Economic Development Authority Meeting   5/18/2021

Let's go ahead and get going.

All right, well, we'll get going.

And if we need to skip over the financial report, we can until he

There we go.

Hold on a second.

I'm going to my connection is not as good.

I'm going to sit down here real quick.

All right.

Notwithstanding any provision of the EDA bylaws to the contrary, as permitted under Albemarle County's continuity of government ordinance chapter

1283 of the 2020 Acts of the General Assembly and the resolution of this body adopted on April 21, 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 six 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, which we will hold next.

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

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

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 matters on today's agenda.

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

All right.

I will do it.

Okay.

Let's see.

Director Shreve, Dave.

Director Munson.

Stuart Munson.

And Director McNaughton.

Present in Troy, Virginia.

Right, Mr.

Okay, matters from the public.

Jennifer, anybody sign up to speak?

That's all right.

Nobody has currently signed up.

All right, then next is approval of the minutes.

All right.

Second.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right, the ayes have it.

So financial report.

We don't have Dave, so I don't know.

Mr.

All right, so we'll pass that over for now and we can come back to it later.

So next, on to new business.

First item on the agenda is the Albemarle County debt financing.

And we have, let's see, Ms. Birch, Mr. Culp, and Courtney Rogers as well.

That is correct.

Yeah, I think we're ready.

Just a quick point of order.

So Steve, thanks for bringing that up.

I think it's good to move Director McNaughton over into the other room.

And I will point out that Mr. Munson is here now.

So we do still have a quorum.

Sorry, I had my mute on.

Great.

You ready for me?

Awesome.

Perfect.

Thanks.

Hi, everybody.

I'm Nelsie Burch here, the CFO for the county.

I'm with some very important people in my life to get us through this fondue issuance over the next few weeks.

They are as follows.

Courtney Rogers, I think many of you know Courtney.

He's been the county's longstanding financial advisor with Davenport.

and Company.

And in a moment after I get down with the introductions, I'll turn it over to Courtney, who'll walk through the financing and the deal, some of the numbers.

And then from there, Courtney will turn it over to another long-standing partner with us in the county, Chris Culp, who's with Hunt & Andrews-Kirth LLP.

He is our bond counsel.

And we'll walk through really the legal aspects of the financing.

answer any questions, talk to you all about the resolution that we're asking you to support today.

And really the reason for our being here, some of you have been through this, others, this might be your first entree into this sort of financing, but we're asking the EDA to support our upcoming bond issuance as our conduit issuer.

And like I said, Courtney and Chris will go through more of the details.

I'm happy to be here.

to answer any questions.

And I did want to mention that Daniel Green, who doesn't have his camera on, but he is our Chief of Treasury here for the county.

There's Daniel.

I'm not sure if you all have had a chance to meet him before, but he's really the person behind the scenes who is responsible for our treasury operations, which is debt, cash, and investment management.

And so Daniel is the person that I am counting on to help us

get over the finish line working directly with Courtney on the financing and Chris as well.

So I wanted him to have a moment to be introduced to all of you.

Awesome.

Thank you.

I am going to give me a second.

I'm going to share my screen.

There we go.

Does everybody see that?

All right, so good afternoon, everybody.

I'm glad to be with you guys, even though it's virtual.

I will tell you, just because we've all been living in an unusual world the last year, I'm at my very first in-person conference in another state today.

Thank you for letting us be here virtually or I have to send someone else.

I'm down in Georgia.

I'm actually in Augusta, Georgia.

And I will tell you that the mask have disappeared.

It's like a light switch flipped off yesterday.

And so it's hopefully, you know, it's gonna be that way soon and we'll somewhat get back to normal.

The one thing that's interesting over the last year is that our business hasn't changed.

Chris and I have been very busy.

We've still been to the bond market other than disruption, which I'll talk about in a moment.

has been very functional.

We have been borrowing money for new projects.

We've been borrowing money for refinancings over the last year.

And so life has gone on when it has come to the bond market.

Good news is it's a good time to borrow money.

And I'll talk about that just a moment from an interest rate perspective.

So let me talk about what we're doing today.

As Delty mentioned, we have had the good fortune of being the financial advisor for the county.

I've been working in the county now for 21 years.

And we've been the market periodically every so many years as projects arise.

And so we are at that point again.

We've got about $66 million worth of needs.

Some of those are reimbursed to county for some projects that have been done already.

