on the next slide, there's just the board action.

Board questions and action on these two items.

I will note there's a third item with a budget update.

It does not change anything with these two attachments because there's a budget update.

We intend to come back to supplemental appropriation on July 7th.

Let's go ahead and take these two first.

Thank you, Mr. Bowman.

Thank you, I have no questions.

I appreciate the help from Andy and Nelsie about the transfer changes and so I'm all set.

All right, thank you.

Thank you.

No questions, thank you.

Supervisor McKeel?

No questions, thanks.

And I have no questions.

Mr. Bowman, I appreciate, as always, your presentation and clarification so we understand what we have in front of us.

At this time, I think, Mr. Cameron, we probably should do the resolution separately.

So we'll first do the, do we have a motion for the first resolution attachment A?

So moved.

Second.

All right, thank you.

and we call the roll, please.

Price.

Aye.

Ms.

Bea LaPisto-Kirtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel.

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

All right, thank you.

Moving on to the second one.

Do we have a motion to adopt resolution attachment B?

Aye.

So moved.

Second.

All right, thank you.

Price, aye, Mr. Bea LaPisto-Kirtley, aye, Ms.

McKeel, yes, Ms.

Palmer, yes.

All right, thank you.

Yes, thank you.

I've got a few more slides to talk through this one before I turn it over to the executive and then to the board for some questions and discussion.

This item this afternoon is a fiscal year 22 budget update where we are seeking the board's direction where we'll bring back a supplemental appropriation to the board on July 7th.

Now, a common question from the board or perhaps the public listening may be why would there be a notable budget update a month after it was adopted?

And that's a very fair question.

This update is part of the process that has been set in motion 15 months ago at the onset of the pandemic.

We developed and managed budgets using the 3-6-6 approach, referring to the last quarter of fiscal year 20, the first three.

The first half was fiscal year 21, the middle six, and then the last half was fiscal year 21, the last six, as shown on this slide.

So on May 19th, staff delivered a third quarter financial report to the board to show a stabilizing local economy in total, particularly during activity in the third quarter that I'll review in a moment.

That third quarter report has implications not just for fiscal year 21, but 3.5 million, or about 1% of the budget that we can now count on in new revenue in fiscal year 22.

But before I get into the when and the why first, just in a high level, what does this 366 plan look like in action?

Because it really does help explain why we're having this update today, because it is a little unusual than what we do in most years when we're not in a pandemic.

So going on to the next slide,

I'm not going to read through all these actions over the next few slides, but what I want to characterize as an approach is that we're trying to make solid financial decisions based on the data that we have available at the time in each phase of this 3-6-6 approach.

And as we get that data and we take actions in the present, we're also recalibrating for the future as needed.

Going all the way back to the start of the pandemic, we've tried to position ourselves that we're able to maintain reserves of caution should things get worse.

But we're also prepared to, should things get better, be able to advance future priorities, should conditions improve, which they have, and also to ensure that the investments we're making are allowing us to be a resilient organization for the future as we're in a time of transition.

So this all began more than a year ago when we began to implement expenditure reductions given projected revenue shortfalls both in the current fiscal year at the time which was fiscal year 20 and fiscal year 21.

And it's notable that we reduced our original recommended fiscal year 21 budget by about 21 million or 6.6 percent.

And while the impact of the pandemic on the county's revenues has not been as great as projected, we are still with this revenue update below where we thought we would be in fiscal year 20.

So this process has proven very valuable and necessary.

We're going on to the next slide as we begin to look like what's happened over the course of the year.

First we saw around the end of fiscal year 20, first quarter, we saw that fiscal year 20 with our financial reserves intact, that things were performing as expected in fiscal year 21 with the limited data that we had, knowing that we didn't need to make further reductions at that time.

We can go ahead to the next slide, which really speaks to what was taking place in the second quarter.

The kind of information on the slide that was very busy for both staff and the board is we received meaningful signs that revenues were recovering.

This allowed actions like $34 million in capital projects to be unpaused in the current fiscal year.

It allowed for one-time funding to be strategically planned at both fiscal year 21 and 22.

And the 2020 budget was put forward with a more positive outlook than was adopted in fiscal year 21 back in May of last year.

So, moving on to the next slide, this approach, we're still in that last six, this approach is continuing.

As we're looking as we are going to have a bond issuance in June, and we are generating fiscal year 22, some projected tensor of savings, as we look how that will be applied in the future, as we consider our future strategic uses of American Rescue Plan Act funding, this sort of strategic financial approach is going to continue.

This is going to happen I guess in two ways today.

The first of which is this discussion where in fiscal year 22 the continued recovery primarily in our consumer and business driven related taxes provide additional revenue available in fiscal year 22.

Tonight there's an amendment to the fiscal year 21 budget that I'll speak to more later but based on some one-time revenue that will become available in fiscal year 21 we have the opportunity to create a reserve to kind of hedge against an uncertainty and capital project cost as raw materials

and bids are potentially increasing and also to ensure that we're continuing to be able to respond and kind of recover and reconstitute our organization and community in response to the pandemic.

So that's just kind of a recap of where we are today over the last 15 months to kind of those highlights where we now have said we have about additional 3.5 million or about one percent of the budget for fiscal year 22 in new revenues and this is primarily due to four reasons.

First of which is the continued recovery and strengthening of our consumer-driven activity.

I will show a graphic of just one moment, but kind of the high-level version is that as we head into the third quarter, the condition of wisdom, as we talked among staff, as we talked among representatives in economic development, the Convention and Visitors Bureau, kind of the general consensus was the third quarter we could see potentially a stall in our recovery.

as we had higher virus cases, we had colder weather, we had a vaccine rollout, but it was in very early stages because we were looking at the third quarter, it's the revenues we received in January to March, but a lot of that is activity that took place in November through February.

So we were a little too early to get to where we are today.

Second is with our actual data for business driven taxes, that includes business licenses and also think franchise taxes,

Just for the board's understanding, we don't really receive any meaningful revenue with our business license until the end of February.

Now that would be true in any budget year, but given the impact of the pandemic on businesses during the early stages of the pandemic where we had a kind of a shutdown, for lack of a better word, and kind of those kind of state mandated and also the local restrictions, would either be an impact.

And while there has been an impact, those revenues are less than we projected in 2020.

That revenue impact will not be as severe as we predicted.

A third update is on local recreation taxes.

We are currently, in fiscal year 21, seeing a record level of these revenues due to the volume and prices in the hot real estate market.

We are not projecting another record in fiscal year 22, but it is strong enough where it's appropriate to increase our prior projection for these taxes.

And then fourth, we had building permit fees.

In calendar year 20, we saw a trend where a lot of our development activity did slow down compared to prior years.

However, based on the fiscal year 21 third quarter, that activity has been really above normal.

Overall, these revenues are on track to finish comparable to prior years.

This also reflects the board's action in April based on community development fees, which creates a little additional revenue from that action as well that was not fully incorporated into the adopted budget.

So just one graph that I have, and it might be my last slide before I turn it over to the county executive, is really to show what does this consumer recovery look like.

This is a slide that the board has seen before, but it's been updated.

Just to talk through it, because there's a lot of lines here.

The green line is fiscal year 19, the actual revenue we've collected for sales tax, meals tax, and transit occupancy tax, also known as hotel tax.

So in fiscal year 19, we see a relatively steady line.

There was no pandemic then.

The blue line, and the word's seen this trend before, we have three quarters of very strong performance over the green line.

That all changes very dramatically as we head into the last quarter of fiscal year 20 with the onset of the pandemic.

The orange line is where we are in the current fiscal year, fiscal year 21.

As we can see, we started the year recovering from the spring of 2020, but still far below the fiscal year

fiscal year 19 actual.

We saw in the second quarter or so we began to run roughly even with that, though there was a little slow down in January.

And that's the information we had when we had to finalize the recommended budget.

We have a little bit of a hint to what February may be, but really when we prepared the recommended budget, the left of that red line is the data set that we had for orange.

What we have seen since then in the following four months is that that orange line has really fundamentally changed where we are now consistently exceeding

the Green Line fiscal year 19 in the current year, especially in February and in May.

And I'll say that May data is preliminary.

I actually just pulled that off yesterday, the first of the month, but there's no reason to expect that there's anything unusual in that number.

Just across the board, we have seen not just a continued recovery, but really a significant step up these last few months from where we were in the past.

So to say this recovery would be coming at some point would be a given.

But to say that we knew it would happen at this point, rather this summer or this fall has been the unknown we're trying to navigate for.

And there still is uncertainty out there.

We still have our reserves to hold that in place.

But this is really the picture we've seen.

