City Council Work Session   3/15/2021

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All right, good afternoon.

Thank you.

Brian, if you go ahead and the presentation.

Okay.

Next slide.

This afternoon, we're just going to continue to provide council with the monthly snapshot of the revenues and expenses for both the general fund and the utility funds.

And also wanted to touch on the steps we've identified as ways of managing the shortfall because there have been some additional developments as you all are aware of in the past

week or so that we wanted to touch on as well and not ignore or overshadow that as well.

Following slides, we're just going to go over some of the highlights of these monthly reports.

More detailed info can be found on the report that's given to council and is going to be posted online here shortly.

The revenue team that develops these projections meets every other week.

I tell you this over and over again, but I just want to highlight these folks because there's a lot of work that goes into looking at these revenues and putting these projections together.

And this is more of a thank you for the folks in the commissioner of revenue, treasurer, economic development offices, city assessor, finance, budget staff, city manager, all of us that are all of those that help put these together.

It's a big thank you for all the work that they do, that they

put into these reports.

This first slide just represents, again, I like to show this graphically.

Some people don't like to look at just charts of numbers, so I want to put up some graphs to kind of give a perspective of the continued decline in the revenue projections.

The top line here shows the total budget assets were adopted, then our most recent forecast and revision, and then the final row in red is if things got substantially worse in

in terms of increased cases, another higher outbreaks, and we continue to revert backwards through the stages and had another economic downturn.

Next slide.

Brian, could I ask a quick question?

Is that further downturn based on the rate

So there was a lot of, so we looked at it and a lot of it was if we had a further economic downturn, how would that affect a lot of our

There's not a blanket formula to go across.

So we looked at each one of some, especially the larger revenues, such as sales, meals, lodging, and did revised projections that said, okay, here's where we think we are now.

If we have continued kind of, I guess, shutdown or reversion through the stages where the restrictions got tighter, we could expect to see some declines in these areas.

And

working the percentages based on prior year actuals, pre-COVID numbers.

We also looked at what that could potentially do to, say, our real estate collections in the second half, our personal property collections in the second half, and made some assumptions on some things.

Parks and Recreation would be one that if we continue to go backwards, we would not open up at all, so we would have no additional revenue from what we've collected to this point, and so there would be

There's lots of different factors that we put in throughout.

We can't say that it's like, oh, if we get to another X amount of cases or something like that.

We didn't quite use that number.

Okay.

I had a quick question.

Sure.

I was just getting to that point.

So thank you.

What I was getting ready to say is we haven't made any change.

These are essentially the same numbers we've been showing council the last two months.

We had told council that with each quarter, we would come back with revisions so that we're not constantly changing the numbers and saying, oh, we're going, we have a good month or a bad month and we go up on a revenue and then back down on a revenue to keep from having that seesaw.

We're looking at every quarter.

So with the end of March, we're going to have another quarter's worth of data to go off of from our in our models and our projections.

And so

Okay I just I wanted to make sure the 13 million that we're looking at is not

on top of something else.

So that $13 million that was on that prior slide, and you'll see on the next slide, that's the total amount of decrease.

So that would be on top of the 9.9 and where we're anticipating finishing right now.

Hopefully things are trending, you know, right now things are trending in the right direction and, you know, never say never, things can always turn on a dime, but right now they're trending, you know, even better than our current forecast, but we'll have to see where that goes as we get another month worth of data in, because like I said, you know, we have one month that goes up and exceeding our projections and the next month's below, and so it's just kind of been hard to extrapolate data and forecast over throughout this time frame.

But again, as I said, we'll come back to you next month once we have this additional month worth of data and we'll have three quarters in the books that we can work from working in these conditions and that should give us more confidence on our next set of projections on where we think we might finish out the year.

But again, we're showing you those multiple scenarios just to make sure that everyone's aware of, hey, this is where we are right now, but there is still that possibility that, you know, things could get worse and kind of show that what we were anticipating as a potential worst case scenario.

But again, overall, we're looking at about $9.9 million right now, about 5% from the original adopted budget.

And as always, we're monitoring these revenues on a monthly and weekly basis.