And so they're seeking to reimburse their coffers to build the cash back up.

And also there are some projects that have a known deadline spending over the next seven months, totally about 25 million.

Some of you may recall that we did a lot of credit last year that it was,

put in place really for projects that don't have as known a schedule.

So this actually, this 25 million is known, and while rates are good and low, we want to go ahead and lock those rates in, which is what we're planning to do here in the very near future.

We also have some, two in fact, potential refinancing opportunities, and I'm gonna talk about those a little bit later.

One of the things that's been a hallmark of the county is since we started working with the county back in the early 2000s was we achieved what is triple, triple ratings, which is very hard to do.

There are not many counties out there.

I think it's under 50 now around the country of total counties who have all three ratings of triple A.

In the county, we are going to go seek those ratings again.

We are confident that there's nothing negative that's going on, so we should be in great shape

to get those reaffirmed.

I'll let you know that these bonds, because they carry what we call an appropriation risk, they're not full faith in credit because they are appropriation bonds, they will have a notch lower.

So when you see the final documents, you'll see that they should carry a AA1, AA+, AA+, which is one notch off the AAAs, which is considered the issuer or GO ratings of the county.

We plan on selling these competitive.

We'd like to put them out there and let the best bid win.

There's a lot of money in the bond market and so we've seen some very competitive bond sales over the last couple of years and we anticipate that will be the case here in the near future.

Mr. Culp and his team will be putting together and have been working on a draft of an offering document.

We call that a preliminary official statement.

So we're finishing up and filling in the last few blanks of that document which will be put out there, which is essentially like the marketing document that we use to sell the bonds.

So we're looking for a sell date coming up in early June around the 10th.

That's kind of what we're looking at.

And we anticipate rates are still going to be very good.

If you look at this graph, this goes back on the left side, back to the year 2000, basically when we started working with the county.

And we've been lucky that rates have basically been trending downward.

On the right side, you'll see over the last basically four plus years, you can see where we sold the last fixed income bonds.

It was in the two and a half, 3% range, the 20 year rate.

Now we're down in the one to 150 range in terms of

the actual 20 year rate that we're looking at.

When you look at just what's happened since January of 2020, except for these months in the March, April timeframe where of course the pandemic started, we did have a disruption in the marketplace where rates jumped up.

But except for that period of time, you can see that all rates 30-year and lower have been below 2%.

So we're expecting to see very good rates out in the marketplace.

We should see an all-in rate less than 2% and then some for these bonds.

The projects that the county has outlined are listed here.

We do have a few that are taxable due to some IRS regulations that we have to follow.

This kind of lists out the various projects, the largest of which are an addition to the Crozet Elementary School, some school maintenance and replacement program, and that's generally taking care of multiple

buildings in terms of some of the maintenance things or replacement that need to take place.

And then, Scottsville Elementary Edition and Improvements is another one of the larger projects, as well as Redhill Elementary Editions and Improvements, the Phase 2 of that.

So a lot of school projects are built in here.

And again, we're not using the line because we know these are going to get done here in the next several months, and we're going to go ahead and lock that in before rates, which are expected to rise in the future, before they get away from us.

What you're gonna see in the next couple pages, we've used interest rates from just a couple of weeks back when we were putting this together for the county.

We've added a cushion of about 25 basis points, not knowing when rates may go up.

Over the last couple of weeks, they've stayed fairly steady.

There are days where they go up, days where they come down.

We actually gained a little bit of ground by about a basis point today.

So that's a good thing.

So it's been pretty steady.

One of the things we're gonna do is we're gonna put those taxable bonds at the beginning and wrap

the tax exempt bonds around it.

Because those are gonna be slightly higher rates, we wanna put those on the beginning of the yield curve if you would.

But you'll see in that last, the last set of numbers, the last column shows you the annual debt service which is basically level once we, what we call wrap around the taxable fees.

And then this is what the new debt service looks for in accounting.

Two of the things that we do as advisor in the county does is they're looking at debt as well as make sure we follow the policies we put in place.

And two of the more important debt policies are, one is total outstanding debt divided by the value of property in the county, personal and real.

and you'll see here that we have a two percent not to exceed number and we're just below one percent and as our projected we just use two percent as a sort of a growth factor we're projecting to obviously decline as debt services paid off as well as the additional growth on assessed value and then the other one we look at is how much annual debt service is paid as a percentage of the budget or in this case as percentage of revenues

And 10% is our guideline.