I think this picture tells it well in terms of what did we know and when and what has changed since then to show what our recovery has looked like from these revenues that have been volatile over the last year or so.

Mr. Bowman, thank you very much for getting us to this point with our board.

So board, for your consideration this evening, the recommended framework for your

fiscal year consideration is to identify the revised revenue projections being $3.5 million over and above compared to the fiscal year 2022 adopted.

That would go into the revenue split by formula with $300,000 to capital and debt, $1.4 million to schools,

and for local government, it's an additional 1.7 million.

I pause there and remind the board that as we work through the budget process, we put a familiar slide in front of you that I don't have ready to show you this evening, but it's a triangle with the base being our financial condition, the middle piece recognizing our economy and the stabilization of our economy, and the third, the tip part of the triangle is workforce stabilization.

This board is familiar because I've spoke to the board both one-on-one in discussions and also publicly in board meetings that we continue to be very cautious with our approach on the support that we give our workforce.

Last year at this time we were looking at a budget that had no contemplated raises in it and it was due to the fact that our last quarter of revenue and FY20 had really drastically dropped due to the pandemic.

We've slowly stabilized our economy and our revenues have slowly clawed back.

We've had an extremely conservative year.

and so we've continued to monitor the data that we've seen.

The board should be reminded that back on January the 28th of this year as we were getting ready to get into the nitty-gritty part of our budget process that we held a joint meeting with school board and the board of supervisors and you heard from our human resources department who spoke about what was going on with some of our benchmark

local government agencies related to school staff, is related to specifically teachers, and also the Human Resources Department put benchmark survey data in front of this board that talked about

Public Safety Pay Plan, specifically that we were identifying that since the start of the Public Safety Pay Plan, which it went online January 1 of 2019, and we had spent considerable money and resources to get that plan up and going, that we had recent salary data to suggest that there was some significant movement in the last six to nine months with Public Safety Pay.

that had resulted in entry level pay for police officers being approximately 8% behind our identified market and a commiserate for fire and sheriff of somewhere around 7% as well.

So that accompanying with applicant pools that were concerningly low and lacking diversity, we began to really pay close attention to that as our revenue picture began to stabilize.

all that being said board I come to you this evening very confident that the data suggests that we need to reconsider with our public safety pay plan the prior allocation of two percent and I would recommend to this board that we do five percent so it would be two plus the three so it would be five percent that would be effective July the first

for the reasons that I've outlined this evening and that does go back to the 3-28 discussion with both the school board and with the Board of Supervisors.

And then in addition to that, we have had as many as 18 positions recently that have been frozen.

that's coming down from a number more significant than that last year but 18 and we're continuing to look at the growth in our revenue picture that Andy has described and we will continue to work with departments to unfreeze the vast majority of those positions are outside of the public safety departments and we're looking to unfreeze post and get back online those positions as they're allocated in our budget

Thank you Mr. Richardson and Mr. Bowman also previously for your additional input.

I'm very grateful at the cautious way that we have managed with our senior staff leadership over the last year to get us to where we are and so wonderful to perhaps have a choice and I know we will continue to be careful and cautious.

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

I concur with what Supervisor Malek has said and I like the direction we're going in and how we are managing everything.

I'm fine with this.

I think I missed something though.

When you say reduce the number of frozen bacon positions from 18, did you say more about to what?

Jeff?

Sorry, I was unmuting.

I did not state a number

that we're moving toward because we're continuing to work through that.

Mr. Walker and Mr. Henry are working with the departments.

They're also working with finance and budget to determine what we can budgetarily

unfreeze and get mail online.

There's been a combination of considerations that we've taken and so we do not have we're continuing to work through that but we we are confident we're fiscally confident that we're moving at a cautious pace but that we are in no way uh stretching or obligating ourselves in the 22 budget where we want

be balanced at the end of the year.

So I did not give you a number that we're working towards, Supervisor Palmer.

Thank you.

I know that you have provided a list of those vacant positions in the past.

Do you think you could just email that out to us?

I will ask the staff that just to give you an idea of turnaround time prior to the end of this week to update that list as to where we are because that number may be less than 18.

There may be some that are in route or actually being posted so I'll give you an updated list and we'll shoot to have that to you by the end of business day on Friday.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

And I really appreciate this very clear report.

It's really been excellent, the entire report.

Thank you very much.

I am very supportive of this approach, which I think all the other supervisors have said so far.

I like taking it very carefully and thoughtfully working our way into our expenditures.

I'm especially

I'm pleased to see that we're going to be looking at some of those vacant positions that were frozen.

I'm sure staff will be prioritizing those positions.

So a discussion about how that prioritization happens, Jeff, might be helpful at some point.

The thought process, I guess, is what I'm saying, but that's great.

And getting back now to the workforce stabilization, I've been especially concerned about our police, our sheriff's department, and firing rescue based on, I think, a market study that was done recently that talked about how far behind the market

our public safety plan was and I would just Jeff can you help me understand a little bit the five percent we're going from two percent to five percent and I'm very supportive of that could you just talk for a few minutes because I think the market study showed we were further behind than five percent if you'll just address that for me so I have a really good understanding of where we are and where we're hoping to move to for those employees because they're really critical I mean these are

It's always extremely helpful to get really strong refined analytical data that gives you a really good bellwether of where we stand with an identifiable market.

And so Supervisor McKeel, you are right that the data suggested that we had slipped further behind than the recommendation which you have in front of you today of five percent.

That's one side of the

I'll pause just for a second.

That's one side of the equation is that we're looking for benchmark data that gives us some guidance as to where we stand out in the market and the market that we're comparing to.

Second side of the equation is affordability.

And that is, what can we afford to do?

The data can be compelling as it stands on its own, but you've also got to look at our financial picture, which brings us back to the triangle of our financial condition, our economic stability, and where we are, uh, uh, budgetarily with our operating dollars and the flexibility or inflexibility that we have.

And so staff has done an excellent job, uh,

in a number of areas, and so we're very confident that we can recommend the increase from 2% to 5%.

Number one, we think it's warranted and justified for all the reasons.

It's critical that we stay competitive on the recruitment front in public safety.

It's also critical that we recognize that turnover is exceptionally expensive in public safety.

And so replacement of people who leave the organization who are fully trained, that is extremely expensive for us in a number of ways.

But the bottom line, Supervisor McKeel, we've recommended what we can afford at this time.

I'd also suggest to you is that we won't take it and just sit it down and not pick it up until a year from now.

We will have to keep constant watch within reason for how we're doing with our public safety pay plan.

This board supported a lot of work that took place in 2018, probably prior to 2018 and 2017 to get a refined public safety plan built, designed,

funded and operationalized and it's concerning to me that we fell behind fairly quickly.

for the last six to nine months.

And so I'm thrilled that we're able to make the recommendation that we are today.

We'll continue to monitor it.

I've worked with our finance and budget team to make sure that the recommendation today is a very solid recommendation and that we can not just afford it now, but that we can also afford that going forward.

It does.

Obviously I'm very thankful for the 5%.

I just, we worked really hard to get the public safety plan, pay plan in place and the idea was for it to be market-based and that it would keep our public safety officers on market.

So just don't want to lose track of that and I'm, yes.

So I appreciate your response.

It still remains a concern to me but I understand the affordability piece.

I really do.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, and Mr. Richards and I concur with the comments of the other supervisors.

I don't want to necessarily just repeat what others have said, but there are a few things that I want to make sure that I also comment on which are largely consistent.

with what you've heard.

And really, as we look at this slide, I think you can break it down into two parts.

One of the parts is that because of the efficient and effective management of resources by county staff, we are now in a position where we maintain our triple AAA rating, and we now have these additional funds that we're able to apply to the needs that the county has.

So I applaud all of you for the work that you've done there.

Turning back to the increased public safety pay plan, as with all the other supervisors, I wholeheartedly support that and recognize that we are a market driven economy when it comes to our labor force.

and if we're not able to retain the people in the positions we need then we will suffer as a county and we will suffer as a community and I fully support this increase to the public safety pay plan.

Coming from a military background which is somewhat comparable to what you do with the pay raises in general here with the county there may be an across the board percentage increase but we also know in the military that there are special pays that go to people in different communities

Naviators, Special Warfare, Surface Warfare, whatever it may be.

And we find ourselves in that same sort of a situation here where we may be able to give an across-the-board pay raise to everyone, but there are certain components of our labor force that we have to pay extra if we're going to maintain the quality and the numbers that we need.

I would ask, and I use as an example, when we approve the one percent

payment to all of our employees.

I hesitate to call that a bonus, given there had been no pay raise and gap positions and everything.

Later on, we discovered that there had been some individuals that had been overlooked in that.

