City Council Meeting   5/16/2022

All right, so why don't we go ahead and call this meeting to order.

It is now 4.01 p.m.

May 16, 2022, Charlottesville City Council hybrid meeting will come to order.

Ms.

Councilor McGill mentioned that she would possibly be late and she'd be joining us virtually.

Okay.

Here.

Okay.

McGill joining us when she can.

Is there a motion to approve or to amend the agenda?

So moved.

Motion by Mr. Payne.

Okay.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Opposed?

Motion passes.

So as always, this meeting will be divided into three main sections.

First is a work session to hear and discuss some presentations.

Second, there will be a closed meeting starting roughly 530.

And then there will be a city council business meeting which will begin around 630.

There will be seating available in the council chambers for up to 23 preregistered attendees.

So the first item on the agenda is a report on a Jaunt update and I'd like to invite Ted Reek, the Jaunt Inc CEO to present.

Mr. Reek, are you with us virtually?

There you are.

I see your face.

Okay.

Yes, Sam.

Yes, we can.

Yes.

Good evening, council and members of the public.

Before Ted begins, just wanted to share with council that the presentation this evening that Ted will make is actually a little expanded from what was posted.

So we just wanted the public to understand that he will get to go into more details than what was provided in the packet that was posted on Friday.

Great.

I'm going to share my screen.

Can you see that?

Yes, we can.

Okay.

Thank you for having me this evening.

I think I've met everyone except for Councillor Payne.

John's vision, just as a reminder, our basic goal is to enable people to live their lives independently and with dignity.

And we've been doing this for about 42 years.

There are four Charlottesville appointees to our board.

One is Lucas Ames.

He's relatively new to the board.

His term expires in September.

Eric Larson is the newest member of our board.

Christine Appert has been on the board since 2016.

And Ray Heron has been on the board since 2001.

As another friendly reminder, we serve a six county area, including Charlottesville.

And I would say most, if not all, most of our services will feed into Charlottesville in one way or another, including services that we also provide in Charlottesville itself.

We have a wide range of services we provide depending upon the needs.

The biggest one is our ADA complimentary service.

That's a requirement under the Americans with Disabilities Act.

We do this in support of the CAT system.

We also provide some of the outlying counties, circulator or intra-county service.

We also provide links from the counties to Charlottesville.

And then we also provide commuter services into Charlottesville and UVA.

This is the CAT system.

The biggest thing we do for both for CAT is to support its services with ADA Paratransit Services.

In general, we cover an area three-fourths of a mile on either side of a bus route.

So pretty much encompasses all the city of Charlottesville and a good part of the urbanized area of Albemarle County.

As a quick refresher or primer, we receive three types of funding, federal, state, and local.

Our federal money includes money that can only be used in the rural areas, and we also receive urban money, but we receive that through the city of Charlottesville.

and these funding can't be mixed.

You can't use urban and the rural areas and vice versa.

And that's a key distinction that I'll get into a little later.

Federal money is reimbursable.

So depending on how much we spend, the eligible expenses determines how much money we actually get up to a ceiling.

and this is allocated annually and it's based on various factors that embraces the city as well as the county in terms of calculating how much we get each year.

State funding is based on performance.

Unlike the federal money, we can use the state money in urban or rural settings.

It's a fixed amount in terms of we're not depending upon a reimbursement

If we get X number of dollars, we get to spend all of that on eligible expenses.

And local money, which is from the jurisdictions such as the city and the county, is also a fixed amount.

Again, we can use this in urban and rural settings.

We also receive some money through agency contracts with human service agencies, such as Java and Pace.

And that's based on how much service we actually provide

those entities.

Specifically on Charlottesville, the main funding we receive is not only from the city itself but through federal funding.

The county, the way federal funding is distributed to the area is based on population and the amount of services that are provided.

So Albemarle County actually contributes to the federal funding that the city receives.

However, that funding is exclusively controlled by the city and it's negotiated between John and CAAT annually.

We call this a split letter and CAAT received 75% of this amount.

and John 25%.

At this point, we can only use it for ADA services, even though the funds can be used for almost any urbanized service, not just ADA.

However, there are parts of the urbanized area of Albemarle County, which is eligible for federal funding, urban funding, but we cannot use it.

And it's kind of creating something I call a transit desert.

and I'll explain more about that in a moment.

For the coming fiscal year, our total funding is $2.6 million, 22% is federal, 13% is state and almost two thirds is from the city itself.

And it covers both operations and capital expenses.

On the federal side, we get three types of federal funding that we use for Charlottesville.

One is what we call formula, which is based on population and other factors.

ARP money, that's part of the COVID relief package.

There's still some of that funding left over for FY23.

And there's a little bit of money we receive strictly for rural areas.

In terms of ridership, like many systems in the country, we were hit by COVID.

And if you look at the graph in around February, March of 2020, that's when the virus really took off here.

And we saw a big reduction in ridership.

We've kind of held our own for the last two years.

We're seeing a slight trend up.

In the beginning COVID kind of limited our services.

Now it's more dealing with bus operator or driver shortages.

We're having a tough time staffing up and I can discuss that more later if you'd like.

Many of you aware, and I know Councilor Wade is familiar with this, having served on the John Board a couple of years ago, we ran into some challenges with the state.

We had our CEO made some judgment errors in terms of spending money that triggered an audit and that discovered some issues that John wasn't doing very well.

findings were contained in what we call a cure letter.

And I want to give you a report as to how we're doing.

I believe we are making progress in addressing many of the areas addressed by the state.

I want to give credit to the staff that was here before me in keeping things going.

So a lot of the accomplishments I credit to them, but we are continuing this momentum since my arrival here six months ago.

There are four basic areas that the letter addressed is performance data, how we spent rural versus urban money, and also some other issues, including our administrative costs.

In summary, we overstated some of our statistics, which allowed us to get more state funding, federal funding than we were entitled to.

this was an error that the prior CEO basically hoarded the data and did not share that with anybody and that data was used to report to the state which gave us more money than we were entitled after he left and we were able to reconstruct what actually happened during that time

We ended up discovering that we needed to pay back the state a million dollars, which we have done and that was charged off for FY 2021 budget.

Fundamentally, there was really no problem in our record keeping

Right now what we do is we have an open record system where multiple people look at data and multiple people verify its accuracy.

In the past, only one person had the data and that wasn't the CFO or anybody to track it.

And nobody was able to see that information, but now it's opened up.

Also, we have been tasked with inaccurate cost allocation among urban and rural areas.

We have a new cost model that does a better job of allocating those costs, but we are looking at even improving that model today.

And relating to urban and rural money,

There's a situation where we bought vehicles with rural money, but they're using urban services.

We're trying to rectify that situation.

A lot of the services that we provide are urban.

So we need to make sure that the money that we use for vehicles and other capital needs line up with those purposes.

We also had some services that were paid with rural money

but they were in the urbanized area.

We paid back just this year about $100,000 to make that even.

Going back to our record keeping, we are doing a better job of tracking and allocating those resources.

