City Council/School Board Work Session (Reconfiguration)   5/26/2021

We approved a plan that included a modernized middle school for Charlottesville 6th, 7th, and 8th graders on the current Buford Middle School site and a preschool center on the current Walker Upper Elementary School site.

The preschool center will offer specialized services to meet the needs of our youngest students.

And fifth graders will stay in their neighborhood elementary school to reduce a transition during the middle grade years.

In 2019, the city council supported this plan by allocating $3 million for design and planning work.

After a pandemic pause, the design and planning work is starting now with the help of local education architects, BMDO.

This process will help us think, dream, and budget so we can make this long-discuss plan a reality.

So, how can you get involved?

Step 1.

Stay tuned!

We'll be posting videos and other information on our website.

Sign up for the newsletter to receive regular project updates.

Step 2.

Attend special events this summer to explore the possibilities of what these new schools could be and how they can meet the needs of our community.

If you have a specific topic that you are interested in or knowledge you'd like to share, you can join the think tank and we will reach out to you to be part of those conversations as they come up.

Step three, join our community design team.

A group of community members who are passionate about this vision and can commit to attending meetings for the next eight months.

This team will give voice to our dreams, offer feedback to our ideas and guide our steps.

The community design team will meet every other Tuesday through the summer, then monthly after that.

The more voices we hear, the more we can realize our dreams for our students and the Charlottesville community.

Sign up to be a part of the process and receive regular updates through our Get Involved survey.

Okay.

All right, so I'll call this meeting to order.

Ms.

Vice Mayor Walker Present Vice Mayor McGill I'm here.

Councilor Hill Here.

Councilor Payne Here.

Councilor Snook Here.

And I'll call the Charlottesville City School Board to order.

Yes, Madam Chair.

Ms.

Bryson Morseberger?

Ms.

Bryson Morseberger?

Ms.

McKeever?

Here.

Ms.

Puryear?

Ms.

All right.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

Let me get my screen shared here.

Great.

So this is what we are going to try to hit today in terms of a timetable.

And my thinking was that I would go through parts one through four, each, which are hopefully five minutes, stop and just take some questions, but not discussion, and then move on so we can get to the overall discussion between board and council.

And

Mayor Walker or Chair Torres, if you think that the questions have gone long enough, just give us a little nudge and we'll move on to the next section if that sounds good to everybody.

And then I think there's also, the city also may have some slides to present after section four.

So we'll do that between four and five.

It talks a little bit about the budget and our debt capacity and some of the limitations we have.

OK.

So we're going to start off talking a little bit about the existing conditions in our schedule, basically what we have and where we can go and how long it's going to take to get there.

So we put together this timeline of the city school history, which has been pretty helpful in a lot of our meetings.

This is in scale from the earliest known school board records, which go back to 1869 up to today.

And you can see our nine current facilities

down in the bottom there.

So the elementary schools are in green, Walker and Buford are in blue, and CHS is in orange.

To me,

This slide tells a lot of things, but there's three things in particular that stand out to me.

Number one is CHS was built in 1974.

So we're not used to building new facilities.

As a city, we're not used to doing things of this magnitude, the things that we're talking about now.

47 years since we opened CHS, that's 23 city councils, that's 23 school boards.

So it's just not a problem that we have tackled.

Number two, I think that history is always informative, and this slide tells us a really interesting story about race and equity in our city schools, right?

So that red zone in the middle, that's massive resistance in Charlottesville, right?

So kind of starting with the Brown v. Board, we know that Charlottesville 12 was late 1958, early 59.

and then our last facility to desegregate was in 1966.

So you can see how many of our facilities were built during that time frame.

Five of our nine campuses were built during that period of upheaval and change.

The Buford Walker drawings are dated August of 1964.

And when they opened in 1966, they mark the end of this massive resistance period.

But look how we went about it.

That's kind of interesting to me.

We have two completely identical campuses.

on the two different sides of town.

So we ended massive resistance and we quite literally created two things that are literally separate and equal, which is an interesting way of looking about it.

So I think that we all know that being desegregated is not the same as being integrated.

So in a lot of ways, the opening of these two facilities in 1966 has started the path that we are still on today

to talk about equity and integration and how our city should work.

The third thing this tells us is that our buildings are really old, right?

So they were shaped by ideas of equity in 1966, you know, how we move out of massive resistance.

But they're also shaped on models of learning that are much older than that as well.

Now we know a lot more about buildings, how they influence teaching and learning and health and wellness, and our sense of community and collaboration.

We know a lot more about what students and teachers need from their spaces.

And quite simply, we know that Walker and Buford aren't really good learning environments at the end of the day.

They just happen to be what's left over from the last time we did something big in 1966.

So our classrooms kind of look like this with just a sliver of natural light in the end and very loud console units that sometimes you have to speak at 69 decibels is the kind of sound level and and kind of I think this picture was taken during during the pandemic.

So we have but we still have old things aligned in rows.

New classrooms today look like this with natural light flexibility flexible furniture bright clean surfaces.

Our entrances and our exteriors, our entrances are down in the hole.

They're not accessible.

They're kind of hard to find.

There's a whole different philosophy of how we approach a building and how we see and be seen and see what's coming from a safety and a welcoming standpoint.

Our corridors are cramped and kind of lacking natural light.

New schools today have opening welcoming spaces like this when you come in into the building.

The corridors in between the classrooms have no natural light, no transparency or visibility into the classrooms.

They're monotonous.

There's no space for breakout space.

These are middle schools today.

This was formerly a corridor that looked very much like that, except it was built out of gray cinder blocks in Greene County and how schools are being done.

This is one of the libraries at either Beaufort or Walker.

In the middle, isolated, no natural light libraries today.

They're being built.

Dining spaces and ones of today and what they look like.

Gems, I think this is a gem at Buford and how they act today, multipurpose spaces, natural light, acoustic control, good spaces.

And then finally, some of the exterior spaces of these campuses are

a little unsafe, you know, we wouldn't build things like this today and a little uninviting and spaces can be much more integrated and accessible to the schools that you have, right?

So I show all those things, every single one of those new examples, that's all work that our firm has done

But more importantly, that's all work that has been done for public schools in the state of Virginia in the past 10 years.

So we know these kind of things are possible.

We know that we can do them and we know that we can do them here.

We showed a slide like this back during the capacity study and we updated it.

The red dots show new projects that have been built around us and the yellow ones are showing ones that are in planning and

The areas around us have spent over $700 million in building new facilities.

So we know this is something that's possible and can be done.

We're just not used to doing it since we haven't done something since CHS.

So when we look at our timetable,

One of the things that we've been talking about in the working group is I've been offering this idea that you can really think about Buford and Walker as a series of three eras, right?

That first era is the opening in 1966 until 1988 when they served as two junior high schools, a north side and a south side junior high school.

literally separated by the railroad tracks, right?

In 1988, we made another step towards equity and said, this isn't right.

Let's make them citywide upper elementary and citywide middle and not have them separated by real estate.

So that was our first reconfiguration.

And then so we had that for 20 years.

And then starting in 2008 was when we really started having the first conversation in the city about reconfiguration, like we're talking about now, where we take fifth grade back to the elementary and put six, seven and eight together.

A decision was actually made by the school board in very early 2011.

Some time went by.

We had a recession.

We dealt with a few things.

A decision was made again several years later to

confirmed that, but also add the pre-K swap with fifth grade and sixth.

This was in response to kind of the increasing enrollment that we had and looking for ways to deal with that.

So here we are now, 11 years later, after that first school board decision to do it, our buildings are now 55 years old.

That first decision was made in the context of some declining enrollment, the second one in some increasing enrollment, and now our enrollment is actually declining again.

When I say declining, I mean before the pandemic.

So if we zoom in a little bit on that to where we are now, a RFP was put out and we publicly competed for the project and our firm, VMDO, was selected in February, March of 20.

We were all ready to start and guess what happened?

So hopefully that is over with and we're getting going now.

Looking forward, this is the schedule potentially ahead of us and how fast that we could move leading to construction that could start as soon as 23 if funding is available and we'll get back to that point.

What we're focused on now and what our contract is now though is really this section in red.

So we are currently in that conceptual phase where we're studying multiple options.

and then we have a decision point in October.

We will take those down to options that we will study in greater detail and then another decision point that comes in March and I'll show you that.

So let's zoom in there a little bit.

So here we are at the at the end of May and we're really looking at what's possible.

Part of our job is to actually work with the public

the council and the board to understand what the budget should be.

What can we build?

What would it cost?

What are the possibilities?

And then once we kind of set what we think that is, we'll then begin to develop that into schematic design, which would start in the fall.

In order to do that, we're going to have four cost estimates that we get to help.

So we'll develop some work.

We'll send them to some independent professional cost estimators.

To do that, they need some time to do their work.

So we come a couple weeks before that.

So you can see we're coming up, we're less than a month away now from where we say, here's six options and send them to a cost estimator to see what they might look like.

Once you kind of do that, you can begin to then put together a series of a schedule that shows decision points.

So we had our school board retreat last week.

The other items in yellow are proposed information items and action items for both board and council for when we can bring you these six options and have a discussion and a decision point.

Then there's an election.

I think that's a key point of this is defining this conversation prior to the election.

So it becomes part of the civic conversation leading up to the election.

We move forward, we get some pretty good prices based on the direction that we get from board and council.

And then a new board and council will come in and march and say, we're either going to move forward with this or we're not.

So those are the

the schedule and the points ahead of us.

Counselors, are there any questions?

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

So school board, we've seen, I mean, a

bigger presentation, but a lot of this.

My questions are going to come later when we talk about school capacity.

That's correct.

And we can come back to any of these slides at any point.

You can see there's a slide number on the bottom right corner.

So if you've got a question on a particular slide you want us to come back to it later.

After you have more information, just let us know and we can zip back to it.

All right.

My colleague, Kristen Hill, is going to take us to our next section, I believe, which is on our outreach and engagement process, which we just kicked off this week.

I think you may have zoomed ahead quite a bit there.

All right, Kristen, just tell me when to advance.

I don't think you're going to be able to use your mouse, Kristen.

I'm going to stop share, see if that helps.

Don't you love a Zoom meeting?

All right, Kristen, are you with us?

Okay, try sharing your screen again, Wick.

I couldn't, it took away all my controls.

I couldn't unmute without pressing the space bar that was zooming everything for it.

So I shouldn't be in control of the screen.

You share your screen.

Okay.

Very bizarre.

All my other Zoom capabilities went away and I couldn't unmute once I was controlling your screen.

Okay, let's try again.

Yes.

Can everyone hear me?

Great.

So yes, we launched an engagement.

Exciting, as some of you saw in the video at the beginning of this meeting.

So we have three main groups guiding our engagement process, the working group, which has been meeting regularly with members of the city council and the school board already.