We're meeting right now, especially during the budget time, meeting several times a week.

We'll continue to see volatility month to month on some of our large ones.

Brian, if you could go back one slide for a second, please.

We're continuing to see a little bit of volatility on some of our larger economic consumer driven revenues, sales, meals, lodging.

We're seeing a lot of improvement as we went through the beginning of the year.

And then the revenues that we got in in December showed a sharp decline.

However, January and February actually look better compared to the receipts from the prior month and to our expected

to our projections.

So we're hoping that that revenue collected in December was an outlier, but we're not 100% sure until we get the more data.

So therefore, we're trying to extrapolate some kind of a sustainable trend has been difficult because we've seen those swings from month to month.

We've added back in the year-to-date projection columns, which is based off of our current forecast, the year-to-date projections of our current forecast, as that's the most relevant for making the projections right now.

And so while you can see we're running ahead of certain projections, most notably real estate, we don't want to give a false sense of security because overall, again, we're still projecting to come in at that at least $9 million below our originally budget figure.

One area on this particular slide that we have discussed with Council as part of the twenty two budget process is the people or the business licenses.

We're now expecting FY21 revised estimates to exceed what is in the budget and what is shown on the side of the six point two to five million.

That revenue was due at the beginning of the month, and those collections are still being sorted through and recorded.

And the amount that this revenue is going to go up, we're really not going to know until we get to the end of this month, which is another reason why holding off till the end of another month gives us more data to help with these trends.

So next month, we should be able to give you the revised 21 figures as we've been talking about the revised 22 figures as we've gone through the budget process so far.

And next slide.

And again, these are just kind of the rest of our revenues.

Again, as I said, we're still running slightly ahead of projection, mainly because of our real estate and where we would project to be there.

But another item on the you know that I want to point out is meals tax.

We also have

a dedicated portion on a corresponding expenditure side.

So as that fluctuates, we will adjust the meals tax transfer as well.

So that will adjust on the expenditure side as well as the revenue side.

Next slide.

And again, just one more time to show that kind of this overall change from our original adopted budget to where we are now in terms of FY21 revenues.

I'm not ignoring the federal dollars that passed.

We'll get to that on the last slide of the presentation because that's still a big unknown, but we'll move to that in a minute.

Next slide, please.

On the expenditures, again, we're eight months through the fiscal year, basically 66.7%.

Again, I say this every month, and it sounds like a broken record with a lot of this stuff, but just caution against spreading everything evenly over 12 months because of the

Some things come in on quarterly payments and some things are due at the beginning of the year versus the end of the year.

You can use this as a general idea, that 66% as a general idea, but don't get locked into if it's above or below, then it's out of whack with where we should be.

We feel like we're on track with all of these areas.

And as you can see, most of them are below that 66%.

If you were to spread it out over 12 months, Healthy Families is above

based on the payments to our outside agencies because we have three quarters worth of payments that have already been made to our outside agencies, which is one of our larger things, as well as the CHAP and rent relief payments, which are the actuals to date for them are over 70% because they include approximately half of the real estate relief program allocations and all of the CHAP program and rent relief program allocations for 21.

Non-departmental, that's our transfers, such as transfers to debt, transit,

social services, et cetera.

And those are done as one-time transfers and in many cases adjusted at the end of the year.

So that's why those are running slightly ahead of that 70% figure as well.

Next slide.

On this final slide, we showed you this a couple of times just to highlight the ways that staff and management is currently proposing to manage this shortfall.

As we go through, one of the items we did just this past week here, potential additional future federal funding, COVID relief funding.

We're still going through what that means for us and restrictions and where it can be used, but we do anticipate

using some of this, and we still need to figure out exactly how much we're going to get, but we do anticipate using some of this to help us manage the shortfall on top of that 7.6 million in our COVID reserve that we had set aside

in FY21 already.

So hopefully, between those, we'll be able to manage those and not have to dip into a lot of these one-time sources.

But we're also, again, still monitoring the departments and looking at departmental savings as well.

And so we will, at the end of the year, when we close out our books, we'll come back to you and let you know what the situation was and how we had to close that gap and make it balanced.