I'm not sure exactly what the totality of the segment

of employees qualify as public safety plan, but I do hope that the county staff has looked into this to make sure we're not inadvertently omitting a category of individuals.

But that being said, I too support the increase from the 2% to 5% and the ability to reduce the number of frozen vacant positions based upon county staff analysis of where we need to move forward.

and fill those other positions.

It'd be great to fill them all, but we definitely need to fill the ones that we've got right now.

So if I understand it, Mr. Richardson, Mr. Campner, this is not necessarily a motion.

This is just a consensus of the board, or do we need a motion?

I'll recommend a motion to,

Staff is looking for board direction.

And I think the direction the board is seeking is what's shown on this slide.

Actually, let's go on and take the motion.

I had something I just wanted to add to the discussion or a thank you after this.

So let's do the motion first.

And I'm happy to make the motion.

I recommend the adoption of the annual, no wait a minute, maybe I'm making the wrong motion.

I move that we accept the recommended use of the fiscal year 2022 revenue update.

I believe that would.

All right, any further discussion?

Mr. Quarles.

Aye.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley.

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek.

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel.

Yes.

Ms.

Palmer.

All right, thank you.

That's right.

I just wanted to thank Nelsie and staff because I had requested a really short

short bulleted section of where we were saving money and revenues we were putting aside so that I could see the list because we had some community members that expressed some concern.

And I wanted to just say to Nelsie that I think on page two, she has given me what I asked for.

That's all I wanted to say was thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you.

Donna, before we move on, can I say one, two?

Sure.

At the very beginning of this discussion, Nelsie mentioned that she thought we were going to talk about the ACE program then at this period of time.

And I just wanted to say that we did add it to the agenda at six o'clock.

If that's a problem, we need to know.

But from direction, from discussion with our county executive, he said to add it to this period or to six.

And at the beginning of the meeting, I had it added to at the six o'clock period.

So I hope that creates a problem.

We'll be prepared there, Supervisor Palmer.

Thank you.

I have lost it, so thank you.

All right, and when you do, we'll, Mr. Richardson.

I'll be brief and Supervisor Mallek may think about what she was getting ready to say.

Two things that I would say.

Number one that I just want to close the decision from the staff's perspective on the public safety pay plan by saying that the data drove our consideration and recommendation to come back to this board and the data was compelling.

The staff was looking back in the January and February time frame when we were not as stable, we were not on as sound footing as we were.

We were struggling with what we would be able to recommend, recognizing that our staff across the county government had had a tremendously trying year and that comes from a lot of different perspectives.

the compelling data as it relates to the public safety pay plan jumped out and it was also tied back to a lot of work that had transpired since January of 2019 when we recognized the need to separate that work group for the specifics of what's involved in with public safety.

We will take a scalpel approach going forward not just with public safety but also across county government and we will begin to build good strong compensation data over the course of time to

to come back in the future, hopefully during the budget process to make recommendations on why we would do some things and what the strategies would suggest might yield the best benefits for us.

Again, wrapped around workforce stabilization.

I don't think that I would say is related to ACE, which I think will come back this evening at six o'clock.

Over the course of the last several weeks, I've spoke to board members about our bond refinancing, our issuing additional debt.

also our continuing improving revenue picture and it's been in those conversations that at least four board members on this board has said at the appropriate time I want to revisit the funding of ACE and so that's why this is coming forward today is because four different board members have said I'm interested in revisiting this topic

in some way shape or form and so we'll be prepared at six o'clock tonight uh as you go through the uh 2021 budget amendment and appropriations i think that would be a a good time to at least have an initial discussion and see what the board's interest is regarding that program and supervisor Palmer is the liaison to the ace committee

Thank you.

Thank you Mr. Richardson and I think that was helpful to know that it's a discussion not a decision today.

Yes, I was just going to ask that Ms.

McKeel mentioned some really great explanations that she had received, and if Nelsie could share those with all of us.

In your packet, Ann, I was talking about page two of five.

We have a bulleted list of where we're putting our monies.

It wasn't anything that I received specially.

All right, I think we've covered that, so thank you all for the information that you've presented to us for some of you.

Now we'll move to item number 10, special exception 2021.

0-0-0-0-1-8.

I am.

Thank you very much.

My head's kind of dashing around.

I'm looking at my three screens to kind of keep up.

A little anxious.

We had a little technical snafus earlier, but I think we're okay now.

So let me share my screen and we'll get going.

Let me know when it pops up.

Thank you.

I want to make sure we're in the right mode.

So I'm here, Director of Zoning and Rebecca Ragsdale is also with me if you all have any questions as we move through.

So our current item is special exception 2021-18.

The property is located at the corner of Jefferson Lake Drive and Thomas Jefferson Parkway across the road from Michie Tavern.

It is approximately

3.28 acres in size and is located within the Scottsville Magisterial District.

I'll briefly review our homestay regs.

I'm not gonna spend a lot of time here.

I think that we're kind of used to this.

This is the parcel that falls in the category of five acres or less.

So it is a rental of two guest rooms, 125 feet for all parcel boundaries, no use of accessory structures, and no whole house rentals.

The possible special exceptions in this category are, there are three of them or four of them, excuse me.

One is use of an accessory structure, which is actually not part of this application.

The other is a reduction in setback, an increase in the number of guest rooms and the ability to request the waiver to be able for the owner to use a resident manager.

So as we just discussed, the use of accessory structures is not part of this.

So of the four, the applicant is requesting three, a reduction of the 125, an increase from two guest rooms to five guest rooms, and the ability to allow for the resident manager.

And if y'all recall, as we went through this subject, when we talk about the two to five, the two was one that we

put in there to kind of keep it more residential on those smaller lots.

The five was a cap that's related to how we address bedrooms for rent or bedrooms that we let in the building code.

So that's where the five comes from.

just as a refresher.

When you get into six or more different building code requirements come into play and that's a kind of a different animal under the building code as well as the zoning ordinance.

That's why we match that definition so we have some continuity and regulation there.

Again you're familiar with the the factors to consider and basically boils down to that there is no detriment to abutting lots or neighborhood and there is no harm

to public health, safety or welfare.

Incidentally, the abutting property owners as our process requires have been notified and to date, there has been no objection.

So now we'll get into kind of the meat of it, the particulars, which is as stated earlier, the property is located across from Michie Tavern, it's approximately 3.28 acres.

There's an existing historic main house

943 Jefferson Lake Drive, and an existing cottage, 941.

943 is the subject of this homestay application and therefore the subject of the special exception.

Parking is located in the front of the main house.

There's existing vegetation along the western and eastern property lines that provide screening.

There's attachments to D&E within your packet that will also help with that.

I do have some additional slides that show the layout of the property.

I want to move into the specifics a little bit about the area.

This one's kind of unique.

This particular property is joined by non-residential and undeveloped and historic uses on all sides.

Monticello Gardens Cemetery is located to the west and the north, property owned by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

Monticello is located to the east and Michie Tavern is to the south.

Other nearby properties are owned by the UVA Foundation.

There's Carter Mountain Orchard, the Saunders Trail, and Mont Alto.

Also, the property is located within the Southern Albemarle Rural Historic District and the dwelling, which is 943, was actually built in 1942 and is listed as a contributing structure to that district.

Thomas Jefferson Parkway, also known as Route 53, is designated as a National Scenic Highway and is on the journey through hollow ground.

This was established in 2009 as the primary touring route for visitors to explore the scenic and historic landscape along the 180-mile route.

This particular photograph was taken up near the end of the driveway, which is what it looks like from Route 53.

The next photo will kind of proceed down, I don't know if you can see my cursor, but will proceed down to about this location, which will be about halfway down the driveway now.

And you can see this is the house 943.

and this is the layout.

So the first photograph was up here under the 32B number.

The next photograph was taken a little bit near this tree looking at the house.

So you kind of had a glimpse of coming down the road there or coming down the driveway.

Again, the homestay will be located 943, which is the larger L-shaped structure.

The

West and North is all owned by the cemetery and the east side is owned by Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

So I'm going to kind of summarize our points within the staff report at this point.

and I'm going to take them one at a time.

So if you wanted to discuss them one at a time, that's fine.

I'm thinking we're going to probably spend our most time on item three, but we'll run through those as we go.

So the guest rooms from two to five, as you know, we've done a few of these.

And as I spoke about earlier, the two guest rooms was a limit that was adopted to kind of maintain residential character on those smaller subdivision lots.

I say smaller in relative, in relationship to rural areas.

So we're not talking about 10 acre parcels, we're talking about those subdivisions that are five acres, two acres, three acres, and kind of have a subdivision feel for them.

The property at 943 Jefferson Lake Drive is not located within an area that has that type of feel, that residential character, but instead is surrounded by non-residential uses, including a cemetery, a historic tavern, and Monticello.

