Economic Development Authority Meeting   2/16/2021

So I'll call the meeting to order and we'll read our electronic meeting notice once J.T.

or Jennifer, there we go.

All right.

Notwithstanding any other provision in the EDA bylaws to the contrary as permitted under Albemarle County's Continuity of Government Ordinance adopted on November 18, 2020,

Chapter 1283 of the 2020 Acts of the General Assembly enacted into law on April 24th, 2020.

And the resolution of this body adopted on April 21st, 2020.

We are holding this meeting by real-time electronic means with no authority member physically present at a single central location.

All authority members are participating electronically.

This meeting is being held in accordance with Section 6 of the county's Continuity of Government Ordinance.

All authority members will identify themselves and state their general physical location by electronic means during the roll call vote, which we will hold next.

This meeting is being recorded and will be uploaded to the county's website.

The public has real-time audio-visual access to this meeting over Zoom and real-time audio access over telephone, both as provided in the lawfully posted meeting notice.

The public is invited to send questions, comments, and suggestions to the authority through the county's Economic Development Office at any time.

The public is also invited to offer live comment during the meeting's public comment period.

Comments are limited to three minutes and must be germane to the matters on today's agenda.

I will.

I can go down.

All right, Mr. McNaughton.

Mr. Ray.

Mr. Ray, you're present.

Where are you located?

Let's see, Mr. McNaughton.

Is he not here?

All right, Mr.

Chair, we have a quorum.

I've seen Mr. Ray and I've heard Mr. Ray.

Can anybody hear me?

How am I doing now?

There we go.

We can hear you.

I can't hear you.

We can hear you, George.

Jennifer, can you step away and give George a call and see if you can walk him through how to unmute his microphone.

So why don't we

I don't know if Jennifer, do we have anybody from the public who wants to speak?

We do not have anybody signed up.

All right.

All right, then let's- Jennifer, I can't hear you guys.

Okay.

All right.

So approval of the minutes.

Are there any comments on the minutes?

Hearing none, is there a motion regarding the minutes?

Move to approve.

All right.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

The minutes are approved.

have only a slight change in our overall balance sheet.

Interest payment to us recorded for the month of December, $202.47, which gives us a total of interest deposits thus far this fiscal year of 12-47-31.

Our cash position has changed by that small amount.

Cash on hand remains at, let's see if I've got this figure handy.

No, that's not it.

719,386.81.

Okay, great.

Thanks, Dave.

So next is new business.

I hear you, but just barely.

So we have the first thing on the agenda is the Afton Scientific B.GIP agreement

I have to recuse myself because I have represented Tom and active scientific for a long time.

So George was going to take over.

I'm here.

All right, George, can you hear us?

I can hear you.

All right, so we're good to go.

You are now in charge, because we are now at the point of the agenda where the Afton Time-tific matter is up, and I'm gonna recuse myself.

Okay, give me two seconds to pop them out.

Okay, Mr. Long is back in the audience.

Yes, ma'am.

Yes, I'm working on that too.

As he's coming in, I will go ahead and start introducing him, if you like.

This afternoon we have Tom Thorpe, CEO of Apton Scientific with us.

Tom is the CEO of Apton Scientific, a small scale contract manufacturer of sterile injectable drugs.

Mr. Thorpe started Afton Scientific after serving as a chemical engineer in a large pharma and later graduating from the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business.

The firm currently employs over 600 persons that serve various critical manufacturing, engineering, and laboratory roles in the production of new drugs and products for chemical trials.

or Commercial Distribution.

These include therapies for cystic fibrosis, breast cancer, immune deficiencies and infant digestive health.

The addition of 8,000 square feet supports the launch of sterile filling operations within Afton Scientific's second clean room facility.

Afton hopes to hire additional engineers, warehouse packaging, floor operations, and laboratory technicians with this expansion.

There we go.

Jennifer, thank you for the introduction.

As a matter of record, you just killed my HR department.

We don't have 600 employees.

I'm sorry.

So we need to hire more HR.

So thank you very much.

We're very excited.

We appreciate the support the county has made.

And certainly, Jennifer, your team and everyone there in economic development.

We're busting out of our seams and we have a number of good projects.

I'm back.

Can you hear me?

Yes.

All right.

Good, good.

I actually have handed to me a little while ago a form to hire one more employee as I was just sitting here.

So I'll do that as we speak.

Very excited.

So just to show you an example, a couple of the drugs, this one here we make.

is for people with immune deficiencies.

It's plasma from people that has been isolated that has antibodies in it.

There's a version that we don't handle that's used for COVID.

So that's HearHear.

This is another product that's coming online now.

Last just started last year, which is for infant gut and it brings supplies.

Can you see all that?

Yeah, there you go.

It's actually behind me to see the picture.

That's for reconstituting.

It's a probiotic for

Infants.

And that'll get rolled out nationwide.

It's very, very exciting.

A lot of major companies are going to be backing it and we'll be making that right here in our third facility.

So anyway, what we do is we take the ingredients and we mix it up and we put it in these, sterilize it and put it in these vials and cap and crimp it and give it back to the customer.

So piggybacking off of what Tom said,

This is a $500,000 capital investment, 8,000 square feet expansion, creating 20 new jobs, not 200, 20 new jobs with the average wage of $48,500.

The wage range is $19 to $48.

VDP just recently announced, well, the governor, Northam, recently announced a V-GIP agreement for $15,000, $750 per job.

Albemarle County is proposing $10,000, $500 per job.

In your package, you received a, in the agenda materials, you received an agreement as well as a resolution.

Are there any questions at this point?

It was included in the package.

I'm not hearing that there's any request to change it.

In terms of the materials, it's my understanding they're available to the public on the website.

So I think if the members are comfortable with the contents of the resolution, then I think we can move forward with a motion to approve it.

Can I ask one procedural question?

And Jennifer, maybe you already saw it.

Okay.

Okay, if there are any changes to the written document that's in our packets, and if there are any members of public that wants to comment, the motion has been made to approve the resolution.

I think we may need a second.

Oh, okay.

All in favor, please say aye.

Aye.

All opposed?

Thank you.

Mr. Thorpe, thank you for attending the meeting.

Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming.

Yeah, man.

All right, great.

So our next presentation is going to be from Peter Lynch regarding the Albemarle County Assessment Report.

Well, thank you very much.

I'm going to share my screen now.

And if you could just let me know that you can see my presentation.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much for inviting me to present this information today.

I'm the county assessor and we conduct an annual reassessment in Albemarle County.

So every year we reassess every property.

And this is the presentation that I provide to the Board of Supervisors every January.

So Ms. McKeel has already seen this.

You know, I try to present, you know, what has happened in the reassessment, you know, like what are the results, the new assessment results, but also information to kind of build some of our, build up our credibility in the process of creating those assessments.