But there's still a long way to go and a lot that can happen between now and the end of the year.

And with that, that was the last slide.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

We have some other individuals from the revenue team that are here as well that can answer questions if you have more specific questions that I can't answer.

But otherwise, as I said, next month we'll come back to you with some revised projections and potentially a little more detail on some of these items.

Thank you, everyone.

That last page,

Okay, thank you.

Are there any other questions?

Thank you, everyone.

Chief Smith, Yes, please.

Chief Smith, Brian, you may start the slide presentation.

We appreciate the opportunity to be with you this afternoon.

I tell you, it's a very exciting time.

that we're experiencing in the fire department.

And I felt it was appropriate and timely council with an update regarding one of our key and as it relates to our community and the service delivery model of the Charlottesville Fire Department.

The discussion is closely aligned with our strategic plan, actually goal five, which speaks to services and response.

Here in 2020, the department expanded its scope to include an intentional focus

on Community Risk Reduction, or CRR, we abbreviate it.

And based on risk assessments, data, and outcomes, they'll change from the traditional fire service practices that you probably are comfortable with and have heard.

Since January, the efforts in Charlottesville gained regional and national attention within the fire service industry.

And this presentation provides insight on the background of our initiatives related to CRR and how did the

and realignment are positively impacting the Charlottesville community.

Next slide, please.

As the new Fire Chief, I thought it was very important for me to share with you these initiatives.

This is a quick look of our current organizational framework, our current organizational chart, which depicts the bureaus that guide our team.

Deputy Chief Powers has been very instrumental in coordinating

the efforts related to community risk reduction.

The presentation he will be discussing today exemplifies the fire department's efforts to create an efficiency in service delivery, matching resources with the needs of our community, and better understand the differences with the city's various neighborhoods.

At this point, I'd like to turn it over to Deputy Chief Powers.

Thank you, Chief Smith.

Thank you, Mayor Walker and members of City Council for letting me jump into your work session.

And Mr. Manager, thank you for all the support with the fire department.

January of 2020 is when CFD reorganized and added the third deputy chief and called that the deputy chief of community risk reduction.

We're one of the only fire departments, one of the few fire departments across the United States that has

invested in community risk reduction at an executive level.

And I'll talk to you a little bit about why that's so important.

Next slide, please.

Within our portfolio of community risk reduction,

The neighborhood risk assessment is probably one of the most impactful things that we can do for our community and provide the right services.

But beyond that, we're also looking at performance analysis, the public information officer falls within our portfolio, a fire department accreditation, our ISO one rating, our strategic plan, our frequent 911 utilizers and a lot of our self assessment.

And then obviously, a majority of my staff is the fire marshal's office.

Next slide, please.

So over the next few minutes, I would like to talk a little bit about what community risk reduction is.

From a fire service standpoint, there's still a very large misunderstanding of what this is, and I want to let you guys have the opportunity to see the differences in where we've come as a traditional fire service to where we're going, and specifically here in the city of Charlottesville.

Next slide.

So from a traditional standpoint, we've always heard of fire prevention as a part of the fire department.

We're changing that mindset and we're taking it from a section within the fire department and making it an organizational process into community risk reduction.

And one of the major players is a grant funded nonprofit at the federal level that's called Vision 2020.

And back in 2005 is where the phrase was first coined.

And we started to see this change across the United States and in Canada.

Next up next slide, please.

What community risk reduction really is, it's a cycle.

It's understanding what the things are that are happening in our community and prioritizing them

and then finding the right resources to mitigate them and then putting people out onto the streets and maybe the fire department and maybe the police department and maybe some of our community partners.

And then we're gonna evaluate it to figure out how well we're mitigating those risks with the right people in the right place.

And then we're redoing this entire thing again.

So that's a complete change in what we've done in the past.

And this is where we're going as a city of Charlottesville.

Next slide, please.

So one of the major changes that we'll see in Charlottesville is these blanketed programs that we provide to the entire city are typically no longer appropriate for communities because so many times the entire city doesn't need a program on cooking fires or pedestrians crossing the streets.

Maybe it's certain intersections or certain neighborhoods.