We've got our building committee meeting, which will start meeting more regularly in the fall as we get to a finer grained level of detail.

And if you want to click once, those are both

basically staff groups.

Our big public group is the community design team, which we are thrilled to be kicking off with our big kickoff meeting a week from today, next Wednesday, the 2nd.

So to keep zooming in on the schedule that Wick showed, and you can see how those meetings play out here, we've got project group meetings really consistently about twice a month throughout the summer.

Do you want to keep going, Wick?

So to get to our bottom right yellow star action item in October, if you want to keep clicking through, what we're really taking on now is this discover phase.

Basically, what options should we be exploring and why?

We're really listening and learning at this point.

And then once we have a little bit of cost information back, we'll get into define and really defining with the community what should these designs be?

What are the options we should be suggesting?

And then once we get to the back to school energy in kind of August, September, we move on to tests where we take those options out on the road.

Do we get this right?

So to look at the general design process another way, we recognize as from that historical timeline, community conversations about reconfiguration have been ongoing for a long time and visions and values will certainly continue on well.

after us.

We're jumping in at a specific point in time looking at the scope and constraints that was defined by the RFP and that we're discussing today.

And our job is to engage deeply with and overlay these two threads and create design concepts.

So in collaboration with Beth Chuck and Brian Wheeler, we officially launched engagement on Monday.

Exciting.

And there's a homepage on the Charlottesville facilities website that's updated with current information, including a get involved survey and that short video that is just kind of a snippet overview of the project.

So where we're at right now is really kind of this middle section where we're reaching out

and networking where we're sitting at meetings with each principal.

We already started with a great conversation with Adam Hastings this morning and with the IRC about how we can make processes that really fit our school families.

And we're doing similar reach out conversations to local nonprofits, community groups, faith organizations, as well as would like to have those conversations with everyone on this call as well.

Anyone who's interested

Please reach out and we want to talk about how we can make this process more accessible.

So this is a graphic from the survey that's being circulated that participants can basically pick a level of involvement that meets your interest level and availability.

So I want to be a core member of the design team really want to help guide the process.

That's awesome.

We want you as part of the community design team.

can't commit to being at every single meeting.

It's a big ask, but you have some specific topics or knowledge you'd like to share.

We want to include you as part of the think tank, which is basically a database that we're building of all of our local resources and knowledge bases within the city.

And the think tank will continuously feed back into the community design teams process.

And then finally, just want to stay informed, keep me updated about opportunities and what's going on, stay in the know.

So we launched a survey less than 48 hours ago.

We've got lots of intentional efforts that we expect numbers much greater than this, but just so far we have 130 responses, including 15 applications for the community design team.

which we're looking for ultimately about 30 open application representatives to comprise that team, as well as some key city and city school staff members.

So it'll be about 75% open application public members.

and this is a closer look at the activities again zooming in further to just the month of June basically we'll have coming up in the next month for our discover phase notice noticeably again is our community design team kickoff meeting a week from today so please be sharing that event and we want to see as many people there as possible it's going to be really fun our kickoff opportunity to really dream big together and as you can see from those two kind of purple background

rectangle shapes.

There are kind of two main main focuses for our time in Discover that are guiding questions right now about get involved.

It's really who should we be talking to?

What should we be learning?

How should we be shaping this process?

And then we move into visioning.

What is our collective vision for the city schools, Buford and Walker?

Thank you, Kristen.

Councilors, are there any questions?

Yeah, I have a question.

Just what are the size parameters for the community design team?

Is it going to be one large group?

Is it going to be a few different smaller working groups?

Unmuted now.

Yeah, as you can see, we're looking for about 40 people, and it will be open public livestream meetings as well.

and so we anticipate that those calls can get much larger than that, but the 40 is kind of the core group and eventually there is a possibility that that could split up into two groups as we have more nuanced detailed conversations about Buford and Walker.

Just one final note about the community design team that I forgot to mention.

This is really the core of all of our new information for the design process.

We're doing no advanced copies, no decisions made behind the scenes.

Great, Kristen.

Okay.

Right, student capacity.

So Maria Baniski, my colleague, is on the phone and she's going to help take some questions on the call.

She really led, she did lead our capacity study that we started in 2016 with the city and is maybe the expert in the city on capacity.

So I'm going to do my best to present her material quickly.

and then we'll see about questions.

So again, we started a 2016-2017 capacity study, and the last time we had a big public conversation about reconfiguration, it was really within that context.

It was in the context of, wow, we're growing.

Are we still going to fit into our facilities?

That's a little different now.

The context of the conversation now is more about academic performance and reducing transitions at bad times, improving the middle school experience and equity.

But we still have the question before us, how many we should build for?

What's the responsible amount to build for now?

What's the amount to plan for in addition in the future?

Which, of course, goes right back to dollars and money that we have available.

So first, let's look a little bit about our capacity.

The chart in front of you is elementary growth rates.

When we are designing for the middle school capacity, we're primarily looking at the elementary schools because that's the kind of

size cohort we want to be able to accommodate in a future school.

So you can see there were leading up to 10, 12 years ago, we were declining.

In fact, we've been declining at not quite 1% a year for quite a while in the city schools leading up to about 2010, 2011.

And then we started a path of growth and increasing and sometimes increasing quite a bit up to 5%

growth in 2013, 2014.

So that's when the capacity study occurred in 2016, 2017, after seeing that kind of growth.

And then sure enough, as often as you make a decision or do a study and your underlying data changes.

So our growth started going back down.

And on the far right, you can see the growth where it dropped from the pandemic.

We all hope that's an outlier.

But

We did recognize that the growth had cooled off from a minus 1% trend to almost a plus 3% trend.

And that's a big difference depending on what you do to project.

So reconfiguration, of course, is about taking the pre-K out of the sixth grade and putting it centralized and splitting five and six apart to take six to the middle and

and five to the elementary schools.

So the big question that a lot of people have had is, does it fit?

Can you simply even make that swap and make pre-K and five fit in those two locations?

And the answer is yes, for now.

So there was a point where when we were growing at that rate, so the chart you're seeing now has the green, remember, Greens Elementary School,

Blue is our current middle school or upper elementary arrangement so we took the fifth grade and we took the pre-k out and put the fifth grade in and you can see there was a point in 2017-2018 where we would have been over our plan capacity not quite to our full max capacity but over it that has since that started declining and that has since dropped and our projections show that we would be good for a while good for

at least until 27, 28, or maybe 29.

But things can change.

A lot of this can change depending on how much new housing we build, for example, and changes to some of the zoning and building permits that we issue.

So if you look at each one of the individual school levels and kind of have a capacity thermometer, if you will, you can see that today with pre-K and four, we fit into all of the schools.

We're below our planned capacity in every single school.

If we make the swap, we also fit.

One of the ways in which swapping pre-K and five helps with our capacity problem is you create more capacity in your elementary schools.

Right, your average pre-K classroom has a 14 to one ratio, 14 students in one classroom.

We typically do, and that's the average between 12 to one at the three-year-old level and 16 to one at the four-year-old level.

Elementary school students can go varies across our schools, depending on how big the classrooms are, but

is like 23, 24 to 25.

So you immediately create capacity just by changing out the needs of the student with the younger kids needing more space.

So we fit, right?

Looking ahead to the, or looking to the next group, which is the middle school, the capacity study that we performed in 2016, 2017 recommended that we look at a plan capacity

of 1,054 students.

And then that gives you a max capacity of 1240, or what is the VDOE capacity.

I don't wanna get into the details of that, but it's simply the way to think of it is that the state needs a common set of stats to compare across jurisdictions.

And so they simply say, if you have 10 classrooms, we're gonna assume that all 10 are full for every period of the day.

Well, school doesn't work that way.

Teachers have planning periods, so we have a utilization rate.

And so the utilization rate is the difference between those two numbers, right?

So we apply an 85% utilization rate, which says if there's seven periods, six of them are occupied, right?

When you go and compare Charlottesville against other jurisdictions or look at the state, everything is based on that larger number, right?

So we have to have both of them.

That's the quickest version I can give.

So if you look again, Green Elementary, Blue Middle, Orange High School, and you take groupings of three grades, in this case, two through four, six through eight, and nine through 11, you can say, okay,

Our middle schools, you know, ages fit easily, but so do our high school and so do our elementary schools from our 15 year average.

If you go to our 15 year minimums on enrollment, they fit no problem.

In fact, we could build and we would never fill the schools up if we ran just at that rate.

If you look at the 15 year maximums, we fit with the high school, we fit with the middle school,

And that one bubble that's going through our system now that's currently at the middle school level would be over our capacity of 1054, just that one outlier.

So again, this gets into the question of what you plan for.

Do you build your church for Easter Sunday service or do you build it for the more typical one as an example?

So what we've been doing, and this is where it begins to get tricky, is that based on our funding constraints, we've looked at, well, what other things can we do?

We've looked at 900, 975, and 1054 as planned capacities for the middle school.

900 basically represents that 15-year peak.

The 15-year peak

That bubble is going through our system right now.

It's currently in the middle school level.

So the 2019-2020 enrollment at 6, 7, and 8 was 891 students.

That's the peak.

And so if we design for kind of our peak that we've had so far, that's 900.

And you see where we are in relation to that.

If we come up from that a little bit at 975, you can see the relation.

And then at 1054, which was what the capacity study recommended, you can see where we fall.

So when we begin to make decisions on maybe we can build a little bit less, it's really in the context of this slide.

And ideally, we are accommodating those green numbers, the elementary schools.

This is our last slide on capacity.

Elementary or early childhood is a little different, right?

Because we don't offer early childhood or pre-K education to everyone.

It's limited attendance.

So you really have to look at it in the context of what we have now, what we've traditionally provided, and what we would like to provide.

Traditionally, we have provided between 18 and 20 classrooms across our system for pre-K education.

And that has varied.

What we would like to do long term is provide as many pre-K opportunities to the three-year-olds as we do the four-year-olds.

Right now we accommodate we teach a lot more four-year-olds.

If we do that, that would take our classrooms up to 32.

Even going back to the capacity study with the pre-K center, we never envisioned something that big.

It was always about doing something at our current level of 20.

And so the kind of middle number between those two is 26.

So we had been looking at options that would build 20 to 26 classrooms in our first phase right now for pre-K, which is the simplest way to think about pre-K capacity and what we should do.

So that is the quickest and simplest overview I can give you of capacity and we will stop there.

Chancellor Snook.

Yeah, thank you.

The questions I've got mainly fall into a couple of categories.

First of all, back in 2016,

VMDO had estimated that the population, the student population in 2026 would be 5,190.

Maria, can you unmute?

Sure.

I have to go look at some spreadsheets, but I could look that up.

I think in the absence of that number at this moment, the general

And I think the trend is that we are, we're not seeing the level of growth that we had forecast back at that time, because the trends of growth at the elementary have cooled.