So some of the information I'm gonna show you is related to that.

And I actually haven't met a lot of you, so it's very nice meeting you in this meeting today.

So the first of all is kind of a reminder of what my office does.

So like I said, we reassess every property in the county every year.

What the reassessment actually involves is that we don't look at 45,000 properties or 47,000 properties every year, because that's just not possible.

What we try to do and what our guidelines are, are to look at every property at least every five years.

So that includes about 20% of properties every year.

and that includes physical visits to a property.

It could include looking at the properties through our aerial photographs called a pictometry program, which gives us a pretty good look at buildings.

We can measure with that and we can get a lot of information that way, but you can never replace that onsite visit.

So we try to get out there as much as we can.

We validate any sales that have taken place to make sure they're arm's length transfers, they're not related parties, anything like that that would affect them actually creating or indicating market value for us.

And we have a valuation model that we use.

We have a valuation model for residential properties, and then we have valuation models for different types of commercial properties.

So we update those models each year.

New construction is kind of our second major category.

All new improvements that are buildings that are being built, we will go out and inspect them and measure them when they're complete.

We also, other than them being complete every January, we are required to add whatever exists at that point to the tax rolls.

So if a building is 50% complete in January 1st, we'll pick up 50% of the value at that.

The third major function that we have is land use, the agriculture and forestry side of land use, the program that we administer.

Land use is a very kind of complex program and what we do to make sure people are in compliance

on an ongoing basis is we conduct a biennial revalidation.

And that process requires them, the property owners in coordination with a farmer if they have a farmer, turn in paperwork to us, identifying the work that they do, the production that they do for agriculture, if they've got forestry, if they have a forestry plan,

Things like that, so we can then go out and make sure that that activity is going on.

We also get new applications for properties that want to enter the program, and we also work rollbacks on properties

when the use has changed from a qualified use to a non-qualified use.

And that could be where you build a house and the land underneath the house.

It used to be a hayfield, but now it's a home site.

So it would cause a rollback of those taxes.

And the way this program works is we actually recover.

You don't just start paying regular taxes going forward.

We actually recovered by state law the five previous years of taxes that were deferred.

So that can be a major program for us.

And this slide, as I go through this slide, is kind of the part that we are building that credibility in the work that we do.

And one of those things we're doing is to improve the quality of the data that we have.

When I came here a little over five years ago, one of the things I identified is that we really needed to clean up our data on the properties in order to do a better evaluation of the properties.

So the first thing we are doing that I wanted to show you is it increases our efficiency and it's kind of the way our model is set up.

And this kind of a technical thing, I won't get too deeply into it, but if in the past we,

organized our properties into two smaller groups.

And when you have two smaller groups, you have too few sales or no sales within those groups in order to determine what the market value is.

So what we've been doing over the last few years is consolidating small neighborhoods into larger neighborhoods.

This is mainly relating to residential properties, but it gives us a lot better data to compare when we use our model to come up with those values.

The next item, which increases our accuracy, is that we have been sketching.

And when I say sketching, I mean doing an electronic sketch within our camera system in which we keep all our data and create our values.

In the past, we've had a lot of hand-drawn sketches that were kind of legacy sketches we had in our office.

and then there might have been a hand calculated square footage on a house that was then entered into our system.

Now we actually sketch that house, the square footage is calculated by the computer so it's more accurate.

We often find at least small adjustments due to those and sometimes, you know, larger adjustments.

Sometimes we find in this process that there was a second floor on the house

that we were assessing, but there was no second floor on the house.

I mean, things can be that drastic in the data that we're correcting.

So this process has been a multi-, five-year process of adding these sketches in.

The COVID-19

The pandemic has actually given us an opportunity to get a lot more sketches in than we normally do this year.

So when we normally look for about to get a four or 5,000 in a year, and that's a good year, we finished 14,000 this year.

And I'm very proud of that and where we've been able to clean up that much data and do that much a better job on those problems.

And then better results.

This relates to land use.

So something we've done recently is we believe it was in the 2018

2019 budget, we got a new position for a land use administration.

So we actually have somebody focusing on the land use program.

And we've been able to identify a lot of properties that were not in compliance.

And we just didn't have the manpower to keep up with those checks.

So just in this last year, we were able to work 135 rollbacks.

and on average we do about 30 in a year.

So that's a huge improvement in cleaning up this program.

The rollbacks added up to almost a million dollars in taxes and going forward, the properties that are then that part of the property or the entire property that's then taken out of land use

has $34 million that would have been deferred that is no longer deferred.

So these are really important to the county budget.

So I'm going to

Jump straight from that into our results for this year.

And I presented on this slide so that we can kind of see over time how that annual reassessment looks over the last 10 years.

So as you can see here, the tax base increased 1.4%.

So this is all the properties in the county, commercial and residential.

but you can see back in the earlier years during the, after the financial crisis and the issues that real estate had with the valuations and then after we pulled out of that and started the recovery and how that has looked each year.

So that just provides a little bit of perspective.

I always provide a breakdown by magisterial districts so that each of the supervisors can see how their district is comparing to the overall average.

So this slide simply shows that.

The important thing that you'll see some more numbers on upcoming slides that kind of explain what's going on here, but those districts that have more commercial

are the ones that are going down and the ones with less commercial are going up and the least commercial are going up the most.

We also break down our value changes by

the state codes, what they're called class codes.

And you can see the definitions on here.

Generally one, two, five, and six are really residential type properties with five and six being more agriculture, a larger acreage.

Three is your multifamily, your apartments, and then all of your commercial properties fall under four.

And as you can see here, our overall change on commercial properties is down five and a half percent.

with Multifamily down a little bit and I'll get into kind of a breakdown and I think the next slide that kind of explains some of that.

So here, and I've included residential over on the right side just as a comparison.

So the residential, this is not a multi mixed use property or anything.

This is strictly the total change for all residential properties as opposed to the commercial sections.

So as you see here on the left side, hotels were are kind of the properties that were affected the worst in their valuation.

because of the pandemic with shopping centers only slightly behind them.

We have found that so far medical office and office buildings are adversely affected, but really the long-term effect on that is still to be seen.

Apartments down slightly along with warehouses and other general commercial properties.

and with mini storage is actually doing pretty well.

And that's not really a surprise to me that I think one of the board members, board of supervisors members pointed out the mini storage doesn't have a staff that's working there in interaction with the public.

So it's kind of a isolated from the pandemic effect.

General commercial really covers all of your

groupings that are single tenant or single owner occupied properties.

It could be a fast food restaurant if it's standalone or any other type of big box property like Walmart or Lowe's.

any property like that.

The groupings, the other groupings are properties that we typically assess or value by the income approach.

So your hotels and shopping centers, offices and apartments are generally driven or primarily driven by the income or the rent that is produced by those.