You can see here with just a shade above 60% with this light green being the new debt.

So in really good shape there and have room if necessary for additional debt in the future.

The two refunding opportunities we're looking at is an issue we did in 2011 as well as another one in 2015.

We look at 3% sort of net present value basis to make sure that it makes sense.

The principal that we're looking to refund is roughly about 20 million.

You can see the existing rates there varying from three and one eighth to 5% on the 11s and 2.35, which was a bank transaction we did in 2015.

And when we look at the potential new rates, we're looking at something in the 150 to 175 range, all NTIC there.

and the savings that we're looking at could be in the $1.7 million range with the net present value being over 10% on the 11s and just a shade above four on the 2015.

So this is again with a little bit of a cushion in there.

So hopefully we'll do better than that and rates will stay where they are and we'll come in even better than that.

And this kind of gives you those savings that they're spread out on a budgetary basis.

about 1.9 million, a little under 2 million.

And that'll basically be each, that's the annual, if you would, savings that were projected.

So what we've got left is, of course, we're asking you all to consider adoption of the resolution that allows the Board of Supervisors to move forward with this transaction.

They will be meeting tomorrow to approve documents.

And once we have those, we will have our rating calls basically next week.

to get the ratings back the week after that.

And then we're looking again to have our bond sell on June 10th and get closed for the end of the county's fiscal year, June 30th.

Camera off, cause I'm got some internet issues all of a sudden.

OK.

If no one has any questions, then I'll turn it over to Mr. Colt and let him answer or kind of walk you through the documents.

Thank you, Courtney.

And thanks, Nelsie, for the introduction earlier.

Good to be with you all again this afternoon.

Thank you for your time.

Our role at Hunton is to serve as bond counsel for the transaction.

So we're working with your counsel, Jim Bowling, the county attorney's office and the rest of the finance team to pull together the legal documents for this transaction.

and then we will ultimately be giving an opinion at closing addressing the tax status of the bonds which is what the bondholders are ultimately looking for.

But we have for your consideration today a resolution that's similar to what you would have, some of you would have seen in prior financings.

We put in place really a master financing structure back in 2003 and then with each issuance

we've been supplementing that master trust agreement and the master financing agreement with each issuance.

And we have in place the trust agreement which is the EDA's document with a bond trustee and it provides for the basic financing structure of the bonds.

And then we have a financing agreement which is between the EDA and the county.

And that's the agreement pursuant to which the county is agreeing subject to annual appropriation

to make the payment sufficient to pay the debt service on the bonds.

The EDA is serving again as a conduit issuer.

And so the EDA is the actual issuer of the bonds.

But the bondholders know that the ultimate security behind this is is the county and the county's credit being triple A is a good credit.

But they are looking for the county to make the payment.

There are no other EDA funds or accounts that are at issue or at risk for this financing.

It's only the revenues received by the county that are being pledged specifically to these bonds.

So the resolution for your consideration

sort of describes the new money projects that Courtney mentioned in sort of general scope of those.

The potential refundings of all three of the 11, 13, and 15 bonds that are potential refundings if the savings targets can be met.

approves the forms of the documents which were included or made available as a part of the agenda package.

Again, we are issuing pursuant to a supplement to the trust agreement that includes the form of the bonds themselves that are being approved.

We have a supplement to the financing agreement which will attach the new debt service schedule and that would be the county's payment obligation.

And then we have the disclosure document, the marketing material that will be used to offer the bonds to potential investors, the preliminary official statement, as it's described.

Section two of the resolution includes the parameters that we're asking you to approve.

And so we're asking the EDA board to approve these the sale of the bonds within these parameters and then delegate to the officers working with the county administration to execute on on the financing.

So you'll see in section two and not to exceed principal amount in an aggregate

some true interest cost parameters which both for tax exempt bonds and the taxable bonds.

As Cordy mentioned, you know, these have cushions in them and he certainly expects market conditions to be well within those parameters and not to exceed final maturity of 2041 and then the parameter about sale price to the underwriter and then redemption provisions.

The resolution does authorize either a competitive public offering or a negotiated public offering.

As Courtney mentioned, the current expectation is for this to be a competitive public sale.

If for some reason there was something squirrely that happened in the market and the county still wanted to proceed, sometimes we can pivot to do a negotiated sale and still get the bonds issued.

But that's

That's not likely, we're not expecting that, and the competitive public sale is the likely scenario.