So what we've learned is the, there was some city, well, there was city population growth following that 2003 zoning change around UVA, all that student housing went up and housing units became available

for family use.

So talking with the Weldon Cooper Center, who we collaborated with on the capacity study, that along with the housing crisis and the recession basically led to more renting, which kind of favors the city.

And it led to more families being able to stay in the city and inhabit homes that had formerly been used by student rentals.

So we sort of saw this wave of growth at that time in the number of school eligible children, families, you know, starting their family and not moving out to the county.

at the rate that had been happening.

So basically, you know, we haven't had a new wave or a new infusion of residential development, you know, at this moment.

I note that on page 38, where you've got the description of the beginning of the growth trend and now and so on,

The last two years pre-COVID, we saw 2.64%, 2.62% decline.

So birth rates have been declining for the past five years at least, but also

Currently, I know that Albemarle County is developing residential units at a much higher rate than the city.

So it's this combined factor of birth rates and then the kind of net in and out migration.

And so, you know, those things together kind of create our school eligible population within the city.

So, you know,

Again, it sort of goes back to people speaking with the Weldon Cooper Center, you know, they made the point people move very fluidly between city and county.

Sometimes they don't even know when they've moved from one to the other.

And so we are a relatively small city within a relatively large metro area.

So things can move quickly within the city.

So what

Sure.

Right.

So there are a couple ways that that

Sheehy, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she,

Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy, Sheehy,

Sheehan, Ph.D.

: That method of projection, you know, we're basing current day enrollments on this rate that's that's about past trends.

And so that's one way.

There's this other piece that is about

in migration, out migration, how many residential units are in the pipeline, how many are under development.

And that is a piece that as an architect, I can't do that.

But the Weldon Cooper Center actually produced in 2016 a report about, you know, they talked with city development,

looked at how many units were in the pipeline, looked at student yield rates by unit type across the city, looked at student yield rates by unit type in each elementary attendance zone.

And so that was actually a suggestion that we brought up at the school board retreat last week was the potential to kind of codify and have a schedule for this type of, you know, look at development trends and kind of connect those dots between planning, zoning,

for the purposes of today's discussion is simply trying to figure out what's reasonable to try to plan for.

I'm also conscious of the fact that our plan for more affordable housing in Charlottesville, if implemented,

is likely to result in more in-migration.

It's likely, I think, to bring greater population and greater some non-student population, a population that might be expected to have more children, for example.

And one of the concerns that, I mean, I don't even know how I would wrap my mind around the question

to try to figure out whether if we adopt a particular affordable housing strategy, and let's say we assume we would have a 10% growth, a 1% annual growth in our overall population, I don't know how we might figure out what that might mean for the schools.

But that's the kind of thing as we're looking at these other comp plan issues right now.

I had people asking me literally today, what are we planning to do about, you know, if you adopt all these affordable housing things and more people move in, what is the effect of that on the schools, on the water supply, on all these other things?

And

I know what the answers are for some of those, but I have no idea what the answer is for the schools and I don't know how to plan for that.

Sure.

So I would say, I mean, one is that collaboration with demographers who have the tools to look at those kind of yield rates of students across unit types and look what's in the pipeline.

Sheehy, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she, she,

I could ask many, many, many more questions that would take up much more time than anybody else cares for me to take up right now, but that takes care of me for now.

I appreciate it.

Certainly.

I was going to say, I remember.

But yes, it was a few years ago.

Yeah, I'd be happy to go into more detail in a separate venue on this topic.

There was a few slides ago where we looked at the projected growth or average over 15 years, and it showed the elementary, the middle, and the high schools.

And I'm just wondering, on that chart, when you're talking about projecting the growth, so the orange is a high school, and the high school totals

always seem like they're within the capacity.

And I guess my question is, we're looking at the elementary schools for the middle school capacity, and that makes sense.

But it also seems like, because my thinking is that like, okay, there's some people who take, they leave the schools and then come back in high school.

So since the green and the orange don't match up,

Is there, I just, it seems like there's just going to be a natural exodus from the schools and some people aren't going to come back.

Totally.

Really good question.

So I think

That part of this is that kind of wave of growth that started in 2010 and has worked its way through the elementaries already.

And that's in the middle school years right now.

And that is, well, who knows what will happen in the future, especially now, but essentially that growth hasn't hit the high school yet.

So that is part of the differential between elementary and high school.

I could do some more analysis on this to try to parse that out from differential participation, essentially, at the elementary versus the high school level.

Yes, it does.

If there's one, can I ask one real quick?

It's Heather.

I know we've talked about this during the working group, but I want to ask it again in this capacity given the conversation around what assumptions do you make when you consider that these are going to be new facilities that are going to be more attractive to some families that we do lose

Totally.

That is absolutely on our minds as well.

So the slide we're looking at now essentially uses those elementary cohorts and those high school cohorts as a proxy for higher participation.

Kathy Galvin, Jr.

: So we know that we see that drop off when cohorts move up from fourth to fifth.

So we said, well, what if we look at the size of a three year cohort grades two, three, and four from the elementary.

So, so this is basically like, you know, what if everybody stayed in the system.

And when they transitioned up to the middle school.

So that's kind of what those green bars represent.

And this is using historical data.

So this is separate from projections about the growth of the eligible student population in Charlottesville.

This is just about

Differential participation at the different grades.

So if day one, everyone's excited to go to the new middle school and they participate the same levels that they're participating in the elementaries, then you start to see those green bars.

If it's similar to what we have been seeing in the past 15 years at the high schools, that's the orange bars.

So it's imperfect, but it's a proxy to try to get at that participation difference.

Thank you.

I was ringing up because I know at some point you're going to show us numbers that show like different capacities for Buford and I think we have to be cognizant around what, what, what we're really saying here.

All right, let me catch us up to speed here.

My apologies, I went to go check on the chat for this Zoom and I pulled up my office chat for a second there.

If anybody on council or board wants to take care of my office chat messages, I would really appreciate it.

Okay, so shown in 2017 as part of the end of the capacity study, this was the data that we showed.

So the pre-K in green was again for that centralized pre-K center to replace the number of classrooms that we have now.

and then the six to eight campus was for that capacity of 10,054 or 1050 in shorthand.

At the time, the total to do all this was 60 to $80 million was the range that was provided.

that was projecting out to projects that would be finishing really today that we'd be looking to move into for the beginning of the 2021 school year.

So you project out, you inflate or escalate out your dollars to the midpoint of construction.

In this case, it was 2020.

So that was 60 to 80.

If you go from there and escalate that at the current rate that we're using, which is three and a half percent, and I'll get to that in a moment,

You can see where those numbers go.

And then if you escalate that out to a midpoint of construction in 2025, the numbers grow to $70 to $95 million.

And that is our current CIP, the current placeholder in our CIP is for FY25, meaning we would start construction in 24.

So just when you get a project of this size, a little bit of delay and a little bit of inflation can be a deadly combination when you're looking at stuff.

So this is the approved CIP.

And you can see down there on the bottom is that $50 million placeholder that's in there.

So as we said with the school board, the first response to that is, whippee, yay.

Anytime a city commits $50 million to a school facilities, that is a great thing.

So this conversation falls into the category of good problems to have.

Now we need to get into kind of the nitty gritty of how it works and what it buys.

And one of the things that we should begin to talk about is that a construction project right now we're simply this is a placeholder, you know, so a placeholder has been put in the budget, again, thankfully.

A construction project typically would have money spread over three years, three fiscal years.

The first year would be about 35%, the second would be about 50% of the money, and the last year would be about 15%.

So that's something we're going to want to think about as we begin to make some of the choices and have the conversations about what we can do in the CIP, what's available for us, right?

If you look at the CIP in terms of education, the pie chart on the left is our current year approved capital improvement program for the budget you just approved where education is 13% of that pie.

This is your total CIP, bondable and non-bondable, right?

So about three and a half million dollars.

Most of that is our continuing large cap maintenance.

issues.

And then one and a quarter million is the elementary modernization program that's going on at the six elementary schools.

If you look at the five-year CIP, the portion of education jumps to 41%, almost $69 million.

And of course, the big item there is that FY25, $50 million.

One of the things that is a lesser of, and I didn't go back and study past CIPs, but I just took the 2022 and I took out that

Elementary School Modernization.

And so you can see that takes education down to about 9%.

And so that's reflective of kind of typically kind of what we've been doing.

If you look at 2016 and 2017 contributions, they were 1.5 and $1.7 million respectively.

So that's about the amount we've been spending.

Again, getting back to the point that we just haven't done this.

We're not used to building school facilities and that's just one of the issues that we're dealing with.

So I'm going to show you where we are with kind of six different ways.

These are examples, illustrative examples of how we could go about

doing reconfiguration.

They're not specific proposals.

And in fact, they're more math exercises, right?

So we know what it costs to do certain things, to demolish, to renovate, to build.

And so what we do is we assign numbers to those, and then we look and see, based on the capacity of students we want to accommodate,

primarily at the middle school.

What does that mean?

So in this case, these are the numbers that we're using.

We work with our cost estimator.

We're using 320 for new construction, 320 a square foot.

We're using a slightly higher number for renovation at Walker than Buford.

And the reason is that, again, these were built as junior high schools.

Elementary and

Our preschool classrooms require bathrooms in the classroom.

They require sink and running water in the classroom.

None of those exist, and so that's a higher level of renovation where you're ripping out a lot of stuff and putting plumbing in.

Demolition, our number may be a little conservative there, but we know that we have asbestos and other items that are going to cost some money when we tear things down.

The soft cost is everything that you don't pay the contractor.

So when you buy furniture and equipment and technology and screens and your architecture fees, your engineering fees, your testing and inspection fees, everything that doesn't go to just paying the contractor to build goes into that number.

So you multiply that number times your cost per square foot.

And then you have the inflation number.

So right now,

12 months inflation ending in April, and in the United States as a whole, the consumer price index is 4.2.

I'm sure you've heard about this in the news.

Everyone thinks that's a bubble.

When we all get back to work and we fix some of these supply chain issues, that's going to go down.

But we are

The advice we've been given is to hold three and a half percent.

And so that three and a half percent number is the number I showed you when 60 to 80 all of a sudden jumped up to 70 to 94.

Right.

And then, of course, when you can start construction also affects what the numbers are.

In most cases, we need to do some work at Buford before we can move any students out of Walker and begin to do that.

So in most of these cases, we're showing a one year difference.

And then in everything I show you, we're showing that 85% utilization rate I referred to.

There's 150 square feet per student per your statewide capacity.

If you look at Buford right now, you have 151 square feet per student.

So it's in line with kind of what we're doing.

And it's also in line with average schools that are being built right now.

It's a good number.

And you see how that relates to our student per classroom ratio.

So these are the same in every example I'm going to show you.

All right.

What's going to be different is the capacity, the number of students we try to accommodate.