So that's why they are the most affected here.

This slide shows a breakdown, and we're back to residential, strictly residential on the slide, based on a value range or a grouping of value ranges.

So it generally shows that your lower value residential properties

experienced the larger increases this year on average than the higher range properties.

And this is not surprising to us either, because typically you get a lot more mobility in the properties at the lower end.

There's a lot more demand for those properties.

And that demand is really what drives those values to go up.

I do have a note down here at the bottom of the slide where we identify the median home value is now $354,500.

And basically, because of this, if a property at that value range experienced

An average, the 3.2 that would be for that value range, that's where that 3.2 came from, they would experience $93.94 higher taxes based on no change in the tax rate.

So we just give that for a little bit of reference for that median level.

This is referring to the percent changes

of properties.

So it would be really easy for me if we identified that properties were going up 3%, that every property went up 3%.

Then we wouldn't get, some people say, oh, I might go up 10 and this other guy went down five.

But the reality of it is there are different effects on different properties, whether it's where they are in the county or what type of property it is.

And there's other information that's kind of changing along with that.

And, you know, a lot of times we find when a property sells, we find out some information about the property that we didn't know about before.

So that could cause those properties to change more, much more or less than the average also.

But what this is showing is that 2666 properties increased more than 10%.

and the vast majority are kind of between that zero and 10%, which is where we'd expect them with the average being in that range, the average increase.

Then there's a large amount of decrease or large properties, a large amount of properties that decreased up to 10%.

And some of this group of properties includes

some of your land use properties where the land use values have changed this year.

So they're two different, when it comes to a property and land use, we determine a market value and we determine a land use value.

And the land use value includes rates that are determined by the state, by the SLIAC council.

and they will set a certain rate for farmland basically for Albemarle County and we use those on the land use side.

Those rates went down up to 10%, probably 8 to 10% on average this year so properties that are strictly in land use, this is the taxable value so that would basically cause them to be in that group.

This is the information that we provide to kind of show the support for the value changes we make.

So I could sit here and say this is the change that we've made.

We're up 3%, we're up 8%, whatever the number might be.

But residentially, this is the support that shows that our information or the change that we made is appropriate.

In 2020, we had 2089 valid sales that happened in the county on residential properties.

It's right in line with the amount that we've had over the previous four years, which is good.

It gives us a lot of support.

We're required by law to be at 100% of market value and that means that

practically that the median sale is at 100%.

So we'll get calls all the time that, you know, I paid this much for my house and your assessment is this much.

We will basically vary 10% above and below the sale prices.

And that's within our guidance, our guidelines for doing proper assessments.

Our center target is that 100%.

And we want those assessments, basically the ratio that's created with those assessments.

And that's how we compare all the properties.

So you could sell a $2 million property or a $200,000 property.

And the ratio is really what we're looking at.

So if you're at 100% of the 2 million and 100% of the 200,000, that's the comparison.

So when we take all of the ratios on all 2089 sales, we then kind of determine the variance of the ratios.

So the center ones are at 100% and how high, how many fall within 5% either way and how many within 10% either way.

And that determines how well our model is working.

So the third, the fourth column here, the one with the variance really is showing how we've been tightening up that variance of the ratios around the 100% in the last five years.

So that 4.02, it works kind of like a standard deviation.

So the majority of your properties are gonna fall within two or three standard deviations, which would be four,

104-96, 108-92.

So those numbers are good and they're getting much better over time.

And as a kind of a reference, the International Association of Assessing Officers

has guidance that says that we should be within 15% or our COD should be a 15 or lower.

And we are reaching numbers that are getting down to four.

So that kind of shows that we're tightening up those numbers and they're well within the guidelines.

And that's

That's pretty much it in a nutshell, but I will entertain any questions that you might have.

Thanks, Peter.

I appreciate that.

Don, I just wanted to make a comment on Peter's presentation.

Actually, the Jack Jewett district went up the most because it's the best district.

I'm not allowed to say that.

Anything else?

All right.

Yeah, I was impressed by the way you're tightening up the model over time.

Thank you, Roger.

Thanks.

Thanks for coming.

This is very helpful.

All right.

So next, we have Steve Allhouse, who's going to give us, who's the manager of forecasting and performance for the county.

And he's going to talk about the county's economic outlook.

Well, thank you.

It's good to be here.

As was mentioned, I work in the Department of Community Development these days, formerly in the Department of Finance.

Historically, I've given updates to the Board of Supervisors about the economy on a quarterly basis.

So with apologies to Ms. McKeel, she's already seen this presentation a few weeks ago.

If you give me a moment, I will share my screen and let me know when you can see this.

Okay, great.

I will start the slideshow then.

Before I begin, I just wanted to preface my remarks by saying that this is a very tricky time to be doing economic forecasting.

Everything is being driven by the pandemic.

And typically when economists do forecasting, they like to look at historical data.

Well, the problem is we don't have a lot of historical data dealing with the economy and pandemics.

In fact, you have to go back to 1918 to the Spanish Flu pandemic to find any data that might be instructive.

And unfortunately, back in 1918, not a lot of data was kept for economic variables.

For example, we didn't have national income and accounting accounts set up back then.

Economists are kind of flying by the seat of their pants these days.

I'll be upfront about that point.

Nonetheless, I've tried to piece together enough information to talk about where I think the county's economy will be heading in the near term.

And so just to give a sort of general overview, we just learned there are a number of things going on with the local economy and some sectors have done quite well while others have not.

Peter was talking about the real estate markets.

That is mixed.

You know, we're seeing some very healthy growth in the residential side of the markets, commercial, depending on what we're talking about, we might be seeing the market doing well or not.

And it's also the case that overall the economy has got some bright spots and some that are not so bright.

What I'm going to be talking about specifically are the county's job space, the unemployment rate, and also some items I think are important for looking at the local economy moving forward.

Let me go first to the job space.

This is a chart that I put together a few weeks ago

What this is showing is the total number of jobs in the county.

I have to put a lot of caveats on this slide.

For one thing, you might notice that the data ends for the quarter ended June of 2020.

There's a reason for that.

This data comes to me from the VEC and also from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics via their quarterly census of employment and wages databases.

And unfortunately, these databases tend to run two to three quarters behind.

So this, again, is very dated information.

The other thing about jobs data is that the information is shown by place of employment.

It includes all kinds of things.

It includes part-time jobs, full-time jobs, temporary jobs, permanent jobs.

So this data is a bit fluid, you might imagine.

Having said that, what this chart is showing us is between quarter three of FY20

and quarter four of FY20, in other words, the quarter that ended in June of 20, the county lost about 10% of its job space due to the pandemic induced contraction, recession.

This is a huge number.

This is without precedent of any time that I've looked at any data going back to data that we have.