We've actually discovered more anomalies.

We are reviewing those anomalies with the state to verify their accuracy and to see what we do next about

and we've briefed our board.

Mr. Sanders has been briefed about this.

Members of the Albemarle County have been.

So we have explained where we are on that and some of our solutions and we're working through the details with the state.

The state will be here next week and we hope to discuss this further with them in person next week.

Finally, we're also in the process of developing a new transit plan, which would be a three to five year look at our business.

We're updating the agency contracts with Java and Pace.

Also the state made a comment that they thought our administration costs were too high relative to our budget.

We've investigated that and we don't see where that's actually the case.

They based their conclusions on a 2016 report from Texas that was based on 2011 data.

And they looked at Texas systems that operates a wide range of services and compared us to them.

To give you a little bit of detail on that,

Most of the systems in Texas don't resemble John at all.

In fact, out of 68 systems, we're thinking two to four systems may even be remotely like John.

We don't have

data about those systems.

So we cannot make a comparison as to where we may be different than them to have the state make the conclusions that they did or the observations they made.

However, we did our own analysis using more recent data and compared ourselves to Virginia systems.

And we think we're pretty much in the meat ballpark with other Virginia systems.

However, we will keep looking for ways to be more efficient administratively.

You heard me talk about mixing in rural and urban funding.

This is an issue.

As I mentioned, we did our own review in addition to what the state did, and we discovered potentially more misapplications than they did.

we've reported those to all interested parties and we're going to as I mentioned earlier we're going to review those what to say hopefully next week to give you a perspective on the left of this chart is the blue area is what we thought was the rural parts of our urban area and the green part

is what we thought were the urban areas.

And we equated the urban areas with our ADA service zones and anything outside that we considered rural.

That was not correct.

actually the urbanized areas defined by the census which is the map on the right and there are some white areas surrounding the city and encroaching on the blue area which we call transit deserts those are urbanized areas eligible for service for urbanized funding but we don't have the funding lining up to do that

and those are services that we provide that benefit both county and city residents.

They include retail as well as employment opportunities.

I'm discussing right now with Garland how we might address that and I'm also discussing with Garland other issues as well and I have been finding Garland very open-minded about these things.

So I just want to let you know that we are working on a solution.

And in that vein, I do want to indicate that we are working together.

I don't believe John and Kat have played very well together in the past.

We are turning a new page on that, I believe.

Not too long ago, the city, the county, Kat and John got together

and how they get to know each other meeting.

Just today, I had a meeting with the other transit operators with the school district, with Garland and Becca White at UTS.

One of the areas we're talking about is how do we deal with the shortage of bus operators?

We're also talking about working together on developing alternative fuels for our vehicles and getting away from fossil fuels.

So to that end, we're piggybacking on a study that CAT has initiated looking at alternative fuel vehicles.

We are also going to look at our fleet.

That study was only going to look at CAT's fleet.

We are putting our money in to look at John's fleet as well.

And in addition to looking at those different technologies, we are forming an advisory committee

for the jaunt portion of the study so that we would have a cross section of our community tracking along with us to see how we evaluate and make decisions regarding on what our future fuel ought to be and what our strategy should be on getting to a cleaner environment.

And later on, if you have any suggestions on who should populate our committee, I would be open to hearing your suggestions.

Going back to the bus shortage issue, that's affecting everybody, not only in this area, but the country as well.

Today, we discussed opportunities where we can see cat bus routes overlapping areas where Albemarle County students live.

And many of these people could conceivably take a cat bus to the high school and other schools as well.

If that works out, that could save five or six bus operators for the school district.

Doesn't sound like much, but it's really huge.

That means we're competing for five or six less bus operators and we're reducing overlap.

And we brought this to the attention of both CAT and the school district just today.

And we're gonna be looking into it further

depending upon how the school district wants to proceed on that.

So we are looking at opportunities to work together and this is just one example.

In addition, it looks like the city may be in line to get what we call a micro transit demonstration that is through the state.

I want to discuss that in a moment.

I discussed the transit deserts, which I am having discussions with Garland about the funding on that.

And Crescent Hall, the senior center, there may be a bigger role for John to play in serving that particular development.

A microtransit, I'll be honest with you, the state has a demonstration grant.

At this point, it's been recommended that the city get that.

I don't know if that's a done deal or not, but the state specifically did not want John to be the grantee on that because of all the issues we've had.

However, I think there's a role for John.

and I would like to see if the state would be willing to allow us to be a subcontractor to CAT to operate some of the service and that's discussion I'm still going to have with Garland and the state this map shows you where we operate the two zones the north zone and the pantop zone

John already operates in those areas.

We have vehicles, we have bus operators,

so we could add that to the to the experiment plus how we do business is not a big stretch from micro transit we do on-demand services now so we'd like to see if there's any flexibility on the state's part and the city's part to see if John could be have a role here I totally understand that John

has some problems.

I totally get all that, but I think it's a great opportunity to turn the page.

Also, this particular service delivery method, we would like to use those in the rural areas as well.

The transit deserts, we think there's opportunity to use new funding to serve this area.

There's also an opportunity to maybe flex existing funds in here.

Again, those are discussions we're trying to have with all the interested parties.

Finally, another, there's some future activity.

I think many of you, Mayor Snook, I know you're involved in the RTA, the Regional Transit Authority is a future opportunity.

Also,

Task Interfacing Technology.

Smartphones are amazing.

There's an application where you can combine the information of all the transit operators in the area in one app.

So if you need to take UTS from the Couric Cancer Center to Hollymead, there are apps that'll trace that trip for you and tell you which buses to board and where to get them.

We hope we can book trips on Jaunt through the app.

You can book your bike sharing if you want to, or if you're so inclined to ride a scooter, you can do that as well.

So just today, we discussed among the operators to develop a joint project

to see if we can obtain an application to provide a seamless centralized point of information.

We like to see if we can expand commuter options.

UVA has been tied on parking.

They would like people to not drive to campus, to the grounds, I'm sorry.

And maybe we can intercept them where they live and do a better job of that.

and there may be opportunities for joint development between transit.

Perhaps there are some areas of the city that could be both a good transit station as well as a location for affordable housing.

There may be transit dollars that we can use to leverage some of those kinds of developments.

And we'll be looking at those opportunities on a cooperative basis.

Thank you, Mr. Reek.

I just had a couple of comments and one minor question.

One, it's, yes, it was a pleasure to serve on our board for, you know, many years as a county rep, as a transportation planner for the county, and

did great work, and I'm sure you still do.

Many of the people that we serve, they were the only way to not only get to that doctor's appointment, but to church or some type of social event.

I'm glad that John is still serving that important role in our community.

My question was, if you could just explain a little bit more about what micro transit is.

Well, to use a commercial term, it's Uber for transit.

You can use the app.

and book a trip much like you do Uber.

The transit service would be provided in much the same way.

It would be on demand with a response within a period of time.

Right now, to use CAP, you gotta time yourself out for the bus route and go to a bus stop.