Resolution authorizes, as I mentioned, the officers of the EDA to execute on the financing so long as it meets the parameters that you all approve as a part of the resolution.

I always like to you all, some of you will remember, but I always like to emphasize that there is no personal liability of EDA directors with respect to this bond issuance that's consistent with the EDA statute in the Virginia Code and the documents themselves include the similar

Disclaimers about any personal liability related to the EDA directors.

I have a quick question, please.

It is not currently set up that way consistent with prior financing since the county itself is the borrower as opposed to a private entity or a nonprofit entity.

Just a clarification question.

Are we, is the Board of Supervisors looking to us to review the financial structure of this and advise them on it?

They're looking for you to be the conduit.

We wanted to share with you kind of what was going on, but they're looking to us for structure advice that I give to Nelsie and her team and then onto the board through Nelsie and her team.

Okay, thanks.

Courtney, I just had one sort of practical question.

So does the interest rate for the taxable and the non-taxable the same?

They're not, the taxable rates can be higher.

They're separate.

We'll actually sell those separate from the, so to have a series A, which is taxable in series B that's tax exempt.

And Chris, I may have them backwards.

The refundings will actually be all in with the new money.

We sell those as one big series.

One other item I would add, although you didn't ask the question, I feel it's appropriate to provide this to the EDA.

We want to get back on an every other year schedule for issuing bonds.

The county has not issued bonds for four years.

And quite frankly, it's not best to do that and use our own cash to support the capital funds that we have for the last four years.

and we would use potentially the line of credit and the off year to reimburse ourselves.

But that is stuff that we'll be working through with Courtney and the treasury management team led by Daniel to make that determination.

That's a great point, Nelson.

When we did the line of credit, I think we set it up.

So we may see you sooner than in a couple of years just to get ourselves back in alignment.

But that is the plan kind of going forward.

Jim, did you have anything you wanted to add or questions or comments?

I have looked at everything and it's really a normal process except this may well be a public issue which is of course different because of the prospectus that needs to be drafted and fine-tuned but everything looks fine so far.

Chris has been a tremendous help as always.

Thank you, Jim.

So it's following up a little bit on what George had asked, and it regards the relationship between the EDA and the trustee.

I take it from the six supplemental agreements

that the EDA won't be administering the funds that actually the trustee will be doing all the work in that respect.

That's correct.

The trust agreement already sets up like a project fund, the cost of issuance accounts and the bond fund.

And so the EDA's role is important obviously at the beginning to issue the bonds, but then with step back and after

After the bonds are issued, the trustee will step in the role of administering the bond proceeds and there would be a requisition process for the county to requisition the money to get payments, to reimburse themselves or to make payments going forward on project costs.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

But the bondholders are really looking for the bond trustee to sort of take on that responsibility to sort of administer the use of the proceeds going forward.

So, Courtney, I know this was outside the scope of what you're here to talk about today, but I would like to talk just a little bit about the difference between the types of bonds we're issuing today and bonds that we can issue to nonprofit organizations and how the bonds can be actually used to charge a fee for those as a sustainable income model for the county.

Sure, and I may even turn to Chris who's even more knowledgeable than I am on some of these pieces because I deal almost exclusively with local governments, water and sewer authorities, and I don't do housing bonds and like corporate bonds and things like that.

Chris's firm deals with some of those more than we do.

But typically, like a 501c3, which is a not-for-profit, private schools are considered, for instance, not-for-profits.

Typically those types of entities that come through EDAs and IDAs in Virginia have been charged fees.

Those are usually

negotiated, discussed ahead of time.

Sometimes some of the EDAs have them in their charters, things like that, so that the entity coming knows in advance that they're going to have to pay a fee to use you as a conduit.

And that's typically what we've seen around the state.

And Chris was correct.

We do a number of these around for local governments.

And typically the local governments are not charged a fee for doing the transaction because usually they're the ones funding the

I don't know, Chris, you want to add to that, maybe talk a little bit more about some of the ones you're seeing late.

Sure.

This EDA probably has been approached and I know has done fun financings for some private schools for continuing care retirement communities as well for hospitals that are that are structured for the IRS purposes as 501 C3 nonprofit entities.

They need to, I mean, they have the ability under the IRS code to access tax exempt debt, but they have to go through a governmental issuer like the EDA in order to access the tax exempt market, and so historically it's been appropriate.

for EDAs to charge fees for that access.