So this is the Walker site on the Buford site on the left and the Walker site on the right.

North is up in both of them.

So in Buford, you can see Cherry Avenue at the top of the screen.

On the Walker site, on the top right, you see the 250 bypass.

Each site has numerous buildings.

They're all labeled in the same way.

The main academic building is A. The arts building that has the auditory unit is B.

The gym is C and then the D building at Buford is that addition that was put on in the 80s, late 80s to add some more classrooms.

All right, so what's the cost to do nothing?

What if we just said, you know what, we just want to keep Buford and Walker as they are and get another 20 years out of them.

Well, we've got about $10 million in things that have to go into those buildings.

Charlottesville maintains its buildings pretty well, right?

But because going back to that timeline, that 11, 12, 13 years while we've been saying, hey, let's reconfigure,

A lot of our big large cap maintenance things, replacing roofs, replacing big HVAC units, we've kind of put that on hold a little bit and said, well, let's wait and see if we can squeeze a few more years out of things, which is very common.

So if we just wanted to go with what we had, we do have some costs ahead of us that are there.

So that's an important thing to keep in mind.

All right, I'm going to take you through six schemes and then I'm going to be finished talking.

So first we said, all right, let's go down to the lowest level possible and replace what we have now.

Let's build for 900 students at Beaufort.

I'm not suggesting this is necessarily the right thing we should do.

So what you do is based on that 150 square feet per student, you can begin to do the math exercise and say, OK, what's the total amount we need?

How much do we have to build new and how much can we renovate to get to that number in this case 158,000 almost 159,000 square feet is what that capacity requires.

So for if you were able to start one year earlier than what our CIP says and start on in 23 you could

Add 900 students to Buford for 48 and a half million dollars.

You could do it for 50 if you start in 2024.

In this case, we would build a new addition to the west of the existing academic building for about 68,000 square feet, and we would completely renovate all of building A to bring it up to 21st century standards, with the exception of the labs that were renovated in 2013, the science labs, and those are indicated in gray.

you could also demolish D and expand parking at the site so if I back up there you can see D and there it is gone right that that eats up the 50 million dollars and you do you do nothing at Walker so you either leave the fifth grade by itself or you make the swap and bring pre-k up into classrooms that aren't really designed for that age group but for junior high students in the 1960s

Here's another way of looking at it where you could try to spread the money out a little bit more.

You build slightly less new construction and you renovate slightly less at the Beaufort campus.

You could still get 900 in and then you could renovate

just the top floor of building A and get to $52 million if we start in 23 or 54 if we start a year later.

This would get you reconfiguration.

This would get you 18 classrooms, maybe 19 classrooms over at Walker.

You potentially could do some more on the bottom where you have admin right now.

And you could fit 900 students in at Buford.

The problem is, is that building C remains.

So your gym might work for 900.

Building B remains, which is your arts facility.

It would be undersized.

Right now, I think you've got 530 students.

Let me back up and see what that number is exactly.

531 students was your 2019-2020 enrollment.

at Buford.

So you'd be going up to a capacity of 900 and you'd have some really undersized core facilities is what we call the facilities that are outside of the classroom, gym, library, arts, auditorium.

So let's go up another level in spending and say let's look at a capacity of 975.

This is the midway point between what you have now and that recommended level of 1050.

right so we could do 71,000 square feet of new construction we could renovate again all of A except for those labs to a nice high level for a cost of 48.8 at Buford and then we could come in and we could renovate the entire entirety of building A at the Walker campus upstairs and downstairs and get in 20 pre-k classrooms and

Wraparound services would also come in and fit downstairs in either scheme, whether you renovate or not, but not touching anything in gray at either campus is not touched.

It stays as is.

B and C, in this case, in the Walker campus.

If you waited another year to start, that adds another $2 million to it.

Another way of doing this, at Buford for 975, tear down building C.

maybe we strike a deal with the Boys and Girls Club and use their gym during construction and able to build a lot of new construction, 94,000 square feet, renovate all of building A, get a pretty nice new modern high school, I'm sorry, middle school for 975 students at a cost of $61.8 million

We could then come over and again renovate just the top layer level Walker Building A for 76 million or 79 if you start a year later.

Another approach here is to build about 71,000 square feet and keep C as is, maybe keep an outdated gym.

but otherwise do the same as you you're doing in the previous scheme in this one you would do here you would have to keep B instead of demolishing it in this case and the money that you save there you could then go to Walker and build a new standalone building which could accommodate 20 classrooms 20 pre-k classrooms now one of the reasons I think in everyone's mind the thought has always been of course you've got to build new at

at Buford, right?

Because you've got to accommodate these new students.

There's no room for them.

We'll renovate Walker into a pre-K center.

I think that's been everyone's assumption going into it.

So why would you do this?

Why would you build something new?

And there's two reasons.

One is that if you have the funding available, you can start them both at the same time.

So you save some money on inflation.

You may also get some economies of scale with one contractor giving you a better bid.

But the other reason, particularly if you can get that new building at Walker open soon, now you've got flexibility.

Once that's open, you can swap pre-K and five and you free up room in Walker.

So if you needed to take one of the grades out of Beaufort during construction, you could move them over there.

So you have flexibility and you might not have to spend money on temporary facilities during construction.

That's the reason that we explored that option.

And then the last one is at Buford to demolish all the buildings except for A.

build all new, renovate up to the highest level, be able to expand, especially by taking building B down, you can really expand and get the appropriate number of parking spots and bus turnaround at a cost of $74 million.

And then another version that looks at bringing in a new building at the Walker campus, which gets the total up to 98.6 or 102 if you start in 2024.

So those are, again, those are math exercises.

The next step for us is to begin to really get in and design these things, show what the busses look like, how much space you have on site, where you can really do these things.

And so this is the summary of all of those.

We can come back to that.

But for us, and hopefully this was circulated a little bit beforehand, but these are really kind of the discussion points

And I think that there are some questions and questions that we have that we would really like to get answered.

One through six are the items that we really need to kind of know about and have some direction.

Because what the working group has said is, hey, we need some guardrails here.

Do we really want to go out to the public and show things that are $100 million?

If we do, we've got to do it in a lot of context and showing when that money is available.

So I don't want to read through all these.

I think we'll come back to this slide, but I will end there.

Okay.

Well, at some point, I'd like to clarify, when we're looking at Walker, the number of classrooms that will be needed in order to have a robust three-year-old program.

in addition to our four-year-old program, because I think that has been our goal, this school division is to grow that three-year-old program.

So I just want to be clear about that.

That number is 32, and we can come back to that in more detail during discussion.

That's right.

Well, again, one of the beauties of building a new structure on that campus is then it leaves building A to expand.

So you could have 40 classrooms, potentially.

We know we're not going to get all this at one time.

We don't have the money for that.

the once you also once you renovate building a I mean you could renovate all building a all of building B except for the actual auditorium in the stage and then the upper level of building C the gym building where we currently have music and health classrooms at the at the Walker campus you could renovate all of that space and you could get 26 classrooms that's the most you could get assuming you think classroom should have natural light and be on the exterior wall which we kind of do

So, and then once you do that, those are all designed for people that are short, right?

So it's hard to use that.

It's hard to say, oh, we've got a blip in elementary school and we want to use some space over at the Walker campus for a while while we figure out growth.

Anyone else from school board or we're happy to move forward, Mayor Walker?

All right, Ms.

Thank you.

So we just wanted to take a little bit of time to go back over the CIP and talk about a few options.

Many of these slides you've seen before throughout the budget process.

The slide before you is a summary of the CIP that was adopted by Council for FY22.

It's a robust five-year plan at a total of $159 million with roughly 121 of that to be funded by bonds.

We feel that this CIP plan accurately reflects three of the top priorities for council with education coming in first at about 65.8 million over the five years.

Again, that's with the 50 million included.

Transportation, I'm sorry, affordable housing coming in second at 38.5 and then transportation and access at just under 34 million dollars.

So again, you know, the plan here was to put in a placeholder of the $50 million for the school project.

The thought process was to put it out in 25.

As Wick says, much of this is a math exercise to determine what and how we can get there.

And by putting it out, there was an opportunity to sort of work through different scenarios and opportunities for how to

to finance a project of this magnitude.

The next slide, please.

So again, you know, how do we pay for the CIP?

The majority of the CIP is bonded.

With this one for 22, 72% of that will be paid for with bonds.

25% is a cash fund from the general fund, and then there's a small portion that comes from other things such as

sharing projects with the county and with VDOT and other things of that nature.

Next slide, please.

So again, as we work through the CIP, there's always a balancing act between what is our capacity and what is affordability and what do we mean when we talk about each of those.

Capacity is basically based on our financial policy.

So as we know,

We have a policy that debt will not exceed 10% of our general fund.

And so that amount represents the maximum number of debt or bonds that we can issue to stay within that.

Affordability is sort of where the elected bodies can come in.

That's where we work on the alignment of public policy and the financial resources.

So in other words, how much can we pay

with current resources before we have to raise taxes or look at other revenue enhancements.

So next slide, please.

So in looking through this, looking at the outlook for the city's commitment to schools, both for 22 and 23 and beyond, we know that for FY22, more than what we've been talking about, which is basically just the CIP, there's also the operations portion.

So for FY22, the city's contribution to schools operations was level funded

because of the fact that we were able to fund or schools was able to fund the increase of about $4.5 million using the one-time CARES money.

We also included as was noted on previous slide the three and a half million dollars which maintains level funding of the lump sums and the school priority funding accounts which is what we have been doing historically.

As we move on to 23 you know the 4.5 one-time money pops into the operations base

there have been conversations about the potential to use some CARES funding to offset some of that increase but at some point it will reach the general fund whether all at once or not and the lump sums there was a plan that will go up roughly a million dollars as we added in work for the CHS roof replacement

So just as a few sort of high level points of reference for you, a $50 million bond equates to about $4.5 million of annual debt service.

75 is roughly $6.7 million, and then 100 million is about $9 million for debt service.

If we equate that to an equivalent of what that would be on the tax rate right now using current projections, one cent is roughly equal to about 845,000, and you can see that, you know, 50 million gets us to about 5 cents, 75 gets us to about 8 cents, and then the 100 million gets us to

about $9 million.

If we move on to the next slide,

So in looking at these options, again, this considers that the school reconfiguration project lands in the CIP on top of all the other projects and CIP that have been planned for the city.

And this also, in terms of these numbers, assume that this happens in FY25.

Again,

We had talked about a tax increase that sort of did a couple cents each year to get you to the total.

The timing of all that can change, but at the end of the day, the debt service is still the same amount.

And so at some point, whether we do two cents a couple of years or whether we do it all at once, we've still got to get to the total.

So

Option one with the $50 million reconfiguration, which is what we talked about through the budget process and what was actually adopted.