I've never seen anything like this.

Not every sector of the job space, however, was impacted the same.

Not surprisingly, and this actually ties into something that Peter was talking about a little bit ago, the three sectors that have been the most impacted have been accommodation and food services.

So if you think of restaurants, and if you think of hotels, there was about a 44% drop in that portion of the job space between these two periods, between the spring of 2019 and the spring of 2020, over the course of that year.

Arts, entertainment and recreation, we saw nearly half the jobs in that job space go away.

and in retail trade, we saw a decline of about 12%.

Together, these job losses in these three sectors accounted for about 65% of the county's private sector job losses.

So in other words, the people working in these sectors disproportionately for the brunt of the recession, of the contraction.

As you can see here, you might guess that these jobs tend to be on the lower end of the pay scale,

So what that's telling me is the people who are most affected were the lower the pay scale, there's been a differential impact across income groups of the recession.

You know, moving forward, I think we'll see some of these come back slowly.

For example, if we see tourism rebound, which is very, very possible, we could see the accommodation food services sector of the economy spring back.

Arts, entertainment, recreation.

Keep in mind that the recreation sector includes things like health clubs.

So we know that people aren't necessarily going to health clubs the way they were before the recession.

So that sector might take a longer term or a longer time to heal.

And retail trade.

We have seen a jump in the number of people

Can I ask just a quick question?

What, beyond the 65%, what were some of the other areas or that you could, that you saw a job loss in?

It was spread fairly uniformly.

One thing I did forget to mention, so thank you for jostling my memory, not all sectors lost jobs, by the way.

There were two in particular, construction, which saw an increase of about 4%, and finance and insurance, which saw a relatively minor increase of about 1%.

So it's not all doom and gloom, but again, these are aberrations, these are outliers from the

from the overall picture.

I have a whole list that could go down, but for time's sake, I won't go into.

Absolutely.

That'd be great.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

What I'll do, Ms. McKeel, I will send to everybody my slides, which have reserved slides, which do the breakdown, which have a list.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

So what do I see looking forward?

This chart is showing us some information we've just seen.

This was a decline that we saw in the third quarter of FY20 and the fourth quarter, between the third quarter of FY20 and the fourth quarter of FY20.

So this quarter that ended in June, we saw that big drop.

These first two numbers are estimates given the lag between the reporting from the VEC and where we are today.

These numbers are estimates.

And then these four numbers going forward are projections.

You're wondering, how did you do these projections?

Well, there is a group that I belong to called the National Association for Business Economics.

Each quarter,

The membership is surveyed and we give our estimates of where things are going to go in terms of employment, unemployment, consumer price indices, et cetera.

And from that survey, I've looked at what economists are saying about the national level, and then I've translated that into local numbers.

How have I translated that?

Well, I've gone back and looked at historical data for many, many years that shows a relationship between changes in national employment and changes in local numbers.

The relationship is not always consistent.

Sometimes you can have jobs numbers going up at the local level where they might be going down at the national level, but I've identified at least one relation that I think holds pretty well.

So I've used that without getting into too much of the detail.

I've used that to make these projections moving forward.

What I'm thinking currently, the quarter that ended in December, Q2 of FY21,

is that we've most likely gained back about 40, maybe a little bit more than 40% of the jobs in our job space.

As shown going forward, this would be a rather flat recovery.

I don't expect this to go gangbusters in the next several quarters, but by the end of this next fiscal year, FY22, I would think that we've recovered probably 60% or possibly more.

This is something of a, of a,

conservative estimate, but something around the range of 60% or more of the county's job space that we lost.

It could be higher, it could be lower.

A lot of this depends on the pandemic and how quickly we can get through the pandemic.

So just a quick question.

You don't show us going back up to pre-COVID levels.

Is that a conscious projection or is that just based on what the

I didn't make a conscious effort to censor the upper bound.

Sure.

Well, you know, it's really interesting with the last recession, with the last recession, we did see job growth over time, but it was a painful recovery.

And again, my fear is that with the coronavirus taking on different mutations and the rollout going along, it might be a while.

And I didn't specifically

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, I agree.

I think it's going to be slow.

He did say it was a conservative estimate.

It is conservative.

One thing that economists are notorious for is we generally don't like to go out on a limb.

We're sort of like weather forecasters that way.

These numbers could turn out to be better, but again, I'll go back to my mantra of, well, we'll have to wait and see.

Okay, fair enough.

Thanks.

Let me move on then to the county's unemployment rate.

I wanted to show you one slide that showed the Board of Supervisors.

And this is somewhat instructive.

The reason I bring this up is that it gets at how backward looking these figures can be.

This is from the US Federal Reserve System.

The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has a massive database, which it calls FRED.

And this is showing the county's unemployment rate going back to the late 90s.

These bands are showing recessions.

And the thing that's really interesting about this is that the unemployment rate tends to go up during recessions, but it doesn't tend to peak until after the officially designated end of the recession.

And you might say, well, what's the officially designated end?

Well, there's a group called the National Bureau for Economic Research, which is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that's the, quote, official arbiter of the beginning and

beginning and end dates of recessions.

And so Enber looks at all kinds of data and they say, ah, this recession ended at such and such date.

Enber has not come out and said that the recession we just went through or might still be in has officially ended yet.

My guess is that they're gonna come back in a few months and say, it ended during the summer, believe it or not.

Anyway, we'll see what they say.

But in any case, the unemployment rate tends not to peak until after the recession.

And the thing about this,

is that you can see here our unemployment rate jumped, just peaked massively in April at 9%, had been, you know, in the two, two and a half percent range.

And then it came barreling down to 3.8%.

That's the latest number I have, which is for December.

By the way, this unemployment rate data tends to be much more, much timelier than the jobs numbers.

VEC and the USBLS tend to get these numbers out pretty quickly after the fact.

So December is the month for which I have most recent data.

One thing I should point out though, that's really important to keep in mind about these, these unemployment numbers is this.

They include people who are, they include only people who are in the labor force looking for work.

And so if people drop out of the labor force, they're no longer included in the unemployment rate numbers.

So it's interesting to note, in fact crucial to note that between December of 2019 and December of 2020, Albemarle County's labor force contracted by about a thousand people.

Now, if I were to add in those thousand,

and count them as unemployed, this rate would be about 5.4%.

It would be up here where I've got the laser pointer at the moment.

If I added in just half of those people, it would be down here at the 4.5% range.

So somewhere, I think the true unemployment rate is somewhere up here, which historically for Albemarle County would be quite elevated.

So this 3.8% number is encouraging, especially given that we were at 9% back in April of 2020.

But you have to keep in mind that this number really probably is understated.

All right, so let me move on then to my forecast.

This slide is showing what we know already.

This is an actual number for the quarter that ended in December.