Next slide.

So we found that instead of looking at this from a one size fits all or a blanket program,

The city is built upon 19 established neighborhoods and with defined borders, and we have the opportunity to get inside those neighborhoods and really tell the story.

Next slide.

So within those neighborhoods, we can start to look at data and have an understanding of who doesn't have vehicle access, who doesn't have internet access, where the folks are that are using food stamps every day, who has health insurance and who doesn't.

And we can do all of this through data and we can do it in very, very small areas and start to tell the story of the folks that are living and working within the city of Charlottesville.

Next slide, please.

We can take it a step further and look at the age demographics, look at the languages that are spoken and even the levels of education that our community has from the folks that live here and then the folks that work here or visit the area.

Next slide.

So as we bring in more and more information, and we're bringing in information from all over,

I can start to tell which neighborhoods have a higher rental occupancy rather than an owner occupied.

I can understand where our vacant homes are and start to look at vacant homes as a piece of point data or understand vacant homes as a community.

I can start to look at the daytime population shift and look at it from a daytime density or a nighttime density and start to compare apples to apples.

Next slide.

And when we do that, we can start to pull out what's called key planning indicators and start to know that in certain areas of our city may have the highest nighttime density, and we need to understand that from a public safety standpoint.

We also need to understand where our structure fires are, but more so, we need to know where asthma is occurring, allergic reactions, hazardous materials calls, and cardiac arrests, because all of those risks in areas of the city can be mitigated with our partners and within the fire department.

and then that drives what our engagement focus is because some cities, some city neighborhoods may not need a high utilization of hands-only CPR training where other areas do.

Next slide, please.

So we've built these for all of our neighborhoods.

We've dived, we've

dived or dove into the deep end of the pool to really understand and tell the story.

So we can tell where the, using data, we can tell where the houses are that most likely don't have working smoke alarms.

Next slide.

We can look at the areas that need to have what we call pre-incident planning, where we take firefighters and take them out into the community and talk about what kind of incidents could happen in a specific location.

and we start to partner with some of our other agencies as we do this.

Next slide.

Because when we understand that our neighborhoods and we understand our data, we start to understand that community risk reduction drives community level program development and delivery rather than a citywide or a one size fits all.

But we take it one step further.

Next slide.

And when we take it one step further, we understand that it's not just the community, but maybe it's the individual populations within those communities because single parent homes and dual parent homes sometimes pose much different risks and homes with the elderly or the disabled or even student housing all have risks that should not be mitigated with a one size fits all where we can start to provide a better community and public engagement.

Next slide.

But a lot of times we can even take it a step further and understand the characteristics of those populations through mental health or drug use, you know, the living conditions that people are in, in the high crime areas, we have the opportunity to tell that story and get the resources to the folks that need it the most.

Next slide.

So this is what Charlottesville Fire Department is doing.

We're developing a community risk assessment that we're going to call our Neighborhood Risk Assessment, and we're going to

We're going to be able to deploy it through a publicly accessible tool and allow our firefighters, our police officers, our social workers, all of our city partners to have a good understanding of what our city poses, what types of risks our city poses, and we can take it to the next step with our community with services and service delivery.

Next slide.

So here's some screenshots of what our neighborhood risk assessment is.

No other fire department in North America is doing a risk assessment to the level that we're doing it here.

And I think that we have the opportunity because of the community partnerships that we've developed and the resources that we have, we can do that more so than anybody else.

Next slide.

We're not only looking at the fire department's deployment of resources and looking at it from a city standpoint.

Next slide.

But we can also look at some of those risks that may not be at the top of our minds like earthquakes.

And so we have data that's available to show where all of the earthquakes have occurred over the last 100 to 150 years.

And when this comes out, it's kind of actually neat that that earthquake that's sitting in the middle of Charlottesville happened at the Sprint Pavilion in 1929.

I think it was Christmas Eve in 1929.

Next slide, please.

and we break it down into those neighborhoods that our city is built upon.

And we've developed a total risk assessment for each of our neighborhoods, but it's dynamic.

As we run more calls, as we find more data, as we do more things, it changes our risk and we can start to, and it'll change here as well.

