Board of Supervisors Regular First Meeting   1/12/2022

All right, we're live.

All right, thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome.

I call to order this meeting of the Board of Supervisors of Albemarle County.

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

The supervisors who are electronically present at this meeting are Supervisor Jim Andrews of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor Diantha McKeel of the Jack Jouett District,

Supervisor Ann Mallek of the White Hall District, Supervisor Bea LaPisto-Kirtley of the Rivanna District, Supervisor Ned Gallaway of the Rio District, and myself, Supervisor Donna Price of the Scottsville District.

At this time we ask that we all stand for the Pledge of Allegiance.

And if you would now please join in a moment of silence.

Okay board, it's time for the adoption of the final agenda.

I have one amendment that I would like to add.

Under item 18 from the board, committee reports and matters not listed on the agenda, I would like the authorization for the chair to execute a letter of support for our Deputy Senior Clerk Travis O. Morris and his candidacy for International Institute of the Municipal Clerk Region 2

I will second that if it's a motion.

Thank you.

So we have a motion to adopt as amended.

Any discussion?

Seeing none, if the clerk will please call the roll.

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Mallek?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Aye.

At this time we have brief announcement by board members.

Yes, Chair Price, thank you.

It's obviously been a rough week for a lot of people.

We appreciate the tremendous service done by the county staff, particularly emergency service personnel to check on people who experience the longest power outages.

I know we'll consider all of this further, what went wrong, what went right at later meetings.

We've got a busy meeting today.

Thank you.

Supervisor McKeel?

I just agree with what Jim said and I'll let it go with that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Just what people wanted to hear.

Nobody knows what the winter storm on Sunday is going to be, but I encourage everyone to take a couple of days of sunshine to pre-clean your sidewalks and get your supplies in so that we are ready for whatever comes our way.

And I also want to thank the dozens and dozens of White Hall residents who took time to share information in great detail about their predicaments on their telephones.

going back 10, 15 years.

So we'll have much better information today than we have had before.

I've gotten several calls of people concerned about the debris by the roadway and cut limbs sticking out over the drive path.

on Berkmar and Early Silk Road and basically all over.

I know we will, Carrie will give us an update.

I'm sure Carrie Shepherd this afternoon about that, but please be extra careful when you're driving to go around the corner and find a log in your path.

You need to be able to either stop or go around safely.

And this evening is the Crozet Community Advisory Committee, and they will be hearing a community meeting presentation on the first application to come through under the new Crozet Master Plan after it was adopted.

It's called Montclair.

It's at the White Gate Farm on 240.

And for citizens, this is a chance to listen and ask questions.

It is not a public hearing or debate, so I'm sorry I won't be able to be there, but I hope lots of information is shared.

Thank you.

Yes, I agree with what the other supervisors have said.

I just also wanted to say thank you very much to all the residents in the county for what they did during this very tumultuous time helping each other and

continue to help each other.

Tomorrow evening is the Places 29 North CAC, where they'll be discussing the middle density, what that means.

And I also wanted to give a congratulations to my Planning Commissioner, Corey Claiborne.

He is the new Vice Chair of the Albemarle County Planning Commission.

Thank you.

Supervisor Galloway.

Thank you, Chair Price.

One quick thing I received, I mean, I appreciate all of the residents who've been emailing us relative to their feedbacks and concerns about power outages.

During that, one resident who is new to Albemarle County over the last year, Ms.

Katie Shipley, emailed me, thanking the staff and team at the Northside Library.

During their time in having the power outage, that's where they were able to go, she was able to continue to do work there, felt safe there, obviously warm, and in addition, sending a word of gratitude to all of the great resources that their family enjoys at the Northside Library there.

I shared that email with David Punkett and asked him in turn to please share that with the board of the JMRL, as well as the incredible staff over at the Northside Library.

So I just wanted to take a chance today to call out and express my appreciation to the team that's working over there, especially for the families that were able to go there and find some amount of relief during the power outage at the library there.

So thank you for that.

Thank you.

Echoing the comments of the other supervisors for the way our community has responded during this last storm as well as Supervisor Malek's comments, we do have another storm projected for this weekend with anywhere from three inches to possibly a foot.

Starting off with dry snow, then turning into a wintry mix, which means it will be heavier.

So again, please do take what precautions you can to prepare.

Two other things quickly, we really appreciate the communications that we're receiving from our community members.

We'd like to encourage and remind you when you email, please include your magisterial district.

That is very helpful for us on the board because as a courtesy and convention we generally defer to the supervisor of the district of the communicant to do the response and so it really helps us to be able to pay attention to who is writing to us from within our district so that we can improve our chances of responding directly to you.

And unfortunately, the last thing, back to the pandemic.

We are seeing a real peak coming with the Omicron variant, and the number of unvaccinated children who are hospitalized right now is really beyond the tail.

So please, for those who are eligible, get your vaccination, get your booster, improve your masks, the KN95s are what they're recommending now, and do social distancing.

and that's all that I have right now.

So I would ask our clerk I believe

You have about a half dozen people who have signed up, is that correct?

That is correct.

Yes, 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.

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 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 an 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 per meeting.

Back and forth debate is not permitted.

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

If participating by phone, please press star 9 to let us know you want to speak.

Then star 6 from a landline to unmute.

Thank you, Vice Chair LaPisto-Kirtley.

Excellent.

Family.

We live right off of Miller School Road.

CenturyLink is our only internet provider.

We've been at this location for about seven, eight years.

July 2021, we lost our internet connection after

calling Central Inc.

and 10 days later after having a service man come out they told us that our line was disconnected because a new house was connected and that's there's not much they could do is after complaining and making

Phone calls, they finally strung the line, the cable line across Miller School Road on top of the grass, connected it to the cable, the box, saying this was a temporary solution and they will eventually bury the line.

That was July, so that we were two weeks without internet.

October a state maintenance tractor vehicle came through mowed the area of course as you know predicted shredded the line we lost internet again we knew exactly what happened i called century link once again 10 days before we could have a service provider come out at that point i think i emailed and i complained to the board of supervisors

spent hours on the phone making multiple phone calls.

Finally, a week later, somebody came, fixed the line.

The line is still on top of the grass, not buried.

It's been now over six months.

It's a matter of time before it's gonna be mowed over or damaged again.

I put orange flags along it to alert somebody in the future.

My absolute frustration is with Centrelink, lack of responsiveness.

It's just sheer incompetence.

Who does that?

Who manages a solution like that?

And who leaves it unattended like this?

My husband and I are both professionals.

We have two kids in high school.

Internet is not a luxury for us.

It's a necessity.

And not having another alternative, Centrelink has the monopoly.

I feel like they have no incentive to make any improvements.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Robert Cline.

Good afternoon.

My name is Robert Cline.

I'm in the Miller District.

My complaint with CenturyLink is it seems like they just don't care.

We have a new house built at London Farm and in the last three years we've been averaging one visit every six months and they come up and they say well there's a problem at your house.

No, there really isn't.

It's an infrastructure problem.

And the reason I say that, I have some experience with wire lines.

I was the operations officer for the phone company in Seoul, Korea.

I understand wire systems.

I spent the majority of my 25-year career in the Army in communications with wired and wireless.

This is an infrastructure problem.

There is one particular tech I'll mention very highly.

His name is Aaron.

When he came out, he realized it was an infrastructure problem and was able to pinpoint the box that it was on.

I can say that the people at Mundorn Farm are very disappointed with

the lack of expertise and the lack of management by CenturyLink.

Several of my neighbors have already disconnected service from CenturyLink and moved on to a competitor and frankly my wife and I are considering that as well.

The

There are tools available where you can check out your infrastructure to see that it matches your diagrams.

There seems to be a lack of management on trying to solve problems.

They always point to the user when this is an infrastructure problem.

I wish somebody would get CenturyLink's attention to put some management on this to solve this.

There are ways of doing this.

I'm familiar with large networks.

Is it easy?

No.

But can it be solved step by step by going through a process?

Absolutely.

That can be done.

The sooner the better.

Since we're out in the hilly area, our communications are very sporadic.

If we don't have a landline, I can't make a 911 call.

And that's happened several times.

And that really upsets me.

Not being able to make a 911 call

Please ask management at CenturyLink to get their act together and to get a quality circuit to the residents that are paying for it.

Hi, my name is Ryan Loomis.

I live in the White Hall district in the Sugar Hollow area.

It's a region with no cell service.

During the recent storm, we were without internet and phone services for about six days with no access to 911.

This is incredibly dangerous for us in the area.

I have elderly neighbors with health and mobility issues that weren't able to contact emergency services.

The cause for this is well known and we've seen it with other storms.

In our particular area, we have a deslam box that has no power when the power goes out.

and we have insufficient backup power for the DSLAM box that CenturyLink provides.

There's only about an eight-hour battery there.

This problem is so persistent and well-known amongst the neighbors that we've had to go to the lengths of setting up an emergency system with an air horn for my 90-year-old neighbors to be able to contact us if something goes wrong.

That is ridiculous that we have to result to an air horn to contact emergency services.

I want to make CenturyLink's legal obligation here clear.

In the Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, Title 47, Subpart H, Resiliency, Redundancy, and Reliability of 911 Communications, Sections 9.19, Reliability of Covered 911 Service Providers, and Section 9.20, Backup Power Obligations,

make it clear that CenturyLink has an obligation, a legal obligation, to provide resilient systems for us to be able to contact 911.

That's our only way to contact emergency services.

This is not a new problem.

As many people on the call may remember, about a decade ago in 2013, there was a terrible derecho that hit our area.

And actually, the section 9.19 that I mentioned was passed by the FCC as a result of that derecho and the devastation that followed.

In the wake of that, CenturyLink was quoted as saying, there are numerous best practices associated with backup power that CenturyLink generally follows to ensure functionality in an emergency, including engine maintenance, battery maintenance, backup battery maintenance, fuel reserves, just to name a few.

So, CenturyLink themselves have admitted that the solution to this is simple.

Just provide the backup power.

It's so simple that this is the third best practice listed under FCC's best practices for small and rural providers.

Network operators should provide backup power to some combination of batteries, generator, and fuel cells at cell sites and remote equipment locations like our diesel inbox.

Yet CenturyLink has consistently put their own profit before resident safety and failed to follow these best practices that are extremely simple.

For any CenturyLink representative that may be on the call, I would plead you to install backup generators across the county at these boxes to ensure that we have 911 services, or at minimum, ensure the capability for external generators to be connected to these boxes.

To the Board of Supervisors, I commend you for having this investigation into the matter and providing the opportunity for residents to voice concerns.

I would urge you to contact the FCC about CenturyLink's failure to meet their legal obligations in this area.

In summary, as monopoly provider of 911 access, CenturyLink has both a moral and legal obligation to provide resilient grid.

Thank you.

Yes.

Thank you.

My name is Kirk Bowers.

I live in the Rivanna district.

I have lived here for 34 years in the same house.

And what I'm about to say applauds to the entire county.

I'm also a retired or semi-retired civil engineer over 40 years.

And I currently serve as the conservation chair for the Piedmont Group Sierra Club.

This is a sustainability issue that affects the entire county.

Over the last 30 plus years, we have constantly lost our power numerous times.

Constantly.

It has never ceased to stop.

In the past year, we lost eight days of power.

Now at that rate, that cost me over $700 a day.

Just in the past week, I've lost over $5,000 of income.

Plus, we had to go to a hotel last week.

I have never seen such damage in my 34 years here, including the direction.

We lost our power for 12 days during the direction.

Every time we have a major storm here, we lose our power.

Key West has 200 to 250 homes in it.

We have a lot of senior citizens here.

A number of them had to flee their lives last week.

So I'm a little upset.

It's raised the point of no further endurance.

We need to begin a program in the county with Dominion.

Dominion is not fulfilling their responsibilities.

I see power lines all over this area that have not been maintained for years.

We have a power pole on top of the hill across from the George Rogers home place that is the highest point on the hill.

So what happens is that the lightning strikes it every time it storms.

And when that happens, we all lose our power.

And down the street, there's another thousand or more homes, and they're starting to lose their powers too.

So what I'm going to have to ask you all to do is take a very proactive

approach to burying the electric lines in the county.

This is a long-term project.

It's part of the sustainability issues that we face with climate change.

It has to be done.

Things are going to get, they're not going to get any better.

And quite frankly, I am so tired of losing my power, being cold, that I can't stand it anymore.

What I'd like to suggest, and I'll be in touch with my supervisor very soon, is to begin here in this area, to begin bearing power lines so that we can have some power.

At least we can start with one area.

And I'm going to call on my supervisor to ask Bea if you could work with us to set up a meeting with Dominion to discuss some of these issues.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate your time.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

This is Dean Begebing.

I'm a Clark Road resident in the White Hall district and first of all, very grateful to Ann's continued response to us when we don't get it from CenturyLink.

So thank you Ann and also thank you and as we understand our role in this as Ann mentioned that now you have more information from residents with these problems.

I think that will help us be able to encourage our neighbors to

continue to speak up.

My remarks would mirror Ryan and particularly with the 90 year old neighbor because I know one of the people who worked with me and another neighbor on a letter is a 90 year old lady

neighbor down the road near Millington, who's been a long time Clark Road Jarstorfer and offered land for all of us to use, who was someone met in the library trying to get internet connection during our outage.