But when you have a situation where you've got a county or a city or whatever, a true governmental entity that is benefiting from the financing itself, typically the EDAs don't charge a fee for that because

And I might add too, this might be a good point, if I could, Mr. Shearam, talk about bank qualifications, because I know, and especially Chris can kind of get into the legal side of it.

I'll let you know on the finance side of it.

In 2017, when Congress changed the tax code,

they lowered the tax rate on banks.

And so when banks charge on a taxes and basis, a bank qualified fee, they're basically passing on their tax ability to, like if they're saving because they're paying a certain amount of taxes and they're buying taxes and bonds, they pass on some of those savings to you, that's called bank qualification.

But since they're paying lower taxes, we really haven't seen a lot of benefit

on bank qualification for some of these smaller projects.

And for those that may not know, it's bank qualifications only when the county is issuing less than 10 million in a year.

So obviously, we're going to be issuing more than 10 million.

So no one can come to you and ask for your bank qualified, whatever remainder you might have, because there's not going to be any

of calendar year 21.

And I know that was a case on a situation not long ago, it may have been last year for you guys.

And when we did the line of credit, we basically did the same thing.

We're just not seeing a lot.

We just had a bid for another Virginia locality.

And a lot of times we'll ask, what is your BQ rate?

What is your non-BQ rate?

And I think

I think 9 out of 10 or 7 out of the 8 that we got were basically, it didn't matter, bank qualification was the same whether it was BQ or non-BQ.

So just so you know, unless the tax rate goes back up on banks,

They're not paying as much on taxes, so they don't have really anything to pass on in the ability for big deal.

So as I understand it, really the issue comes down to whether we've got

For Bank Qualified, whether we've got the capacity, if we're not using that up for Albemarle County.

So I think it's a, the question is, if we're, if we're doing financings for Alb, for the county, then, you know, we don't have the capacity to do it for somebody else where we might be earning a fee.

You don't have that capacity.

Exactly.

And there has been some discussion of raising the limit from $10 million up to $30 million.

That's been kicked around in Congress, been kicked around now for a couple of years.

It's been talked about as part of possible infrastructure bill as well.

So we'll keep you up to date if we hear of change.

But that's just at this point talk.

And just a quick clarification.

If the EDA agrees to do this financing on behalf of the county, it just forecloses a nonprofit borrower coming to you and saying, do you have BQ capacity?

But it doesn't stop you from doing a regular tax exempt deal for that borrower.

There is no cap per se on the EDA's ability to issue debt of any dollar amount when you take out the bank qualification topic.

Hopefully that answered your question.

OK, good.

All right.

Well, then any other questions?

All right, any discussion before I ask for a motion?

Although I guess I could ask for a motion and then we can have discussion.

With someone with better glasses needs to read it.

I move that the Economic Development Authority of Albemarle County, Virginia adopt the resolution as presented relating to the financing of the Series 202-1 project and authorize the chair and vice chair

All right.

All right.

So there's a second.

All right.

Is there any discussion on the motion?

Director Ray?

Yes.

Director Munson?

Yes.

All right, and Director McNaughton disqualified himself.

All right, thank you.

Mr.

Chair, thank you very much.

Thank you to the EDA for your support of the Albemarle County government.

All right, so Roger,

Well, thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Really just got a couple of short updates we wanted to make the directors aware of.

One is that the county is gonna receive funds from the American Rescue Plan.

And that is gonna come in two different tranches.

We believe one in July, one in next July.

The Board of Supervisors, a month or so back, agreed in principle to allocate a portion of those funds, which is 21 million, a little over $21 million in total, I believe.

Some of that goes to Scottsville, but as a general rule,

It's going to be around $10 million or so in two separate tranches.

They've set aside $4 million in a bucket of funding called an economic vitality.

And in that bucket would be for economic development purposes as well as human services purposes.

So our team is working in concert with the Department of Social Services, the Finance Department, as well as the Office of Equity and Inclusion

to come up with some of the best plans to use those funds with the greatest ROI.

The finance department has taken the lead in getting this information to the board.

We're behind the scenes providing conceptual ideas for the county exec's concurrence and the board to later approve.

We just wanted you to be aware that a great deal of the work that we're doing behind the scenes is in preparation for how to best use some portion of the funds that I just mentioned to help our businesses either survive or reconstitute our economy.