For John, you gotta make an advanced reservation with a micro transit feature to our service

Delivery Repertoire, you can make more spontaneous trips.

And that's how probably people live is spontaneously in many ways.

Right.

And the cost and, you know, the timing of it will be compatible with

not compatible will be able to compete with the Uber.

Well, it would be subsidized much like transit is anyway.

So I mean, no transit system pays for itself out of a fare box.

So to the user, it might be nominal versus an Uber or Lyft.

That's a detail that has to be worked out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A few questions.

One just first is in your presentation, you mentioned

Crescent Halls as an opportunity.

Well, I've just been given a very high level issue.

I think CAAT deviates off the main road to serve that development.

and my understanding is that's an awkward movement for a larger vehicle to do.

So the thought would be to have John provide that service instead of the main group.

And I'll ask Mr. Sanders to correct me.

Now, John already serves Crescent Hall, but it's limited to ADA eligible riders.

if there are people who are not ADA eligible.

And being a senior citizen does not automatically make you ADA eligible.

So if we were to serve that, our mission would have to expand a little bit to do that.

But we're already there.

If it makes more sense to have us take people somewhere,

having them board a bus and we can look into that.

Beyond that, I don't really have any details.

Okay.

And I appreciate in the presentation, you know, the focus on the future, but I do want to return to the past a little bit.

You know, obviously you weren't there at the time, but this is the first time that Jaunt has been before us as a body since the state audit.

And obviously, you know, you had a situation where the executive director had spent

$11,000 for a hotel ticket, stayed at the Ritz-Carlton, $700 for a single meal.

And then when Jaunt as a body was approached to provide information about that, the site receiving over 90% of its funds from the public,

did not willingly present that information.

And I know you weren't there at the time, but I could say for myself and I think a lot of members of the public, a tremendous amount of trust has been lost given the fact that we provide Jaunt with millions of dollars.

It's majority, vast majority, publicly funded.

In addition to these issues that you talked about in the presentation about inaccurate data, misuse of urban rural funds, I am curious to hear in a lot more detail

What was wrong structurally that made the board unaware of these problems?

What was the situation beyond just the executive director and problems deeper within the staff?

Well, I can't speak about the dynamics between the prior executive director and the board.

My impression is that there's a high degree of trust.

So, and I don't know what information was given or not given or what was asked for but not provided.

What I do know from talking to the staff here that the prior executive director

basically hoarded the information, both budgets, statistical information, almost to the point where when he left, the staff was unable to recreate some of the assumptions.

So the number one thing is not only have transparency with the public, but within the job itself.

So there are more eyes now on our data

is a more collaborative effort in creating budgets, making sure we're doing things right.

And I credit the staff for taking that lead.

That's continuing under my tenure here as well.

So I think the staff is fundamentally competent.

they're honest, they're dedicated and they're absolutely horrified that all this happened.

A lot of hardworking people felt betrayed and they're horrified by what all happened but we're determined to put that behind us and move forward.

That's all you can do with the situation.

and for the board's perspective, we're trying to do a lot more to keep the board engaged.

I speak with the board president every week.

I give him a 15 to 20 minute update as to what we're doing, minutiae stuff as well as big picture stuff.

We have regular meetings with the executive committee of the board where I review the agenda for the upcoming board meeting.

as well as any issues that we think may be on the horizon.

The finance committee needs on a more regular basis.

I think that committee is more professional.

We have the assistant CFO of the Albemarle County sitting on it who has all kinds of financial credentials.

So I think overall we're making information more available

being more upfront.

As I mentioned, we discovered problems ourselves with some of the rural urban stuff that the state hadn't known.

We're coming forth with that, not only with the problem, but how to solve it.

So I think it just takes work on everybody's part.

And the board has eagerly stepped up to improve its oversight role.

And so I think we're heading in the right direction.

As long as we keep the communication lines open in the way we have spoken about, I think that will do a lot to prevent future actions.

So that's our pledge.

In terms of some of the transparency issues,

Technically, John is a private public service corporation.

However, we're gonna treat ourselves like a public entity.

We're following FOIA.

We're gonna be training and appointing a FOIA officer for our agency.

We just recently hired a new attorney who specializes in local government, and we're gonna treat ourselves like a local government.

Anytime we have a purchasing issue, we double check and make sure we're following state federal guidelines to make sure that we're doing it right.

One thing I would like to do to improve our transparency with the public is to make maybe annual reports to the governing bodies of each of the jurisdictions that we serve.

not during budget time, but maybe mid-year when we're not asking for money to give you all an update as to what we're doing much as I just did today with you.

And we will be, we're also in the process of creating a public engagement plan where we want to be out front with the public on a more regular basis, letting them know what we're doing.

So to answer your question simply, we're just going to work harder at being transparent and we're going to hold ourselves to the same standards that public agencies hold themselves to.

Even though we may not be required to do so, we are going to do that because we receive so much public money.

Appreciate that answer and perspective.

You know, could you just talk in a little bit more specificity in terms of what changes in specifics have been made internally?

Is there an additional staff member who has to approve expenditures?

Is there a change in how the board is structurally involved with staff?

Any expense I have as CEO is presented to the board monthly as part of our finance report.

The CFO collects that information and reports it to the board.

I do not tell her what to report.

I don't review it.

It goes straight to the board.

She has a dotted line communication to the board.

So if she sees anything out of place financially, she's empowered to go to the appropriate people on the board and report that.

So I think that's a new feature that did not exist before.

We have spread out the reporting requirements among different staff members.

The key thing that we do is have a formula or algorithm to deal with the allocation of costs, ridership, and funding and costs among the different jurisdictions.

So our Chief Planning Officer handles that.

He works hand in glove with the CFO that provides that.

I check the work and our Deputy CEO also checks it.

And we also run that by the Finance Committee as well.

So there's an established procedure to look at that.

Our current cost allocation model was reviewed by one of the consultants that is on the bench of DRPT.

and they reviewed it.

However, we're embarking on a new transit planning project where I want to see that model improved over what it is today.

So I think the biggest thing is we have put algorithms and procedures in place to report information and to track information.

Multiple people see this and we think that's a way to do a check and balance and then we have a communication right back to the board.

In terms of public documents, I know we do audits, and I'm not sure if those are provided publicly, but they can be, and they can be sent unsolicited to the different jurisdictions, so we do go through an audit procedure.

I'm not sure if an audit would have caught the extravagant spending,

but we can certainly provide that as a check.

I will say through the budgeting process through the county and the city, numerous questions were asked of us about variances and various line items.

I believe we've answered those.

And we even had an in-depth workshop with the city and the county

about how our funding works and the changes we have made.

And the things I showed you today is really a high level summary of what we discussed with them.

So internally, we have more internal checks and balances.

We have a direct report to the board that doesn't go through the CEO.