We've addressed a lot of what we had to say from prior comments.

especially the lack of being able to reach 911, especially when we're involved in tree and snow removal.

It's very disconcerting.

Sprint Mobile had worked.

Now that T-Mobile owns Sprint, we had problems getting T-Mobile signal, and even when we could get it during the day, for whatever reason, it disappeared at night, which doesn't make sense to me.

The only other thing I didn't hear anyone address with the concern with CenturyLink among all the others is

The request for credit for the time without service.

They are seeming to prioritize profit over service and I don't think we should be paying for a week without our landlines or our internet, not to mention you know the numerous shorter outages that just seem to happen even when it's cloudy.

and so I would like to be able to have that addressed to CenturyLink in terms of compensation and mitigation.

At least some acknowledgement of their failure to deliver on their responsibility monetarily would be welcome.

Thank you.

Alright, thank you.

Hello?

Hi.

Hi.

Sorry about that.

My name is Dave Mabee.

I am a resident of the Samuel Miller district.

My wife spoke a little bit earlier.

We are residents close to Crozet.

She explained our particular challenge with getting reconnected.

Their volume, they have no reason to expand their volume down there.

They know that there's lots of competition coming.

Of course, we're waiting for the competition to arrive.

We tend to fall in the donut hole of service.

Sailor doesn't get to us.

Satellite doesn't get to us.

Firefly doesn't get to us, Ting doesn't get to us, we are not in anybody's zone except for CenturyLink and CenturyLink has made it pretty clear they are not expanding their volume in the area without bigger neighborhoods moving in.

So from a financial standpoint I understand they don't have a great deal to push to

expand.

And yet at the same time, I do know that they are working under the purview of the county with regulations that require that they do provide a modicum of service.

And I would say that they are not balanced.

And maybe that's true for the industry as a whole.

It's not balanced to provide that service, but with

Children in School with my wife being accessible to patients over the internet and over the phone with me being able to access my business up in Crozet and be accessible to my patients over the phone.

We moved in there believing that we did have that support and it is certainly not there.

If the purpose of this meeting is to identify problems, I would say that there's a real need in our area to go ahead and perhaps get a good survey of what people truly have access to.

You talk with 10 residents down there, you will hear 10 different circumstances with regards to the shortcomings of choice, access, speed, what have you.

I think we all as a community want to know that we are providing good service.

Batesville has a lot of elderly.

I echo what my friends up in Sugar Hollow have to say.

Thank you.

We do.

Thank you.

Okay, Supervisor or now Chairman Price and members of the board, thank you for allowing me to speak this afternoon.

I'll make it quick and to the point.

On December the 16th, we lost the internet.

We have CenturyLink.

We called and talked to the technical people for over two hours.

They said that the service people would have to come to the house and they wrote a ticket for that four times.

That was scheduled for Monday the 20th.

Four times over the weekend, we received texts from CenturyLink saying, make sure you're there on the 20th all day.

We'll be there sometime between 8 and 5.

Before we got up on Monday morning, we received a text saying, make sure you're there.

We'll be there between 8 and 5.

They never showed up.

When I moved here 15 years ago, I was told that if you want to get anything done from CenturyLink, catch one of the local service guys in the building on Hardware Street in Scottsville.

So Tuesday morning I went down to the building on Hardware Street and I caught up with two of the local guys that serviced this area, explained the situation and one told me, he said, I have a pretty light load today.

Obviously he didn't have a ticket from the home office.

He said, I have a pretty light load today and I'll see what I can do and by 4 o'clock that afternoon I had my internet back.

Obviously service is not in CenturyLink's vocabulary.

It just gets frustrating after a while when particularly somebody promises to do something for you and you spend the whole day waiting for them to do it and then they don't even bother to call and say I'm sorry we were so busy we couldn't get to you today we'll do it tomorrow so again thank you for allowing me to speak that's one of a number of occasions with CenturyLink over the last 15 years that I've been here

Fortunately, my cell phone service is with Verizon and I don't have a problem with that.

Thanks again.

Thank you.

Right.

Board, at this time, we'll move to the consent agenda.

I have not received any comments for any supervisors to pull anything.

So in the absence of

That, is there a motion to approve the consent agenda?

So moved.

Seconded.

We have a motion made and seconded.

Please call the roll.

Mr. Andrews?

Ms.

LaPisto-Kirtley?

Aye.

Ms.

Ballot?

Yes.

Ms.

McKeel?

Yes.

Ms.

Thank you, Chair Price.

I will recognize Trevor Henry, our assistant county executive, and he will be leading the board and our staff through this work session this afternoon.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Chair Price, members of the board, good afternoon.

As Jeff mentioned, Trevor Henry, Assistant County Executive.

I, along with Emily Kowai, our Director of Communications and Public Engagement, and Greg Cantner, our County Attorney, will lead the work session today from the staff side.

Appreciate the opportunity to present the information that you're about to see and get the feedback from the board through this work session to help us hone in on

what returning to in-person meetings look like.

When we first sent this agenda, it was prior to the Omicron variant that Chair Price mentioned at the opening of the meeting, prior to that wave hitting the region the way that it has.

At this point, we will not be recommending a date certain on returning to in-person public meetings, but rather we'd like to walk through what staff is proposing around the configuration and the scope of the various meetings

the technology that has been built up and implemented and tested in the auditorium and room 241 of the county voting.

And really the primary purpose is to kind of walk through that tiered approach, talk through an implementation sequencing, again, not with dates, but with a recommendation of sequencing to get input and feedback from the board that we can then come back at a later date with a recommendation of implementation.

That's the primary purpose of the work session.

Before we get to that, though, we thought it would be prudent to just give some updates on the COVID data that we are tracking as part of our reconstitution work.

Our COVID-19 reconstitution team uses data as it has been for almost two years now to inform our decision making around our operating posture, access to services,

Mitigation protocols that we take, that we require in our buildings and our community needs.

The following slides are a snapshot of some of the data that we're seeing.

And I know that this is very public and the board certainly is tracking this, but we're at a transmission level that is unprecedented since the pandemic started.

Next slide.

This is the past six months showing the daily cases.

You can see the chart.

The data that we pulled today has at the state nearly 20,000 new cases today.

If the health district is at 510 and in Almar County, it's 175.

Again, these are confirmed cases.

Next slide is around the testing in the health district.

The blue bars are the test of volume.

The yellow line indicates a percent positivity.

there's been a high sustained high demand for testing really since Thanksgiving definitely over the past 90 days but has been incredibly high over the past three to four weeks the percent positive rate surged to you know 30 percent ish with PCR tests coming back positive we believe that this data is likely an undercount based on disruption and testing availability through the holidays and the snow event that we experienced last week

Also, this data does not include those at-home test kits, antigen test kits that many folks are using.

Today's positivity for the state is just under 36% and just almost 29% for Albemarle.

Next.

This goes back two years.

You can see the peaks, the different surges that we've experienced.

This is the daily cases.

It's just a different view, but it shows you more of the

historical view of the virus and its variants.

Next.

This is a EVA model we've been using since the beginning of the pandemic.

It's not 100% accurate, certainly, but it's a model, but it provides a good guide in staff and the team understanding

the projected direction of the predicted case counts and kind of what that curve might look like.

Right now, the model is predicting that we see a peak, and it's really focusing on the Omicron variant in our region, but it's predicting a peak on January 23rd, again, estimated with approximately 12,000 daily cases.

Again, it's predicting a peak of 12,000 daily cases.

You can see the curve shows a rapid drop off

which is also evident in what other countries have experienced as this variant has moved through different regions and countries in the world.

Next slide.

Just a data drop against where we are with vaccinations statewide.

We're a fully vaccinated rate of almost 70%.

Elmar County continues to be a leader in that.

But even with that backdrop, we're still seeing the surge that the previous sides indicated.

Next slide.

Many of you saw, or most of you saw, that the governor declares a limited state of emergency on Monday, I believe.

really directed to hospitals and healthcare workers in order to provide resources needed to help mitigate the surge in patients that they're seeing.

And then my final slide is really just one of the takeaways, kind of the slide said it themselves, is that at the state health district and local levels, the COVID cases are at an all-time high.

I know as an employer, we are dealing with that across all segments of

of our employment population.

Our county has done a good job and continues to lead in booster vaccination rates.

The local hospitals have publicly reported strains on their system.

So we're just reiterating what has been publicly communicated.

The county has adjusted our operating guidelines to mitigate transmission.

We're emphasizing our work from home, keeping all of our services open.

but still doing everything that we can in the building to minimize transmission of the variant between staff.

And again, at this time, staff is not recommending that we shift into an in-person public meeting posture just yet.

And so that's really the COVID kind of update.

We were then going to transition to a legal update that really sets the stage for EMILY to come in place and

and talk about recommendation on the in-person meetings and what that looks like.

Thank you, Mr. Henry.

Supervisor Andrews.

I have no questions at this time.

Thank you.

Thank you, Trevor, for your good report and I appreciate the data.

I didn't see any reference to hospitalization.

It seemed like to me your data was really about cases as opposed to hospitalizations.

I know you said local hospitals demonstrate restraint.

Supervisor McKeel, yes, that is data I have not seen.

We could take that as a look up and see if we're able to pull that

Early in the pandemic, we were able to get information through the hospital systems as part of our coordination with the health district.

I am not sure if that information is still available.

I do know that both hospitals have reported strains on their system and Martha Jefferson, even in the media last week, talked about standing down, you know, non-essential

Sure, absolutely.

All right.

No questions.

I'm just so appreciative of the county's posture on masking and keeping doing absolutely everything we can do within our immediate power to protect each other and ourselves.

Thank you.

Thank you, Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley.

No questions.

Thank you, Supervisor Galloway.

Thank you, Trevor.

I don't have any questions at this time.

Thank you.

This is the COVID part of the presentation.

I'm going to transition it to Mr. Kantner to talk a little bit about the emergency order that's in place, the timing of that.

He has a couple of slides that he'll reference, and then he'll hand that off to Ms.

Kilroy, who will walk us through the proposed method of bringing, when we do come back in person, what those public meetings look like, kind of the scope of work, what levels,

a series of slides that will come back to me for board discussion.

So I think if the board can hold for another bit of information, 10 slides or so, then we'll come back for board questions on what you'll see.

Thank you, Mr. Henry.

I'll hold off on any questions or comments at this time.

Thank you.

Are we now turning it over to Mr. Campner?

Yes, ma'am.

All right.

Thank you, Mr. Henry.

More embarrassing.

Good afternoon, Supervisors.

Brett Campner, County Attorney.

The local emergency that the board ratified back on in mid-March, the County Executive issued the original local emergency on March 12, 2020.

It remains active.

It was never

allowed to expire because of the ongoing pandemic.

Under the state emergency laws, the pandemic, because COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it is a disaster.

And that term is significant because it not only ties directly to the local emergency, but it also ties to the continuity of government ordinance.

As Mr. Henry

noted the governor did issue a new executive order earlier this week, Executive Order 84.

And that order, while it is applicable to primarily hospital services, it does reiterate that COVID-19 does remain a disaster.

One question that has periodically come up if we have gone through the dips and valleys of

of the pandemic has been when does the local emergency end?

And the state code, the state emergency law provides it.

It ends when the board in its discretion determines that there are no further emergency services to be provided.

The key element of declaring a local emergency is the ability for the county to use its resources to

Deal with the Emergency.

So at some point, we will reach that point.

We thought back a couple of times over the last several months that we were getting close to that point, but variants emerged.

And so we held on and retained the local emergency.

But once it does end under state law, which provides the enabling authority for

the board's continuity of government ordinance, the county will have 12 months to resume to normal operations.

And those have been on the board may have heard me refer to that six month period to return to normal operations.

The general assembly in its most recent session extended that period to return to normal operations from six to 12 months.

Next slide, please.

So once the local emergency ends and the board determines, once the disaster ends would probably be the more accurate way to state it, once the disaster ends and the board is no longer

is ready to begin resuming normal operations.

It does have 12 months.

And at that time within that 12 month period, the county's public bodies will need to return to physically assembling in order to conduct their meetings.

So there are some exceptions in the Virginia Code as the board may be aware of for

Medical situations and other types of emergency situations for an individual supervisor.

But over that 12 month period, the board or the county's public bodies will need to resume having their quorums of their public bodies physically assembled.

And that the members who are participating do so unless one of the FOIA exceptions applies.

Next slide, please.

And I will hand this over to Ms.

Thank you, Mr. Campner.

Thank you, members of the board.

So while we are not recommending transitioning away from virtual public meetings, we are planning for what that would look like for when we are ready.

We've shared this at points throughout the pandemic, but as we're looking at developing a framework for how to approach public meetings, whether that was in person prior to the pandemic, the pivots that we made to virtual meetings in 2020, and what our planning looks like for the future, we're really trying to strike a balance across these different priority areas shown on the slide.

So we want to maximize the effectiveness of the public body to be able to conduct its business, first and foremost.

We also want to create a consistent, safe, and comfortable user experience for those participating.

We want to make sure that we have a high degree of reliability, that the meeting will start and finish as expected.

And with virtual, what we're looking at is making sure that we have the right AV resources in place to support the meeting's success.