Again, significant revenue enhancements to even get to the $50 million.

What we talked about during the budget process, that equated to roughly a $0.10 tax increase.

Again, using the

bullet points on the prior slide, $50 million for the project would give us about five cents for the debt service alone, plus an additional five cents for everything else that's in the CIP.

again you know we have not up until this point spoken about the operational impact but to cover the 4.5 million that's roughly another five cents on the tax rate so at a 50 million reconfiguration if all things came in at once that would be roughly equivalent to a 15 cent tax increase

Our debt service would basically double in six years.

Our bond capacity would be exhausted, and there would roughly be about two years in which no new bonded projects could be added to the CIP, and our debt service fund balance would be completely exhausted.

So as we talked about during the budget process,

Even to get to the 50 million, there's work to be done, which again was sort of the thinking behind putting it out into 25 in order to give council time to figure out how to work through these options in order to fund that project.

So if we move on to sort of compare at a 75 million dollar

dollar amount for the project.

Again, significant revenue enhancements would be needed, but this time we're looking at roughly an equivalent to 18 cent tax increase.

Again, if we are including the operational increase at five, the debt service then pops up to about eight cents

and then the additional CIP is roughly five.

Again, we're doubling our CIP in a little bit shorter time.

Now we're at five years.

Only by FY28, we have completely exceeded our bond capacity and we would be exceeding our financial policy.

In addition, there would be four years roughly in which no new additional projects could be added to the CIP and the debt service fund balance again would be exhausted.

If we move to the $100 million option, again, all those things are equal.

We're up to now a 21 cent tax equivalent.

We're now doubling our debt service in only four years.

There's roughly five years in which there would be no capacity to add any new projects.

And again, we would be exceeding our financial policy.

So next slide, please.

So how do we get there?

Again, you know, the screen that we just talked about is sort of a bleak.

It's not meant to mean that this is not doable.

It certainly is.

Trying to balance priorities and commitments are really delicate balance here.

There are options to be considered that we can work through.

You know, as we look at other things, in addition to this project, there are operating budget increases that can be expected for both schools and the city.

The debt service increases will be weighing on our expense needs.

There will always be new initiatives that will need to be considered.

And as CARES and ARPA funds and other grants are phasing out, those will also continue to add expense pressures on the budget.

And so on the revenue side,

how, you know, what can we do?

We've talked about the revenue enhancements.

We can also recalibrate the dollars that we're committing from operations to capital projects, and we can also reprioritize CIP spending.

So all of this to say is that it seems like a big hurdle, but there are options we can work through, but we need to talk, we need the opportunity to talk through those and figure out those, and I think

Thank you for that.

With the increase in the

Would this money going to debt service also produce the same way it would sort of have to freeze new CIP projects for a few years?

So the general fund would be making the transfer to debt service.

So if we increase the taxes, for example, if that were the route we decided to take, the revenue that came in, let's just take the $50 million example, if we increase the tax rate by 10 cents,

Any of that revenue would then become designated, would not be part of the formula that would go to schools.

It would all be dedicated solely to pay the debt service for the project.

So I do have

I mean, I have a lot of questions, but I mean, my child was at Walker.

I know exactly how miserable these buildings feel.

They feel like they were built during a time when schools were built as prisons, looking like prisons.

I

I will voice this because it's something that I really think we need to make sure the community is very aware of is what this impact is going to be on the community going forward with this.

I don't know if the general broader community, especially since we've come through COVID really does understand what this is going to, how this is going to impact everybody for a while.

And I want to make sure that we hear from people on this and put that out there that

that people really understand, because I mean, how many, there's 49 participants tonight, but there's only 12 attendees tonight.

How are we getting this out to the 50,000 people in the city of Charlottesville of what this is going to mean to the city in doing this?

I mean, even if somehow we were able to get away with only 50 million.

And

I know we need to put a lot of work into our elementary schools as well.

And this plan doesn't really address that.

And I also have a question of if we are building, if we are looking to build to expand third graders, I mean, not third, three year olds, how are we all, is that going to increase

the need from the general fund to support that as well.

So, I mean, I feel like, and there may be part, and I don't mean to jump in and WIC and team can address some of that, but I think they have an excellent plan in place to engage the community and to get this messaging out.

But I think, you know, the hopes today was to bring, you know, the council and the school board together because we need to figure out, again, what are our guardrails and what do we want them to be bringing forward to the public?

because if we don't set that and if we don't get to some type of understanding about that, then what are they presenting?

So all great questions and I agree with you 100% on all of that.

So there is that financial component which is very important and how that may or may not

Smith, Kathy Galvin, Ph.D.

: The public needs to hear the financial implications of this, but also when you look at

what we potentially will be doing to these buildings.

And when you're talking about equity, there's a part of this presentation that just touched me and made such a huge impact on me as far as the health equity.

When you look at the buildings and they touched on it briefly as far as daylight and just the quality of air and the quality of spaces and what that will do for the health equity or inequities

within our community right now.

So there's so many potential positives that I think we also need to hang on to.

And I know that VMDO has a lot of those resources that they would be willing to share with you as well.

And I would just say the question about operational impacts for the pre-K, honestly, Sena isn't something I had really weighed my head on.

And that's a really good question.

And it's something I think we do need to understand just as we look at beyond just the capital needs, the operational needs moving forward.

But I do want to say like all the conversations I've been involved in, I don't think there's anyone on the screen right now that's not committed and acknowledging that we need to make a significant investment in our schools.

I think the question that we need to focus our effort energy on right now is

How are we gonna pay for this?

And I think we have to look beyond the city's coffers because we are limited as Christy just kind of outlined pretty clearly.

And I mean, I bring this up every time we have a work group meeting and I have brought it up with our general assembly.

We've been in touch collectively with those opportunities.

There are other avenues we're gonna have to pursue for this plan to become a reality because I don't believe that the 50 million is going to get us really what we need.

There's a lot, I think most people on the call agree with that, but we have to acknowledge what the limits are within the city.

And even within those limits, it's going to have to be a cost that the community is going to have to participate in and through taxes.

but then what are other avenues and I think that we have to shift our energy into how do we advocate for other revenue sources and in the case of we've been talking about is the 1% sales tax and what does that mean how do we get that to become a reality versus just you know right now a discussion point and so I think we're going to need collaboration with the school board to really push for that in addition to that I think we can't look away from private philanthropy and I know that Jennifer and I met a while back with CACF I understand more meetings have happened since then

But I think that's just really where the crux of this conversation is that as a city, we're going to have limitations that are not going to allow us, there's just no, there is no path forward.

Agree.

I have a question just for clarification.

So, you know, to say, is that the only one?

No.

There are lots of options we can talk about.

In terms of revenue streams, the only thing that the city has the impact on to control are taxes.

So whether it be property taxes, meals taxes, whatever it may be, it would have to be some sort of tax increase that would provide additional revenue.

unless there's some external source, you know, a grant or something like that.

But again, I think we have to be realistic.

If we're talking about trying to do something, many of these things, even the sales tax, we can't plan a project on something that could take several years to materialize.

And so

And I personally would be very hesitant to raise restaurant tax or lodging tax

for this project, mostly because they're inconsistent and unreliable as we're experiencing right now.

Property tax is a much more stable form for this long-term type of project.

It's just, I mean, we take an economic downturn someplace and utilizing a restaurant meals tax or lodging tax, it could take a serious hit

I mean, that's... Well, we probably wouldn't want to increase those two areas based on what has occurred in that industry over the past year.

But I think before pre-COVID, they've been pretty consistent.

But again, that's something that I wouldn't feel comfortable doing.

You know, increasing at this time, just based on the hit that they've taken over the past, you know, past year.

One of my questions is just wondering if when we talk about the debt not exceeding the 10%, what happens if we do exceed it?

I'm going to default to the expert on this perhaps.

Sure, Chrissy.

You know, I think it'd be, it's a general guideline.

I mean, it is a policy.

It is what we've communicated to the rating agencies.

So it would be something that I think we could explore as you're pushing it.

But I think the

I think the greater issue is really the coming up with the revenues, you know, I think has been indicated.

So structuring the debt, lengthening the debt, I think there's certain things we can do as we refine this.

But to me, the

And my other point just along with the meals tax and lodging tax, that the increase in real estate taxes would have to

go hand in hand.

So we would need more revenue to expand programs like the CHAP program to help homeowners who cannot take that impact.

So that would have to be considered for revenue needs.

And so we can't not discuss that if we're discussing, basing this on an increase in real estate taxes, which we don't

have too many other options.

Yeah, this is Juan Wade, and I think that, you know, from the presentation that took, that we, the very thorough presentation that we got at the retreat, I think was 260 or so slides, and I was at that point convinced that, you know, we really need to probably go towards the 70 or 80 million dollar at least range.

We don't, you know, I don't think we need to

go towards the $50 million one, which will give us what we have now as far as capacity.

I think that we will see an increase at some point in the city based on things that the changing and the zoning and just the fact that people want to come here and that we want to kind of do it all at once so we won't get that construction fatigue and to go to the public one time and say this is what we want to do but I do know in the future that we want to put some money aside each year for these type of big type of constructions

construction projects.

And I think that we can't use simply the increase in real estate taxes to address, is this going to be too much and it's going to take too long.

I just think that we can ask other localities, how did they do it?

Ask Harrison Byrd or Martinsville, just simply this, you know, and maybe they too just use their tax to pay for the project, but I think we need to ask them how they did it.

But, but

just look into different

Innovative Finances to address this.

I think that, you know, that there's ways to do this.

It's not, this is not unheard of.

And that's the approach that I think we need to take to address this.

We need to do it because I do think it's an equity issue that we show that we value our students.

We value where we educate them.

I'd like to just add to that and go back to the very beginning of the presentation and I think that I know there's so much pressure on council to try to figure out how we're going to fund this.

I think we really need to

educate our community, the larger community on the fact that Charlottesville has not really modernized and invested in our schools in a very long time at the level that we need to do.

And I think there are people in the community and resources in the community that might come to the table

You know, and help us and give us some other ideas of how we can do this.

But it's, I think it's so, it's just so imperative that we help the community understand, as Juan was saying, the equity implications of not modernizing our schools and not allowing all of our students to really

be able to learn in the ways that we now know are best for all students and particularly for students, you know, from poverty and students who have less opportunity.

There are things that maximize the success for all of our students and the whole community, I think, needs to get behind this idea.

So I hope that we will be doing that, that we will be engaging in this process of

educating, informing the community about what state-of-the-art education looks like now in 2021 and going forward, and that others in the community will come and help us come up with some other creative ideas for how we can make this happen.

I'd be glad to.

How about if I start with our meeting with Delegate Hudson?

That one was a little bit more positive.

So I'd rather start with that.

Both Delegate Hudson and Senator Deeds in meeting with both said that they would be happy to sponsor a bill for us in the General Assembly in the coming year.

to ask for the legislation that would allow us to increase our sales tax.