Next slide.

So each of these neighborhood risk assessments for each of our individual 19 neighborhoods have been built.

Next slide.

And it's a comprehensive risk assessment that really drives the efficiency of our services and programs.

And it gives our company officers on fire trucks and it gives our community partners the ability to understand at this intersection, at this neighborhood, at this street corner, these are the things that we should be doing for our people.

Next slide.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't thank all of the partners over the last 12 months that have really engaged with community risk reduction, both internally within the city and externally from an outside of a city standpoint.

And a huge thank you to all of our partners because without partnerships, the fire department can't do all the things that we are able to push out and get to our community.

But I would briefly like to talk about just one outcome that really highlights what community risk reduction does for our community.

Next slide.

So for more than two years, we responded out to an address in Charlottesville and helped an Army veteran to his third floor apartment because he was disabled.

For two years, almost every day we would carry him up to the third floor because there was no one else for him to call.

And when I came in in January of 2020, that was one of the first things that I took a look at.

I needed to understand, you know, I'm glad that we were able to provide that service to him, but I also knew that we weren't the right service to provide for him.

So

Through a lot of work and with help from Department of Social Services, Human Services, Region 10, lots of different folks came together.

We were able to find the gym, which is pictured here.

A local nonprofit gym agreed and said that, hey, sir, if you come work out with us for free and get healthy, we'll carry you up and down the stairs anytime you need to.

So since middle of July, I think that he's only called two times.

and that's a huge outcome for us.

He's now healthier, he has better access to services, and he's no longer relying on the 911 services to get him up to the third floor.

Next slide.

So the last thing I want to talk about real quickly is an understanding of what community risk reduction really is and how it ties into Charlottesville.

So from an impact standpoint,

We are always, the city of Charlottesville is always looking at performance.

So next slide.

We're always looking at how quickly from the time a dispatch occurs to the time our fire trucks or ambulances are rolling down the street.

We call that turnout time and we measure that constantly.

Next slide.

We're also measuring from the time that somebody calls 911 to the time we get on scene.

We call that total response time and we measure that on every incident that we respond to.

Next slide.

But from a community risk reduction standpoint, what I want to know is I want to interact with two primary benchmarks, and that's incident and recovery.

Next slide.

So when we talk about incidents and recovery, either we are going to prevent the incident from ever occurring through good education or public engagement or the right engineering, and we call that prevention, right?

Or we need to next address recovery and slide recovery as close to the incident as we can.

And there are so many opportunities

to either prevent the incident from occurring or have the right things in place to bring recovery close over to incidents.

So next slide, and you can actually skip one more slide ahead.

So this is our community risk reduction opportunities and influences, and this is how I explain to both firefighters and non-public safety personnel that community risk reduction is not just a section of the fire department,

it's an organization wide impact and I know this is hard to read and I'm happy to share this with anybody that if you can't see it on your slides that I provided but

It gives us the opportunity to understand that good firefighter training, good social media messaging, good code enforcement inspections, training of bystanders, engagement with the 911 center, engagement with our city council can provide either the prevention of incidents or having the right resources in place to bring recovery as close to the incident as possible.

So next slide.

So again, I think I've met everybody on our call except for Mr. Boyle.

So welcome to the city, Mr. Manager.

My contact information is there.

If you have any questions or would like to know more information, please let me know.

We will have our neighborhood risk assessment available to the council very soon.

And I would like to be able to share that with you because I think that that'll provide some insight into the community.

And I really, really do need help.

So when we do provide that, when Dr. Smith provides that to you, reach back out and say, hey, have you ever looked at it from this way?

I'm new to the city.

I'm probably the newest person to the city here.

Well, actually, except for Dr. Smith.

I'm relatively new to the city, so I need as much help as I can.

So when I do share that with everybody, please provide some feedback if you have the time.

But thank you for the opportunity.

Yeah, thank you.

for the presentation.

Thank you, Chief Smith, too.

And that's just, I mean, I like the story, the connection, knowing that when departments are working together well,

And that way, that was really all good to, you know, really good to hear.