Roger, I don't have a question, but as you mentioned, Scottsville is getting a similar grant and I would be really interested in what kinds of projects you all are thinking about doing.

We've been having a lot of discussion about what we think we'd like to do, but

I'm always interested in having some other thoughts in that process.

Well, we have quite a few ideas going through the pipeline of approval.

I think it would be appropriate for us to run this through our county exec's office once that gets vetted.

I'll be glad to sit down with you, Stuart, share what those particular ideas are, both those that made it through the process and those that did not.

I believe the finance department's going to the board on June the 16th to talk about some of these ideas.

Fantastic.

That sounds great.

Yes, sir.

Well, Kat, I'm not the driver of that project.

I'll share that concept with the folks who are driving those.

I do know that the process has been transparent to date.

It was shared at the board meeting in April.

Mr. Richardson, please correct me if I misspeak, where there was some general discussion about what to include and what not to include.

And then I guess it goes back on June the 16th for the public to see what's going as well.

So I wouldn't say it's not transparent

Director Imhoff, but I do see your point and would be happy to entertain any ideas that this group has.

Mr. Richardson, do you have any other comments that you'd like to add to this discussion?

Not at this time, okay.

I will be happy to share that information with this group and give you an opportunity to weigh in.

The other item that I just wanted to make you aware of is give you just a little bit of a tourism update and talk a little bit about the average daily rates.

And J.T., if you could pull up that information and I'll just kind of walk through it as quickly as possible.

Did we lose J.T.?

There it is.

I promise I'm not going to go through this eye chart.

But what I do want to point out is what you're looking at is really Smith's travel research report.

And it does sort of an in-depth look at how travel and tourism is doing across the United States.

But specifically, you're looking at information as it relates to Virginia.

They measure the average daily rates that a county or community is able to charge.

They measure an occupancy rate, and then they combine those two numbers and give you a revpar number.

That revpar number is a way to look at the health of the travel and tourism community.

I'm gonna ask you to, if you would, J.T., to look at the, you may have to move around just a little bit, to go to the Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and look at IDOM,

I believe it's the other direction, J.T.

There it is under Virginia area.

So as you can look and go over to line item A.G., which J.T.

has highlighted, you can see that the average daily rates

for this particular week is as high if not higher than all the comparable markets say for I believe Stanton Harrisonburg.

I'll also mention that we compared this number to May of 2019 and our average daily rates have exceeded our May of 2019 numbers.

Why this is important is much like our hospitality and tourism market was the first to be injured, it's also a leading indicator of economic recovery.

Suffice it to say, this is extremely good news in terms of what the economy may look like now and moving forward as travelers are returning and they're actually returning in paying rates similar to what they paid in 2019.

This trend started a little over a month ago and is continuing to incline and trend upward.

We just wanted to make you aware there are some leading indicators that our economy is on its way to recovery.

Roger, just a quick question.

And I should know more about this, but did they close the tourism office on the downtown mall and is it now a roving office?

I'd love to

Yeah, so they closed their office and accepting visitors on the downtown mall.

They opened a back office to do work and then they purchased two vans to have a traveling mobile visitor center.

The CACVB board approved that roughly.

A year ago, the tourism vans are now out in our community where the people are.

They're serving more people at a lower cost and hopefully increasing the daily spend average while those folks are here helping our local economy.

It's really hard to track and determine, you know, would people have spent that money before being able to meet this mobile visitor center.

And do you think with, you know, post COVID, I love using that phrase, post COVID, do you think that they might go back to using volunteers and having some presence on the downtown mall?

Yeah, I don't believe that's the plan.

You know, I can't speak for the CACVB board as a whole.

Roger, you might just mention that the CACDB is very hopeful and has been working with the University of Virginia with their new to come visitor center and gateway to the community.

We will be able to have something at that facility as well, which will really be good.

The complex they're building over on Ivy Road.

Right.

Yeah, we've had the van down in Scottsville a couple times.

It's great.

Well, Mr.

Okay.

I do have one question before we go.

Our next item is a closed session.

I don't know whether I thought I might ask if we know the county has gotten feedback on sort of meetings and what the likely plan is in terms of having meetings in person or where we where we are on that.

I thought it might make sense to have that

I do not have an update.

I do believe there's an agenda item on Wednesday to talk about this very subject, Chairman Long.

Well, and Jeff, I saw Jeff unmute.

He's probably going to speak to it, but you're correct.

We do have an update on our agenda tomorrow.