3.8% was the average for the quarter.

I've got this going down.

Again, the methodology was the same with this slide as with the other.

I've looked at the National Association for Business Economics Survey, what economists are thinking is going to happen at the national level.

I've used historic data to look at the differential going back many, many years between the U.S. figure and the local figure.

And again, that relationship can change over time and it can change depending on where we are in the business cycle.

But I've got a number that I've been using for this.

And if I go down all the way out to the fourth quarter now of FY22, I guess down to about 2.4%.

Historically, what I've told the Board of Supervisors is that I think based on 20 years worth of data, I think what we'd call the frictional rate of unemployment or the natural rate of unemployment in the county is somewhere around three and a half percent.

But I don't really believe that this number that I'm showing for FY21, the last quarter, the June number of this year, would really be full employment.

I think given all the people who have dropped out of the labor force, I think we really will have to wait probably about another year before I would be comfortable saying we're back to full employment.

And that's assuming that these numbers go in the direction that I'm talking about.

Again, it's really up to what happens with the pandemic, with the rollout of vaccines and how comfortable people are

All right, so I've talked about employment, I've talked about unemployment.

I want to talk about some factors that I think are positive moving forward.

and there are several of them.

And I am gonna have to caveat a few of these because economists tend to look at data one way and other people tend to look at it in a slightly different way.

But let me go through these.

The one that I've been talking about is the coronavirus vaccinations are available.

This does have the possibility, opens up the possibility that people might get out again and start consuming.

By the way, private consumption is 70% of the US economy.

So it's important that people start

Start getting out and doing things again.

The other thing that's interesting to me, and again, I'm gonna have to caveat this, is that overall consumer confidence has been increasing since April.

If you look at the data published by the University of Michigan Index of Consumer Sentiment, generally that's been going up since the month of April of 2020.

It's not been going up every single month.

It jumps around, but the overall trend line

is up during that time.

That's good in the sense that if people are feeling more confident about the future, they might again go out and consume more after we get past the bulk of the pandemic.

But I want to caveat this bullet point heavily.

As I mentioned earlier, there are large swaths of our local labor force

and in the United States generally that probably are not feeling increasingly confident about the economy or their own position in it.

I'm acknowledging that.

What I'm talking about is the overall number that the University of Michigan is publishing, but you have to keep it in the back of your mind.

There are still people hurting in this recession and it's aftermath.

So I want to talk about consumer confidence going up.

I just want people to be aware that I'm aware that not everybody is feeling more confident.

Likewise for their increase in the overall U.S. savings rates.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, U.S. Department of Commerce, the savings rate doubled between December of 2019 from about 7% to about 14% in December of 20.

That's a good sign in the sense that it might indicate that there's some pent up demand moving forward.

As the economy starts rolling again, people might feel confident and might have the ability

to spend.

But again, that's an overall number.

It's not the case that everybody in the U.S. is saving more or able to save more.

Some people's savings rate has probably turned negative in the last year.

The third point that is hopeful at the aggregate level in any case is household net worth.

U.S. Federal Reserve System keeps track of this.

and is showing that in the last three quarters, US household net worth has increased by about 11%.

A lot of people are saving and also their property values, to get back to Peter's point locally, have gone up.

And also with recent increases in the last several quarters in the US equities markets, people's net worth have gone up.

Now, again,

I have to heavily caveat these statements by saying not everybody owns stocks, not everybody has a 401k savings plan, not everybody owns a house.

So again, there are large swaths of the population that have not seen their household net worth go up.

But again, economists look at these numbers and say, well, overall, this should be positive for the economy.

Finally, I wanted to talk about the proposed federal fiscal stimulus.

As you're well aware, President Biden

has proposed 1.9 trillion in fiscal stimulus.

That would be the equivalent of about 9% of US GDP in calendar year 21.

It would be a huge number.

I don't think we're going to see the full 1.9 trillion.

I think for various political reasons, I think it'll probably be below that.

But nonetheless, if it is substantial, that should have a good positive impact on the US economy and locally as well.

Can I jump in?

Just a quick question.

Well, you know, there has been some discussion about that, and this would get at a very long range planning issue.

A couple of things, if people are looking, particularly if the millennials are looking for lower density environments, and they start moving out of, say, the city of Charlottesville to the county, that could have an impact on us.

But I think the larger issue is the remote work situation that we're seeing in the last several months.

Anecdotally, I'm hearing things like, well, you know, from realtors, I have a client who moved down here from Northern Virginia.

Their job is still up in Washington, D.C., but they're looking to live here in this work remotely.

That could become, if that trend holds and if it accelerates, clearly that would have planning implications for the county, because now you would have people whose jobs might be elsewhere, but who might be living here.

Historically,

What that's meant when people move here, their jobs, they've come here for jobs.

So you have the tax base growing with physical structures, housing, say, offices or retail or whatever it is.

And then you have people working here who are earning those incomes.

Now, there might be somewhat of a disconnect between the two.

So that is something I've thought about.

I don't know how that's going to impact long-term.

I don't know how long that trend will last or if it's permanent.

Some people are arguing that we're seeing working from home as a long-term trend, that we're not all going to go back to the office.

And there's probably a lot of truth to that.

OK.

The last two things I wanted to talk about really were the NAIB survey that I alluded to earlier as it relates to U.S. gross domestic product.

According to the December survey, economists in that survey were forecasting for calendar year 21, 3.4% growth in U.S. GDP, and 73% of the respondents thought that the U.S. economy would have returned to pre-pandemic levels by the second half of calendar year 21.

This is a case where I think the economists are getting a little bit ahead of the picture.

For one thing, I would like to point out the survey was released in December.

The survey was conducted in November.

November was before we started seeing these variants of the coronavirus popping up.

So this first, excuse me, second half of calendar year 2021 timeframe might be a bit optimistic.

More recently, I was looking at the February, 2021

Wall Street Journal survey of economists.

And these numbers were very interesting.

This group was even more excited than the name group about the prospects for real GDP growth in the US in calendar year 2021.

The number there was almost 5%.

And the survey also asked economists about calendar year 2022.

The number there was 3%.

Well again, this first number is a lot more optimistic than 3.4% and the second year of 3% would be a pretty healthy growth rate.

The other thing that was interesting though about the Wall Street Journal survey was that the average forecast for inflation in the two years was just over 2% in both cases.

I wanted to point out that this figure up here, this 4.87% represents real GDP growth

Real meaning inflation has been stripped out.

Well, if you're talking about consumption, if you talk about real activity plus inflation, you could be looking at some pretty healthy growth or pretty robust growth moving forward in terms of numbers that we would see in say retail sales and things like that.

So again, I'm gonna be optimistic moving forward.

The only thing I would temper that with is, we still have a large number of people again,

So just to summarize very briefly, I estimate that we've gained about 40% of the jobs that we lost during the last contraction, forecasting modest growth over the next year.