The entrance of the property is located on Jefferson Lake Drive, which is located along that curve.

I'm sure most of you are familiar with that location.

But it's a private road.

and the access is for that homestay parcel.

Previously, it provided access to the cemetery.

I know that under other matters from the public, I believe the property owner mentioned that he still allows the cemetery some use to that.

If you look at the aerial photographs, and I'll go back for a moment, these buildings here, 879, all these parcels are owned by

Monticello Memorial Garden.

So that's all cemetery property.

Some of you may either recall or have been on the board when the cemetery came in for their special permit for that expansion when they acquired those properties.

So in regards to the guest rooms, staff does not believe that the increase in the number of guest rooms to five at this particular location would change the character of the area or cause a detriment to the abutting properties.

Now we'll talk about the required minimum yards.

The home state regulation again requires 125 feet.

The intent of that was again to increase the setback,

and provide some buffer for the residential neighbors or neighborhood abutting property owners so they could enjoy kind of the peace of their property, the peacefulness, I should say, of their property.

Special exceptions for reduction in those required yards is allowed.

And let me

Pop back to the drawing, you can see parking here on the west side is about 45 feet from the property line.

It's really 100 some feet from the road, from Route 53.

Also parking on the east side is about 80 feet.

Again, the east side is owned by Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

The west side is the cemetery.

Oops, got a little bit ahead of myself there.

And again, with the reduction in the setbacks, those aren't technical difficulties, that's operator error that you just witnessed.

Hang on one second.

With the access on that private road, and again, I think that a property owner at other matters did mention that there is no history of accident in that particular location, that we don't believe that the increase in the number of the bedrooms, which theoretically would cause an increased number in trips, wouldn't alter the character of the area or cause a detriment to the abutting properties.

Again, operator error.

And now we'll get to the last one, which I think for us, I think we've only had one other property that has requested the resident manager.

That was a property out on Woodlands.

And that particular application, I believe also requested a reduction in setback.

Neither one of those was approved.

just to give you a history.

It was the same application, so when I say either one, I mean neither one of those requests.

The special exception request was completely denied, both portions of it.

I don't actually recall the property owner,

That's the only resident manager request that has come before us.

Staff has had discussions about the resident manager with other property owners, but that is the only request.

So to date, we have no approved allowance for the resident manager.

So one of the things we did when we looked at this, not only for the location,

and the surrounding neighborhood is to kind of weigh it against also one of the concerns we had during the process was would it remove any housing stock from the market?

So we know that on this particular parcel, there's actually two dwelling units, which are permitted.

The cottage is a long-term rental.

The house currently is not, but it is or was a long-term rental.

There's a unit there where

A resident manager or owner could reside and that is the plan of the property owner once the renovation is complete.

So there is a building permit.

It is valid.

It is active.

The owner is following the permit.

Once the, and I believe he also stated in other matters that

Once the renovation is done, he would move his caretakers, I'm a little old school, so they would move the resident manager, if allowed, back into the main house and then resume long-term rental with other folks at what we call the cottage.

So again, we didn't see, just to summarize that briefly, is there's no residential character of the area.

It's pretty commercial in that particular

I'll call it the corner of 53 just because of that curve.

Not far from there, there's another small road where the, I think it's the Fraternal Order of Police Lodge is, and then there's some residences down that road.

We know that a few of those are actually owned by the tavern property, the same folks, and I believe there's two more down there owned by one individual, and then there's a, we'll call it a larger house at the end of the road that is

as the crow flies about a quarter mile away.

I think that is the closest residence to this particular piece.

And again, with the housing stock, we know that the previous use of two single families is still going to be the use or proposed to be the use.

It really can't be anything else if you're following the regulation.

There will remain in long-term rental status, both the unit in the, what we call the Big House 943, where the home stay is proposed, and the cottage.

So based on those circumstances, staff would recommend approval of the special exceptions.

We do have

a list of conditions.

What I'd like to do is probably save this slide and maybe go into discussion to see if we would even want to discuss any or all of the conditions we have listed here.

Why don't we go around through the supervisors, see any questions or comments?

Okay, thank you.

Let me get back to my notes.

Hold on, I just blew it.

Very good.

So I appreciate all of the description about the different numbers of rooms as far as being residential versus rooming house.

I think that's what they used to call it versus hotel.

Are there different building code rules on these three categories?

and are those then taken into account with this application for this to be five rooms rented to others plus a sixth room for the resident manager, which I think is the way it is.

The second question, and I'll just drop them both, is during the development of this program

We really emphasized the need to help individual family people who lived on the property.

And so this is a big change.

It may be allowed in the small print in there, but this I think is a different approach altogether.

And I was interested to hear what the applicant said during the matters in public this morning, that there is no longer really a house here.

It would be

rooms with individual entrances and people coming and going and not seeing each other.

So that's also very different than the approach we have had so far with the homestay where there may be five bedrooms, but they would most often be used by people who all come together in a large group to benefit and make use of a property.

Okay, I'll take the easier one, which actually happens to be the building code one today.

The five to six rooms or the five room is the cap to let or to rent out.

So if I have a 10 bedroom house, that's a single family house, it falls under the residential building code.

If I rent out two of those rooms of the 10, it's still a residence under the building code.

If I rent out five of the ten, still residents under the building code.

If I rent out six of the ten, that's when it changes.

And so the particulars are vast when you hit the sixth one because it's going to depend on the style of construction.

There's fire marshal or ingress-egress requirements that kick in.

ADA requirements, sprinklers, depending on type of construction, an ingress, egress, there's a formula, exit sign, so it really does become kind of part of a commercial structure once you hit the sixth room for Lett.

I know that we'll be talking about that some more in August,

is just because there's a section in the building code that also talks about occupancy loads.

So we want to make sure that we stay fresh on that particular subject.

So did I misunderstand that there would really be only four guest rooms plus the one where the tenant would live?

Or is it five guest rooms plus the one where the tenant lives, which then puts them into the sixth?

So the sixth is a long-term rental.

Well, it's a rental.

But it makes it a single-family house.

kind of agree or disagree with the code.

So if I was, as an example, if I was to rent the 10-bedroom house, you own the 10-bedroom house, Supervisor Mallek, and you rented it to me, that's 10 bedrooms to let.

so and individual to family yes we spent a lot of time and I think it was actually a last-minute addition if I'm not mistaken when I went back and look through our adopting in 2019 where we actually added the

resident manager provision in a month delay is the way I would put it.

We came to, I think it was in late June or July, and then we rescheduled for August to add the resident manager language.

And I believe most of the discussion in my memory is that we talked a lot about kind of the family farm.

There were some folks that spoke about, they inherited that and they wanted to

make sure that that worked.

However, at the time

What we didn't have was complete consensus, I believe we used the term areas of consensus, I think.

And this was one of the ones that was kind of on the fence as far as if we wanted to do it and when or where we wanted to do it.

So it did get adopted, but it only got adopted in the five acre parcels or less.

It did not get adopted in the five acres or larger.

So

When that happened, I'm not disputing the memory, but as the umpire, what the regulation states is that they can make the application when we look at it on its merits.

So we have talked to other folks that are in residential neighborhoods, and we have discussed kind of the commercial nature of the way things take place, like with this particular

application be appropriated in a residential neighborhood on a smaller lot.

We would have to analyze that application on its merits, but if it's surrounded by other quarter acre lots, the default is in that area, as is here actually,

is the two bedrooms by right, right?

Is what we say the threshold is by right, unless you have a special condition under analysis that would grant you, and this was part of the discussion, right?

When we talked about those parcels, some of the discussion was also about if I own two parcels next to each other, let's say, or my farm surrounded my two acre house in the middle,

and we didn't use something like this as an example, but other special circumstances that would allow you to go to the five.

So that's kind of where we are.

So I hope that answers your question.

I know that memory wise, I think we're probably in the same place.

I did go back through and look at some of the minutes for the workshops and our discussion at the board meeting.

And surprisingly, for my memory, the amount of time I thought we had spent talking about it

There didn't seem to be that same amount of time.

My memory kind of plays tricks on me, but it didn't seem that same amount of time was reflected in the minutes.

So I think it was a hot button issue that got us emotionally charged, but I don't know if we actually spent a lot of time on this.

Thank you.

Your history helped me to remember that most of the discussion that I remembered was that the resident manager was there to be the liaison with the neighbors and to be the single point of contact.

One of our former colleagues, Donna's predecessor, made a really big deal about how this was the magic solution to help with the problems of not having somebody, the owner living there.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much, Mr. Sabota.

So, just as a recap, the main house has six bedrooms.