And of course, always meeting our obligations under FOIA.

So this is a framework that we've drafted to sort of approach how we might look at public meetings moving forward at the time that we feel like it's safe to resume some in-person activities.

The framework that we're putting forward for your feedback today is to have three public body meeting templates when we're able to make that transition.

And I'll talk a little bit more about what these terms are in a bit.

But this slide is really to sort of set out which public bodies would utilize which meeting template.

So what we're calling hybrid would be for legislative bodies.

What we're calling virtual access would be for the authorities and some of the other decision-making bodies.

And a return to in-person only would be for boards and committees that are advisory in nature.

So I'm going to walk through these meeting types in the reverse order from what I just described.

And I'm going to start with virtual because that's what we're used to at this point.

So while the pivot to virtual meetings has had its challenges at the onset, we've really gotten used to that technology and the cadence of virtual meetings.

And they've actually become really easy for us to run.

Meeting experience at a virtual meeting is as good as your broadband connection.

And the reason that I have a picture up here is just to sort of demonstrate everyone in a virtual meeting is sort of on the same plane.

So regardless of what your position and role in a Board of Supervisors meeting is, we all end up sort of on the same gallery together.

So this is a little bit different when we look at what a hybrid meeting would look like.

And this is what I've sort of roughly simulated here.

So this is what Lane could look like and we expect will look like when we're ready to make that transition.

People in the meeting room can see and hear those participating via Zoom, and people on the Zoom can see and hear what is happening in Lane in real time.

We'll have a camera operator switching between in-room camera views to help keep everyone focused on sort of where the action is at the time, whether that's discussion by the board up on the dais, a presentation happening up on the dais, or a speaker at the podium.

Members of the public and presenters can be elevated in Zoom to speak to the room and then we'll move them back to view only when their time has elapsed.

Pulling off a meeting like this is high production, so there's a lot of people in the background making sure that all the pieces work right, but it really tries to bring in-person attendees

on to the same plane as virtual attendees even though of course you're in very different places.

Technology is mostly in place and very soon will be fully in place in Lane Auditorium and 241 which would be then enabled to conduct these types of meetings.

Virtual access is the next meeting template.

And this again would be for as we envision for decision making bodies and authorities.

Under FOIA, the members of the public body have to be physically assembled.

But this meeting type would facilitate virtual presentations to the public body, virtual public comment and public viewing in real time.

The challenge with a virtual access meeting is that the focus of the public body shifts throughout the meeting.

So if you think about if you're kind of having a conversation around a table, you're all sort of looking at each other.

But with sort of the center of the meeting focus being back and forth between the table and the screen, at various points, you're kind of moving different places.

And it's hard to kind of keep a tight focus in any one particular area.

at various points in the pandemic.

Internally, we've held virtual access meetings like this, and sometimes the conversation around the table would get so focused, we'd actually forget that the virtual presenters were there, or it was hard for them to sort of raise their hand to get a word in.

Screen size, positioning, microphone sensitivity and positioning in these meetings is a challenge for everyone to have a good experience, but it certainly does enable convenience of participating remotely, and it's something that for those

And then in person.

Do you guys remember these?

We haven't had one in a very long time, but we're familiar with that.

You know, really in an in-person meeting, your focus stays among those on the public body.

several months ago we did a survey out to members serving on public bodies and one of the things that they reported valuing about in-person meetings that they really missed with this virtual time has been getting to meet each other and also other members of the community whether that's a geographic area or connected to their subject matter so the police community advisory committee meeting at the police station they really valued getting to sort of see and interact with officers while they were attending that meeting

and so setting up virtual access or hybrid in the field is really difficult because every meeting is different, internet connectivity varies and the built-in AV varies from place to place and we feel like those advisory bodies can really conduct their work in a really meaningful way in person and that that's the appropriate level to support those at.

I'll pause here and see if there's clarifying questions before turning it back over to Mr. Henry to walk through sort of what we would see as implementation and also some discussion questions.

Thank you.

All right, thank you.

I guess I'm questioning Emily whether or not to ask my question now or to wait until the entire presentation is over.

I just, I was looking at what you all had earlier in this presentation about the different levels and what groups were going to go back in person.

And one of them, it indicated that, I'm sorry.

Would you like me to bring that back up?

Well, you can, sure.

And maybe if you see where my question is going, you can tell me whether or not we can deal with this later.

but committees and boards, I'm assuming that our citizens advisory committees would be under this committees and boards?

Yes.

And I guess my first thought was that I have better participation right now on my CAC than I've ever had.

And my CAC board members are really liking the Zoom, right?

Certainly we are.

I think, you know, one piece that we have to weigh on that, and I'll, Mr. Campner, if you want to add anything, the FOIA will, when we've elapsed the transition period, FOIA would still require that those bodies assemble physically in person as long as they are public bodies.

That's good.

Thank you very much.

And then I should have, see, I should have waited.

I'm sorry.

Supervisor Mallek, you may be muted.

Oh, there we go.

It took six clicks on the button to get it to go.

I appreciate this and move forward to the discussion to try to get more hybrids.

If I understood the question correctly, once the disaster is determined to be over, the county has 12 months to return to normal operations.

Okay, so for example, the committees could continue virtually and all the other committees could continue virtually for that 12 month period of time.

They could.

Right, I mean the opportunity is there.

Yes, if you're referring to, for example, four members of the school board,

physically assembling and three of them still being virtual.

Okay.

Thank you.

No further questions.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And I will hold off as well.

So Ms.

All right.

Thanks, Chair Price.

Thanks, Ms.

Kilroy and Mr. Kamler for a few portions of it.

Next slide, please.

What staff is proposing in the project management world, this is a sequential kind of schedule.

It's a waterfall, if you will.

And when the board is ready to come back and the environment would allow us to come back into that public hybrid meeting,

What we would recommend is that we would first start with that top tier, the legislative boards and planning commission.

And we always learn from our experience.

We have already done a few dry runs in the auditorium.

It is a high production process.

It takes a lot of staff.

We have kind of tested this.

I think it will work well.

But what we would recommend is that we

kind of to the point of that 12 months, we would come back with this first step.

We're a supervisor, school board planning commission in the county office building, McIntire.

We experience a couple of meetings.

We learn our lessons from the process and the technology.

We feed that in to how that works.

And then a month or so later,

We would then go to the next tier of meetings, the public bodies that are decision-making bodies.

And we would, you know, the virtual access forms, we would then bring them back in to the county office buildings to then manage through that.

And then at a period after that, we could return to in-person meetings for the remaining entities, the advisory

committees, et cetera.

So it's really staff is proposing not doing this all at once and we will kind of phase it.

I would think that this would take us really over a quarter, a calendar quarter to get from our first meeting with the board to having the virtual access meetings kind of experienced and have those working well.

And I will note that part of the reason the proposal is what it is, is it really it's

It is us, the meetings that are typically out of the county meeting are meetings that we can control.

We're able to put the technology in.

We have resources that we have funded in our current year that are being proposed for next year to kind of handle these top two levels of hybrid meetings, if you will.

Beyond that, when you're in different locations, different technology, the complexity of trying to do a

A virtual access meeting is much, much greater because it's the inability to control some of those locations.

Next slide.

Before we come back in person, or even as we come back into the first step of public meeting, we will be shifting our public posture.

COVID will help dictate that.

We've advised this phased implementation

approach.

And we would do that with the protocols that would be put in place continuing to follow our CDC guidelines, as well as the health district in the state.

We have used that to kind of anchor our decisions throughout the whole pandemic before we move to even the board coming back in.

You know, the conversation would also include what we're doing with masking, with spacing, with other protocols.

And so that work continues.

And that's something that we would come back, you know, certainly to the Board of Supervisors with when we're getting closer to a recommendation around being ready to return to that first level of hybrid meetings with the legislative bodies.

I think we're coming to our last slide.

which is really the board discussion.

We've provided a framework around the tiers.

We've already had a couple of questions around that makeup.

That's where staff's recommendation is today.

We would love the board to provide some feedback, some guidelines, some questions, questions that we may or may not be able to answer today, but we certainly could come back with.

So really around the framework of the meetings that was proposed along with the kind of implementation phasing that were proposed would be great to capture the board's thoughts on that and then we can take action and return to the board likely in a month.

I would imagine by the second meeting of February we'll see the Omicron

Hopefully we're coming down off the peak and we'll be in a place to talk more about potential data service.

That's the last slide and really it's turning it back over to the board.

We have Mr. Richardson and other staff that can answer questions and take notes.

Thank you Mr. Henry.

Board, we'll go around again.

Yes, thank you Mr. Henry and Ms.

Kellroy, Mr. Campner.

I'm enthused about coming back together eventually and I'm looking forward to when COVID updates are no longer necessary.

As someone who's new and really spent a lot of time trying to understand what's going on in local government, all different levels, I can tell you that the recorded meetings available on YouTube, particularly where you can access them and move around in the meeting easily, are very, very valuable.

And so I just applaud the ability to continue to record as much as we can to make it accessible to the public.

Thank you.

Thank you for all of the hard work that I know this, giving this presentation to get to the point where we, you all can even talk about it and make recommendations.

And I'm thrilled to hear that you all have been practicing, you know, the hybrid, I'm sure that you were, but I think it's great that you have been.

And I agree that we're all anxious to get back in person for no other reason than it represents normalcy and certainly we are social animals and we like being with folks.

Having said that, we all know that our public participation has really gone up while we've been Zooming.

and I appreciate the virtual access for our community, especially with the Board of Supervisors meetings and the Planning Commission and those meetings that often the community is extremely interested in.

And, Jim, I appreciate the information on the usefulness of the YouTubes because, of course, those of us that are not, we're in the meeting.

I must admit, I don't go back and rewatch the meeting.

I guess I could, but...

Having said all that, I do have a question about the committees, and I think it was listed as committees and it wasn't boards and committees, was it?

But maybe it was.

So I guess what I'm hearing Trevor is, and Emily, that the concern with offering a hybrid, for example, our Citizens Advisory Committees, is staffing and how much effort it really takes to get this done.

Emily, you certainly can answer that.

I would say it is a combination of resourcing, which would be probably a significant change in how we currently work.

And the locations are so varied.

It really makes the ability to pull that off in a more seamless way much, much more difficult at a location that is not under the control of a

Well, and that really makes a lot of sense, Trevor.

I get that.

So if my CAC said, well, we won't meet anymore at Greer Elementary School, but we're going to meet at the designated place at the county office building, right?

I saw Emily unmute.

I would say it would make that less difficult.

We would have to, of course, look at how to staff that to support it.

And then also have to look at the scheduling for being able to manage that in our building.

A lot of those meetings, most of those meetings happen at night.

So that's something that we, if part of today there's a board wanting us to look at some of those other committees, that is something that we could look at that from a scope of work of what it would take to manage and how we would do that.

No, sir.

I think you covered exactly what I had on my mind regarding the availability of 241

Yeah, and I'm not saying, I'm just trying to talk it through in my head to figure out, and it's not so much, I don't think that folks are liking the Zooms as much.

It's not that they're concerned about COVID.

It's that the ease with which, so the year which Bea was talking about is fine, but it really is more about being able to go to the meeting and not have to drive home late at night.

You know, child care issues, those sorts of issues rather than the concern

going hopefully at some point about COVID.

And so that helps me understand the challenges a little bit.

I appreciate it.

And I'll just add Ms.

McKeel to that point.

FOIA really is what is dictating that part.

It's so much easier just to click in than to drive and care and dinner and work obligations that can get in the way.

FOIA at present would be requiring the members serving on those public bodies to physically assemble once we're sort of back out of an emergency status.

Yeah and that's why it's really good to be able to talk this through.

so that some of us can go back and explain exactly why and what's going on, but I was interested.

So, because I really will say my participation is way up and I can't speak for other supervisors, but for at least my CAC folks have been very appreciative, certainly during COVID, but with the format as well.

So it'll be interesting to see what others say.

Thank you, I'm grateful for this information because it's filling in sort of a missing gap of where we are and that's great.

I think I'm always one whose people yell and say I'm a Pollyanna but I'm always looking for the positives and the silver linings and we have talked for 25 years about improving the access to our meetings and to local government processes and when the pandemic came along it had to happen and we made it happen because it had to happen.

and so I really appreciate all the people who have made that happen and allowed everybody, whether it's staff people who can come to an evening meeting and the baby's sleeping in the other room or people as Diantha said who can't drive or the weather's horrible or something for us to be able to keep moving forward.

So I absolutely appreciate

and we'll cling to very hard the public access in the COB once we get to that point so that people can participate in their pajamas if they want to.

And the fact that we have two rooms that are set up is great.

I agree that the recordings are essential.

I am confused about why we have a problem now or you're perceiving a problem for virtual access for our CACs, for example.

How is that different than what has been happening for the last year?

Where we should clone Carolyn Schaefer or hire somebody else to help her, because I understand she is everywhere all the time, and that's a huge burden on one person.

But I think it will really disable the CACs for many, many months to come if they're now going to be

16 people in the large meeting room at the Crozet Library is nowhere near big enough to have social distancing.

So the reality is that

We're expecting two things to happen that may not be possible, and that is following the protocols and having everybody together without any access virtually.

So I would love to get some more information about that question.