Our unemployment rate seems to have peaked at 9%.

I don't anticipate anything jumping up and going above that in the foreseeable future.

As of December 2020, we're at 3.8%.

I'm expecting full employment sometime probably by the fourth quarter of FY22 or June of 22.

And then as I mentioned, there are some positive things going on with the economy involving savings rate, net worth and consumer confidence with the usual caveats.

The impact of vaccination, I think, you know, as long as things roll out in a timely manner and we can get enough people inoculated, I think that's going to be

I'm heartened that a number of my colleagues at NAIB are forecasting positive growth in GDP moving forward.

Thanks, Steve.

I really appreciate that.

Got two.

Okay.

Steve, thank you.

On the issue of one of the

positive indicators you cited which is twofold and that is the increase in net wealth and the component next to that was... Savings rate.

Savings rate, excuse me, yes, right.

I think we know, don't we, pretty much that which quintiles we're seeing those changes in and therefore aren't we really seeing

Two things that could be graded as negative rather than positive, and that is rising inequality and housing costs crises that are appearing.

Well, I would say that nothing ever runs on mixed in the economy.

You're absolutely right.

If you're looking at the upper quintile doing very well due to wealth creation and because people are in that quintile are predominantly shareholders, equity holders and own real estate.

Yes, by all means, we're probably seeing inequality rise in our country.

What I'm getting at is that

Right, right.

I mean, you would expect that if the gains are concentrated in a smaller portion of the population, the consumption bulge would not be as great as if it were spread out more evenly.

I would agree with that statement.

Oh, I said I had two.

The other one was, do you have any data on the way in which municipality public jobs and municipalities have varied relative to state employment, state public jobs as well?

We've noticed, of course, that Virginia on the state level has fared pretty well in terms of keeping revenue on a

at a more decent level than some places, and I haven't seen good data on the jobs connected to that, but I haven't heard much about municipalities and where they stand.

What I'm seeing is a mixed bag.

If you look across the country, some states have done quite well, their employment levels have held up.

Virginia, my recollection, don't quote me on this because I'd have to go back and actually look, but my understanding is that state employment has held up fairly well in Virginia.

Albemarle, we've not seen declines like we've seen in other localities.

But I will say this, it really varies on the locality.

If you're talking about localities, for example, that are heavily, heavily dependent on tourism, those localities most likely have seen greater drops in their municipal employee numbers than others that are not as dependent on that.

And one of the connections there that might be worth watching is, you mentioned the

Yeah, absolutely.

Absolutely.

It depends on whether or not that gets folded in.

Do we know what the,

That should be available through the Office of Management and Budget.

I'm sure you could contact Andy Bowman.

The revenues did come in

about where we thought maybe a little bit stronger.

And I've now stepped back from that world.

Formerly, I was responsible for forecasting the entire general fund, but I've since moved over to community development.

But our revenues have held up pretty well, better than we expected, I might add.

Overall, now, some have not.

Some have not done very well.

Our TOT, of course, was down because we've seen a hit to tourism.

But generally speaking, our revenues have done pretty well.

Mr.

Chair, if I could just make a comment.

Sure.

You know, putting some context around this, last meeting we spent at the, we started at the global level, worked from the state level, and then kind of talked about the programs and policies that our department was putting in place to help the community.

Steve and Peter did an excellent job of taking you into the granular details of what's happening locally.

It's our hope that all this information will help inform this authority to make

Thanks.

I'm curious, Steve, at the beginning you mentioned that you're breaking new ground here in terms of

Well, my biggest surprise was how fast things on the unemployment rate turned around.

That was not expected.

When we were entering this contraction back in the spring, frankly, I was worried that we were going to see double-digit unemployment in the county of Albemarle.

Secondly, if you had told me that it would turn around as quickly as it did, I would have thought that you were just daydreaming.

So that was one piece that really surprised me.

The other thing that surprised me was, and this relates to the county's budget, was what Peter Lynch was talking about with the residential real estate prices.

He and I had a conversation back in February and March and we were scared to death.

We didn't think that the real estate market would necessarily hold up as well as it had.

And again, looking at the commercial side of the market, you know, that's really a mixed bag.

He and I kind of thought that maybe something like that might happen where you had, you know, your big box, you know, essential service retailers and these big boxes doing quite well and then the mom and pops not doing quite as well and the strip mall is suffering as a result.

So, I would say those are the things that really, surprisingly, the unemployment rate turnaround, the residential side of the real estate market, and just the prospect that, you know, people

that we've come as far as we have so far in such a short period of time.

Yeah, I mean, my own personal reaction is I think it's really gonna depend on how many of these businesses like restaurants

just gone for good and how many of them are able to restart?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

I do a lot of tooling about town, looking at storefronts occasionally, just out of curiosity.

And what I've seen in the city anyway, and I'm assuming this is also true in the county, is that restaurants have gone out.

Some of my favorite restaurants have gone out of business in the last year, and yet I'm starting to see new ones come in, sometimes in the same spaces.

Again, I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic that we eventually will go back to an equilibrium where we've got a number of restaurants, a number of other types of businesses making a rebound and coming back in.

In terms of office space, that's a bigger unknown.

We're all on this meeting now on Zoom, working from different locations.

I happen to be in my office in the county office building, but I could just as easily have been doing this from some mountain on the side of Colorado, I suppose.

So I don't really have a sense long term how this is going to play out.

I think it's going to be, I think you're going to see some businesses say, let's go back into physical space.

And I think other businesses are going to say, you know, we really don't need to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't, I don't really have a question.

It's more just building off what, what Dave was sort of saying and something I'd love, you know, not today, but longer term to think about, but as we define

what economic health is, kind of looking at inequality indexes and even local environmental health.

I think, you know, Almar County has always been very thoughtful of looking at economic development in this more holistic way.

Yeah, well, it's a point well taken too.

When I gave this presentation to the Board of Supervisors, I was following a presentation

It was given by our Office of Equity and Inclusion.

And I had to make the distinction on the one hand, I'm presenting a cyclical analysis of what's going on.

They were talking about some very long-term structural issues, which I acknowledge are important to the health of this community.

Um, so I'm with you, you know, previously when I was doing reports about the local economy, I was looking at the inflation adjusted.

and then compare that against inflation adjusted average weekly wage.

We have an issue.

We do have an issue in this community and I'm fully cognizant of that.

I'm just going to just reiterate, I think a point I probably made before to this group, how intentional we were throughout the pandemic and remain currently in trying to keep our construction economy active.

We maintained our office posture in our community development department.

And as you've seen that play out in terms of the new construction values, but you also

You'll see that play out in the employment figures, in the construction industry in particular.