We can provide our audit findings if that's desired.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And, you know, I would just say

I think Jaunt has done really critical work as a critical part of our transportation sector critical towards our goal of a regional transit authority and I know you said you know the employees and the ridership felt betrayed by what happened I certainly think myself and in council in the community felt similarly and I know that's not a reflection on you in any way whatsoever you know you weren't here when any of that happened and

But so I appreciate the answers and just definitely I'm going to be watching closely for what public information and actions, you know, can prove that there's been a change so we can have confidence in the millions of dollars that we're investing as a government body are fully going to benefit the ridership in the community.

Brian.

Yes.

Hi, Mr. Reich.

Thank you for coming tonight to share with us.

Can you

Can you say a little more about, this is largely similar to what Counselor Payne was pressing into, but in terms of rebuilding the trust with DRPT and our state partners and I guess federal partners, sounds like there were things that came to light as a result of the initial

things that were flagged.

And so I'm just wondering, I see all the work that you're doing and have done in terms of being honest with DRPT, getting their feedback, making changes.

Well, going back to DRPT, as I mentioned, they gave us the cure letter

in March, at the end of March, we wrote them back indicating the things we had done to that point to address the cure letter issues.

And I summarized those to you just tonight.

They didn't ask us to do that.

We did it on our own initiative.

And we also went back, they found some urban rural

issues and our own initiative we went back and we checked three years worth of data to see if there were any other issues that maybe they didn't catch and we found some so and we brought those to their attention as well so I think things like that where we're trying to clean up our house and be honest about it and I'll tell you some of the findings don't help John

but we want to get them right and that's our motivation is to do the right thing so I think we're making progress we invited them to come to here they've accepted our invitation and that's why they're going to be here next week so I believe things of that nature I hope build trust and accountability

So those are the main things I can think of that we're being proactive about.

We're probably doing a better job in following state guidelines on FOIA, for example.

We, on the openness meeting requirement, I don't believe we were strictly following

and I think that's a good question.

I think that's a good question.

I don't know if we did a great job in any of those things, but we're making efforts now to do it.

I don't know if we did a great job in any of those things, but we're making efforts

one of our staff members will be trained to be a FOIA officer, actually will be trained tomorrow and will be certified as a FOIA officer and I'll ask the board to appoint her for that role.

So we are taking the very much to heart our obligations to be, to act in the highest fiduciary we can

as a public agency, even though technically they are not one.

We are reviewing our governor's documents to make sure they are in sync with what we actually do in practice.

And I'll tell you, there are some anomalies there too that we're discovering.

And we're going to figure out how do we fix that?

Do we just amend our current bylaws?

And if we do, some of that's going to require us coming back to you for approval.

because the city of Charlottesville, the stakeholder is a shareholder of John.

And for us to make amendments to our Articles of Incorporation will require the city council, I believe, to approve that.

We're also thinking about, are there other options for us?

Should we remain a public service corporation?

Maybe we should become a public agency in our own right.

and if we need to go to the governing bodies to get our articles of incorporation approved, maybe just easier to change us.

Is there some advantages for us to be a public agency

among those advantages is that it forces us to live to a higher standard.

One of the contentions I recall from reading the paper during the prior administration was there was some thought we were not, didn't have to follow FOIA.

And $50,000 later and a lawsuit later, we discovered we did.

and so we're just going to just be that way.

So I'm not sure if I got all your questions, but if I left anything out, let me know.

And Mr. Reich, about the only other question I have is,

Do you have a sense of when, first of all, are there any more shoes about to drop?

And second, do you have a sense of when you will be past the shoe dropping phase and can kind of move on with things?

Well, the biggest thing is dealing with this urban and rural funding issue.

You know, we've discovered some issues from the past and we need to discuss that with the state.

Most of the people are aware of that issue.

I've discussed with the staff of Albemarle County, discussed it with Mr. Sanders, a little bit with Carleen Williams.

All of my board members know about those issues.

and we discussed them preliminarily with the state.

So I don't think there are any more shoes to drop and if there is, that's the one.

And I'm hoping to have that resolved quickly in the next 30 to 90 days, sooner if not more so, but that's the biggest thing I can think of.

Yeah, John needs to do a lot of things better than what we do.

We need to be a more data-driven organization than we are.

One of the strengths of John is its focus on people, both the employees and the riders.

I've heard nothing but heartwarming stories about John and how it works with the public.

I hear that from

you know everyday people whether it's at the grocery store or what have you so there's a lot of good will out there and but at the same time we need to run ourselves more efficiently we need to challenge ourselves are we running on time are we keeping the buses fixed

Do we have enough drivers?

Are we paying them well enough?

Are we thinking about the future, especially when it comes to alternative fuels?

So I'm hoping if there's any more shoes to drop, that we're doing a better job.

And we're trying to work better with our regional partner, with CAT.

So I think that's something that, but I think if there's any particular issue is probably how we handle urban rural funding.

I believe we have a pretty good handle on that.

We just need to get to a better place.

We need to line up our funding with our expenses in that regard.

Thank you.

That's all I've got.

And I think

it's been very helpful to have you here and to be able to hear from you a little bit about the progress in clearing things up and again I'm hoping that we will soon be at the point where everything's moving forward and I know that there are a lot of things that we would like to see done in terms of transit for which Jaunt may well play a very important role and it's important that you have all of your

House in order so that we can move that forward.

Appreciate you being with us.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

So thank you again, Mayor Snook.

Councilors and members of the public, this evening's presentation is the culmination of some internal work that was done to establish a single source repository for all agreements within the city.

We discovered that that hasn't been happening in regards to all of the leases, properties that we own, and various service agreements.

So what we're trying to do at this moment is to compile that, but one of the first things that we had to do was to identify an individual who would have that as their job.

Her name is Brenda Kelly, you've met her before.

She's excited about this new opportunity to help us get our arms around these very, we have a significant number of agreements all over the place and she has been managing this process trying to herd the cats.

if you want to consider that.

To pull this work together, she's going to share with you tonight the analysis of the first phase of that work on city leases.

We imagine it would trigger a number of questions.

Prepare to do the work on figuring out answers to those and get those back to you.

And then she'll be coming back to you next month with a presentation on city property.

Good afternoon.

I'm going to share my screen here.

Okay today we're going to talk about city leases and this is basically defined as leases or agreement type leases where either the where the city is a party this is either the city owns the property or the city is a tenant of a property owned by someone else

So we can break this down into further categories.

We have ground leases, we have spaces or buildings that the city owns, and we have both property and buildings.

The property is owned by the private sector.

The city is a tenant.

The property is jointly owned.

And this is typically the city and the county own the property together.

And the space is occupied by another entity.

And we have other lease type agreements that don't fall into the previous categories.

So we've linked those or called those other.

So what's not included in our discussion today except for this slide is outdoor cafe spaces but we did provide you some summary information on these outdoor spaces for your information but again that is not included in our general overview

of the city leases.

So right now we have approximately 43 active outdoor cafe spaces.

Those can change, that number can change any day depending on who's moving out and moving in.

And further on in the slide, I know it was of interest to all of you to talk about where the revenues go to with these leases.