They're only asking for five because the sixth bedroom would be the home of the resident manager, therefore taking it out of the commercial realm.

Correct.

That is greater than 30 days.

Okay.

Greater than 30 days.

So theoretically, if the person is the resident manager, if that house, if they only let five rooms in that house and the resident, could the resident manager live in the small adjacent structure, the other house?

Yes, okay good.

Okay, but we could ask for that verification, correct?

Like they do with the ABC rules, they ask for who owns the LLC?

Yes.

We could ask for that.

Okay, so if we approve this, this is conditioned upon the fact that he is the owner of the LLC.

If that was a condition, the answer would be correct, and the county, Mr. Kantner may want to jump in, but that is akin to conditioning the special exception to a specific owner, meaning if I own the property as an individual,

and you conditioned it to me and I sold it and Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, you bought it.

If you were to condition it to the LLC, it would only go to the LLC, depending on how it was worded.

But if I'm following you correctly, the condition would be to the LLC ownership.

Which would be you.

Right, which would be me.

And if I sold it, it's not you.

Just to correct a couple of things.

One, looking at the application, unless they've changed their form of ownership, it's a corporation, which is a little bit different.

We've talked about the idea of conditioning special exceptions to particular owners.

If the issue is the resident manager, my recommendation would be that we

develop a condition that focuses on that particular issue if that is the one that is triggering the concern about who owns the property.

I'm not worried about the resident manager because the owner of the LLC who owns the property is ultimately going to be responsible if it's not well managed.

I'm more concerned about the LLC

Well, that's an issue that arises with every single land use approval.

We really don't control the ownership.

And your decision needs to be based upon the impacts created from the use itself.

and not who the owner of the property is.

And we may need to make certain that there are conditions in place.

And while these regulations were developed, there was a lot of time that was spent dealing with this particular issue of having management of these properties that was responsive to issues that were arising.

And Bart, we have

If I can pull up the regulations.

All right.

No, I think Bart was going to bring up the regulations or not.

Like I said, the resident manager, I'd rather see it on a larger acreage.

But in this circumstance here, there is no one else around to bother, so to speak.

But it does concern me that it's under five acres.

Is there a way to make sure that the resident manager is in the house and that they don't do the

Yeah, that's part of the condition one and we also, you know, under the way we currently do it, although we want to talk about that program also due to resources, but the way we look at the postings online, as far as the number of bedrooms that we rent,

They check that.

So I want to touch on one of Greg's point for one second if I may, which is there's a difference between responsible agent and resident manager.

So the responsible agent is the agent that when the property owner is off site in the whole house rentals, that's the person that is notified and responsible for taking care of any issues or problems.

And when we do adjacent notification, that's part of the form that they get and part of the contact info.

The resident manager lives on the property and acts as the owner in the owner's capacity as that manager or they could be dual phone numbers but the similar information is given out when we contact the adjacent property owners to let them know about the homestead.

So if we have issues.

Again that was one of the, if those of you that were here recall

One of the things was about, one of the issues was about having the neighbors being able to get their, maybe me and Ms.

Right, and I would just want to make sure that the, who actually owns the LLC.

Okay, thank you.

So I got a little bit confused Greg when you were explaining the ability for us to tag the resident manager issue with the corporation ownership.

Are you saying that we could sometime in the future tie one of these

No, what I was trying to say is if the concern is having responsible management of the property, focus on a condition that creates some obligations on the resident manager to do so.

They do have the obligation

under the regulations, but if there are additional concerns about the resident manager managing the activities on the property, then clarify it that way, not through a condition that blows up the special exception when ownership changes.

Because that particular type of condition really lacks that nexus to

the impacts on the property because they don't know who that future owner is.

So let me ask it a different way.

If the owner of the property was going to be living in that sixth bedroom,

If there is information- A nexus.

Yes, something in the record that shows that

It's a reasonable condition.

And off the top of my head, I don't have one.

And then during prior special exception applications, I've noted for the board that there was about a two-year period in the late 1980s when the board did that.

And in a lot of ways, it was a trap for innocent

owners who had special exceptions who, when they went from a corporation to an LLC, they voided their special use permit and they had to start the process all over again with really no material change in the effect or the long-term activity.

Okay, so I have one other question for right now and then I really would like to hear from Supervisor Price since it's her district and she probably has some more information possibly about it than I have at this current moment.

But I do struggle.

I recognize that there are people buy properties all the time to rent out.

And we don't normally think of that as a commercial activity.

But this feels almost like, and I know that it's not, I understand legally that it's not, but it almost feels like a rezoning of a residential property that's in the midst of a bunch of commercial properties.

And we're basically, you know, saying it can now be a much more heavier

commercial use than prior.

Could you just comment on that if there's anything to comment, because we are greatly increasing the commercial ability of a piece of property when we do this.

If you have anything to say about that, is that just a... Is that to me or to Barb?

I think that's to you, Greg.

It almost feels like a rezoning.

Well, I would say it's not a rezoning.

It is reaching the limits of the homestay framework that the board created when it adopted the ordinance.

Their request is for three special exceptions.

They're maximizing the rooms.

But when the board adopted the regulations, it determined that yes, up to five rooms is permissible, but we want to evaluate it on a case by case basis.

Yes, we're willing to allow resident managers, but we want to evaluate the application on a case by case basis.

So what's in front of you now is

is this example.

And you have this piece of property with this house that has six bedrooms.

And it is unlike some of the other homestay applications you've had.

It's not out in the country on a huge piece of property.

It's also not in a suburban neighborhood that is surrounded by

with R4 zoning that's surrounded by other immediate neighbors.

You have this particular scenario with these particular surrounding properties that help define what the board's analysis is because the two criteria that are laid out for you

or if there's any detriment to abutting lots and whether or not there's a harm to public health, safety, or welfare.

Bart's touched on the safety aspect with respect to the building code, talking about the entrance onto 53.

I'm not sure this raises any health related issue, which leaves you with looking at the welfare and that gets to the commercial.

Is it commercial or is it a homestay?

And does approving these special exceptions change the welfare of the community?

Okay, thank you.

I might have something else to say later, but I would like to hear from Supervisor Price since it is her.

All right, let's finish going around in our order.

I didn't mean to cut you off, Supervisor Palmer, are you finished at this point?

I agree, Donna, that I'd like to hear from you.

because I'm sure since it's in your district you've visited the property and talked.

Okay, well let me go ahead.

Go ahead.

I just have a couple of thoughts that maybe you can address when you're chatting as well, right?

None of these, we deal with all of these special exceptions separately.

In other words, none of them set precedent for any for the next one, Greg.

I feel comfortable saying that.

So if we approve this particular one, it's not tying us into having to approve anything that comes to us with a property manager or a residential manager.

And that's the way we have really dealt with all of these, I think.

I feel pretty comfortable that we do that.

I do have a quick question, though.

It would not, and maybe this is for Bart, you could not get into a situation where that sixth room was rented out and a property management company was hired.

Right, because the property management company, well, Bart answered

A lot of times just when we deal with accessory apartments is a good example.

We routinely deal with accessory apartments that pop up when a house, say for instance, goes for sale or there's a listing and the realtor will call us and say, well I need verification that this is a legal

Okay.

All right.

So that's, that's good.

And I do appreciate all the discussion about the LLC and that was really interesting.

I want to take us a little, a little bit of direction, different direction when I'm in looking at this.

And I want to hear from what, how Donna reacts to this and what she thinks, because I know she drives it a lot more than I do.

I'm concerned about public safety and then, and Route 53.

That is a dangerous road.

And we have had some bad accidents on that road.

And we're all of a sudden going to be setting up five people, five rooms of people, maybe couples, individuals, I don't know, to be using that exit or entrance onto 53, which is blind.

Dangerous.

I mean, I don't know whether, I know the speaker at the beginning of the meeting, the owner, spoke to VDOT, said it was all okay.

I'm not sure I have a comfort level with coming in and out of that, especially, you're talking about people that are not familiar with the area, don't know that road?

Yeah there's no data that we were able to produce kind of either pros or cons that would

You know, other than the feel that you have for it when you drive it yourself, right?

And the feel that you have when you're coming down that road and you see the buses queued up at Michie Tavern.

getting ready to pull out or pull in depending on if they just dropped off at Monticello or not.

So there are, you know, some things to pay attention to when navigating that stretch of road.

But, you know, other than that, we don't have, say, crash data, for instance, for that particular turn.

and we look at these types of concerns with everything we discuss.

And we don't have any data because we've never had a house renting five, a property renting five rooms there and another resident manager living there and then another, yet another.

I mean, we're really putting a lot of people into that egress and ingress.

So just to comment.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

And Supervisor Malek, I saw you had your hand raised.

We'll come back around to you.