And so it was intentional on our part to try to keep as much of our employment in the construction industry as viable as possible throughout the pandemic.

And that is just acknowledging that that's played itself out.

And the other point is, you've also heard before, Roger and Jennifer and J.T.

talking about the programs using the CARES money that the Economic Development Office has

has been administering in an effort to try to keep our businesses as viable as they can.

Those that maybe were destined to fail because of the pandemic may not benefit ultimately from that investment.

There are others who we believe absolutely will be sustained and will recover, at least in part, we hope, because of the investment that we've made in them to try to kind of keep them working.

So just making those two points, Mr.

Chair.

Sure.

All right.

Any other questions for Steve?

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Steve.

So the next item on our agenda is the director's report.

Yeah, mine's pretty simple.

That's funny.

So I just wanted to give you a little update on Biomic.

About three years ago, Roger and J.T.

met with the seraphic group.

a primary business that produces a gut health supplement at their facility here in Albemarle County.

During the meeting, Serafic Group expressed the desire to expand internationally.

We connected them with the EDP and as a result, Serafic Group's subsidiary company, Biomic Sciences, was enrolled into the ballet program.

A little bit more about the ballet program specifically.

It stands for Virginia Leaders in Export Trade.

This is a two-year international business acceleration program.

Companies receive training as well as some international sales plan development, educational events, and most importantly, market research.

The program participants are eligible to receive up to $30,000 towards export related expenses.

And over 300 companies statewide have graduated from the valet program.

We are happy to announce this week, Biomics Sciences has graduated from the valet program.

And as a result of this participation, they were able to expand their trade market in Europe.

But I would like to add that our work does not stop here.

As a part of our business retention expansion program, our office will continue to partner with BDP and Biomic to explore other opportunities provided by BDP's additional services.

Yes, sir.

A couple off the top of my head since I've been tracking it would be Green Berries Coffee Roasters, as well as Punch Out to Go.

They provide business to business connections.

And there is one more that is escaping my mind.

But yes, there have been several programs or several companies that have gone through our program.

Thank you.

Well, this is just a general update.

I'm going to ask you to think back to your orientation about Project Enable.

And if you can remember, we have a goal.

I think it's goal three, actually, that talks about preparing our community to accommodate businesses.

One of those programs includes site readiness.

Our staff takes a look at our existing environment and the amount of product available and our definition of products are available sites for businesses to locate in.

So we have a wide variety of product that we would like to establish in our community.

Those include some general ideas of rail serve sites, which to date we have none.

It could be a large industrial site, which we happen to have a tier four site in our community.

It's at the research park.

It's 100 acres.

So UVA research park, I guess the new name is North Fork Park has a site there that's ready.

You're aware of the ABC,

Albemarle Business Campus Public-Private Partnership.

The economic development component for that was to create a build-to-suit Class A office space, which we have the opportunity to exercise in the next five years.

Our community could also benefit from having a site available directly adjacent to 64 in some way, shape, or form for convenient access to highway or interstate.

and then the other is looking for existing buildings.

We receive quite a few opportunities or RFIs, if you will, from the state of Virginia to locate some primary businesses here and or retain some existing businesses here.

Oftentimes those requirements include they want a site that's already ready, if you will, something they can move into quickly.

And we don't actually have that many in our particular community.

I just wanted to make this Economic Development Authority aware that we have been continually doing due diligence on existing buildings in our community, which include Fashion Square Mall, Stonefield, Hayasan Plant.

We've been meeting with owners, operators, general managers, and the like.

in some cases administrators for the town of Scottsville.

Just to inspect some of our existing buildings in our community.

I really don't have anything to report about the future of these things or any redevelopment opportunity.

I just wanted to inform this board that we're looking for space and at some point economic development staff will return to this authority and talk to you about supporting some initiative towards site readiness for an existing building.

I guess, Roger, just a little bit more about what this would entail.

Are you sort of putting together

images and descriptions of the property and posting them up to the state side.

Yeah, at this juncture, we have no agreements with any of these buildings, if you will, so to speak.

Whether it's Stonefield or Haesong or Fashion Square, we just go out and visit these sites and do due diligence.

Once we get an agreement with those folks, we'll be happy to put them on the VEDP's website, which also markets these sites to the world.

You know, these owners have different ideas about the use of their property.

Some of them may not want industrial there at all.

Some of the community may not want industrial there.

So we usually reference the comp plan and make sure we don't get out in front of any land use designations first.

So some of these properties may not be fit for those, for industry, even if economic development thought it was fit for industry, the community may want a different use there.

So we don't want to get out in front of those folks, Kat, but we will eventually

Find a location or two where we can accomplish the community's goals and the economic development goals concurrently.

And when those situations arise, we'll be coming back to you to ask for support in some way, shape or form.

It's a long way of saying it depends.

All right, Roger, is that you got more?

No, sir.

I just wanted to make you aware that we're working behind the scenes to find existing buildings.

And when we show up at your doorstep asking for support, you you'll be prepared.

Well, if that's the.

OK, so who is this?

This is J.T.

You're muted.

Give him just a second.

Everybody's got me?

Yep, yep.

Okay, well, sorry for the delay.

Just like Roger, there are a couple of announcements that I wanted to share with the authority.

No action necessary.

This is our information.

You know, as we've moved to electronic meetings, we have people who watch our meeting recording on YouTube.

We have members of the press that are attendees for our webinar right now.

So I wanted to use this opportunity to not only inform you, but also inform the community.

There's a really great opportunity for our food and beverage businesses to take advantage of a free program.

It's a food accelerator.

Companies from the Valley and the City of Charlottesville are invited to apply.

The application process is very easy.

I think it would probably take five or ten minutes for any businesses that might be interested.

But much like the valet program that Jennifer just talked about for international sales, or like the catalyst program that Roger has talked about previously, this accelerator program would help food businesses with things like branding and marketing, better understanding their value proposition.

Virginia

as you can see on this slide has a lot of food and beverage production for a variety of reasons.

But agribusiness and food production is one of the county's targeted industries.

And so this program started accepting applications yesterday and they will be accepted through March 8th and

The businesses will be notified by the end of that week, and the program will start at the end of March.

So it's a great opportunity for food and beverage companies that want to scale up.

So this picture comes from a spread from the Virginia Economic Review magazine last year.

I just thought it was kind of a cool illustration of everything around the state.

Yeah, that'd be great.

Yeah, and you probably know J.T.

and the rest of you for seeing the bumper stickers, but there's a

Pull Buy Fresh Buy Local movement in Virginia.

And it's actually really strong here in Albemarle County, kind of a linchpin for it.

And they're about to rebrand and send out a million new copies of Buy Fresh Buy Local guide.

Oh, great.

That sounds great.

I can step into that one.

So this is an old shot or an old one that he's pulled.

Thank you.