And in this particular case, the rents received from outdoor cafe space goes to the parks and rec maintenance budget.

so here's some interesting facts regarding leases and what we're talking about today so we're just under approximately 150,000 square feet these numbers may be off a little bit but this is the best we could put together with the information we have we did have to do some estimates on ground leases and acreage so it's approximately 50 acres that we're leasing out

We have approximately 51 leases or lease type agreements and one of the oldest active leases we have goes back to 1922 and that's the Lambeth pump station that utilities has a lease agreement with UVA as the property owner.

so of course we want to give you some disclaimers and all the information we're giving you we're not always comparing apples to apples there's a whole lot of different type of information and sometimes it was actually a little difficult to categorize so in the example of not comparing apples to apples an example is the city as a tenant in the Water Street parking garage

The city doesn't own the Water Street parking garage, but we lease parking spaces.

So in the upcoming slides when we talk about the rent paid out where the city is a tenant we've got that calculated in that figure but we have not discussed in this presentation the revenues generated back to the city for those parking spaces so just wanted to let you know that there are other things like that but that is just one example of

A lot of information and kind of where do we put that?

Market values, we worked with the property assessor who is not really comfortable giving market values for the properties.

So what we did was we provided as a range and that's what you'll see in the information that we're providing.

and some of the square footage or the acreage calculations we just talked about are best guest estimates, but we're kind of generalizing with approximate values.

So in summary, here's some number of agreements that's in the summaries and what we'll be talking about where the city is the property owner, the property is owned by a private party and the city is the tenant.

the property is jointly owned or again, those lease type agreements that don't fall into those previous categories we call as other.

So let's break this down a little bit where the city is the property owner

We have approximately 17 active leases, four expired leases.

We'll talk about that a little further on.

And we have one property where we actually found out we don't even have a lease in place.

The approximate total annual rent the city is receiving is about $580,000.

Now this does not include our ground leases or our other type agreements.

This is just for the property, the spaces, and the buildings that the city owns.

Here's the value we looked at for the annual market value of leases, approximately $3 million to $4 million.

and leases that we have in place currently for zero to one dollar a year there's seven of those and we'll give you some more information in upcoming slide so here are those leases for zero one to one dollar a year and we've tried to do a best guesstimate on the market value of these

So you can see these are all listed here.

The Piedmont family YMCA and the cars.

Typically what we did was we took a square footage value by a market value.

Well, in the case of the YMCA and the cars, we don't really have a square footage.

It's land and building.

and those are kind of different anomalies so we probably could find some way to determine that but in this for this presentation we did not go that next step.

So where do the rent payments go?

So we've tried to calculate and work with the budget office and determine where these all go to.

So the lucky seven in the Guadalajara and all the Market Street parking garage retail spaces, those rent funds go into the parking enterprise fund.

and the Charlottesville Pavilion and the S&P Global Building, which is also known as the SNL Building, those go into the CETA account.

That's the Charlottesville Economic Development Authority.

The city manages, the finance department manages the books for the CETA.

so what's left out over out of that 580,000 annual rent is the general fund now again this does not include ground leases or other documents this is for properties properties and buildings spaces and ground leases now where the property is owned by the private sector and the city is a tenant we have approximately 18 active leases

Two expired leases on top of the 18 and the approximate total annual rent paid is a little bit over 1.2 million dollars and four of those are leases for zero to one dollar a year.

Now when we get into talking about

the jointly owned city and county in the information we're talking about today there are two properties that fall under this jointly owned there are many more in the city so through our research we determined that a lot of our jointly owned properties we have things like use agreements or

operating agreements or other types of documents and as Mr. Sanders stated this will be kind of a phased approach to research so today we're talking about city leases next month we'll talk about city properties and then in a future session we'll talk about city other type of intergovernmental type agreements and so the libraries the court system and other jointly

owned properties will fall into those other types of agreements.

It was a little bit harder to pull out that information.

And I think there'll need to be a little bit more research a lot of times because of who's really responsible for the lease.

Who gets the rent or does the maintenance?

Those types of things will be a little bit more involved in doing the research.

So we did not include those in the leases.

We could not find any specific lease agreements for those types of properties.

So right now we're only talking about two lease type agreements for jointly owned properties.

Now these other type of leases or agreements, this other category, these are license use agreements.

This is for utilities that are using land that the city owns.

The city has an MOU with the Department of Social Services where the social services pays some, it's not actually a rent payment, but it's similar to a rent payment.

and the Jefferson School City Center that the city is not technically a party, but is involved in some way.

So that's where those other category comes from.

So through this research, we found that there were some current challenges with our leases, a need for a point person that Mr. Sanders talked about, a need for consistent policies and procedures, and a need for a system to track lease renewals.

Also, we need a system to track rent payments and increases in rent.

We found that many times we are not collecting increases on rent that may have escalator clauses on an annual basis.

A need for a system to track property inspections, a need for a system to track maintenance requests and track maintenance costs to the city.

We've also found out through our research that while the facilities department with the city may be

in charge of those types of things.

Some of those costs may be taken out of other departments so we don't have a good grasp on where that actually is right now.

We also should be talking about market values whenever we talk about leases and that information we just put together recently we have not had any previous experience on that.

So now we'll go into some staff recommendations based on the challenges that we found.

First of all, we need to identify a departmental staff person in each department if there's a department specifically kind of overseeing or in charge of a lease.

If not, that will default to me.

As Mr. Sanders said, I'm now going to be the coordinator of all this.

And I also will be that one point person that will coordinate with each of the department staff people.

Lease creation and renewal.

We should be developing a standard template.

The city attorney's office is involved in this and has also suggested that this would be a good idea.

And lease rates.

We should be talking again about the market value and what are going rates for spaces in the city.

Property Inspections, a good way to be looking at this is anytime we have an amendment or a lease renewal or a new lease there should be property inspections done and this should be a system should be put in place by city staff right now our facilities management folks are doing some inspections so they will be working on developing a whole new process to monitor this

and also tenant and city responsibilities.

These should be very clearly called out in each lease and in addition the responsibility should be commensurate to the rent paid.

We do have maybe one or more than one examples where we lease out the property and we're also responsible for maintenance and janitorial services

And that might not be reflective of the services the city's providing on the rent that is being paid.

We need the system to track the lease renewals.

We'll talk about that a little bit later on with what's coming up that's expired, currently expired or about to expire.

and we also need to track the rent payments so we're looking at city staff talking to the finance department about putting a system in place to track those rent payments and again those increases in rent payments and also reporting many of the leases that we have in place currently require that the tenants provide you the city council an annual update on the services that the organization is providing to the community and we need to track and make sure that's being done

We also need a system to track the property inspections and that would be something that the facilities folks would need to put together.

Again, with the maintenance requests and the tracking cost, we need to develop some type of standard point of contact and information provided in the leases.

So there is one point person that an organization leasing property would get directly to to put in work orders or talk about what maintenance is required.

And we also should be tracking these regular maintenance and repair costs so the city knows

What's being done to what properties and how much that is costing the city if it's included in a lease agreement.

And again, we've previously talked about we should be whenever we're talking about leases, whether it's renewals or new leases, we should be talking about current market value of the actual property.