I understand that it's been a burden, but as I said, it has been far better result and participation than we have ever had since 1984 when I started coming to meetings here again.

So that is an exciting thing, and I will try hard to keep that from being lost.

There are ways that I'm sure we can free up some groups, some smaller clusters of people who could meet and report to the big committee, for example, who can then

Go through the FOIA things.

I mean, if you have a group of people who has no power, they're just kicking around ideas.

They share their ideas with their bigger committee.

That's when the regulations should be starting, not trying to control a group of two or three people who want to sit around and have coffee and work on something.

So I think we've made it harder for ourselves in some way by trying to do all those or stop them as well.

I'll run back over my list here.

I think.

But we're looking at at least 12 months, even from today, before we have to do anything.

And it's probably going to be many more months because it will take quite a while to figure out if the Omicron is the end or whether there will be another variant around the corner.

So I like the step-by-step approach, and we'll look forward to learning more about how we can continue to make some small bits of progress on some of these things.

Yes, thank you very much.

I have a question regarding for the committees, for the CACs.

The reason why

Ms.

Yes.

In order for the CACs to continue to meet via Zoom, would that have to be a change in state legislation or would it have to be a change in FOIA regulations?

It would require a change in state law.

And I assume we're talking about the period beyond the 12 months of the internal operations.

And the reason I was distracted is there are a pair of bills that have been introduced in the General Assembly of this session that would allow public bodies to conduct all virtual meetings.

OK, so there may be some change coming.

OK, so really that's what we need to focus on is getting the state law changed either for either for boards or even for our CACs.

It has to be a change in state law.

Second, if nothing changes and our CACs have to meet in person, as do we, if we have mask mandates or vaccine mandates, then really the emergency isn't over, is it?

The emergency is over when we no longer have to have mask or vaccine mandates.

You know, you almost need a doctor to answer part of that because there are parts of the world where when people are out in public, they're wearing face coverings all the time.

So I really can't answer that.

We may reach a point though where other than the fact that it may be advisable to wear face coverings when you're out in public,

Right, so that's my point regarding this, Supervisor Malek's point, is that we would have to first get to a point where masks would be an individual choice because someone just wants to or they have a cold or the flu or something.

But we wouldn't be mandating them, which is what we're doing now.

So that's a different scenario so people would be able to meet.

There wouldn't be a problem social distancing because of the fact that there wouldn't be a mandate there.

There wouldn't be an emergency.

The emergency wouldn't exist anymore.

I mean, after that, that's personal preference.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Thank you.

I mean, overarching my thoughts on it are that obviously I would be

leaning on the side of being as lenient as possible to allow people to participate virtually.

Prior to the pandemic, the way of the world was tons of virtual meetings were happening in government and in business.

And it wasn't a new thing.

It was new for some because the pandemic forced it.

And it showed them how it can be beneficial and why it was being used elsewhere prior to the pandemic.

It's efficient.

It helps people have access.

There's obviously technological glitches, just like there can be a glitch in me driving my car to a public place to have a meeting.

So with new forms come that.

So, you know, in trying to track down volunteers and always knowing that time is a big part of the conversation as to whether or not you can get somebody to commit to volunteer on a board or commission,

The virtual element allows folks to be efficient with their time and to me opens up participation.

What's interesting to me is when you read, you know, when I look at the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, it says, right, the affairs of government are not intended to be conducted in an atmosphere of secrecy since at all times the public is to be beneficiary of any action taken at any level of government.

Well, how in the hell does virtual somehow made it more secret?

It hasn't.

So that's where the onus lies is that they have to go into FOIA and go, this is starting to become antiquated and it has to be updated for what the modern world has to say.

When you read down to the electronic meeting, it just states no things should be done by telephone, video, et cetera.

Well, it's kind of like our 20 year old wireless policy.

I mean, 20 years ago, we thought of

cell towers is a passing fact and of course visual as I've said many times before the aesthetic ruled the day on that in that consideration.

Well today I mean at some point they put in that FOIA act that oh yeah we just can't do it this way we have to host where it's going to be and everybody knows where to go.

Well, if you've ever tried to find a committee meeting at the state level at 7.30 a.m.

and you didn't have a guide getting you to that room, I can tell you that that's pretty damn secret in how they do a lot of committee meetings down in Richmond.

So if there's a virtual way for me to access that, I don't have an hour-plus drive, let alone the folks that live all over the state trying to get down to the Capitol, and probably will have an easier time from parking, going through security, and trying to find the damn room to begin with.

so the state legislators should have this on their plates and if it's not then maybe it's just a full court press on us to go hey FOIA can be supported nothing has been damaged in my opinion for from a FOIA standpoint over the last couple of years we've got the proof and in fact it has made it more transparent and easier for people to participate in the public's business so with all that being said I apologize for being long-winded on it but that's where I'm at so

As a board member dictating what we do in the county, I'll be trying to force or push or encourage

that, yeah, a zone meeting's fine for a CAC.

Why not?

And, you know, the TJPDC has three or four members meeting in their conference room.

We do it by Zoom.

They're on one camera, one TV.

The rest of us are at our location.

And it works.

And it's just the Zoom method in one computer, one piece.

So I think there are some low-level ways here to get around some of the true staffing obstacles because the hybrid version should be in play for the Planning Commission and the

Board meetings and all of that.

But at the lower level, I don't think we have to set the bar as high for staffing it in the same way that we would a full board meeting or a planning commission meeting or a school board meeting.

With that, I'll conclude.

Thank you.

Respecting the comments of all the other supervisors, I concur, support the recommendation that county staff has presented and I thank Mr. Richardson, Henry, Campner, and Ms.

Kilroy for your presentations and information.

As our next agenda item however will point out, virtual meetings do not work for people who do not have connectivity.

And as that presentation will show, we have a substantial portion of our population that does not have regular or reliable connectivity.

So while for those who do have connectivity, the virtual meetings may be much more accessible and allow greater participation, if we are only in a virtual world, those who do not have connectivity are effectively excluded from participation in government.

And so that is a major concern.

One of the things that is important to remember, and all of this of course has started based upon the COVID pandemic,

There have been multiple variants of the pandemic, three of which have raised great concern.

That's the original Alpha, Delta, and now the Omicron.

And there are 10 current variants that are being monitored.

2,654 Americans died yesterday.

So what we know is that this pandemic or any future pandemics are likely to continue and expand with variations over time.

I fully support the hybrid model for the Board of Supervisors, the School Board, and the Planning Commission.

I am supportive of virtual opportunities for the other boards, committees, commissions, whatever it may be.

but the problem becomes if they're all live or if they're all hybrid I'm sorry if they're all virtual then there's a segment of our population which is excluded from participation but I also recognize that it's resource heavy to have virtual or especially hybrid meetings both in terms of technology and personnel

as availability of spaces.

So I have confidence in the recommendations that county staff has put forward, and I would recommend that we follow that with this implementation of phasing.

Mr. Campner, I do have a question.

At noon on Saturday, Virginia will have a new governor.

It is expected, based upon public statements that have been made, that the new administration will be less supportive of many of the

actions that have been taken to try and constrain the expansion of infections across the country and in the commonwealth.

Are there any executive actions that the new governor could take which would limit our ability to continue on the plan that we have now towards this phased implementation?

All right, so I take it from that then as you've indicated in response to other questions that for the foreseeable future up to at least a year from today, Albemarle County does still have the flexibility to proceed as we know right now.

Yes, under the laws that exist right now, that is correct.

All right, thank you.

I have no more questions for comments.

Thank you.

And I understand completely the comments about the connectivity issues.

But it's a different population.

There have always been populations of our community who could not participate because of age, disability, no transportation, dark night, getting home, or bad weather, et cetera.

So I really want to try to widen that net of thinking about this as much as we possibly can.

and I'm grateful that the Attorney General did already make a ruling about the Governor not having the power to take apart the RGGI payments and the carbon credits that utilities are required to create because I think that's helping the learning curve for this new person to understand he is not going to be a dictator and he will have to work with the Assembly.

Thank you.

Sorry, additional thoughts.

So I would be very interested in having the discussion that this go on our parking lot for a tickler issue for legislative packet.

Obviously we would need to talk about it before then, but just if our attorney could mark it down as something that we might be interested in talking about later to go on our legislative packet.

Thank you.

You froze there, Supervisor McKeel.

So I'm going to at this point assume you've finished your comment, but if you have more, please come back.

Just a quick addition on the access issue, and that is whether we can look at talking to our library services or other places which have better connectivity and maybe available rooms to allow citizens to go there to attend meetings virtually.

Thank you.

Sorry, lack of connectivity popped its ugly head up and I just went away.

Anyway, I was just going to say that, like Jim was saying, that I would really like to have this discussion because I'm not sure we were ever talking about all or nothing.

Certainly, I think Ned makes good points about what happens down in Richmond and in some of these other areas, the really good points.

But with our CAC meeting, I was thinking if we weren't meeting, if we could meet at a designated place,

where staff would have access.

We could have the people that want to come to be there, and yet they would have the hybrid option that they wouldn't have to be in person.

Thank you.

Mr. Richardson, I'd like to come back to you if I could.

It appears that we have raised all of our comments and questions.

Thank you, Chair Price.

I would like to have an opportunity to summarize because today even though we did not have, we thought back in November as Trevor presented, we thought in November that we probably would be looking at a date certain for recommendation today for the board to consider going back live.

Over the past week there have been several cities in Virginia, I don't know what's happening in the southeast, but there have been several cities in Virginia who have been live for a while, that as of today they're moving back to totally virtual.

So I'm proud of the fact that our staff has stayed

True through the emergency to hold down our numbers.

And we've certainly been conservative during the times that the numbers have dropped.

But with the two surges both from last summer and then over the holiday period, it's kept us on track with this board.

We know it's inevitable that at some point in time we will see clear to begin to come back.

And so, yes, I had put down on my notes that we would be moving forward over the next year to speak through TJPDC, David Blount, work with our board, work with our county attorney, and talk about

What are the legislative changes that we would hope to work through Richmond to get things opened up a little bit at the local level related to the requirement that members of a board, members of committees and commissions be present?

And that's what we're working with right now.

that boards and commissions in normal times must be present.

And so we'd be working with the state legislature.

Greg talked about that and I think the board understands that.

In addition to that, and I'm checking with the board right now as we move forward.

Trevor's Cascade slide of phasing this in.

What we're looking at is the technological capability of Lane Auditorium to be able to handle hybrid meetings.

This board, I believe, understands that.

Emily worked through that.

And then in addition to that, we're also upfitting room 241.

and Room 241 has capacity constraints.

This board knows that, that with six foot social distancing, there would only be a max number and Trevor has that number of personnel, staff and public that would be allowed in that room.

But those two rooms under county government would have the capability to do hybrid and meet the requirements under state FOIA currently.

and at this moment as we leave today and we work to go forward with that, we would not be looking at other locations in the county that we would begin to source the cost for technology, the cost for resources and such to be able to get those spaces to the degree that a 241 and Lane Auditorium

would have in it.

In other words, if you wanted to do hybrid meetings, you'd be doing hybrid meetings in either Lane Auditorium or 241.

And I'm stopping there to make sure the board understands that that's where we're at with our work.

I'm looking at the screen.

Supervisors, if you have questions, please use the function to raise your hand.

Thank you.

I guess a question to leave on the table for Greg is, is there a different obligation or should there be for decision makers, which I think absolutely should be at the highest

level of transparency, et cetera, versus an advisory group.

And I don't know if there's any decision or tier in the law.

Secondly, did I just understand you to say that staff would be researching the cost of perhaps having some other remote places equipped, like libraries or something like that?

Good question, Ann.

Mr. Andrews had mentioned just a while ago that he would hope that we could check with our library system to see what the connectivity, what the technology and connectivity is currently at the library.

So we need to look at availability, room availability, and technology.

I think we can do that and report back to the board.

But Ann, unless the board directs us today in the budget process to go further than that and start looking at spaces and what it would cost to outfit it and resource, to have these hybrid meeting places ready, that's not contemplated currently in the budget.

So a follow up to that, before the budget, will you be able to have any kind of a range of per outfit cost?

And I'm thinking about emergency services and how

Splendid, if it were affordable, we could be if we had fire stations, all of whom have big rooms that may have been paid for by Bingo years ago or weddings more recently, where we have the opportunity if we had some upfit to have meetings, but also to have more emergency services available.

So I'll just throw that in there.

I can answer Supervisor Malek's question about whether or not it makes a distinction between, for example, the governing body of the Board of Supervisors or its advisory committees, and it does not.

Thank you.

Mr. Richardson, what I would like to do then right now is I'm going to just poll the board to see if there is a consensus that the county staff look into the feasibility cost considerations of expanding other spaces beyond Lane Auditorium in room 241 in the county office building.

To this point, the conversation has been that Lane Auditorium will be limited to the Board of Supervisors, School Board, and Planning Commission use and not open Lane Auditorium to other bodies.

Yes, as we're looking at that, I mean, I'll be honest with you, I would, I don't know the cost of doing this, but not only do we have the cost of equipment, although Supervisor Malek's suggestion about putting it in the fire stations would enhance, could possibly help the fire stations.

But other than that, we have to make sure that people are going to show up, we're going to have people.