Just rough numbers of a one cent sales tax, which could be allowed would generate, if I remember right, $10 million a year.

And

Delegate Hudson was very optimistic that she thought, given the makeup of the General Assembly right now, it would stand a very good chance of passage.

Senator Deeds was not as optimistic with that, and he even stated that his bigger initiative is for a comprehensive

revenue change for local school districts and local governments for school improvements that statewide there needs to be a comprehensive look at how we're funding our schools and especially our capital projects for schools.

So he to me was very clear that between the two initiatives he preferred the comprehensive look

But he was very clear that he did say he would support our movement to move forward on the local legislation.

And both of those then did recommend that we should work with them.

They would co-sponsor a bill and the General Assembly for us asking for this legislation this year.

And again, that would

I think we have to add, by the way, that if under current law, if we were given the authority to seek a 1% add-on, that would only take effect if we had passed a referendum

vote in which all of us, city council and school board, would have to be advocates for the plan to the rest of the community.

If there were going to be any doubt about any lack of unanimity, any dissent from the top, it would be fatal to getting something like that passed.

I will tell you, I've looked at the election returns in every jurisdiction that has had one of these proposals.

They've all passed anywhere from 52 to 79% of the vote.

Charlottesville is a community that values education.

Thank you for that.

The other question I think is, you know, if we view that as one component of solving the revenue issue of the school reconfiguration, how are we going to align both as a council and a school board ahead of the upcoming General Assembly session to just build community support and demand to get us included in that legislation, because I think it will definitely require a, you know, coordinated organizing effort on our behalf to help

I should add the other difficulty with this plan, although I think it may be the only way we have forward realistically, or certainly the best way forward realistically.

We couldn't even begin to make a decision to go that far, to go that way.

until after November 2022.

We're a year and a half away from being able to make that decision.

whether the answer is a $50 million plan or a $100 million plan or somewhere in between, you've seen how incredibly limiting it's going to be to the rest of what city government would like to be able to do on affordable housing, on all the other things that we've talked about.

The effort that I was seeing last night on TV talking about the plan to perhaps redevelop West Haven or redevelop

South First, pardon me, Sixth Street.

Those kinds of plans would not be possible within the next decade, realistically.

There are so many things that we would end up not being able to do that we want, that we've already decided as council, as a community that we want.

And so the way forward that doesn't involve ditching all of those things that we've already said we wanted

the way forward is the sales tax avenue.

And that's why some of the questions I've raised during our working group meetings is understanding, is there a phased approach that can be taken with the knowns that we have and then knowing that there's another step to this when

because I want to be optimistic that whether it's a shorter term as, you know, as Delegate Hudson is proposing or Senator Deeds, which is a little bit longer term, assuming that something is going to come of this, how would we be able to phase this so that we're not completely losing all this time waiting just to know what our full picture is when we know that we do have local funding that can be allocated in some capacity.

It's just not going to be able to solve the whole puzzle.

So, I mean, I think a phase approach depends on how many phases and how long phased out it is.

I think that in my mind, you know, with the

debt capacity and the cost to restart construction and things.

Again, I would like to get it done as quick as possible.

If that phase can be over a few years, it's just dependent on what length that we're talking about.

I just believe that the public will be what may say, I thought we already did a construction project.

I think a lot of it really depends on how we roll it out and how we explain it to the public.

And I do think that they value this.

And I think it can be done.

I think so, too.

I mean, I think I have tremendous faith in VMDO, you know, to

do what we are all asking them to do.

But I also want us to remember that by phasing it and stretching it out, each year that we push it out, you have those inflation costs.

And I don't know, maybe we lock into something or there's some

opportunity to lock into pricing, but I do, you know, I think that was an important part of what they were trying to illustrate for us and in looking and, you know, following along with other projects that the city has taken on.

I think we, you know, we are seeing the increase in some of those costs as projects have been delayed by a year or two, you know, and so I think that's something else that we need to consider.

I don't think that, and I'm speaking for myself, I'll let the rest of the board weigh in on this if we need to phase it.

I mean, that's a discussion, but I also feel like we need to be able to walk away today with a better understanding of saying,

Okay, let's see what we can do with the phase, but we're going to shoot for that 70 to $78 million range and see what we, you know, and have them come back and with city continuing to work, you know, on options for funding and, you know, us as a board, 100% being supportive and, you know, showing up to work, you know, with delegate Hudson and, you know,

So just a quick, we're at 620.

I'm fine with opening up to public comment.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

We have 11 people in the audience.

If you'd like to address city council and the school board, click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

Each person will have up to three minutes.

If you're watching via Comcast, Facebook, or Boxcast, you can come join the webinar at charlottesville.gov slash Zoom.

So in terms of extending the meeting, 15 minutes, 30 minutes?

Yeah.

I mean, to play it safe.

It's at 621, so we probably should say maybe 30 and try to shoot for 15.

Hopefully before, but okay.

All right, so we're going to go to the questions.

The only other question that I want to just throw out there is, and I've said this before,

Council having to comb through its budget, put things on hold, really attempt to prioritize the operational side of schools is a big, and I brought this up during the budget cycle this year, and so those type of like $4.5 million increases, the one that was just approved

is going to be a challenge and moving forward, that is going to be almost impossible under the numbers that we're seeing too.

So just for you all to think about that too, in terms of what is possible.

I know that Kim has talked about that there will just be some increases because of retirement and insurance and things like that.

But outside of those numbers,

Yes, I mean, I agree, Mayor Walker.

And I mean, we even this weekend and realize that, you know, we will have to work hard, you know, as we do with each year as we prepare for budget talks, but working with staff to kind of look at resources and programs

and that is, you know, huge on my mind and the rest of the boards and realizing the CARES money and ARC money, you know, is temporary and one-time funding.

Can any of the ARC money coming down be utilized?

for some school improvements that would take a little bit of weight off some of the CIP money that, or this might already be being factored in.

I don't remember, Chrissy, if not 50 million, if that's including like the 1.5 or more in maintenance.

So if it's not, if some of that, if there's any of the ARPA money that can be used,

Yeah, I think we did get an initial presentation and kind of some recommendations at our work session with that money and how to do that.

And it very much was geared towards looking at those as options.

Hoover?

It's $10 million and some change.

Sorry, I don't have these.

And how long do you spend it?

Yes, it can go out to fiscal year 2025.

It can touch that budget, but we've only got the first quarter of fiscal year 2025, so, you know, July, August, and September, but it can come to bear in the upcoming budgets up till

until and can have some impact on fiscal year 2025.

The funding's there to support the smoothing.

But as Mayor Walker referenced, I mean, the reality is with inflation and so forth, we'll have to keep an eye on health insurance and the VRS pension.

And then there's the other thing that's always, you know, is the whatever's happening with salary actions, whatever the state sets as the

Target to qualify for their funds, their matching funds, or their contribution towards raises, things like that.

And it's already been brought up before, but also just given the scope of what we're talking about and dedicating new revenues, and I think Chip mentioned it earlier, to this capital projects, the impact that could have because it ultimately is a change in how we look at our formula.

Well, and Chrissy or Ryan, I know Chrissy's on and could speak to this better than I can, but we used to talk with Leslie Ballgard, that 40% of new property tax, I mean, that predates my involvement with Charlottesville City Schools, but it's sort of been a starting point for the conversations and realistically, I mean, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainable Funding for Education, that was back in, what, 2014, it said that, you know, by no means could education with

the type of programming and the community values that the programs are set around for Charlottesville.

It requires a variety of revenue streams for sustainable funding.

And that's what we've seen play out year over year.

And that's not to say that there's just this expectation of ever increasing funds, but there are things that do increase that we don't have any control over.

And then we do look at reductions every year.

We reallocate resources.

so that things don't even get to the board as requests.

So just also to add to that, just as a note of reference and looking at our projections with our real estate growth in total, we're looking at just under about a projection of just a growth about $1.8 million for the entire revenue growth.

Um, so even with the 4.5, um, in the base change that makes up a couple years growth, um, on top of these other changes that Kim's referencing.

So even the real estate 40% formula is not going to cover probably potential needs operationally.

And, and just my point in, in throwing the ball to Christie too, is that it really hasn't.

If you look at the track record over the past, as far back as I've ever looked at it, um,

So when we talk about a tax increase, it's specific for reconfiguration.

Our assumption is that that full increase

would be going directly to the school's capital projects that we're not taking 40%.

That's the point I'm trying to make that we're not taking 40% of the increase in operations.

Correct.

Sure, I can share my screen and do that.

Yes, thank you.

And Chrissy, real quick, I'm sorry.

So that property, that

number amount that you just referenced there at the end that you said that would be reflected in debt service.

So the options that we showed included the city CIP plus the $50 million reconfiguration project.

That 10 cent increase funds both of those.

So five cents basically would cover the debt service on the 50 million and the five cents would cover the rest of the city CIP.

However, I do want to say in the interest to be fair, if we weren't adding $50 million worth of debt, we would not be buying down our debt service fund balance as quickly.

Got you, you know, and then, and then the point that I know has been made a couple of times is that, you know, I think in this may be another conversation is that we need to look at how do we or do we need to, you know, change, you

the allocation, you know, and spreading out and plugging in numbers.

So, you know, four different projects throughout the year instead of that 50 million coming in in one lump sum.

I mean, and that's something that probably outdates.

Again, we haven't done this since 1975.

So and it's hitting us hard now.

And I think we all know that.

And that's certainly an option, but the debt lasts for 20 years.

So even if we spread it out over five years and we did 10, 10, and 10, at the end of the five years, we still have 20 years worth of $50 million debt to pay for.

So absolutely.

And in fact, we wouldn't be selling $50 million of bonds all at once, probably.

We would space it out.

based on the timing of the project, but we still have to be prepared to pay for it.

So all this to say, yes, we can certainly spread it out.

Okay, well, so that certainly speaks to item seven that's on the screen right now.

And both seven and eight were items we put up there just to bring clarity to the conversation.

I think we've gotten some of that already in this phone call.

One through six are really items that we need to kind of understand as to what are the parameters on these six options, right?

We're going to, we're

is three and a half weeks away from submitting information to independent cost estimators on

Six different ways of doing this.

We basically said, you know, we're going to look at three options at one site and three options at another.

But they're all tied together in reconfiguration.

So what are those parameters?

And all of these questions go to that.

I would suggest that we actually, maybe I didn't think about the order in which I put these in, but maybe question six is really kind of one of the big ones, right?

If we

You know, the capacity study suggested that we plan for a new middle school for 1050 or 1052.

Again, our peak enrollment is at the middle at six, seven and eight is 2019-20, which was 891 students.

So 900 would just be building to our peak that we've experienced historically.

1050 would be what was recommended and then something less than that is 950.