So I did visit the property.

I did speak with the owner.

Mr. Sloboda, could you pull up that aerial shot again?

I'd like to kind of frame a few things for reference for the other supervisors.

Give me one second to re-share.

That's exactly it.

Thank you.

All right, no worries at all.

So I do want to point out to everyone, and I'll just kind of work my way sort of driving on the property in the very far left corner at the bottom, the 32 right, right where the cursor is.

That is the driveway, the private road that comes onto the property off of 53.

If you are heading from 20 up the hill, Mickey Tavern's on your right, you're heading up to Monticello,

There is a hard right bend in the road where that comes off as a sharp left fork and it immediately proceeds steeply down the hill.

If you are coming down the hill from Monticello towards 20, you're coming around a hard left turn and it is an exceptionally hard right turn to go onto the road

and it drops below you.

I happened to drive a monster truck and as I was coming down 53 did not feel safely navigate that right turn partly because of the size of my vehicle partly because of the steepness of the drop.

I actually went past the property turned around at the cemetery came back up the hill and made the left turn right at the

the corner of that hard right turn and it's a little hairy because you have no idea until the last second if a car is coming down the hill as you're getting ready to take that left turn across traffic to the fork and then down the hill.

The property owner, the applicant, he did say that he is looking into that and I want to follow up with what I think Supervisor McKeel was just saying.

Prior to this remodeling, you had one

Family, we'll call it a family, that was residing in the big house.

Now there's a separate building, the lower one in the image, 941, and by the way, that rectangular parking lot to the left of that, the 941 residence, that is exclusively for the use of the occupants of that building.

There are two parking areas.

They're highlighted in blue here.

There are three to four parking spaces that you first pass.

Then as you go past the house, there's

ample room for parking down where you can see at the upper end of the L, the garage that goes under the residence.

So there's plenty of parking and it is differentiated between the rental house versus the homestay building.

The little bit of the driveway you see coming from the second parking to the bottom of the picture is access for the backyard of the rental house.

It's not to be used by the homestay occupants if this is approved.

One of the concerns I have with this overall process going off the bit on a tangent is when an owner

invest substantial sums of money into remodeling before the approval has been obtained.

Now, I guess there's sort of a bit of a risk that an owner makes or takes when they do that, but this is extensive remodeling of the building.

We did go into the building, we walked around, and it appeared very clear to me even in the midst of the remodeling

that it needed substantial work if the building was going to remain as a usable structure.

It's not exactly five bedrooms, it's actually five suites that are being developed through the remodeling with what I would call an apartment

on the ground floor.

It's one floor in the front, two floors in the back.

Four of the suites are on the top floor.

The apartment for the resident manager and the fifth suite are on the bottom floor.

Each of them have two entrance points, a front and a back if you will.

and each of them have a private deck or patio with privacy that's been provided.

As indicated, there is no communal indoor gathering place so it's not the situation where you now have five suites that open up into a common area, if you will, a party room.

These are separate.

They are not connected in any way.

You cannot access directly from one of the units into the other unit.

Two of the units are, if you look into the inside corner of the L where that sidewalk goes up to the house, there is a porch overhang there and two of the doors are there.

The others are off to the right and then you can access the basement unit either from the main floor or from the back.

The apartment for the resident manager is accessible from the ground floor and from the back.

So really what you're looking at if this is approved, oh and by the way 941 the smaller rental house at the bottom I've watched over an extended period of time the work being done on this property because every time I come down 53 it's just right in front of you before you make the hard left turn.

They've basically taken an old building that was unusable and turned it into a modern house for rental.

So if this is approved, what you'll be looking at is someone living, a family living in the house, the property, the resident manager living in the apartment below the house, and up to five suites being rented in the main part of the house.

So it's extensive work that's being done with plumbing, electrical, and all of those things.

So I've got a number of notes here.

They're not necessarily in a logical order.

I'll apologize for that.

The first concern that I have is with the access point coming off of Thomas Jefferson onto the property because of the blind curve.

If you're heading east on 53, the hard right turn to the driveway and the drop down if you're coming west on 53.

Again, the property owner said he's already got an injury or looking at how he can raise the elevation and make that safer.

I would definitely like to have that part of the contingency that that becomes a safer entrance because we're going from one family to potentially seven different families, if you will, that could be there.

The five that rent the homestay, the one of the property managers on the ground floor,

and the family that's living in the rental house.

And that's a substantial increase in volume over the current or the previous where it was just the resident manager couple that was living there.

The other thing I think that ties into this is that since it's not all going to be long-term tenants or owners of 30 days or longer in length,

There are going to be people who are less familiar with the safety risks of that intersection, so I have some concerns there.

I did reach out to Monticello and spoke with a representative there.

They feel comfortable with the use of this property.

They see the ability to have other visitors to Monticello nearby as a benefit.

They didn't see a particular concern with unauthorized egress or access.

through this property onto the property that they own as Mr. Savota pointed out.

It's basically surrounded by the cemetery or the Thomas Jefferson Foundation property.

I think this is a very unusual if not unique application coming before the board.

To find a property of approximately this size with this sort of a request

in a setting such as this is I think at least unusual if not fully unique.

I don't believe that a decision made on this property as Supervisor McKeel and Mr. Campner have confirmed they do not have precedential value and I can clearly differentiate this from previous applications that I have seen before the board

For example, on this one, with one minor exception where I believe there was an outdoor patio that has been closed in to make part of a bedroom, there has been no change

to the square footage of this structure as opposed to taking a building and greatly expanding it and totally changing the footprint and the volume of square footage in the building.

So this is largely intact within the previously existing boundaries of the building itself.

I also think that while, and I'm going to make this as more of an editorial comment, while these decisions are not precedential and while the board is not obligated or required in any way to state why we may approve or disapprove of a particular application, I do think it's helpful for our community members to know where we see our concerns and where we see

things may be mitigated so that they will have at least a better sense of what we as supervisors are looking for when we reach these decisions.

So some of the things that I was looking at, and I appreciate the input from Mr. Campner and county staff, first off is the character of the community.

And as has been addressed, this is pretty unique.

There are virtually no residential properties

near this.

It's surrounded by a cemetery, Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Mickey Tavern.

There is a road a little further to the west as Mr. Spoboda mentioned that has the

police officers union located there.

There are about a half dozen residences down that street, but they're pretty far away.

So this is not in an otherwise residential community, so the fact that it's a smaller

parcel of land does not necessarily result in the type of impact that might be expected if this were surrounded by other residential properties.

I've already talked about the road.

It's really, there are no other properties around where we have a consistency with the neighboring properties, the character of the community to address.

Here, they actually have added a residence that would be building 941 that prior to this was not being used as a residence.

So it doesn't actually diminish our available housing stock.

And sort of a favorable factor as I looked at it is that by having the 941 rented on a long-term basis and a resident manager, you actually have

two different entities that help to provide some sort of supervision, if you will, to reduce the potential of this becoming a party house.

That and the fact that the five units are all separate and in distinct.

I always have some concerns when we move away from owner-occupied to resident manager.

I don't believe legally we can put a constriction on who owns it, whether it's an entity, a partnership, a family, an LLC, a corporation.

I defer to Mr. Campner on that.

So as I look at the three different exceptions, the 125 feet setback, I don't see any adverse impact from waiving that here.

There is no other property or residence nearby that would be adversely impacted by that.

The five rooms, that's unusual in the sense that we haven't approved many if any of those.

The resident manager, as I understand, this is the, we've had one before, maybe a couple that have come through because I was thinking of a different one that had come through that was not approved.

and that always gives me a little more pause.

On full analysis, however, I don't necessarily see under the unique circumstances of this particular property that that would be the concern that I would have if this property and this application were located in a different neighborhood or community where it might impact the character of it.

For me,

Right now, the biggest concern I have is the access point off of 53.

The safety aspect of that is where I really have some concerns.

So, you know, those are my thoughts on it.

And let's go back around and, supervisors, open to any other comments or questions that you might have for county staff.

Supervisor Mallek?

Would you like me to stop sharing?

Um, sure.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Sepulveda.

Thank you.

Uh, so board mentioned that they didn't have any accident data or anything else.

Is, was it requested?

Yes, so that would be correct.

As part of our process, we would ask VDOT to analyze an existing single-family dwelling.

And so we know that they would look at it kind of as that.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you.

And I did want to state that my concern regarding the LLC was to make sure that you didn't have a number of different corporations coming in, buying up properties, having a resident manager.

That was my concern.

But I definitely am in favor of a resident manager and I'm in favor of an LLC, provided we know who owns the LLC.

then it's not some big corporation type thing.

Not in the five rooms, but a kitchen available to the five rooms.