So with the leases currently in place, the city owns the properties.

Currently, we have no lease in place for one property.

We have expired leases and renewals are needed for five properties.

And we have renewals needed further on in 2022 for one property.

renewals needed in 2023 for seven properties that are coming up.

And a lot of these properties or these spaces or leases coming up are the Market Street parking garage and the Office of Economic Development has a really good grasp on that.

So they keep up with those leases and keep those very current.

And then further on, we have outgoing expiration dates.

I also want to let you know that we do have some leases that are month to month.

or they have just a notice of termination clause in the lease.

So they're an ongoing lease with a notice of termination.

So those leases where the city is a tenant, we have two current leases in place where a renewal is needed.

We have one coming up that is needed in 2022, a renewal.

And we have one coming up that's a renewal in 2023.

And then I've listed some of these next expiration dates with that information.

So what we're recommending with these staff recommendations we just put forward to you is that we're looking to implement these recommendations.

We've already put basically a team together.

that will address all the things we previously discussed.

It may take a little while to put some of these measures in place and how to set up new systems for tracking.

The first thing we're going to do is assess the expired leases like we just did provide you a little bit of a lease and the lease is due for renewal and then we'll work with the city attorney's office to get working on those.

They're already in the process of working on some of those.

And then as we discussed, we need to assess the compliance of the existing leases.

That's again, are they paying their rent?

Are they paying the increases due on the rent?

Are they complying with their reporting requirements to use the City Council?

and a little bit further down the line, it's going to take us a little bit longer to work on it.

We want to assess the maintenance and repair costs to the city.

So we have those values, especially as we look to renew any of the leases.

If we're finding we have extensive maintenance repair costs that, for example, the rent payment may not be covering that, we may need to address that in negotiations on the leases.

So that's pretty much all the information I have.

Thank you, Ms.

Kelly.

And I would like to note, by the way, for the record that Councillor McGill joined us at about 415 today, but I didn't know that.

I apologize to Ms.

McGill because I deprived her of her opportunity to ask questions of the jaunt folks.

I would have spoken up.

It was all good.

Everyone asked the things that I would have asked.

I do want to comment on this presentation though because I know this is I've been asking about some of these things now for a couple of months and Brenda I'm just floored by your presentation thank you I know we still have work to do but what you have put together already

really was exactly where I was trying, I was getting lost in trying to figure out what we owned and how we could have paying rent so much more than what we were bringing in for things.

And I just think going forward, we're also going to have to sit down and talk as a council what we want to do and

when we it's when we're supplementing the rent for a private company because when we look at a lot of these rents on a lot of these buildings they're about half of market rate which is fine if we are doing more than just collecting rent

if we are giving small businesses a start, if we are working with the community investment collaborative maybe, or with our minority business programs and giving new burgeoning businesses a shot.

But when we look at leases that are 20, 10, 20, 30 years old, that's not giving new people a shot or

are the people who are benefiting from this even living in the city.

So I mean, part of this, this now gives council a starting point to also think about theoretically what we want to do with this level of support as well.

Let me just add, I know that Councillor McGill has been asking these questions, frankly, over and over in recent months, and that's fine.

It's the stick-to-itiveness that we need that has led to getting this very important report from Ms.

Kelly.

Yeah, I said a couple, I think I concur with a lot of what Sena said and what I heard Brenda say over and over again is that we need to standardize this process and to, you know, as these leases and agreements come up to say this is what we would like to see as a city, those opportunities that Sena mentioned and other opportunities for the public to use the space for meetings or gatherings or things like that.

opportunities where we can encourage collaborations with different organizations, and that is some direction we need to set as council, but we have this valuable resource.

We need to make sure that we're getting our money's worth out of it, and some of these nonprofits are small and may not have the opportunity to pay full market costs, but if not, we need to make sure that we're getting the

the best bang for our buck that we can and over the coming months through staff, through Mr. Rogers and Sam and Ashley, let staff know what our direction, our guidance will be for these agreements.

Thank you.

This is a lot of work.

Yeah, I want to thank Councilor McGill for pressing on this.

I think it's a great example of a question we've had and it's important pieces of data we need to get answered and she really kept pushing and I appreciate staff pulling this together and Ms.

Kelly, the report you gave, thank you for that.

I would love to get a copy of the PowerPoint separately if I could.

As I sort of read what you have and understood what you said, it sounds like this will just be sort of the first step as we evolve towards a more complete accounting of of our leased properties, either where we're leasing or the actual leesor.

So, yeah, thank you.

I appreciate this.

And again, I'll look forward to seeing the PowerPoint, the

presentation as well as as we go forward in the months ahead more detail and backup being filled in.

Yeah, and I would just echo what others have said.

You know, I'm curious how we can develop a process when leases come up for renewal, how we can ahead of time evaluate, you know, as Vice Mayor Wade said, you know, is this the use we want in terms of our long-term vision for the city?

I don't think we need to be nickel and diming every organization if there's a clear benefit to the public and they're a smaller organization that can't

that pay market rate or paying market rate would affect their ability to offer services.

But I certainly think there's a lot of arrangements where there's a lot of questions that council in the community would have about, you know, is Verizon the ideal use we would want for this space given how valuable our land is?

And the final thought I had is just when it comes to the S&P, the leases for the S&P Global Building in the Pavilion,

you know the the S&P one comes out in about a decade the pavilion one comes out in about comes up in about two decades and you know for us on council with four-year terms that's kind of like a lifetime away but given how central and valuable those properties are I don't think it would be a bad idea for us in the coming years to think long term about what would our vision for these spaces be and

what would be a potentially transformative use or how to involve the community and use these in the most beneficial and best possible way because if those leases come up and we haven't done any planning we may have missed some incredible opportunity to have

The only thought that I would offer is not directed towards Ms.

Kelly but rather towards anybody who might be listening who may have one of the nonprofits that is a lessee that is having a favorable rent arrangement.

This is not necessarily a prelude to bumping everybody's rent up to market rate.

It is simply a recognition that we don't we at this point until

this report and this information is gathered we on council had no idea who we were subsidizing and we have no idea why we're subsidizing them in some cases and we may want to make some conscious decisions to continue to subsidize in the form of the rent or we may not but at least we will be doing so on the basis of actual knowledge and that's an important thing that we've been missing for a long time and I

I join others in saying to Ms.

Kelly I appreciate your work.

I'm sure we will have other questions for you as time goes along and other tasks that will have to be addressed.

But thanks.

Council.

That is basically it for our 4 to 530 agenda.

And since it's about 524, it's probably a good time to go ahead and go into the closed session.

And unless somebody has something else we need to be talking about right now, we've hit the agenda points.

Yes.

Pursuing to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that the City of Charlottesville, the City Council, close this open meeting and convene within a closed meeting.

Pursuing to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that the City of Charlottesville, the City Council, close this open meeting and convene within a closed meeting.

Code Section 2.2-3711, Section A, Subsection 3 for discussion or consideration of the acquisition of real property within the city for a public purpose and the proposed disposition of publicly held property where discussion in an open meeting

All opposed?