And since Jeff is there, I'll let Jeff speak to that.

I'm sorry, I hit it twice accidentally.

Supervisor McKeel, thank you very much for recognizing me to speak to that.

We do have the district who will be at our meeting tomorrow afternoon.

Dr. Bonds will come and give an overview as to the numbers in Albemarle County and the work that we're doing in coordination with Blue Ridge for this region, but specifically for Albemarle County.

Our incident management team continues to work hand in glove with Blue Ridge Health District on a variety of issues.

And we will be before the board tomorrow afternoon to talk about the alignment with the governor's office and with his most recent executive order and the loosening of the restrictions across Virginia.

On your specific question on meetings, we have no plans right now as a county government.

We do not have any plans to go back to in-person meetings.

in the next little bit.

We're going to continue to monitor it.

If the governor maintains the executive order beyond June 30th, we'll be okay to continue that.

If the governor discontinues that executive order, we're working with

Our legal department, but we do have a period of time that we can go beyond June 30th.

I'm hesitant to give a date as to when we would consider going back live, but I would say that for the immediate future, for immediate planning purposes, for this board and for other boards that are connected to county government, that we're going to maintain our current posture.

Certainly I would guess through the summer, and we're going to continue to monitor that.

I think the final thing I'd say, and Supervisor McKeel may want to weigh in on this, is that once we do look to go back live, we're going to be exploring the possibility of looking at live along with participation from the public virtually.

I think our public would certainly appreciate that.

We've conducted well over 400 meetings virtual, and our public participation is as high as it's ever been for these meetings.

And so I think there's a lot of advantages to us continuing to look at doing that.

And thank you, Jeff.

I appreciate it.

It is amazing how our public engagement, in some cases, I know staff has said it's doubled and tripled.

And so I think the public, many people in the public, while there are some folks that are wanting us to go back in person, there are a lot of folks that want us to figure out a hybrid.

I call it a hybrid of some sort.

But that's going to take some thought and some planning.

And it gets to what Jeff has said.

So we don't want to just rush back to the county office building, as wonderful as it is, and then leave lots of people behind.

So thank you, though.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, I do think it's, you know, the ability to have people participate remotely, I think is gonna be a real benefit, assuming that it can be done or the statutes get changed to allow those sorts of things.

So, all right, well, thanks for that.

And then I guess we will move to a closed session.

So I moved, whoops.

I did move, okay, there we go.

I move that the Albemarle County Economic Development Authority go into a closed meeting as authorized by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act section 2.23711A of the Code of Virginia under subsection five to discuss and consider prospective businesses and industries and the expansion of existing business where no previous announcement has been made of the businesses or industries interest in locating or expanding their facilities in the community

to wit the location and development of Project Leopard and the location and development of Perrone Robotics in Albemarle County, subsection six to discuss and consider the investment of public funds where bargaining and negotiation is involved and where if made public initially the financial interests of the authority in the county would be adversely affected to wit a performance agreement related to Project Leopard and Perrone Robotics in Albemarle County.

Second.

All in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

All right.

The motion is adopted.

So we'll move into closed session.

We need to beam the rest of us up.

Hey, Roger.

Yeah, we'll be contacting you.

Feel free to invite J.T.

Oh, well, yeah, absolutely.

Well, Roger came once before, and we were talking last night about upcoming agenda possibilities, and they said, we haven't seen the economic development in Roger for a long time.

We'd like to have him back.

And I was, yes!

All good.

Okay.

Can you guys hear me now?

All right.

All right.

I switched over to my phone.

I somehow messed that up last time, but I think it's working okay now.

All right.

We have to do that by roll call, so I'll call roll.

Director Ray.

Aye.

He said aye.

There we go.

Director McNaughton?

Aye.

Let's see, we'll go back to Stuart.

He may not have made it.

Yeah.

Director Munson's not showing up on participants list.

All right, well everybody who made the transition.

All right.

All right.

Let's see, Director Munson, in regards to certification of the closed meeting,

Do you certify that only public business matters that were subject of the closed meeting motion were discussed and considered?

I do.

All right.

All right.

I do have, well, under other matters, I would like to just point out that J.T.

's wife is due June 1, and he will be taking some leave to be a good supportive father, as he should.

Yes, thank you.

Thank you, Roger.

Very excited.

If anybody's interested, I will send along photos.

Please.

All right.

Well, our next meeting is June 15th.

Bye.