It seems a little crazy to me to only build for 900.

That seems a little short-sighted.

I don't think we're necessarily going to want to build more than 1050.

We're always going to be looking for where we can put some expansion.

But do we even keep 900 on the table?

I showed you six options and two of them were 900 capacity.

Does that even stay?

Let's have a guardrail discussion on capacity.

I think the amount of this investment to do this at 900 is short-sighted.

It seems to me that the only way that it would make sense to plan for less than 1050 is

is if we really think we're not going to implement the affordable housing strategies that we've talked about.

I mean, realistically, if we're going to implement the affordable housing strategies that we've talked about, including the zoning changes that are being proposed, even if we don't go anywhere near all the way there, if we go even a little bit there, we have to expect we're going to have growth in the student population.

I suspect that if we come back with a census number right now of about 50,000 that 10 years from now we should reasonably expect to be around 55,000 unless the university suddenly decides they're going to stop growing.

And that's not likely in my view.

So my concern is that I think the affordable housing strategy

that we are probably going to embark on.

And of course, even how the comp plan gets written and implemented is still a decision that's a year away.

But assuming we're going to go that way and assuming we're going to expect that we're going to have an increase in the population of Charlottesville being driven in significant part by an increase in affordable housing, which necessarily includes children,

We have to assume we're going to have more kids coming to our schools.

Is there an option in the proposals where, like at Beaufort, where there was a building added on when there was increased capacity?

There's a lot of different ways to solve that problem, Mayor Walker.

I think that you've got to start off by making sure that you've got your core classroom capacity for your students.

And then, you know, a lot of ways when people are designing for growth, they will say, all right, we're going to design for 900 now, but we want to grow to 1100.

So we're going to make sure that our core things, our library, our arcs, our

Jim can handle a building of that size.

We'll build for the 900 students and then we'll begin to expand, right?

That's a typical way you would approach a new building where you were looking at growth.

It's a little different here now because we've got an existing building

with some facilities and we know we don't have the money to do all of it.

So I think, so then what are you looking at is, do you do a combination of expansion of, you know, one way would be to say, you know, build for the students that you need and the expansion in the future is going to be, we're going to make those core facilities bigger, right?

And this is where we begin to move from math to design, right?

It's when we really get into it, right?

What are the creative ways, what are all the different ways to solve this problem, right?

If you keep your current gym now, can you use the gym at the Boys and Girls Club?

Is that your expansion?

Is that how if you need two gyms or an auxiliary gym when you go bigger?

That is in conflict with an open campus, a campus style school versus a closed one.

So, I mean, there's options as well where we could say we're going to temporarily use the boys and girls gym.

That's big enough to hold a bigger population.

We're going to take the existing C building, which is a gym.

Let's renovate that into an auditorium.

And then we can have a proper size or auditorium.

We'll tear down building B and have the space for all the cars.

There's a solution in there that may be the right thing.

So I'm getting a little ahead of myself in getting into the design options we would look at.

But

I think the core thing is to make sure that we can make the swap.

It goes like, you know, we always talk about can fifth and pre-K swap?

Will that fit, right?

We have to have the same question here.

You know, can we fit 975 or can we fit 1050 and realistically have an arts program, realistically have a PE program, and what would that take?

And we've got some work to do on our side to see that, but having that number set helps us understand that.

Hey, Wig, I don't mean, I feel like we need to talk about the budget because A1, I really want to see that option go away because it does not accomplish reconfiguration in any meaningful way.

It merely renovates Buford.

which is desperately needed so I feel like A1 is actually the kind of do nothing model that you kind of preface things with with the 10 million it's actually like okay if we have just going to leave everything the way it is it's actually going to probably cost us 50 million dollars just to make Buford a place that people want to go and send their children and for children to be

in an optimal learning environment.

But that's not actually what the school board or this RFP is being asked to do.

And so that's why I really would like, I feel like with the $50 million placeholder is a really good starting point.

But I think what we're also talking about is the way that we're trying to smooth it out with the money from the,

whatever arc and also the potential for sales tax 1% increase there too.

So I feel like that gets us to 70 million in like the most optimistic world.

and also 70 million will get us a lot more today than it will in three years and that is why I feel like we really need to have these guardrails established sooner rather than later and we're going to you know I feel like the school board is always acting in good faith towards the council and that's why like in my mind that ARC money is going to be CIP related

so that we can limit the debt that this reconfiguration will necessarily require for the first time in 60 years.

And hopefully we can get, I can't talk about operations right now.

We have had, we're just a

The thing that we could do to really reduce operations, honestly, is to make a large elementary school, a large middle school, and a large high school.

Instead, our community values neighborhood elementary schools.

That is why our operations cost so much.

We ask the question all the time, is this how we should be operating?

Because it does cost so much.

um and you know if you want to fundamentally rethink the way that Charlottesville provides neighborhood schooling great let's talk about that as a community but let's first you know like we that's how we basically would have to operate would change our um general operating fund is to fundamentally change the way we provide instruction at elementary school

But we do believe that this reconfiguration model will lower and reduce the operation budget over the long term.

It's just going to be a long term commitment.

So I would just hope that we could really focus on number one, which I think at a minimum, the floor should be $70 million.

And I would hope that we could ask for

Of course, if the budget, if the sales tax proposal were to be implemented, were to be passed by the General Assembly and then passed at the referendum in November 22,

then in the budget that we would be preparing in the spring of 2023, which of course would be the fiscal year 2023 to 2024, at that point you all could start talking about spending, about how you would spend some of that money.

I'm not sure exactly how it would work, but my sense of things is that that would

We would essentially say, okay, here's roughly $10 million in each year that you all can spend on capital funds.

Okay, so I'm going to put something out there and say that I'm hearing you guys say 900 doesn't make sense.

We'll study options between 975 and 1050 and we should understand what the impacts are to our core spaces to make sure that we can accommodate 1050 if we do 975 in the short term.

Yes, I would say that 900 is definitely off the table.

And I believe that with the growth, the affordable housing plan that council is looking at, plus I do believe if we build this new school, I do think that we will

see a return of some of the students who leave the division at that point.

So I think that I would go for close to 1050.

Okay, I'm going to just try to facilitate and move us along a little bit with the time in mind.

So one of the ways that we can do that is to try to start going a little faster.

So I'm going to go to question three.

And this is just as much for the city manager and Ms.

Hamill as it is everyone else.

The reason we have been showing options that start construction in 23 is that's the fastest we can really get there.

By the time we go through the process we've talked about today, get approval of schematic design, design it all out.

By the time we can get stuff on the streets, funding that's available in FY 24, July 1st of 24 is the fastest we can go there.

When we put together the first proposal of looking at a two cent per year increase, it was just to spread that out.

If we were to move that tax increase up, then it means that we could move up that debt service as well.

Or at least a portion, you know, if you wanted to do 5 cents in 5 cents or 10 cents in one year.

I think that's a conversation that we're going to have to have a little bit more conversation about.

But I would like for us to explore what moving this up, not just because, you know, the cost at the, but even the interest rates at this time.

And I'm sure that maybe by the time these bonds are sold that it may have increased anyway.

But I think, you know, as we talked about last year with very favorable rates,

We would want to, you know, be able to do this project under more favorable terms than not and just acknowledging that that, you know, that that could increase.

I was just going to say, it would be very difficult for them to get much less if I'm remembering my email right.

So that's what I'm seeing.

Yeah.

I think the 1.79 would have been an increase over last year as well.

So just to clarify, the sale was today and it was at one point three eight.

And and so to clarify some of that, Mayor Walker is absolutely correct.

Moving that up, there is some benefit to that.

But again, we have to be able to pay the debt service.

The assumptions that we have in under the scenarios we've been talking about issuing in twenty five.

are at 4%.

Yeah.

So it sounds like if we were able to figure out the revenue part, that it would be to our interest to do it sooner rather than later.

The other thing I would like for the schools to, you know, and I don't, this is not my area, so, but I was watching a video the other day and they were talking about that they, you know, educators across the country, the administration feels like it'll take 12 years to rebound and

from this one year of COVID, which seems just, you know, wild to me.

But if that's the case and the way the federal government has traditionally poured money into, you know, emergencies, not that it's something that you all can, you know, bank on receiving, but that they will probably be making these investments long term for the needs that divisions may have because of the, you know, COVID year.

And just to make one other point, so even if we were able to move the bonds up and sell at a lower interest rate, that does help ease some of the pressure on the affordability.

It, however, does not really change your then capacity issue.

So if we are now, you know, abandoning a $50 million limit and we're moving to 70, we do need to still talk about the fact that that does exceed our policy at some point and

There are other impacts.

So I just, you know, all of this is a balance.

I also just want to be mindful that one of the things that Christie said over and over and over again in her presentation was like on top of all of the other projects and if all things come in at once.

So there was just a lot of emphasis on the fact that if we wanted to continue to do the things that we wanted to do instead of pausing them, like we've paused reconfiguration for a decade, like that is something to consider as well.

I think that

talking about this in the context of all of the other CIP priorities, of course, like that's fair, but I also think that there's also opportunities to talk about this pausing other projects as well as somebody who also values the amazing facilities that we have in our city.

There is no package of things that we could pause that would get you where you want to go.

And I think all of this is a negotiation.

I mean, if we come up with $20 million, you know, around the sales tax and the ARC money, and then we have some leveraged private philanthropy money, and then, you know, we're just trying to cobble together.

We're not getting, you know, this...

We're not getting to this in one easy way.

We're just trying to find a way forward.

Is it 20 or 10?

And I just want to just, you know, for counsel and just for the school board to know, you know, the recommendation for the affordable housing plan is at 10 million, but we knew that that was low, even for that.

As Lloyd mentioned a little earlier,

looking at the news about the next phases of redevelopment for the Housing Authority, that's not currently in the plan, but it is in the discussions about how to make the plan happen.

So some of, even though I think there's a way, you know, ways that we could be more strategic, there are some other conversations that we also have to have that are not currently being considered.

So it is, you

It is going to take a lot of effort.

I hope I've said that this is something that we definitely should do as someone who went through these schools and have kids currently in and family members.

And so I know that even just looking at the pictures of the other schools in the state, it's, you know,

a world-class city shouldn't have our schools looking like that, but we also have to make sure that when we try to prioritize funding that we understand if they're talking about limitations on any other projects that

Some of the very people that we are doing this work for may not be here or may not be able to live here if we don't, you know, also keep up with the commitment and affordable housing longer term.

And that is likewise my biggest concern.

I mean, like the $75 million, you know, some equivalent of $18 in tax increases.

You know, that doesn't really scare me as much.

I mean, Harrisonburg, when they built, well, they haven't done it yet, but when they approved constructing their new high school, they did a 14 cent increase, I think all at once, although they paused it because of the pandemic.

So it's something other localities have done.