Any opposed?

Okay, the motion passes.

Council will now be in closed session.

Are we returning to the same link or to a different link?

To a different link?

A different Zoom link at 6.30, so anybody who's watching us on Zoom are going to have to find the new link.

We're in closed session and this open session is in recess.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

I move that the City Council members certify by record vote that to the best of each member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in a motion convening the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed meeting.

Okay.

Ms.

Thomas, would you take the vote?

We stand against those acts of domestic terrorism, we stand against the acts of domestic terrorism against marginalized communities and our hearts are heavy for those in Buffalo as well as anyone who is feeling the fear this act of terrorism evokes.

We acknowledge that black lives matter and are valued and so let's just take a moment to reflect on all that this means for us here in Charlottesville.

Thank you.

Yes, Mr. Chair.

I'd like to announce that community activists, Mr. Alexander, will be launching a new program.

It's called Yo-Go in the Veal, and it's going to create a campaign to interrupt the culture of violence, be it guns, road rage, or workplace violence, and certainly

is prevalent and needed during this time.

He's going to have a press briefing.

tomorrow, May 17th at 10 a.m.

at the City Hall Ting Pavilion again at 10 a.m.

and I encourage those who are available to attend that.

And also I'd like to note that this is National Police Week and we would like to thank the police for their service to the community and for protecting us and so I just wanted to acknowledge that as well.

Thank them so much for their service.

Mayor, one quick announcement.

Just wanted to acknowledge that last night, Virginia's COVID tenant protections and new applications for the Virginia Rent Relief Program ended, but wanted to call attention to the fact that Charlottesville is a local

pathways and emergency funds are still operating and people if they individually need to reach it or know someone who does can contact those fund hotlines at 833-524-2904 or 434-373-093.

0 for the Spanish language line.

And then finally, Legal Aid Justice Center is also operating a rent relief helpline, which can be reached at 434-326-4305.

Okay.

We have a mayoral proclamation.

May 2022 is Mental Health Awareness Month.

Whereas mental health is essential to everyone's overall health and well-being, and whereas mental illnesses are real and prevalent in our nation, and approximately 9.5% of American adults age 18 and over will suffer from a depressive illness

Major Depression, Bipolar Disorder or Dysthymia each year and whereas one in five individuals in our community are currently living with a mental health challenge and whereas everyone experiences times of difficulty and stress in their lives and should feel comfortable in seeking help and support to manage these times

and whereas we seek to address the disproportionate unmet mental health needs of black and brown community members and whereas engaging in prevention, early identification and early intervention are as effective at reducing the burden of mental illnesses as they are at reducing the burden of other chronic health conditions.

and whereas with effective treatment all individuals with mental illnesses even serious mental illnesses can make progress toward recovery and lead full productive lives and whereas in Charlottesville we are actively working to create a community best able to meet the needs of its members living with mental health challenges by centering the voices of residents

with lived experience, embracing trauma informed and person centered practices and dismantling discriminatory policies.

And whereas by setting aside a month to acknowledge the impact of mental health on community wellbeing, thus increasing awareness and understanding of available behavioral health resources in our community and achieving positive outcomes for individuals experiencing a behavioral health crisis.

Now, therefore, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville does hereby proclaim the month of May 2022 as Mental Health Awareness Month calling upon residents, government agencies, health care providers, public and private institutions, including businesses and schools in Charlottesville to recommit to increasing awareness and understanding of mental health to the steps that our citizens can take to protect their mental health

and Appropriate Response to Mental Health Crises Signed and Sealed the 16th of May, 2022.

Lloyd Snook, Mayor Sue Hess, who is to be speaking.

Any of you guys to officially receive this?

Yes.

I have a client that's going to receive it.

Come on up.

Yes, please.

Well, just that I'm thankful and grateful to receive it.

This has been a struggle of mine for quite some time.

Really didn't acknowledge it, but pretty much for 30 years of my life have had severe depression and anxiety.

to which I didn't really speak or get help for it until my divorce, which was brought on from years worth of

verbal, physical, and mental abuse from my spouse along with some trauma.

My sister was murdered.

And so I guess all of that together brought me to Ms.

Sue Hess and Partners for Mental Health along with the Women's Initiative to which I still use today.

I've overcome a lot of my depression, but the anxiety is a day-to-day battle that I'm still going through.

Well Charlottesville is fortunate to have a number of people who are willing to help.

Lots of needs and lots of folks willing to help.

If not, then we're ready for the consent agenda.

Ms.

Yes, consent agenda number three, minutes, March 21st meeting.

Four, resolution appropriating additional funding from the Virginia Department of Social Services for the VIEW program, $38,025, second reading.

Five, resolution appropriating funding from the Virginia Department of Social Services for Child Abuse Prevention Month, $1,000, second reading.

Six, Resolution Appropriating Supplemental Funding Received from Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development for HOPWA, Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, HIV, $10,098, first of two readings.

Seven, Resolution Appropriating Anticipated Supplemental Grant Funding from the Virginia Housing Solutions Program to be used for contracted services, $141,000.

First of two readings.

Eight, resolution appropriating funding received from the United Way as reimbursement of community resource hotline staff costs.

Thank you, Ms.

Thomas.

We will now take public comment regarding items on the consent agenda as that they were just read by the clerk.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes.

In the Zoom webinar, you may select the raise hand option to be placed in the speaker queue.

If you have joined by phone and wish to speak on the consent agenda, you may press star nine.

And let me emphasize the thing that you would have signed up for in advance, this is not the time.

That's going to be in a few minutes.

So if you want to speak on one of those six items that was just read,

Raise your hand, press star 9.

Is there anyone in council chambers who wants to speak on one of those six issues?

Seeing no one.

All right.

So I'll close that portion of the public hearing.

Any other questions, comments, Council?

Ms.

Mayor Snook?

Yes.

Yes.

Not tonight, sir.

We give our City Manager's Office report at the first meeting of Council every month.

So we report at the last meeting and we have nothing to report tonight.

Now Community Matters is next up.

There are five preregistered speakers, leaving 11 slots for additional speakers on Community Matters.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes.

There will be an additional public comment section at the end of the meeting.

We will now open the floor to pre-registered speakers.

Others wishing to speak may select the raise hand option in the Zoom webinar to be placed in the speaker queue.

If you have joined by phone and wish to speak during community matters, you may press star 9.

In-person attendees may raise your hands to be recognized and we will alternate in-person with virtual speakers.

The first speaker that I've got here is Oleg Glushkov.

Yes.

We can hear you.

Right.

My name is Oleg.

I am a senior at Monticello High School.

In government class, my group and I are working on a project where we conduct research on a local ongoing public policy issue.

We decided to examine in greater detail the issue of affordable housing and community gardens.