So if there are only five rooms, usually when you have a whole house rental, there's a kitchen there and people can cook their own food and this and that.

But I'm asking because if they each have their own separate entrance and they're not associated with each other, it's almost like a motel where you just have a single room.

Yes, so they're correct that there is no kitchen in each individual room or no access, no obvious access to the kitchen.

So I don't know the plans of whether or not they'll serve breakfast.

Okay, so it sounds like it's more of a... Strictly the bedroom to let.

Just the bedrooms to let over commercial enterprise.

I'm wondering if the seven days a month, 45 days a year, if that's going to be

So this wouldn't apply here because the whole house rental isn't allowed on these smaller parcels.

Those are the farm parcel, for lack of a better way to put it, for the less technical way to put it, those are the farm parcels, the larger parcels that allow for whole house rental.

So this isn't a whole house rental because it would have either be owner occupied or have the resident manager.

They could rent the two bedrooms out as many days as they want.

Yes.

So the 45 days applies to five acres and larger.

This is 3.28 acres, so that particular regulation does not apply.

Whole house rentals are not permitted.

In our definition of whole house rental,

Maybe it's not the English version of that, which is it appears they're renting out the whole house.

So if you did have a whole house rental, let's say this particular piece of property was on, I don't know, 20 acres.

Yes.

For the whole house rental, which means I vacated the property so I could rent my whole house that I live in to you.

Yeah, so the resident manager option is not available on the larger lots.

Okay, that makes no sense at all, but okay.

Yeah, and we'll talk about more more about that in August as Miss Malek pointed out, Supervisor Malek pointed out in the beginning.

I think this was a It came about as a result of talking about the larger parcels that were owned either by LLC or trust or corporation

I can go after all the supervisors.

All right thank you Mr. Kammer.

Yeah, more than just VDOT, building code, ADA upgrades, possible site plan, because it takes it to a whole different place than an accessory use to a single family dwelling, which is what a home stay is supposed to be.

Okay, so, and we all know on this board how hard your department works to try to get to all these sites

when you need to inspect or need to look at something that's been reported or you found out because we have all witnessed the lack of time or a staff time to do all the things that you need to do, all the complaints and whatnot.

And we also know that when there is a zoning violation, it frequently,

goes for months and months.

And we end up paying the court cost if we take it to court, etc.

So the resolution process, if you have somebody doing something incorrect, and that's not to say that this person would ever do anything incorrect, I'm not saying that, but we're all discussing what if.

What if we had a problem?

We know that that

that finding a solution to that problem is really difficult in many cases.

We've all had those in our district and watched you guys work hard to rectify, to only go on for years.

So my concern is that this really has reached its limit, that this is a commercial operation.

Clearly, it was designed from the beginning to be.

It has been very unique circumstances, but at the same time, it has risen to the level of really for public safety, requiring that it be

a commercial property where VDOT gets involved in and all those things get involved to make sure that it's safe.

Now, I think that that's where I've gotten by carefully listening to all the information that I've received and I really appreciate it.

And I won't keep us any longer.

I just have given my opinion on this.

Thank you.

And I do appreciate all staff's work because I really do understand the uniqueness

of the area.

I'm just overwhelmed by the safety issues that could arise by having this many people on this property at one time without a proper entrance.

And there may be a proper entrance in the future, but right now we're not requiring that.

Thank you.

Well, my last remarks, I'm still aware my last remarks were.

We have not approved other proposals that had less traffic impact, in my opinion.

If I'm saying that correctly, I think you get what I'm saying.

I am very concerned about this entrance.

Having said that, I'm willing to try and figure out what we can do, because I do appreciate the fact that they've spent money, and I get that, but to put people that aren't even familiar with that road, using this entrance and exit is very concerning to me.

I think Donna mentioned that he was willing to do something to take a look at or to try and ameliorate the problems with that entrance.

I'm only going to be able to support this if in fact we have some sort of a condition.

I don't know what we want to do with that, but if he can work with VDOT and some engineers

to get this entrance safer than I'm happy to, because I do think this piece of property is unique and I have no problem in supporting it because of its uniqueness.

It's the safety issue on that road I'm very concerned about.

And Ann, I appreciate the question about the traffic data, but it doesn't make, whatever the past traffic data, it doesn't make any difference because you had one house and the people that lived in that house knew that road.

I'm just, to me, that makes a huge difference.

It's turning into a commercial property, which is fine, but he's got to be able to address that entrance and exit for me.

And with that, I'll just stop.

Thank you.

And I have to concur.

And Supervisor Mallek, you had a comment?

Go ahead.

Sorry.

What Bart said a few minutes ago, it really struck me.

This really is not an accessory use on a single family house anymore.

And so I can't really pretend that it is.

And that's, I think, where it really helped to crystallize for me the fact that the limit is passed, in my mind, to what we were talking about with the intent of this.

The other thing that has come to sort of the forefront is it should not be an excuse to get a permit when you spend a whole lot of money without the permit first.

That is a very dangerous slippery slope.

And so people do those things at their risk, knowing that they may not be getting the permission to do what they think they're going to do all along.

So I'm not sympathetic to that argument.

Thank you.

And I concur with that.

I have two strong feelings on this.

The first one is I think that what the applicant is doing is really saving a piece of property that likely was gonna fall into total disrepair, disuse, and would be a blight.

And that would not be helpful.

I would not be looking favorably upon this if it were located anywhere else in terms of residential area or things like that, because it would be so out of character of the surrounding properties.

I think it is a totally unique application we have before us.

It is not really an accessory use of a primary structure.

It's a primary use of a structure with an accessory being a resident manager.

I do have to say that when I visited, the owner did say, he pointed out what he described as a quote, kitchen of sorts, close quote.

That's my recollection more than his exact language.

which struck me is that it was not gonna be a full kitchen.

It would be more sort of, if you will, a kitchenette or where you could prepare some food, but not really live there.

But the biggest issue for me is the safety as well.

I mean, and I agree with both what Supervisor Malek and Supervisor McKeel both talking about is prior data, it's really irrelevant to what is taking place now.

So I guess I'll have to turn to Mr. Campner or Mr. Svoboda

I don't want to necessarily push for disapproval, but I'm not prepared right now to push for approval.

Are there ways that we can go back?

Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley, are there ways that we can defer this and get back for further study?

And even if it was unanimous in support, I would recommend deferring so that staff has time to

All right, thank you, Mr. Campner.

And then the last thing I'll say before I turn it over to Superintendent LaPisto-Kirtley for your other comments is this is pushing the envelope of what our homestay regulation is.

Because of the uniqueness of this property and its location, it's one that I would

I could see myself being open to provided the other things, the safety issues can be met and not in any way feel bound because it would not be precedential on any other application coming before us.

We must look at each one as they come to us, not based upon what may have happened in another location.

Yes, as I heard from the other supervisors, I'm realizing more and more with

Maybe they have a kitchenette, but the fact that they have six suites with separate entrances tells me it's not a location for a whole house rental family to be there to get together.

It's like individual motel rooms.

So you may stay two days, I stay one day, someone else stays another day.

That's what it's feeling like.

And I'm hoping someone tells me I'm wrong because I really do want to approve this.

But that's what it's looking at.

And the ingress, egress really worries me.

And I'm wondering if he's going for whole house.

Well, I guess he couldn't do it under commercial.

I mean, it almost seems like we need to rezone and let him put in a hotel type situation.

Sorry, Greg.

Go ahead.

Having heard the physical arrangement of the suites and I

And I use the term kitchenette.

What I took from the applicant when I was out there, he made reference to a kitchen of sorts, which I should have followed up and I didn't.

I don't take that as a full kitchen, oven, dishwasher, all of those things, but more, it's a suite, which is essentially a sleeping area, a great room, if you will, and a place where you can prepare some food, but not really a kitchen.

um more um sort of like a extended stay suite rather than an apartment but as for the resident manager downstairs that would be the largest of the six identifiable components and it would be a full apartment with a full kitchen and everything that would go along with it that's my understanding

So it appears to me, and Mr. Campner helped me to make sure I put this in the right format, that the consensus of the board is to put action on this, send it back to county staff to try and get some of these questions that we've got answered.

I just want to be clear on what we're bringing back to you, which is a VDOT analysis.

I just want to caution everyone that they may not have the same safety concerns.

So we'll look at that and maybe what suggestions for improvement would be out there.

Yes, and we would check that on the final zoning anyway because if they had a kitchen then it would be a duplex and that's a different critter under the ordinance and that would require different things and you can't have a homestay in a duplex.

But there have to be rooms for dining and meeting for the guests.

So when I hear the five individual suites with the exterior access, without those rooms for dining and meeting, it falls outside of the definition of the homestead.