Our Zoom meetings were having a lot of CAC compliance.

I think all of us are also searching for CAC members.

So I take it though, Mr. Supervisor Andrews raised the

the comment and Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley you appear to support looking into what the costs are.

I am more interested, to be honest with you, in the county staff looking at the Lane Auditorium and our conference room in Lane and the county office building.

At this point, I think it may be too early to go out, in my opinion, and try and spend a lot of time on cost in other locations.

I also would like to have a discussion about using the legislative means to get changes.

but to answer your direct question, I'm interested in the possibility of the county office building spaces being possibly used for hybrids for our CACs because I think we have the space to get the number of people that we might get from our CAC in a hybrid meeting with some people at home and some people in one of those two spaces.

I think what you said is rather than looking to spend money on facilities outside of 241 and Lane Auditorium, you want to focus on that.

As I suggested when I mentioned libraries, I was not thinking that that would be something that would cost a lot to look into to expand beyond libraries.

Well, right.

I mean, we're not committing to spending money.

It's whether you're in favor of the county as part of the budget cost looking into it.

I think any room outside of the two is going to cost money.

I take that as a yes.

Number one assumption is I assume from the presentation that late at 2.41 we're set, ready and ready to go.

So I certainly don't want to put anything ahead of that.

I thought that was in the bank.

Secondly, I definitely am in support of finding out the question, the answer to the question of per room basis, what does a boilerplate cost?

to do something that would allow.

And the suggestion of using the BOS buildings for other meetings is fabulous for all of the committees.

I guess all but three of them, two of them are right close to the urban ring.

The Rivanna North and Crozet would be the ones who might benefit the most from another opportunity because of the 15, 18 miles to drive.

Yes, I would not be opposed as long as we're not spending a lot of time, but like someone mentioned the boilerplate, you know, how much something this would cost, how much this would cost if we had another location.

So it simply costs, it's simply looking at what it would cost.

It's correct.

That's right.

Right.

So that's fine.

All right.

I mean, I'm not opposed to looking at it, but I mean, what Supervisor LaPisto-Kirtley was just getting at is let's see if the state doesn't move on where they're at, it doesn't matter.

We can do whatever we want under our emergency of ordinance.

We're doing that now.

So what I envision is to allow the participation that's going on now to continue and not have to be under an emergency ordinance to do it.

So we don't need to do any cost exploration under now.

The biggest cost based on trying to set up hybrid or do something more than just a Zoom meeting in these other spaces will be staff that have to be on hand to help with the technology, set it up and all that.

Frankly, I'm not interested in that for the same reasons that I wasn't for the public.

For staff, I don't want them having to go out to these places and set this stuff up because the hourly cost of that is going to be a problem.

But I mean, you know, if you have a Roku TV and a laptop, you can connect to it from your iPhone, from your laptop, whatever.

So I think there's easy ways to get at, if we just need a place for some folks to get together for some Zoom meetings, I think that's a low bar to meet.

But to go further than that particular type of meeting, then the state has to speak to if they're going to even allow it and then

then we can go from there.

But I'm never interested in doing a whole lot of effort or work if eventually they're just going to go, nope, can't do it, you can't do that.

Now, I haven't expressly said that the plan put in front of us from staff, I'm fully supportive of.

So the hybrid model for the main auditorium and for the planning commission, the school board and the board of supervisors fully supportive of that.

And I have no problems with what has been laid out here.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

It appears that there's not broad consensus to do anything more at this point until there's more information on whether it would even be available to use those other resources.

Chair Price, this is a good discussion and Mr. Henry and Ms.

Kilroy, the staff, we really appreciate the board's time today because you've got a lot of things, not just on your agenda, but you've got a lot of things on your mind with the various issues in the community.

So I really, this has been very valuable for us, especially on the eve of the budget process.

We will continue to work off of the template today.

The more that we can maintain inside of our facilities with the services that we provide, that makes things a lot more cost efficient for our organization.

So we'll continue

to take your comments today, work through that.

And the next time that we come back to this board prepared to talk about this more, we will have advanced this topic further and be able to be ready to, I think, talk at the next level.

No, sir.

I value the board's discussion and input.

I think that gives us feedback that we need.

and it seems like the area really that is the most questioned is around that last category, which is not surprising.

Not articulated exactly, but it does seem like that last group, the in-person group that we commented on, it seems like the board would be supportive of taking advantage of that 12 months to stay virtual

Roy, to give us time.

It wasn't specifically said by each board member, but it seemed like there was a consensus in the thread of conversation.

Mr. Henry, I believe that is accurate, that the board wants to be able to take advantage of the time we have, and if there are changes at state law, then we can take advantage of those.

Thank you.

No, we've worked through this.

Chair Price, we need to move on.

But a good rule of thumb for me, and I thought Ms.

Kilroy did a really good job today on a complicated topic, but a really good rule of thumb for me is all in person,

Remember how that used to be.

We're all in one place, Lane Auditorium.

And that's where we used to be.

And all virtual, we've gotten really good at that.

But when you mix in person and virtual and you do the hybrid, that's where the complications come from.

We've been doing

We've been doing these meetings for almost two years and there's probably not a meeting that goes by that we don't troubleshoot something that's pretty significant.

And we've got a significant amount of resources provided for these types of meetings as you would expect.

So the hybrid is going to be very resource heavy in order for us to make sure that the community member has an experience where he or she says, I understand what's going on and I'm getting to participate.

So that's certainly something that we'll continue to work on.

OK, Board, at this time, we'll move on to item number 10, CenturyLink Lumen update and discussion.

Thank you, Chair Price.

I imagine we'll be letting our participants in here momentarily.

Looks like they're coming in.

And I'll just be a minute of really kind of comment and transitioning over to Mike.

Mike Culp is our

Director of our Broadband and Affordability Office, along with Jason Fuentes, who's our Program Manager of that office.

That's a new office, hasn't even been a year old, but it reflects the work and effort and interest the Board has in helping solve the connectivity challenges in the county.

And as the previous work session just talked about in our virtual meetings,

you know, the downside of that is the inability to connect sometimes.

And so we just worked through that in a previous work session.

I know we didn't set this up in really thinking about the two going together, but it really is almost coincidental that we're having this discussion after the last.

And so I just, purpose for today really is for the board to have a chance to talk directly with CenturyLink representatives

I may not get everybody to introduce themselves, but Mr. Steven Berger, Ms.

Dolores Carroll, Mr. Joe Rogozin, I'm not getting the name right, I apologize, and Ms.

Trish Stepanovich, all from CenturyLink, are willing to come on board and spend time hearing concerns and addressing questions from the board.

And so I really value this opportunity.

Mike and Jason are going to do a little bit of preliminary work on some of the work that his office has done as it relates to receiving input from the community on issues of connectivity related to CenturyLink, but also other systems.

And then we'll quickly turn that over to CenturyLink for them to do a short presentation.

And really hoping for the balance to be an opportunity for the board to have some direct question and answers

with CenturyLink.

So I'm very thankful for CenturyLink's willingness to be here today, and I look forward to hearing the conversation and then any forward action that might come out of it.

And so with that, I'll turn it over to Mike.

Thank you, Mr. Henry.

Thank you, board, for having the time to meet with us in CenturyLink Lumen, who is our partner in all of the activity that is going on in the county.

Lots of great community input.

It's challenging to go through everything and make sure that we're addressing all the community needs.

I think we have an opportunity to help CenturyLink and Lumen improve their processes and potentially invest even more in the County of Albemarle.

So we're looking forward to a really good discussion today.

Trevor has already introduced the CenturyLink Lumen attendees, and I'm grateful that they've taken the time to be with us today.

So thank you all for dropping in and having this discussion with the Board of Supervisors.

I wanted to say a huge thanks to the Board of Supervisors on looking at the broadband challenges that we're having and making the decision to form an office in May.

And that office has been working on both accessibility and affordability.

Our office has a mission to help individuals and households access broadband at an affordable, adequate, and reliable way.

So we're looking all the time to do that, but we're also trying to bridge that digital equity gap.

So some of our efforts are going into that.

So we'll talk about that at a future board meeting.

We do work with the Albemarle Broadband Authority.

This meeting is not a broadband authority meeting.

It's more about how the broadband office is working with CenturyLink Lumen to look at improvements in services.

So I think that's, you know, we just need to make clear that this is a broadband office meeting, not necessarily an Albemarle Broadband Authority meeting.

Next slide, Jason, thank you.

So I wanted to just give a really brief update and thanks to Jason Inafuentes for doing a lot of work to help move forward our fifth body project and that is with CenturyLink Lumen.

It was a while ago that this was offered funding and we're now getting to the point where activity has happened and

We're doing a much better job of getting community input on this project.

One of the major things that's happening is the quantum fiber brand will be coming out for new fiber customers in the 1,675 locations on that project.

We're having monthly updates via Zoom.

Going back to our prior work session, it's very beneficial.

We have a lot of attendees because of the ability to have those Zoom meetings and people being able to participate despite what else is going on in their lives.

And they can listen in and contribute.

We take questions and answers at all of those Zoom meetings.

There's a lot of issues with terrain in Albemarle County, and we ran into one, or CenturyLink Blue Moon ran into one on this project.

There's been a delay in our first rollout, and that's to Jones Mill Road.

Originally, orders for that service were supposed to have been taking place at 12-31-2021.

That date has now been moved to January 30th, 2022.

So a month delay there because of an unexpected rock found in the path of the fiber that needs to be put into the ground.

Next slide.

Thank you, Jason.

So I will turn it over to Jason.

Jason also has a great background in data analytics.

So he's been doing a lot of work helping us collect all of this information.

So I'd like to introduce Mr. Jason Inafuentes.

And thank you, Jason, for being online.

So I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you, Mike.

And thank you, Chair Price and supervisors.

My name is Jason Inafuentes.

As Mike mentioned, I'm the program manager for the Broadband Accessibility and Affordability Office.

Since August of last year, one of my roles has been to track resident complaints received by email or telephone regarding concerns with CenturyLink service.

In total, there have been 200 recorded contacts since April 2021, referencing 117 addresses in Albemarle County.

Before we discuss our analysis, I want to make clear that our data only represents complaints that came through our office, which means it is a subset of residents frustrated with CenturyLink service.

Since Monday morning when the board asked the public for comment by email, we've received greater than 100 additional emails and phone calls, all echoing much of what we had previously heard.

Looking at the categories of complaints below, we see that the new installations was far and away the largest subject of these contacts related entirely to VODI 2020 concerns, with outages and reliability trailing behind.

Our office is confident that the process changes made for VODI 2021, both in communication and service initiation, should greatly lessen the frequency of these types of complaints in the coming year.

However, it should be noted that one in six of these new installation emails were in reference to an outage or reliability issue that arose following installation of fiber service.

If we remove those contacts that were associated purely with service initiation concerns, we see this.

Outages dominate the concerns followed by new and ongoing reliability issues, and then those individuals who had outage or reliability issues after a new installation.

Again, the bulk of the responses we have received since Monday echo these results.

Briefly, other represents instances where during construction or repair, concerns were raised by residents about the deployment, such as improperly placed pedestals and poles, debris and property damage left unresolved,

Improperly laid fiber and equipment left on private property.

Access to telephony either through traditional copper phone lines or by the internet is vital in areas of the county that lack sufficient cellular coverage for accessing 911.

This makes the prevalence of these outages and reliability concerns a public safety matter, as seen in many of the responses we have seen in the last two days and during public comment.

Our analysis and research suggests two issues common in nearly all of these contacts.

First, insufficient investment in maintaining copper infrastructure.

Copper telephone lines are susceptible to degradation when exposed to the elements and result in the frequent outage and reliability issues that we are seeing.

Additionally, phishers and customer service processes leave residents frustrated and uncertain about whether any resolution will be reached.

CenturyLink Lumen staff have endeavored to resolve escalations as they arise.

Envadi 2021 demonstrates a willingness to attempt to address customer service issues.

The impact of these changes and the willingness to invest in maintaining copper infrastructure is yet to be determined.

We thank you for your time.

Madam Chair, Supervisors, my name is Steve Brewer.

I'm Director of Governmental Affairs with Lumen.

You also know us as CenturyLink.

Trish Stepanovich, who is the Manager of Regional Operations, is with me today.

She and her team have recently gone to great efforts to restore services related to the recent storms in your area.

Also with me is Dolores Carroll.

Dolores is Government Affairs Director and part of my team.

It helps when you unmute.

Thank you, everybody.

Good afternoon, Madam Chair and the rest of the Board of Supervisors.

I'm excited to be here.

And we have had a good relationship, I think, in this last year with Michael and his office.

And we do find ourselves continuing to improve upon that.

And so let's jump right in to talk a little bit about voice reliability.

Today on voice reliability, I heard from your constituents about concerns around 911 and their ability to reach when they're in a severe event or if they need that service.

We certainly understand that need, and we do work towards a priority of restoring those customers as those events occur.

Well, I'm unable to show you the exact numbers because those metrics are confidential.

And this is a public forum that's being recorded.

We do, in terms of showing voice reliability, we do maintain a prioritized restorer rate.

You will notice, though, that in the second half of this year, we had some increases in that restorer time.

and what I'd like to highlight for you is that in the chart to the right, we show two values in terms of trends.