You'll be delighted.

Any other questions about this program?

Great.

Well, the next thing that I wanted to inform the authority about was, you know, a few people have already referenced earlier in the meeting all of our efforts to get the federal CARES money out into the community last year.

And we talked about it with this board several times.

through our lift grant and our safe spaces grants.

Many economic development organizations are going into 2021 monitoring the rate of vaccinations and sort of asking what's next for business.

How will businesses be pivoting?

How will they be transformed?

And what role can we play to best support them?

One of the things that we've been doing is we've been connecting with our partners.

I mentioned that the program previously from the Small Business Development Center, but we've been working with others to try to identify gaps in the support that's been provided as well as survey local businesses directly.

So what's shown on this slide is local business survey results

asking them what would be most beneficial for programming this year to your business and both our partners as well as our own local survey data is showing that assistance with website and e-commerce development is far and away the most popular and most requested type of program.

One of the ones that didn't score particularly well on our survey but

We did confirm through working with our partners is that there are certain agribusinesses that did not necessarily meet all the thresholds for some of the federal support.

And so we're looking very closely at how we can support those agribusinesses that may have been left behind.

And

Some of the other programs, as you can see on the screen, that we asked businesses about were like loans or support with sanitizing their space, following a COVID exposure, a continuation of safe spaces.

That's what's referenced by the grants for temporary outdoor expansion.

So just wanted to share some of that information with this body.

As Roger said, we want to keep you

well-informed so that as we propose new opportunities, you're able to advise us and the board of supervisors on where we can get the best value.

We did ask the businesses what sector they represented when they replied.

And so we had a pretty nice cross section of manufacturing, retail, tourism related.

I'm thinking that some of these might be much more attractive to some sectors

Yeah, that might be.

You spot on.

For example, if you look at the agribusinesses that sell direct to market, when you dig down into the data, they rank that very high, while overall it didn't score well because it just wasn't simply germane to some of the other businesses.

Yeah, you're spot on in that and we've dug through that data.

We just weren't going to go through all of the report to you.

We're trying to give you the macro level view.

And I will say J.T.

referenced the partners and SBDC and CIC and some others.

I'll also mention that the city is looking at this in lockstep with us.

It just makes sense that collectively, working with the city, we can accomplish more for our community than going about it independently.

Well, it seems to me that, you know, the fact that people are looking for website help and e-commerce help is a real opportunity for

working with somebody like the business innovation with CBIC or other folks to try to get those services and make people aware of them.

Yeah, I think, Don, this is logic, so there's no data to back this up, but we believe there are quite a number of businesses that were not prepared to use e-commerce in any form or fashion, country stores and or certain restaurants, for example, to pick up, take out.

So they never put ways to accept funds electronically on the website, or they didn't use marketing.

They counted on the local market, and we believe a high number of those have said, okay, it's time for us to move into

That makes sense.

I hadn't thought about that yet.

Right.

All right.

Any unfinished business?

End the pandemic.

Yeah.

Well, speaking of that, I don't know.

Doug, are you still here?

Is there anything?

that you want to bring up to pandemic related that is appropriate to sort of share with this group?

Or I know we talked last week, last last meeting about being supportive of doing what we could do.

I can I can certainly I can certainly

Okay, can I let you know that we continue to kind of attack this pandemic on two fronts with respect to our ongoing efforts to mitigate the virus spread, right, with the posture that we've taken with our direct delivery of programs and services as best as we possibly can and keeping our employees safe and keeping our community safe.

And so that work just goes on.

It's interesting that

that it's been tougher to keep people focused on that because the vaccine has kind of taken over everybody's intention and for all understandable reasons.

And so we now are kind of juggling, kind of keeping people's focus on issues related to the virus spread.

and now with UVA students back on grounds and in issues that they will continue to have with just lots of people in close proximity.

So it's been a challenge how to stay focused on that.

The larger issues have been around vaccine administration, both as it relates to our frontline responders, what we call the 1A category that are eligible for the vaccine,

on the county employee side, as well as community members who fit into those early categories, 75 and older, 65 and older, those underlying conditions, and really working as best we can with our health district, which is not a part of county government, but is a partner associated with state government.

And so it's just kind of created some very challenging coordination, collaboration,

issues for us as we help them, they help us, and we all try to help the community.

So it's been choppy at best.

There's probably a lot of other words that could be used, but I'll just stick with choppy.

I do think that it's getting better.

The constraint right now is if you're following this, then you know.

I'm sorry if I'm not kind of overstating the obvious, but it's vaccine supply.

But the work that we have done is to position ourselves structurally so that when supply is available, which we expect it will be, if not in February, then perhaps in March, then we have an ability to really ramp up our ability to, again, get shots in arms.

So that's where the county's work has been, in collaboration with UVA, with Sentara, Martha Jefferson, with the city,

and with the health district.

We've trained volunteers, we have teachers, we have our emergency medical providers.

We have a cadre of now trained, qualified vaccinators.

This is not an altogether simple vaccine.

It does have some, they call it, it's a little titchy.

But once trained and whatnot, we do have a larger group that can then participate.

When we have the volume of vaccine available, we do think we've got infrastructure that we've been developing to help us get it out to the community faster.

I'm not sharing proprietary information.

This is information that we've shared candidly with our board and urging everyone to stay patient as possible while we wait for the state and wait for the feds to get vaccines to the state.

So that'd be the way that I would characterize it.

We certainly are aware of the anxiety that it creates within the community.

And we're just doing the best we can to try to mitigate that.

So two messages.

Thank you, Donna, for giving this opportunity.

Two messages.

Stay patient with respect to the vaccine.

We are absolutely preparing to be able to get it administered when more doses are available.

and don't lose sight of the fact that we still have virus in our community, variants in our community.

And so masking, now double masking, six feet apart is going to tend to be part of our message.

So that's what I would say, probably more than you asked for, but you asked the question, give me the opportunity, I'm gonna go there.

Thanks, Doug.

I do think, as I thought about Steve's presentation,

I think what we need to be, there's obviously a limited amount that this body can do in terms of the immediate needs of other than people volunteering to give vaccines.

But I think we do need to be in a position that as we see how things turn around and where the holes are and where the areas in the recovery as hopefully we start to come out of it, that's maybe where we need to be thinking about what we can do to support

whether it's certain sectors or taking other steps to help facilitate the businesses that Roger was talking about, the things that we have kept going, who needs that extra help?

Because I think that's, it seems like to me that the key of what we've seen over time is obviously there's a broad brush approach, but really there are

Anything else from any board members?

Other matters?

All right, so the next meeting is March 16th.

And I look forward to seeing everybody there.

I appreciate everybody's participation today.

And if there's nothing further, then I think we will adjourn.

Thanks so much, all.

Thank you all.

Bye.