And as someone who has had, you know, the firefighters come for family members and emergencies.

My son got his arm stuck in a mailbox downtown by the post office once, you know, neighbor and cardiac arrest issue.

You know, last summer, a major incident with suicide outside my house.

I mean, just

I have seen response throughout the years that have been very promising.

So it's good to see, to hear what I've already seen firsthand

a lot of times, and it's good to hear that you all are working to even improve, but that inter-departmental response to something that other people may have considered a small thing, but I know that it's really meaningful for that individual for his life, so those type of things are really good to hear.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

And I guess, to that end, I was just kind of curious if you could just talk about, you know, how that interaction is happening.

Yeah, so it's,

I think that if there's an unintended effect of COVID, it's this.

The ability to connect with people not in person anymore and do it efficiently has done a tremendous amount for the Charlottesville Fire Department from the community risk reduction side.

On a monthly basis, we're bringing the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad, social services, mental health,

Human Services all together on the same call and talking about some very specific locations within our city that's using 911 a lot.

And that call was just a few hours ago.

And then once we do that, like tomorrow morning, I'm meeting another community partner at a house to make sure that they have the right services based on the phone call today.

It's just this constant, it's

It's really interesting because when you start to provide a little bit of information and start to ask questions, people start to get involved.

And I'm a big fan of the second meeting.

I can come to you and tell you all the great things that I want to do and support the Charlottesville Fire Department, but maybe you're not the right one to do it, but you do know the right person.

And then we end up having coffee two days later, and now we're generating outcomes and really impacting the community where we wanted to be.

So it's all in these baby steps.

You know, if we try to bite too much off, it's never going to work.

Talk about the scope of services that the fire department generally delivers.

Realize that as we move, as we evolve,

of our service delivery model has changed and continues to change.

So when we talk about long term sustainability, we talk about how our strategic plan, how we align our strategic plan and our vision for the city of Charlottesville and the fire department is important to understand that data is going to be the key element that's going to help us drive us in the direction to provide a more comprehensive service.

not only the quantitative data, but also the qualitative data, having the conversations with community stakeholders and individuals and board members and so on and so forth to ensure that we approach it from a mixed methods approach and really look at how we're doing business moving forward as we try to align ourselves with meeting the goals of our strategic plan that was recently updated.

So with that, if there are no more questions, we thank you for the opportunity again.

And again, I commend Chief Powers for taking the helm and moving forward and doing what we do.

Firefighters and emergency services provide a comprehensive level of services to our community.

One more question.

It will be.

Yes, ma'am.

Yeah, it'll be available to everybody.

Okay.

They don't mean anything.

Just wondering.

Hey, Brian, Mr. Wheeler, thank you for advancing my slides.

All right.

It's the Open Society Foundation grant report.

In July of last year, we were awarded a grant from the Open Society Foundation, the Emma Lazarus Campaign on Cities program gave us $250,000 after we applied for money jointly with the county.

for emergency relief for people who were unable to receive the federal stimulus checks.

And the campaign was specifically focused on folks who were unable to meet the requirements for the stimulus checks because of their worker status, whether that was because they were domestic workers, often working under the table, or

if they were immigrants, migrant workers, undocumented workers.

I think there might be one other descriptor.

And so they had had some really incredible success with direct financial relief for such workers in New York City and also in Los Angeles.

And so they were reaching out to other communities to distribute the funds.

And so you all appropriated those funds on July 20th of last year.

And previously, you have allowed me to

I used $50,000 from the Human Services Fund balance to make this a $300,000 project.

And it's a very simple, straightforward project.

But I do want to say that it was really an incredible collaboration between the finance office, the treasurer's office, and human services, and a number of community partners and the county to pull this off.

It required all of these organizations to work just a little bit outside of their norm.

And so both the flexibility and the collaboration I think is laudable and something that I see as a great success.

So we knew that $300,000 was not going to be enough money to meet the totality of the need, even for this narrow subset of the population.

So we distributed the funds with three additional criteria to help our community agencies who were distributing the actual gift cards of $500 a piece

to determine who among their groups who qualify for the baseline requirements could or should get the money.