The orange line is for Virginia and the blue line is for Albemarle County specifically.

In Albemarle County in the second half of the year, we had a couple of key items that I'd like to call out and I'll speak more towards on the next slide.

But during the end of July, we jumped right into weather related

Season that essentially impacted us for a significant time period.

We picked it off with the derecho storm in Scottsville and Skyler that occurred on July 28.

We had extensive challenges with the damage that we incurred with the significant amount of tree damage that took down not only the poles that support our

fibers, as well as the power components that were related to that.

But also, as we went to go do our restorer, we ran into supply challenges in terms of the amount of copper cable and fiber cable that we had to bring in due to as challenges from COVID and other supply mechanisms impacted us.

Our delays were significant in terms of restorer.

I do believe that is not a common

You know, a situation that we encountered this last year, we certainly had unprecedented times in terms of the impact of COVID and the supply chain.

But we have, as we continue with all of our partners, look for mechanisms that help us mitigate those challenges.

Certainly, that amount of product itself was not something that was a normal length of

cable that we would normally have to replace in one setting.

So we also have just experienced a large amount of lightning storms and high winds.

I've listed several dates there in terms of the amount of activity that occurred.

While it's not unusual for us to have summer storms, I think the amount of lightning damage that we incurred certainly provided an element of challenges as we work to restore

Services, back to back.

And customers, of course, if they were impacted multiple times, continued to feel the frustration of trying to see their services being maintained.

I'll mention, and I think Jason alluded to, our first rollout in Tevadi certainly had its challenges.

We tried to do some different things that had not been standard process for us in terms of creating a white glove,

customer experience that, you know, proactively trying to bring our drops into the fold.

That created some customer issues in terms of timing and communication.

We had additional drops that, you know, got cut as along the way as part of our construction efforts.

And then we also had, we found some nuances

with our Galton programming.

So while the fiber was more reliant, we found that the integration of the fiber in our Galton back office equipment had some challenges that we ended up having to work with our engineers with.

So that took us just a little bit to work through.

We finally have gotten those addressed.

We've done that audit.

We feel confident as we move forward in that space.

And it would be similar to all of providers, COVID and child care with our staffing.

We're not immune to those impacts to our workforce as well.

We certainly have put in resources and tried to

work through those challenges, but certainly based on the CDC guidelines and the amount of time that our workforce had to maintain outside of the workplace, certainly were aspects we could not accommodate in all aspects.

And so we did have some extended windows on where we may have had due dates given to customers that were challenged due to that.

And then finally, I'd say another factor in that second half was really third-party damages.

We had an opportunity to meet with the SEC earlier in the fall to talk about our damages that we're seeing at the SEC damage prevention arm.

really focuses more from a general utility and so we were able to highlight for them the damages we were seeing from third parties from a telco ISP sort of provider and we're setting up recurring discussions with them as to how they can help us improve the reduction of damages for the ISP community as that certainly impacts the customers at the end of the day.

So those were some of the highlights for those

extended windows that we saw for customers in our experience.

But if you go back to the slide, we saw that Virginia as a whole, we have generally been within the guidelines of where we expect our restorer efforts to be.

There's some aspects that we focus on for improving our network reliability.

Certainly, we're investing in our training of our employees.

We've offered training in both the spring and the fall for

trouble isolation.

We've managed to put 20% of our crew through that.

It's an ongoing component that we're investing in.

We find that trouble isolation, especially as we've had some newer technicians join, we're continuing to build their skill sets and improve their trouble isolation skills.

We also have introduced a new tool called our Good Pair Check,

It's in concert with some of the trouble isolation work that we're doing, trying to work through better diagnostics on copper-based services.

One of the things that we're very mindful of and that we've put a significant focus on is the reduction of repeats.

So when we come out to a customer, our goal is to make sure it's a one and done.

We certainly have heard, I have heard since I've joined the market about a year and a half ago, there's been a recurrent

you know message that customers have had those colleagues and you know aspects that continue to just have to come back to us and so I'm very interested in focusing my team's skill sets to get that one and done you know if we do have to come out the customer can be confident that we're doing it right the first time and then lastly we've also spent some effort in terms of our transformation project

So in concert with the work in terms of training, the tools, I'm investing in our proactive copper rehabilitation efforts.

Now, for some of you, by the way, I do live here in Charlottesville.

For some folks who've been here for a long time, they may feel like that's been needed for many years.

However, my commitment is to make sure we're trying to move forward.

and look at opportunities and we've done a significant amount of those projects this year.

It overall, so overall million dollars, I won't say exactly, but we've said several million dollars that have been in that space just since that program was launched.

So I want to highlight just a couple of challenges from customers that we're aware of.

So we did launch a new customer repair ticketing process and so

We do know that that transition to the new platform around the June, I would say early August time period, customers were experiencing challenges and being able to report tickets.

We did find that there were some parameter and some adjustments that needed to happen.

And so that had been taken care of.

We also heard from customers even today around the lack of automated credits for when there's an out of service.

We do support customers receiving credits.

However, the systems are not integrated in such a way that it can be facilitated automatically.

So we do rely on our customers to be able to reach out to us and let us know if they have had a service interruption.

We have had extended due dates as I highlighted earlier in the presentation.

One of the things that can happen, which I think will maybe frustrate our customers, is that we provide due dates based on working every individual ticket based off where our capacity is.

Now, what we don't have embedded is the means to be able to overlay a restorer effort, such as during the storm event that we just had.

Some of our customers were given extended dates, however,

Many of them had improved dates based on the strategies that we implement locally to be able to restore customers earlier than the committed date.

And that can be, you know, it's a good and a bad.

I think customers initially feel frustrated but are thankful that we've been able to restore services earlier.

And sometimes that is the case and there could be a situation where we may not have been able to.

So our goal has been as a company to make sure

you know we're providing a date that at least at a minimum that's the worst case scenario and then we look to improve upon that.

I did hear about some recurrent performance challenges customers who have said that maybe every six months they have an issue and so forth.

You know one of the things that we found as I've investigated those concerns from the office is that sometimes we have repair tickets from those customers and sometimes we don't.

And I think the important thing is that I'm able to react to recurrent performance issues when I'm aware of them.

We look at opportunities for our network maintenance based on the amount of tickets and recurring issues.

And if we don't see that, we're really at a disadvantage to be able to know what the impact is to our customers.

Our ticketing process helps us to navigate those priorities.

So we do encourage everyone to be able to create the tickets

And then as we get those tickets and we get visibility into our network condition, some of those certainly will be handled through regular maintenance and others will require capital funding.

Capital funding for Albemarle is based at a larger level.

It's not just within the county, but we do compare that to other projects within Grumman for financial funding.

And then last but not least, we heard from customers around phone service outages.

Some folks have asked, do we have backup power?

Do we have generators?

And the answer is yes.

We have during our storm events, we have our central offices that do have generators and backup batteries.

And they have various different timelines for recovery as well.

Typically, just depending on the size of it, we'll go for multiple days.

We do have smaller network elements that will have the same similar setup.

And as you know, all of our equipment does have a backup on it.

I would say during a multi-day event, such as the one that we have, there may not be a perfect situation where coverage was, our batteries may have been exacerbated.

And so to the point where there's an outage, we're just verifying our

our coverage there.

And sometimes customers are unaware of some things that they may also be impacted by.

As we move towards a more digital electronic devices, customers do need to be aware that they need to put battery backup in their phones.

They're used to working with a wireless phone.

And so they do need to make sure that they are mindful of those situations

whether that be for a basic landline and or for fiber services.

And then ultimately, if we have a damage to a cable that's been cut or damaged by a tree or whatever the case may be, that will not resolve the 911 call.

We will be out during those instances and we'll work to restore those as quickly as possible.

Let me transition over to the body investment and some process improvements.

Here in this space, as we highlighted, we've got 10 sites for 2022 that we're excited to be part of to get launched.

Jones Mill and Elgarth Heights are going to be the first set of deployments that we will have and then followed by a series of deployments throughout the year.

These are currently estimated dates as Mike shared that they could be delays depending on what other situations that could also be improved.

So we'll work through that and we'll continue to keep the constituents apprised on any developments during the monthly town hall calls where we update them with statuses.

So we recently shared in December at the first town hall meeting

improvements into the body program and the process for ordering.

So we highlighted for customers what they can expect.

We are transitioning to a Q.com site, and we thought that at the very beginning we'd be able to take pre-orders 30 days prior to the market launch.

We just recently updated customers to let them know that will not be the case at this time.

We will be doing that at the date of the market launch.

but this helps them understand once they do that ordering process what the pre-work will look like and then what to expect during the installation process.

We also shared with the constituents our Q.com site and just basic layout of how it's going to look and feel.

We've really transitioned this into our new platform.

There is a difference from us in terms of our network and how we're moving forward in terms of the digital experience for our customers.

So this is just a quick glance of how that looks.

We'll go to the next slide.

We wanted to show customers around, especially in the body program, if they want to check to see if they want to let us know they're interested in fiber.

We do have a means within the new Q.com to go check availability, and if you check availability but you're not in the area that's going to have it, you can let us know you're interested.

We are currently working in concert to find a better mechanism to do sort of a Google Map for customers to let them look at their address, but we do believe that will likely happen sort of in the spring timeframe.

and we're currently working to see if we can do a little bit better job even with Michael's office to see if we can allow customers to see if they're included in the current body program.

The additional thing that we've learned with fiber is that there's a lot to focus on, understand about the technology.

They have a lot of questions and so we're building out the frequently asked questions

not just for body customers but also for all of our customers who are transitioning to this new technology.

So we're working to take the input from customers and really build that out and make it user friendly for them to be able to see various aspects around how does this service work, how does installation work, what can I expect and so forth.

So our newest transition is, as you may be aware of, is around bright speed.

Thank you, Trish.

As most of you are aware, we're involved in a multi-state transaction where Apollo Investment, Apollo is a private investment firm, has stood up a company, Connect Holding.

Connect Holding will ultimately be the owner of the assets that are transitioned, and those services will be marketed under BrightSpeed.

So as you can see up in the top left-hand corner, the new logo and the name of the new company.

So as part of that transition, we are aware that there is no plan reduction in our ILEC workforce.

The transition has committed to bringing additional services

We will ensure continuity and lumen personnel who interface regularly with the State Corporation Commission.

The transition is currently before the Virginia State Corporation Commission and we're expecting an approval timeline not later than May 3rd of this year.

And then finally, on a national level, the transition should be approved and the new company

active as Blight Speed sometime in the July timeframe of this year.

So we're tremendously excited about the impact of this transaction.

It will bring additional investment to the 20 states that are part of the transaction and should do a great deal to satisfy and to excite our customers about services that they're able to receive from us.

Thank you.

We do have, I know, a number of questions, so we'll go through our order.

Yes, hi, I didn't go first on this one.

I represent the Samuel Miller district.

Thank you for this presentation, as many might look at the maps and realize that we're probably arguably the most rural of the districts, but there are a lot of rural areas throughout the county where there have been significant issues and where Lumen CenturyLink

controls the local exchange telephone service and as a practical matter much of the internet service.

I know you've looked at the large number of complaints and I appreciate if you read those very carefully because they're very concerning particularly when it comes to people's emergency services and 911.

I would like to hear more about the policies with respect to responding to service complaints and providing reliable information.

ways for people to know.

And I'm a little bit concerned when you say that you don't know.

And it seems to me that it's not a good system if you have no way of knowing when the services that you're trying to provide are not accessible to

customers.

Albemarle is also a customer and I know that there have been outages at many of our school facilities in the past.

So the questions I have concerning the transition, CenturyLink has a 2.3 million dollar VADI 2021

Grant is my understanding that you've mentioned is behind schedule.

I don't know what is the status of the transferability of that grant.

I am concerned about falling further behind schedule.

with this statement about how conditions are unknown, that is not a good situation to be looking at at this point from our point of view and from the point of view of our relationship with the Department of Housing and Community Development who may be looking into this at some point and asking about CenturyLink's performance.

We have to give reports and

do we need to go to them about these issues, particularly issues that might come up because of the transfer of assets.

You've mentioned these asset transfers and I'm told that February 17th is the deadline for the State Corporation Commission's public comment on the transfer, where there is a public hearing scheduled in February and

I guess I'm worried about people getting their comments in and the county perhaps raising concerns about the processes and maybe even involving the Attorney General's Office of Consumer Counsel to the extent that we have these hundreds of concerns about reliability and other service issues.

So there's a lot here.

It would be very helpful to hear more about the transfer and whether or not this transfer, you have any sense of what kind of investment is going to come in connection with this transfer.

We haven't heard anything other than words like significant in terms of improvements that

could be put into this.

So I'm a little bit worried that it feels a little bit vague.

So those are my questions, questions to you, to my fellow supervisors.

I guess I certainly see the value of the broadband accessibility and affordability office for informing the public of resources for residents experiencing service issues.

And I think they should include links to SEC and FCC complaint pages.

This is a process that's gone on too long and I think we need to

help people defend their rights with respect to the services that they need and expect.

I know 911, it's a regulatory requirement to provide that service, although I understand the difference between trunk lines versus individuals, but it's extremely important.

And I'll stop there.