And, you know, it's certainly within the realm of feasibility for other localities in Virginia, but

Likewise, the only thing that, you know, just I struggle with is that exact same point of it freezing up the CIP budget and also kind of freezing up our operations budget to a lesser extent, because of our affordable housing strategy because of redevelopment of affordable housing.

And also the fact that like, we've had things pop up like the Smith Aquatic Center where we didn't anticipate it.

But once we knew about it, we couldn't really put that off.

Likewise, what happens if we have like a low income housing tax credit property that

affordability period ends.

And we have an opportunity if we have $5 million available to keep that affordable.

And if our CIP is totally at capacity, we can't do anything about it.

So I don't really know the answer there either.

But that's really the only thing that gives me pause, not so much the tax increase itself, not the idea that this isn't necessary.

But if it is at all possible, as was mentioned to

So in terms of exploration, because

We do need to give this direction to the design team, and we are acknowledging that there might be revenue sources that we can't be certain about today, but that we might need to lean into.

Is there a number that we can coalesce around in terms of just the range?

Obviously, we know where the floor is, and for some of us, we didn't know the ceiling was going to be too much higher, but is it 75?

Is that the range where we're saying that we could cobble together other sources of revenue, and we feel confidence in that?

Yeah, I think even if we gave the 75 million at this point, we would still have to ask staff where, because as far as we know, we have only figured out another, what, maybe $8 million up from the 50, unless I'm missing something.

And so the 75, I mean, if we

There's just some things we're just not going to know right now, but I think

to exclude and to be too prescriptive right now, knowing that there are other possibilities that haven't come to fruition, for sure.

But I just think that we need to at least give the design team that flexibility without going overboard.

Yeah, and with the conversations, potential other designs will come up that may serve the community needs better.

You know, they talked about in our meetings that they often get ideas, you know, from the public.

So I think the design exercise versus a math exercise is probably what we should keep in mind.

So not exceeding 75 million is where we are.

Yeah, I mean, and even up to 75, we're going to have to get, we have to get other funding revenue at this point.

I mean, it just, it cannot just come from raising of property taxes.

I mean, I So I think all the options

Wicke, am I correct?

If that's the direction that you're giving us, we'll do that.

Of course, the second part to that is $75 million win, right?

So we could say, all right, we're going to start no later than 2020.

then the F24 year that's currently in the CIP and that means you would start the second project, start Buford then, you start Walker two years later so you can move students.

So from a debt perspective, we can issue debt anytime.

I think it comes down to, again, sorry, but I think it's down to council's appetite for what you're willing to commit or sacrifice, however you want to look at it, in terms to get to that payment.

The issue, the thing I'm trying to think about is

If the only realistic way for us to accomplish what we want to accomplish is with this sales tax increase, how much point is there in our trying to figure out a way to do something less than that?

There's an old doctrine of restricted choice.

If you're playing a bridge hand and the only way to make the hand is to assume the king of spades is on your left,

you assume the king of spades is on your left and you go for it.

You've got to assume at some point that the right circumstances will obtain and that we all will work for them and that we move forward.

And if we're not in a position to say that because our legislators say that it's really not a possibility, that's one thing.

But where our legislators are at least

Cautiously optimistic to optimistic, and it's the way to solve our problem, then I just think we ought to be thinking with that in mind.

Now, if the answer is that, okay, we're going to talk about $75 million, but if we say to Wick, if we know on November 15th of 2022 that we've got another $10 million a year in sales tax revenue coming in

starting the next fiscal year, what could you do with that?

Is there a way to build enough flexibility into the decision-making process so that we can say, all right, if it fails, we've got a $75 million answer.

If it doesn't fail, we've got the answer at $100 million that really does what we want to do.

Yes.

I think from the conversations in our working group, there was concern about setting the ceiling at 100 million or more.

And so they wanted to have this discussion to see if there was a

Floor and a ceiling that was less than the hundred million.

Yeah, I think that's a great question, Counselor Snook, and I think, and Wick, you jump in, please, if I'm wrong on this, but my thinking in response to that is, you know, if we are in agreement to start with Buford, and then, you know, maybe the designs aren't fully fleshed out or they leave possibilities for the preschool center.

I mean because I think even with the 75 million we're limiting the preschool center to 20 classrooms I believe correct me if I'm wrong you know but if that extra money then does land in our laps you know we can we can think bigger and better for preschool which I think also you know as as

And that's just what I was getting at with a phasing question, exactly at this point.

So yeah, jump in, please.

One proposal would be, remember in the beginning of the presentation I said we're doing four estimate points.

So we're going to send stuff to be estimated in a couple weeks.

We'll get it right back for the 4th of July.

Then we'll have another decision point make.

We'll probably need another phone call just like this to kind of maybe bring those guardrails in a little bit.

And then that'll lead us up to the end of the concept design where we get to the opening day of school and we've got some options to discuss with more detail with the community.

So maybe we explore things that range from 50 to 90 for the estimate that we have done in three weeks.

We're going to come back from the 4th of July.

You guys will have to take that information and tell us how far you want me to come down on that top guardrail.

That'd be one way to think about it.

There's a reason that, I mean, remember, we started this, one of the quandaries you had was we don't know how much to budget because we don't know how much it's going to cost.

So let's start studying it.

So we can start to study a bigger range for the next three, four weeks.

Wick, can I ask why would we still be considering the $50,000?

Because in our discussions here, I'm not hearing that that's feasible in order for us to come near accomplishing what we need to accomplish.

50 million.

50 million, yeah.

Well, it's all the money that's been offered.

And I think we should stay there with not the goal to be there.

But until we find it, since this is, again, the community engagement, it's not going to cost us, from my understanding, anymore to have the floor and ceiling at a certain space.

I just, because that's, I mean, we have maybe a little bit more, council hasn't talked about that, but the 50 million is what has been allocated at this time.

But I think if we can explore with the community, the upper levels, and it's within the scope that we're already paying for, we can get those backs.

I think the fear is that people will want all of those things that come with the

you know higher cost and but we'll have to kind of you know reign that in and understand that if we have limitations we have to work within those but I think what Counselor Snook was getting to is if we can present more options and if the cost if the dollars do manifest in some way that we will know that it's something we can move forward with so it's 708 so does that work

the proposal that he stated, knowing that we will still have to meet and come to agreement on that before we are moving forward.

And we can explain to the public why it's a $50 million project or a $90 million project and why we made that decision if we don't have the resources to pay for it.

Okay, so I don't hear any

We have enough.

We'll keep pushing forward.

I think when we show what you can get for what price,

It would help the community conversation if we could also say, and that's going to require X amount of new revenue or this many cents of a tax increase, even if we don't know exactly how it might fall out.

So if Chrissy and Chip and Kim could work with us to help us give that what that is.

So I still believe that if you put all the information out there and present it in a clear and concise way that almost anyone in the community will get it.

So tell people what it costs, tell people what the facts are, and they'll help us.

Help me give what that criteria is, however we go about it.

That would be my request back, and then I think we're just fine going forward into the community.

A lot of this is a political conversation right now.

Are you as the political leaders

Are you going to be okay if we go out and have a conversation that shows things that are $90 million?

I'm hearing you guys say 90 is a ceiling.

Explore things between 90 and 50.

Because even if we get that sales tax increase, the sales tax amount, we need to put some of that money into also maintaining and upgrading the elementary schools.

Because our elementary schools also need a lot of work done to them.

Well, remember, there's the modernization program going on.

This is already in your CIP.

So every elementary school is getting all new furniture and all new IT and flat screen boards and four to 5,000 square foot renovations in key areas.

That's on top of the 1.2 million already in your CIP for overall system maintenance and on top of the $750,000 a year in overall HVAC maintenance and on top of your roof replacement.

So there's money in the CIP to maintain and upgrade our elementary schools.

What there isn't money, Councilor McGill, is to expand them, like if we had a capacity issue there.

Stay at Walker if we don't switch.

Okay, so we wouldn't stay.

And we would, in our engagement, we would say that loud and clear.

It's like, this is what this means.

And maybe that's okay.

I was telling the school board, it's like, it's not just about reconfiguration.

It's also now about there's going to be middle steps of reconfiguration.

Like we may have interim steps where we're reconfigured differently than we are now before we get to our final step.

And we just need to start talking about things in that language.

Whit, can I ask one quick question?

When you were talking about the money and the budget for the CIP for the elementary schools, does that money also include the slide you showed about just the maintenance of the current middle schools if we didn't do anything, the HVAC and all those things that needed to be replaced?

Well, that slide was for the middle schools only.

The way that, and Kim can correct me here, but I think the way that the school system likes to do it is they have that $750 a year for HVAC and $1.2 million for large things, and then they go where they need and see where it happens, right?

Because you don't know when a system is going to break and fail, you know.

So that's kind of money that's flexibly spent to maintain system-wide across all nine of your campuses.

The

The $10 million was simply kind of big things that we could have replaced, choices that we could have made at Walker and Buford a couple years past.

So we're stretching a couple extra years out of a system.

Again, like we were saying, you wanted $100,000

Miles out of your car, it's still running at 150, so you're good.

Those are things that we have put off because we have put off reconfiguration.

That that's correct.

I just wanted to speak quickly to Ms.

McGill's point about the elementary modernizations.

Those have been targeted in terms of their transformation of the architecture of the schools.

They have been school-wide so far in terms of furniture and technology upgrades.

But as a mom of a child at Jackson Viya, there's additional work to imagine in the future of our elementary schools.

And it is like, that's what kills me about sending her to school there is that

they're not windows into those classrooms other than a two foot wide window.

Yeah.

So my final thing, I guess I would just say is

You know the upper limit being 90 to 100 million does give make me a little nervous because I do worry that you know potentially we're putting something out there that's just will not be feasible and just what impact that will have on the communities trust in this process and sort of how we're planning for it.

Perhaps there's no avoiding that, but that's, you know, one of my reactions.

And I know this isn't VMDO's job, but I do really think one of the important things in the discussions with the community from, you know, council and all of us as elected leaders is to be forthright and honest about the tradeoffs, because I think it's one thing to see a great plan.

Everyone loves it, but

If you're not presenting it with the trade-offs, people's reactions are going to be different than otherwise.

And I think we do really need to be honest about that trade-off set.

Certainly if we're going 90 to 100 or even 75, you know, we can get there with a 15 cent

tax increase and take our tax rate up to that similar to Loudoun and Fairfax in Northern Virginia.

But even doing that means will we be able to have fulfill our affordable housing plan of 10 million a year?

Will we be able to do CRHA redevelopment for the other sites?

Will we be able to take advantage of preserving affordability and low-income housing tax credit property?

And we will present information with a trade-off only in terms of a tax increase.

It's not our role or our job to say, you know, you would have to do this instead of that.

That's not what you hired us to do.

And I agree.

Okay.

So it's 7-17.