Yes.

Would there be a need to draft, and I'm thinking there is, so I'm just trying to verify, a need to draft

Correct.

Right.

Correct.

I don't think so.

I think the other cautionary tale for other community members is submit your plans before you engage in the

Yeah, I don't have a problem with an LLC.

Yeah, that's a valid point.

We could do that.

I know, I'm not sure I understand right now what Ann is talking about about a large research project, but having said that, I know that VDOT may not have concerns about this.

but I don't really care.

I'm just saying.

I think we all agree in that.

I think the straw poll is a good idea because if it doesn't even meet the definition of a homestay, then we have a whole other issue and this is a hotel for gosh sakes.

So is that what Ann's referring to as a research project?

Well can someone help me with phrasing on exactly what that would be because I thought what we were going to do is send it back to county staff to get back in touch with the applicant get more information and then determine whether it

I'm happy with that, Donna, because I think if we had a design and staff could look at it, we would know better to answer because some of Greg's concerns, right?

I mean, I'm just going to.

Yes.

There appears to be consensus on that.

I count at least three or four who would support deferring for staff to come back with the information.

Perhaps a revised or a new condition and more specific plans.

Right, and I saw four hands go up for that.

Okay.

At this point, if there could be a motion to defer action on this based upon what was just discussed.

So moved.

All right.

Any other discussion?

Ms.

Ms.

Bea LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

All right.

All right.

Thank you.

Board, we've been at it for a while, but we're already

Running a little late, we're at 5 20 and we have a six o'clock start time.

So I'm gonna, unless there's a strong push, I'm gonna say, let's move forward so we can try and get to our closed session.

Yes, please.

Number 11, Shenandoah National Park report, Mr. Kinney.

And Mr. Kinney, thank you for your patience.

Oh, it was fascinating.

I was learning a lot about homestay, so thank you.

No, it's all good.

So thank you for giving me a moment of your time.

I know you're extremely busy and really appreciate the opportunity.

So for those that I haven't met, I'm Pat Kenny.

I am the new superintendent of Shenandoah National Park.

I arrived last October.

and my apologies for my negligence and not getting to you sooner, but the pandemic has made settling into a new community a little interesting all to the same.

So, but I wanted to get out and say hello to all the counties that are in the, you know, we are surrounded as a park by eight counties and I've been working my way around to all the boards of supervisors.

So I just wanted to say hello

and give you a quick update about what's going on in Shenandoah National Park.

Just a little bit of background on me.

I've been a 30-plus year veteran of the Park Service.

I moved to Virginia, like I said, in October.

My last assignment was at Yellowstone National Park, where I served as the Deputy Superintendent.

Prior to that, I was in North Carolina.

Prior to that, I was in Colorado.

Part of that I was in Florida so bounced around the country a bit with the park service.

Glad to have landed at Shenandoah here at this point in my career.

So, you know, it's an interesting time manager in just in the public poll with the pandemic going on.

COVID-19 was not, we were not immune to it in the national parks as far as managing a large group of people.

Workforce workers and things like that.

I never would have imagined last March when things were, a year ago March I should say, that we would be talking about record visitation in a year of a pandemic, but we were.

Shenandoah ended the year 15% up from the previous year.

You'd have to go back 25 years in our history to see, have seen that level of visitation in Shenandoah.

October when I arrived was extremely busy.

We ended up having a visitation at 53% over 2019 levels, which is quite a lot of folks to manage since October is our busiest month annually anyhow because of fall color.

so that's just something that we've had to manage our way through it as you all know we were closed for about six weeks and then when we reopened obviously people thought of parks as being a safe place to come which is a positive thing in some respects it was a challenge and just like you as boards of supervisors and you have a workforce and your county staff you had to manage that and manage all those levels of

anxiety and expectations and things like that.

2021 is probably setting up to be another busy year within the parks.

All indicators are that we should anticipate seeing high visitation levels again.

Our April visitation was up significantly over previous years.

We had a really busy January even

February was slow, but we had a lot of ice and snow.

But our other indicators are showing a high visitation.

Delaware North Corporation, who runs the lodging and the waysides in the park under a contract, is seeing high demand for reservations.

Our campground reservations are up.

So that's all setting up for another year of pretty significant visitation in my mind.

And that'll bring benefits to the communities as far as tourism, but it'll also bring challenges since we're still managing our way through the pandemic, at least what is perceived at this point to be the tail end of the pandemic.

So let's hope for the best.

There'll be some project work going on in the park as normal.

You know, we will see like, you know, the old joke is that there's two seasons.

There's winter and then there's road construction season that applies to national parks as well.

We will have a fairly significant road project going in mile post 50 to 65.

The Skyland Terrace is under, has been completely demolished.

We're dealing with some drainage issues and

structural issues with the lodge there, which hosts the dining room and the store and the bar and things at Skyland.

It's totally being redone.

We had hoped to get that done earlier in the season, but it slipped.

Unfortunately, it seems that's what happens with projects often.

We kept finding additional problems as we unearthed and tore out the old terrace.

The end product's going to be really spectacular.

We're making a connection to the dining room.

There'll be an opportunity for outdoor dining at the terrace connected to the dining room, which will be nice.

We'll be working on a lot of projects that fell through the cracks last year because we couldn't hire as many people.

So things like VISTA management and other activities will be ongoing and back up to normal operations.

You may have heard about the Great American Outdoors Act that was passed by the last Congress and signed into law by President Trump.

This is a pretty remarkable piece of legislation.

It's directing revenue coming off oil and gas sales to deal with the maintenance backlog of facilities related to public lands, national parks, forest service lands, fish and wildlife service.

The National Park Service is the biggest beneficiary of this and could see north of six billion dollars over five years Shenandoah was fortunate enough to capture approximately 27-28 million dollars for fiscal year 21.

Again another road project related to skyline, a pavement preservation project will be underway

In this calendar year, most of it will be in the design phase and most of the work will be actually being seen implemented in fiscal year 22.

We also captured a small amount of money to demolish some facilities that are obsolete and no longer needed in the park.

But again, it's about a 27, 28 million dollar amount of money that will flow into Shenandoah National Park through that Great American Outdoors Act.

Obviously, contractors will be hired, jobs will be created, materials and things will be acquired in the local communities.

Those are all positive things.

And ultimately, the park will be retiring what we call deferred maintenance.

So that's a good thing.

We are in the process of competing for the remaining four fiscal years of projects related to the Great American Outdoors Act.

We have submitted proposals for over $230 million worth of work, some large infrastructure type projects, which is really a key focus to the act, water and wastewater systems.

Many of our systems are antiquated, have outlived their life cycle, just like you all deal with there at the county level.

these things come with not small price tags and so we're in the competition so to speak internally for these dollars.

Our projects are being vetted up through our regional office and the national office for consideration.

I feel positive that we are positioned well as a park to capture some additional monies out of this funding source which will help with the infrastructure and ultimately the goal there is to make the place

I think we're very fortunate to have a park like Shenandoah here in Virginia.

You know, and you're all part of that community.

I think my philosophy about managing national parks after this, as I've moved around the country, is to make sure that we're part of the community.

It's a little challenging in Shenandoah in the sense that it's such a long linear park.

It makes it difficult being based in Luray to get down to Charlottesville on a regular basis, but I do do that.

I think it's important that we work in collaboration with the counties and the communities that surround this park and we try to come up with solutions to concerns that may come up and so I would encourage us to continue this dialogue when we can because you at the local level will often hear things your constituents may start with you and but please do not hesitate to contact me if I can be any assistance

and try to resolve things.

We cannot manage Shenandoah as an island.

We need to work with everybody that surrounds us and I'm committed to doing that and look forward to working with all of you.

I know you have a really full agenda, so I don't want to take too much more of your time.

Thank you, Mr. Kenney.

We appreciate you being here.

We'll go around the horn.

Thank you.

As someone who in 1971 had my two-day honeymoon at Big Meadows, I love the park in many ways.

So a couple of quick things.

Is the Blue Ridge Committee still meeting?

Because we haven't heard anything about it in a long time.

We just had a meeting

I believe it was last week or the week before, excuse my senior moment there, but we just had the last couple weeks.

And I don't believe anybody from Albemarle County attended.

That was going to be my second question was, do we have a roster and who's on it?

And we need to make sure we're not absent at those meetings ever again.

So that's important.

I guess I'm thrilled to hear all of your improvements because I know the sort of capital improvement program has been in great arrears for a long time due to funding, so that's great.

And separately, some other time I will talk to you about the weed control.

I did participate in a public comment period last year about some sort of aerial spraying or something of invasive species right around some springs on the eastern slope, and I would like to learn what's happening with that, but I'll do that separately.

Thank you.