Thank you, Supervisor Andrews, and I'm going to ask that we not move on right now, Mr. Brewer, if you don't mind, so that all the supervisors have an opportunity to make their comment because we are fine constrained on this.

And so I'd like all the supervisors to have a chance first to ensure that we all have a chance to speak.

Yes, thank you.

And I do just want to start off by saying we thank you for coming today.

We apologize because I think we were a little late in getting to you.

And so we apologize for asking you to wait for us.

I agree with what Jim was saying.

Albemarle, of course, has six magisterial districts, and all of our magisterial districts have some urban and some rural.

So all of our six districts have these problems that we're hearing from our constituents, although certainly some of the districts have more than others because of the rural nature of that particular district, the greater rural area.

I agree with, and I think Jim was referencing, links that should be available for folks to the FCC and the FCC for complaints.

I would, and while I think it's great for our broadband authority to be able to provide those, Trish or Dolores or someone, do you all have those links available for your customers?

I'm just curious.

Maybe Donna doesn't want us to get into a dialogue right now, but I would like to know if you all provide, and I'm sorry, I'd like to know if you all somewhere on your all's website provide those links for customers that are expressing concerns.

And I do recognize that your presentation today follows certainly a storm

that we've had a major storm.

And I think that does enter into our discussions today.

And certainly I appreciate your discussion about the recent storm and the one this summer.

But we've been, but customers in Albemarle County have been experiencing these problems now for years.

We've been hearing about these problems, many of the same problems for years without storms.

like we just recently had.

I think I just want to go on record to say that this is not, while we did have a recent storm, these problems are not just related to two critical storms that we've had.

Another point I'd like to make is I'd like to know with climate change and the need for redundancy,

We know that we're going to be experiencing more and more of these climate situations.

And certainly systems need redundancy.

So I would like to know what investments are you all going to be making prior to the sale and the switchover?

to address some redundancy and investments that you're going to be making to deal with these storms, as we've just been talking about, but also just the daily glitches that happen for folks.

And I guess there's six of us, so let me stop there and I'll let someone else go have a turn and then we'll be hearing from you afterwards.

Thank you, Supervisor McKeel.

And again, I appreciate everyone having an opportunity to speak.

We may or may not have time for you to answer all the questions today.

And if not, we would be looking for answers to come back to us.

Thank you.

I will try to be brief and many of the questions I have will need to have that written response.

I don't expect you to come forth with all of this right now, but I do want to share what I think is the highlights of the concerns in the district I represent.

I'm focusing on telephone.

not broadband at the moment because the 911 is the lifeline for everybody even people in the rural the growth area who may have wonderful internet still need a landline in order to survive for reaching their doctor's office many many other things.

In the rural area where I live I have personally experienced over the last 50 years

I was born here in 1950, but I've been an adult resident for 50 years.

All of the issues mentioned in the White Hall district constituents' emails over the last many, many weeks.

We're told that, Ms.

Sabatowicz mentioned that the techs need training, but what I hear from the people who come to my house, and I mean multiple times a year, like every time it rains, we lose our telephone for a week.

uh that these wires in the northwest part of the county are 50 years old at least that they have gone back and made the same repairs to the same places multiple times to try to keep service this light this statutorily required 911 access available

You mentioned lightning damage is happening.

The poles are 50 years old too.

Are they properly grounded?

Is there any investment?

I have been told by middle management century-like people over the years that they're not interested in investing in the copper system.

and that is a horrifying prospect to me.

And I do understand, I'm not trying to kill the messenger here because you all may not even be at the point of being able to make a decision like this, but I do want you to understand the concerns that people, how isolated people feel.

Recurring service challenges, some don't have tickets.

I wrote that down because when one calls, you're 45 minutes on the phone trying to get to somebody to take your information.

When you call back the next day because there was no service email sent, there is no record of the 45 minutes you spent on the phone the day before because that has been lost.

I don't understand this.

When customers are directed on the telephone to go to the website but their website is down because we have DSL through the copper and we're on our cell phone at a high ground to be able to call you at all, that website doesn't do us any good.

You mentioned the digital phones and that's a problem.

Let's not blame the victim here.

We keep an old black phone, a dial phone, a princess phone in our closets that get plugged in.

But if there's no dial tone on that nice old phone, it is not in the house.

It is in the line.

And I grew up here and in the 50s, we had copper carried.

The copper carried enough power to keep itself going and for our old black phones to work.

That is the minimum performance that should be happening here to keep people safe.

When you have

these repeated weather events, rains normal rain no problem and the service goes out the hum on the phone is so great you can't even say a word and be heard nitrogen tanks used to be placed at all the transformers that was 40 years ago but that shows you how long this neglect has happened and as I said this may not be in your wheelhouse but it has to be in somebody's wheelhouse

And I guess my main question now that I've given you a whole lot of concerns is, what is next for CenturyLink service?

And I mean specifically, what's in it for us is what our citizens are saying.

What does this transition mean?

Someone has to require that maintenance be done to preserve 911 access via landline.

And maybe that's the SEC, and maybe that's where we all need to go in the next several months.

I appreciate Supervisor Andrews' very coherent and succinct approach to all these different things.

We also can't have people being

Sales handled to say sign up for this hire service when we know that the wires at the end of the road are not capable of carrying anything more than the less than three megabits down and less than one megabits up that I have on my house in a good day.

Questions also.

Right-of-way maintenance.

For years, people throughout Albemarle County have called and complained about abandoned wires with trees hanging on them.

I mean, the excuse from the company has been that they're abandoned and we don't have to bother.

Right now on Earliesville Road, there are trees hanging on wires, which when the wires go, they're going to drop on people's cars in the middle of the street.

These are 12 inch diameter trees just waiting for disaster.

So this is your responsibility and it's something else that hopefully the SEC will care about.

The high risk lines were supposed to be buried.

These are all things that have been issues for generations here.

And I appreciate you coming and appreciate you taking notes and getting back to us with the answers.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you very much, Ms.

Stepanovich and Mr. Brewer for coming today.

I have to say the presentation was extremely underwhelming.

I realize that you've only been here for maybe a year and a half, but you're

Your presentation was almost like you were the sacrificial lamb.

You're giving all the answers that the company wants you to give, but you're not really giving answers that the people want to hear.

In the VATI grant, how many of those have you received?

What are you using the monies for?

If your VATI grant is being used to get additional customers, I doubt that that's going to happen.

Another question is,

Is the Vaddy Grant going to be used to upgrade the years of neglect or will Bright Speed be providing those funds?

That would be another question.

Why hasn't the copper been maintained, the copper wires been maintained?

Your automated process doesn't work.

People are extremely frustrated with that.

And yet you do say automated notifications are working to improve the customer experience.

Well, no they're not.

I mean, if you read all the emails, the hundreds of emails that we receive, that is not happening.

And when you say that you have challenges,

when you know about it, well, our residents, our customers can't get to you.

They have no way of getting to you to tell you that they don't have service because the lines drop, they don't have connectivity, they don't have cells.

telephone service, they don't have internet.

So there is no way to get a hold of you or they get an automated service that then hangs up on them.

So you say you respond when you know about it.

Well,

It's hard to get a hold of you.

I think that's one of the biggest complaints also.

People here are actually very patient and you've outlined the concerns that have happened since June of 2021.

But the complaints that we're hearing have happened over years.

years and years and people are just really fed up.

One of the things you mentioned, you mentioned a white glove service?

and I thought that was very interesting.

I'm not even sure what that is.

I think people would just really like to have any kind of a service and just have the connectivity.

I think that's what you need to focus on.

I'm very happy that we will be publishing the FCC and SCC websites so that our residents can also call in and write to them.

and let you know personally and maybe at the end of this you'll put your company's email, phone numbers.

I mean people would, the residents here would like to speak with someone, be able to have a direct connection with someone.

That's not being provided.

So I think you can sense my frustration and I'm voicing the frustration over from our residents.

But I do thank you for

having the courage to come here today.

And like I said, please read all of the emails.

I know Mike and Mr. Culp will be forwarding all those emails to both of you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Chair Price, and thank you Steve, Trish for being here to hear us voice our concerns.

And I hope to do this in a way that doesn't sound too lecturing or finger-wagging.

But in my view, and we're doing all of the emails from residents, not just recently, but over a several year period, you have a massive integrity issue.

And I'd like to know how you're going to solve it.

At the end of the day, whether it's a power outage, an accessibility, an infrastructure, underground, a bulk line, what have you,

For me, how I encapsulate this is that residents are turning to us because they feel your company is not being responsible for your responsibilities and you're not holding yourselves accountable.

They're turning to us to try to do that.

And that is a difficult thing as we are not your bosses.

But that's where you stand.

And if in my business, I would never want to be there.

When folks get upset with me as a general manager in my company, I tell them I'm responsible.

If my actions don't live up to my words, then they want to know what they can do to go above me to find that accountability.

So in the follow-up for me, question-wise, I'd like to know that if our residents continue to experience the issues they've been experiencing, and after your presentation of what you say you're going to fix them, if fixes don't happen, what's our line for accountability to make it happen?

And I think your service clients or your customers deserve to know that.

And since we've got to this point today, I think we deserve to know that as well.

I'm going to give two examples beyond what I've been hearing relative to the outages that happened prior to whether events were not specific to that, but I think leads to some of the integrity pieces.

I had a resident in my district over a year ago talk about just trying to get a utility line for CenturyLink to say, this is our line.

When every other utility told them it was CenturyLink's line, it took over a month or so to get CenturyLink to go, yes, this is in fact our line.

hung up issues, we're trying to do a sewer piece and could not get the sewage problem solved, had to live in a hotel for a while until just the ID of the line and somebody said that's our line and it's responsible for us.

That's a problem.

The fact that asking, I get it, if a customer thinks they have to ask for a credit,

I'd like to know what that process is now to get the credit.

If I have to verbally on the line, if I say I have an outage and I've waited a long time to be able to say that, they should be afforded the luxury of not having to specifically request the credit.

They should just be given the credit because they've had the outage.

and how can they process the credit other than just having to call to get through because right now, because of the integrity issue, you don't have a high confidence of people being able to contact you.

So I don't know if there's a form or what have you, but I'd be interested in knowing about that because that is something that other utility providers provide for folks and know it on their end.

And that's what you're up against.

I mean, that's a standard that they're looking at that is being afforded to them elsewhere.

I also would like to, recently, and it goes to solving the problem of wires and things being above ground, but HOA in my district in the Carsbrook neighborhood has sent me a petition and been trying to get me the help with

You know, Dominion is putting lines underground, and since they're digging and doing stuff to put things underground, why can't CenturyLink do that with them while they're doing it?

And trying to get that idea over to the company has been problematic.

So right now I'm voicing my request.

and I've sent the information to our deputy county executive and the county executive to pass over to the appropriate person that we're connected with.

But this is part and parcel to solving some of the outage issues.

This is an urban, this is right in the urban ring and if these power lines, just why Dominion's putting them underground is going to help solve their outage issues, it's going to help solve it for CenturyLink too.

If two different companies could work together,

We've said before, if we're going to put a sewer line in, let's see if we can put other stuff underground and capture the efficiency of doing the project collaboratively.

We have to have a way to be able to suggest that to you, or communities should, and HOA should be able to go century length.

This is happening.

What can we do to get you in tandem with Dominion so that you both can reap some benefits of this project?

So I'm hoping that information will be passed over to you for consideration and I'd love some follow-up on items like that because I'd expect that there are projects like this happening around the county where there could be multiple ways that all utilities could jump in if one project's happening to make it easier on everybody.

I will say that moving forward that the opportunity in my opinion is that regardless of the complaint that's at hand or the frustrations that our residents are experiencing, the only way to restore their faith

and Build Back the Integrity will be the actions that they see happening.

And I hope that in the follow up to some of the questions and requests and information that we're passing along to you, that when the follow up comes back to us, or what you're willing to share, it will be action based.

And then as I said to start, we'll know what the lines of accountability are so that if we see the actions not occurring, that we'll have a proper method for follow up.

First off, Mr. Henry, Mr. Colt, Mr. Enofuentes, I want to thank you for all the work that you have done on behalf of the county for our community members.

You've been extremely responsive when these concerns have come through to be able to bring them up to an enhanced level at CenturyLink.

Mr. Brewer, Ms.

Carol and Ms.

Stefanovich, I appreciate you being here more than you know, and our community members appreciate you being here.

I have to say, however, and this is not directed to any of you as individuals, what we received today I believe was mostly an advertisement, not answers.

I found some of the material to be candidly not valid.

Your chart 11 voice reliability without information on the y-axis, the data that's shown is really meaningless.

We have no idea what that really reflects.

With regard to chart 14, with regard to recurrent challenges, you say when we know about them, that flies in the face of the efforts of your customers to try and inform you.

And you're a technology company.

If you don't know when service is not being breached to your customer, you're a technology company, how are we supposed to know?

I am a former CenturyLink customer from July of 2018 to July of 2021.

I had your service when I called to cancel and the customer service asked why after three years.

I said it was three horrible years.

And my experience is merely exemplary of what many of our community members have experienced.

The fee adjustment.

I've gone weeks when I had your service.

I went weeks without internet.

It would take hours to get through.

The phone would hang up.