And so we included severe economic need, the presence of children under 18 years old in the household, medical vulnerability, and we allowed both the agencies and the respondents to determine

the definitions to those things was really important as we worked with existing providers that we knew that we were not going to be able to deliver these gift cards directly to the folks who were eligible, both local governments

While we are good people and have good intentions, we don't generally have good working relationships with folks who don't meet the federal requirements for assistance.

And so these are folks who tend to believe that local government is in conversation with federal government and therefore and also potentially with ICE.

And so it was important that we used existing organizations who had those existing trusting relationships.

We trusted the organizations to then distribute the funds

As part of that, we understood that we could not keep any identifying data.

And so we asked the agencies to be the maintainers of any identifying data, but not to pass that on to us.

We did ask them to pass on descriptors to us.

And so that information is what I'd like to offer you today.

So we worked with a number of community agencies.

Some of them were actually kind of surprising to me.

We worked with Sen Barreras, Seville Cares,

Piedmont Virginia Community College, International Neighbors, International Rescue Committee, Child Health Partnership, and both the Department of Human Services and actually Department of Social Services in both city and the county and Habitat for Humanity as our distributors.

So of the folks who received this money, 72.4% self-identified as immigrant workers, 37.6% self-identified as domestic worker.

This second number was surprising to me.

I didn't anticipate having so many folks who would identify as domestic workers in the pool.

I was glad.

15.9% is migrant workers and 3.8% is undocumented.

My guess is that's underreported.

It's not surprising how that could be 93% of the recipient households included children under 18 74% of recipient households reported severe economic risk and 20% of recipient households included someone in the household with medical vulnerability 79% identified as Hispanic or Latinx 7.4% is Asian 5.5% is black 3.8% is white

3.1 is multiple ethnicities and races and 1.2 is Native American or indigenous.

So I just wanted to let you all know who received that money and also have a public shout out to the treasurer's office and the finance department for their flexibility and helping us secure these gift cards.

It was an amazing day to work with a bunch of staff from human services and staff from each one of those recipient agencies to divide up these cards and have them go out to people who are in desperate need of financial relief.

Thank you, Kaki.

I want to give a quick shout out to Sally Hudson for bringing us to our attention probably last April or so, I think.

So again, thanks, Sally.

And I'm glad that it worked out.

That sounded amazing.

And I'm glad that the partnership worked out like that.

I know you made the statement just now concerned about how flexible government could be to get this off the ground.

So I'm glad that it was a success.

Me too.

Thank you.

So thank you all for everything.

I'm sorry, maybe I looked at it.

When did the actual distribution take place?

I was trying to figure it out.

We sort of, it was over a couple of months, but I think it was September and October.

It took us a while to get the cards.

And as it turns out, 600 gift cards were substantial enough to fill a suitcase that was

walked over two at a time by the folks at the Treasurer's Office to deliver it to us here.

So it took some time to get it out to the community.

But reports, I think, were due back to me on December 1st.

Great.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

Okay.

Well, thank you.

All right, so it's 4.45, so we should be able to go into closed session early and then just go into break and then go into regular session.

Yeah, I think the closed session would be fine.

We can't start the regular meeting any earlier than 6.30.

Ms.

We can't hear you.

You're muted.

Sorry about that.

Did you send that to me?

Well, don't adjourn until Heather reads the motion.

And I'm sorry, I need to get that email to her.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

We have six people in the audience on the webinar.

If you'd like to speak to council,

You can click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

If you're on via telephone, you can press star nine.

Each person will have up to three minutes to address counsel.

And while I'm trying to stall for Ms.

Robertson, nobody is raising their hand at this time.

Would you all like to break for five or 10 minutes?

Sorry, I'm just having computer issues.

I can't get this thing to send.

We are almost there.

Hill to read it from there.

All right, it should be on its way to you, Councilor Hill.

All right.

Pursuant to Section 2.23712, the Virginia Code, I hereby move that City Council close this open meeting and convened in a closed session as authorized by Virginia Code, Section 2.23711A1 for discussion or consideration of one or more prospective candidates for appointment.

Okay, I'll call.

Yes.

Okay.