When you finally got to someone very frequently you couldn't understand because of language barriers from an offshore calling center.

and two weeks without service and eventually I was told well we'll give you a $20 credit or something like that and it took two or three months for that to show up with additional calls so what you were offering is not an answer to our customers but we don't want to credit we want service

The automated notification is not working.

I'll tell you that.

We hear that from our customers all the time.

The COVID and the storms may have impacted most recently with the storms in the last couple of years, but as other supervisors have mentioned, that is not an answer for years of problems that we have experienced.

I've had as others a patch line that was laid above ground

across gravel roads.

You cannot put a copper line across gravel and expect it to last more than a few vehicles going over that gravel.

I had to go out myself, as your other customers have done, to dig trenches to put it under some layer of protection.

Patches are being made in holes where when water comes, water, electricity, they don't meet very, they don't match together very well, so the power goes out.

You try calling, you eventually get through, and they say, for better service, go online.

Well, if we had internet, we wouldn't be calling you to get it fixed.

My telephone line never worked.

In three years, it never worked.

There was always an incredible static on it, and that again, I'm simply repeating what many other of our community members have said.

Does anyone have, I mean are non-digital phones even available or working?

Supervisor Mallek said she has one.

I don't even know if that actually works anymore, but I've replaced phones on numerous occasions and still it never worked.

I would simply be repeating

the comments from the other supervisors at this point, but I would say we have a lot of answers that we want, not an advertisement for new service, but answers for our customers, our community members who today do not have services.

And again, this is not directed to any of you as individuals.

I think each of you has yourself been responsive, but your company is not.

And as Supervisor Galloway just mentioned,

Your credibility is an all-time low.

If every single person that I read an email from, and we've had well over 100 come in over the last few weeks, every single one of them basically has said if they had any option at all, it would be to go to another company.

But because you have a monopoly on the area, they have no choice.

And the fact that we do not have reliable 911 service is a violation of your moral and legal responsibilities.

So, Board, we are past our time.

I do want to give Mr. Brewer, as I believe you may be the lead individual here with CenturyLink, just a few minutes to respond.

But basically, I think what we need to do is to get answers to the questions,

Mr. Culp, if you have not already, I would ask that you share all of the concerns and complaints and candidly what we need are specific answers to each of those concerns.

Thank you.

Yes, thank you and I certainly appreciate your time today and your insight.

Certainly, I understand the frustrations that you are

I will tell you, in all honesty, I am very excited

about the transaction related to BrightSpeed.

The company has, the acquiring company has committed publicly, we are not here speaking on behalf of BrightSpeed, please understand that, but the company has committed publicly to making substantial investments across 20 states.

I have heard the figure of $3 billion above and beyond the purchase price that they are paying for those assets.

I am excited and very hopeful that the transaction will mean great things to not just Albemarle County, but to all of Virginia and to all of the states involved in the transaction.

Thank you, and again, we really do appreciate you being here.

It's been a tough conversation, but our community members need reliable internet and phone.

Thank you again very much for being here.

Board, we were scheduled for recess at 3.30.

We're about 20 minutes past that.

I would ask that we just take about a 10 minute break and come back at 4 o'clock.

and you're live.

All right, thank you.

We now have item number 11 on our agenda, Transportation Planning Quarterly Report.

Ms.

Thank you, Chairman Price, Chair Price.

Wonderful to see you all again.

Welcome to Supervisor Andrews.

We will be going over the transportation quarterly report today.

You all have received that in your packet.

And we'll go over a brief presentation with the highlights.

Jessica and I will go through the county stuff and allow you all to some time to ask questions.

We also have Carrie Shepherd from VDOT that's available here and she has a presentation following our presentation.

But we're all going to be available for questions after both.

And I'll also point out that Lance Stewart, the director of FES, is going to be available as many of the projects that we'll be discussing in our presentation will be things that they are involved in, things that they're leading.

So they may be able to help out with some detailed questions.

Great.

Thanks, Kevin.

And thank you, supervisors, for inviting us here today.

I'm going to go ahead and get us started.

So much of our work lately has been focused on the upcoming round five of SmartScale.

As some of you may know, the SmartScale grant program is the primary method for funding large-scale transportation projects in Virginia.

The program provides state and federal funds for the design right of way and construction of transportation projects.

It runs on a two-year cycle with mandatory pre-applications being due this April 1st.

and final applications due August 1st of this year.

Funding decisions for these submissions won't be final until June of 2023.

So this slide has information that you saw at a previous quarterly report.

It's a list of the four projects that the Charlottesville Albemarle MPO will be submitting as SmartScale pre-applications this year.

The numbers next to each project name indicate the project's priority ranking in the county's 2019 Transportation Priorities document.

As you can see, the Rivanna River Bike and Pedestrian Bridge doesn't have a number next to it because it was not considered for ranking in that document, but it is prioritized in our Pantops Area Master Plan.

This slide shows other projects that we're considering for SmartScale.

The top three projects, Avon Street Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements, Fifth Street Extended Bicycle and Pedestrian Improvements, and Belvedere-Rio Intersection Improvements are all projects that we're considering for SmartScale submission as county applications.

It should be noted that thanks to recent studies, we have a very clear idea of exactly what infrastructure we'll be requesting for each of these project applications.

In the set of four projects below, these are also good candidates for smart skill applications.

These project areas are currently being studied by VDOT and their consultants.

The first two projects, number 9 and number 39,

are part of the VDOT project pipeline process and the other two, number 16 and number 21, are being investigated in separate studies.

We need these studies to wrap up and make their final recommendations so we know exactly what infrastructure we would be requesting in each of these project applications.

As you may know, Amarillo County can submit a maximum of four project applications for SmartScale this round.

So we could do all three that are listed above 10, 19, and 17, and then we could add one of the projects listed in the group of four below.

We could then ask the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission to submit the remaining applications on our behalf.

The TJPDC also has a limit of

for this round.

We expect but don't know for sure that the TJPDC will be using at least one of their four slots for a project expected to come out of their ongoing Route 29 north corridor study, but we're hopeful that they'll still be able to accommodate some of our other projects.

Kevin and I will return later this spring to discuss SmartSkill applications in detail after we get the results of the studies for these four project areas listed at the bottom.

and after we have a better sense of the PDC's ability to accommodate our applications on our behalf.

In previous rounds of SmartScale, especially most recent rounds, the county has been very successful in getting projects funded.

While there is usually a really long way between finding out that a project has been awarded funding and that funding actually becoming available, VDOT has fast-tracked four of our projects from the previous round.

Fast Track is a somewhat relative term as the tentative schedule from VDOT currently shows us taking off three of these projects in the spring of 2023 and another project in the summer of 2023.

Kevin and I will be returning to the board next month to review agreements.

VDOT has sent us for these four fast-track projects.

We're required to sign these agreements because our applications included a commitment of local funds for each project.

At the bottom of the slide, you'll see intersection improvements at Route 20 and US 250 in Pantops.

This was a project that was awarded funding in Round 3 of SmartScale.

It's currently in design.

and VDOT expects to wrap it into a single construction contract with the route 250 east corridor improvements.

That would make all the construction in that area happen at one time.

It would maximize efficiencies related to construction costs and it would reduce disruption to road users.

We're moving away from SmartScale and onto revenue sharing, which is another funding opportunity for transportation projects.

As we stated at our last quarterly report, we submitted an application for Eastern Avenue.

This would be a brand new road connecting US 250 to Corey Farms Road.

It would include a new bridge spanning Wicking Hole Creek.

We'll know later this spring whether or not that funding has been awarded.

Currently, consultants are working on a geotechnical survey of the project area, which would be submitted to VDOT and it would help firm up project cost estimates.

In other projects, Berkmar Drive, Crozet Square, and Library Avenue were previously awarded revenue share funds and they are currently in design.

Some highlights for Berkmar Drive, a project kickoff meeting has been held,

Crozet Square is actually wrapping up its design and will be heading into the right-of-way phase.

And Library Avenue has staff working with private developers on design.

Moving away from funded projects and onto our major planning efforts, this slide lists ongoing planning projects.

So Route 29 North Corridor Study is actually being led by the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

Its goal is to identify safety and operational improvements to the 29 corridor between Airport Road in Albemarle County and Deerfield Drive in Greene County.

They've held one public meeting and a second public meeting

will be held soon and the study will wrap up in February.

As I said before, we expect that the TJPDC may apply for smart scale funding for a project that comes out of this study.

The Rio Road corridor study, they've wrapped up phase one.

They're finalizing the phase one report and they've recently kicked off phase two at a Places 29 Rio CAC meeting.

Phase two looks at the Rio Road corridor between John Warner Parkway and the city line.

The multimodal transportation plan.

As I said at a previous quarterly report, this is effectively going to be the transportation chapter of the comprehensive plan update.

We're working closely with Rachel Falkenstein's team to determine our next steps.

One of the outcomes of the multimodal transportation plan will be that we'll have more data and we'll have a more robust big picture of the multimodal transportation network in Albemarle County.

We hope that that additional information will allow us to overhaul our project prioritization process, the thing that gives us our 29 transportation priorities document.

But since that's a little ways away, we are planning to, we wanted to inform you that we'll be working on a briefer refresh of our 2019 transportation priorities document.

We'll keep you updated and seek your feedback as we move through that process.

For Earliesville, Reyes Ford intersection improvements.

So the consultants have completed their study and submitted a final study document, which is currently being reviewed internally by Albemarle County staff.

We'll return to the board in April to share the results and determine next steps.

VDOT project pipeline studies.

So VDOT is working to proactively identify projects for SmartScale and Albemarle County has two study areas currently in this process.

One is in Pantops, it's looking at 250 between Hanson Road and Hanson's Mountain Road.

And the other study area is Shadwell, the intersection of 250 and Route 22, Luisa Road.

VDOT hired consultants have held three stakeholder meetings for these studies.

They were most recently trying to get feedback on potential design solutions for the corridor.

Early this year, we expect the consultants to hold at least one public meeting and have another stakeholder meeting before they share their final recommendations.

As you might recall from an earlier slide, we're likely to choose one or multiple of their recommendations to submit as applications for smart scale funding.

and then moving on to transit planning.

County staff continue to attend regional transit partnership meetings and what they are working on there is a lot of important things and they've really prioritized the regional transit vision plan.

The vision plan was intended to create a community-driven vision of the future of transit for our region.

You can see with the sub-point that we'll be coming back next week to talk more about the Regional Transit Vision Plan and its outcomes.

But to give you a highlight, one thing that's coming out of the ongoing Regional Transit Vision Plan process is that there's a need for additional funding and collaboration to meet the community's expectations for transit.

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission is proposing to complete a regional transit governance study to determine how to best meet those funding and collaboration needs.

When we come back next week, we'll talk about the role the county could play as a stakeholder in this upcoming governance study.

For transit stop improvements, so progress continues.

County staff have been working very closely with Charlottesville area transit staff to prioritize locations for additional stop infrastructure, things like concrete pads, benches, and shelters.

And we're working through the feasibility of each of those high priority locations.

Also with transit stop improvements, we have the Sense of Place program, which is intended to pair

transit stop infrastructure with art installations.

The very first site for Sense of Place is a transit stop in the Stonefield development.

We are currently working on getting CATS contractors a building permit to install a shelter and concrete pad at that Stonefield location.

So we're getting closer and hopefully you'll see something on the ground soon.

We're also looking at a potential site, a potential second site for sense of place.

And that second site would be Northside Library.

So we're in the very early stages, but so far it looks very promising that we'll be able to get another sense of place location going there.

and then progress continues on the Albemarle County Transit Expansion Study and this one is close to wrapping up.

So this study was intended to look at immediate service changes to improve transit in three priority locations in the county.

There have been numerous public and stakeholder meetings and final recommendations are nearly ready.

As you can see, we're going to be coming back again next week for this item as well.

Specifically, the study has recommended implementing microtransit service in two of the study areas through DRPT's demonstration grant process.

We'll have someone from the consulting team here with us next week.

He is going to walk us through all of the details of what microtransit is and why they're recommending it for these two locations.

Thanks Jessica.

So related to bicycle and pedestrian transportation planning, what you see on the screen here are some of the significant projects that are underway currently.

Once again, these are projects that really are being led by the team in FES, the project management team.

and FES.

So a lot of the details I'd rely on Lance to be able to address questions on.

But Mountain View Elementary School, that's the crosswalk in front of Mountain View.

That project is essentially entirely complete.

It's been operational for a little while now.

The Ivy Road bike and ped improvements, this includes sidewalk and

and a bike lane from the city line out almost to the bypass and that project is under construction and I believe the um the the completion date is expected sometime in the the late summer early fall of this year uh rya road pedestrian improvements

being done together with Avon Street and US 250.

Although they are separate locations, they were projects that were awarded grant funding a number of years back, all as one.

And all three of those projects are now under construction with construction completion estimates ranging from the late spring to late summer for all three of those.

The Greer-Jewitt Bike Pet Improvements, this was a transportation alternatives grant that was awarded a few years ago to create a pedestrian network between Albemarle High School and Greer and Jewett schools.

That project is not actually quite under construction.

We have the contract award ending, trying to work through a few more details with that.

but it is very close and we do still expect that to be a project that will be completed by the summer of this year.

Moving on to the next slide, there's some additional bike ped projects listed.