In the last couple of years the expansion of affordable housing in the city of Charlottesville started forcing a number of large community gardens providing tens of thousands of pounds of food to people in need to close down with the intention of constructing more subsidized housing units in their place There is a dilemma here because both affordable housing and community gardens provide necessary services for the people in need who live in subsidized housing

The residents depend on the subsidized housing for shelter they can afford and on community gardens for the fresh food If we favor building more affordable housing at the expense of community gardens then we deprive more than 300 families or 950 Charlottesville residents of the fresh produce they currently receive from the community gardens managed by the Urban Agricultural Collective

The Urban Agricultural Collective grows around 20,000 pounds of fresh produce annually and shares it with around 300 families.

In 2019, they lost two gardens in Charlottesville, including one at Friendship Court on Monticello Avenue, where construction of new subsidized housing is already underway.

But at the same time, if we preserve all community gardens, there will be no available land remaining to construct new affordable housing.

This is hardly possible since according to a recent local study,

There is a current need for more than 1,600 subsidized housing units just in Charlottesville so we need more affordable housing both community gardens and affordable housing are vital so the main question I think we need to find a solution to is how do we ensure that affordable housing and community gardens both continue to coexist in the face of decreasing availability of land

So as one possible solution, I would like to express strong support for the City Council to eventually approve the Urban Agricultural Collective's initiative of receiving small amounts of growing land in city parks, Washington Park in particular.

Thank you, Mr. Grishkoff.

Next speaker I've got is Brenda Brown-Grooms by Zoom.

Ms.

We can hear you.

Hi, I'm Brenda Brown Grooms.

Pastor Liz Emery and Reverend Greg Moyer are there with you.

We pastor New Beginnings Christian Community in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Two of our members live in a trailer

owned by Mr. Steve Bolthapel and his sister Barbara Thompson.

We have talked to everyone we can possibly try to talk to about getting them the help they need.

Majoyka and Darko are members of our church.

They were on the streets for several years before we met them.

He has developmental issues and she is mentally ill.

They experienced war in the camps in their native Croatia, and they rent a room in one of Steve Holzhoffel's trailers.

On every occasion we can think of, they pay their rent, which includes all the utilities, but the electricity's off, the water's off, the heat's off, the air conditioning has been off.

Mrs. Marcetic and another person in the tent

in the trailer are both bedridden.

The water has been off, and so they've not been able to flush the toilets or to be washed after they soiled themselves.

Mr. Holzapfel collects $600 a month from each person in the trailer.

When they complain about anything, he threats to evict them immediately and recently told Darko that he would have him evicted and put on the streets immediately if he carried this complaint in a

Further, the Marsetics are horrified at the thought of living on the streets again.

Even with the black mold that covers the walls of the trailer, the holes in the living room and bathroom, where Joyko fell through the hole in the bathroom, and the EMT worker who came to take her to hospital fell through the hole in the floor.

That's less horrible to them than the thought of being homeless again.

Nurses and other medical personnel have declared war the place of biohazard and will no longer enter the trailer to see Mrs. Marcetic.

Mr. Holzapfel has been ordered to build a rack to make it possible for her to get in and out of the trailer.

He has not.

He will put the property in his sister's name and raise the trailer to the ground before he makes any

improvements.

We have complained to social services.

We call Sue Moffitt, Todd Niemeyer, Adult Protective Services, Rob Hall, the Police Department, Ashlyn Moley.

I've put a notice on the city housing question board.

We talked to the Haven.

We've talked with, given several notices to Carly on your side and now Van Anderson at the Daily Progress and no one has responded except for one Mr. Ikifana who referred me to a number of the people whom I've named not heard a word from any of them so we want to know at this point whose job is it in Charlottesville to stop unscrupulous landlords

who helps sick, scared, mentally ill people in Charlottesville.

Can it be that while this city struggles to find housing for Afghan refugees, it is virtually impossible to find decent affordable housing for the poor who already live here.

These people count on us to be their voices when they can't speak for themselves.

Do we need to call Ben Jones or some other public utility to get this problem taken care of?

We don't need it studied.

These people have spent two summers and now two winters waiting for someone to act on their behalf.

We need to know what's going to happen to these people.

Are we going to allow Mr. Holzapel and his sister to put these vulnerable people on the streets where we know there is no housing for them while he continues to collect rent for them and nothing is done for them?

If

I sound a bit upset.

It is because I am.

This is a beautiful city with an ugly underside.

There is no reason for people in Charlottesville, Virginia to live like this, and no one in this city do a thing about it.

Thank you, Ms.

Brown-Grooms.

I'm Dr. Elizabeth Emery, co-pastor with Reverend Brown Grooms of New Beginnings Christian Community.

And I have some pictures for you of the place where they are staying.

This is the ceiling, which is all warped and with falling down.

And here's some of the cockroaches that are there.

Here's the floor with a hole in it.

Here is another part of the ceiling that is falling down and I have other pictures.

Here's the bathroom which has the tile off of it and falling apart and here's another part of one of the ceilings in the hallway.

which is this way all the time and when it rains it literally rains inside their trailer and we have tried the fire department, the police department, adult protective services, social services, even the hospital to help us but no one will do anything for them.

They are just condemned to live in this hell hole where there are rats and cockroaches and mildew

and water falling on them.

And then Mr. Holzapfel routinely doesn't pay his electric or water bill.

And so last week he had the water turned off twice because he didn't pay the bill and he's had the electricity turned off often because he's refused to pay the bill.

and yet the Marsetics have constantly paid their rent on time.

They have been very cooperative.

They have asked for help, but no one in the city seems to care.

There's no tenants rights here that we have found.

We have even gone to the neighborhood action

group here and no one can help us.

They just keep referring us to somebody else.

And so you are the court of last resorts.

This is not generally a city council business to help out a tenant, but we are throwing up our hands.

We cannot get anyone to help them.

And they are absolutely desperate.

Mrs. Marsetic weighs over 350 pounds and she sits in her bed.

and she cannot get out because there's no ramp even though the fire department has gone to Mr. Holzapfel and told him that he must have a ramp so that she can escape in case of fire.

He has refused to do anything about it.

He's refused to make any repairs.

He's refused to do anything to help anyone there.

He's just going to be a slum landlord.

and take all their money.

And if they raise any protest, he is threatening them with eviction.

And we need to do something about that.

And you are the court of last resorts.

Thank you, Ms.

Emery.

Good evening.

Dr. Gregory Moyer, Associate Minister of New Beginnings Christian Community.

And for several years, I lived in that trailer until it became unbearable that I had to get out.

I now live at 1128 East Market Street, so I'm a witness to the conditions of that place.

Right now, as this TV program is being broadcast live, Darko and Rejoica are at home crying because they had been threatened

that if this proceeds to city council or to anywhere else, they would be immediately evicted.

And I called them right before I came here and said, bring it on.

The moment Steve Holseppel approaches the house, I will call the police and have them not evicted.

They lived two and a half years on the streets of Charlottesville.

They're Croatian refugees.

It's very, very sad that Charlottesville says they're such a progressive city.

But I don't see progress when two people who were

in a concentration camp in Croatia say their life there was better than where they're living right now.

And Steve Holzapel's response was, you should be glad you have a place to live.

This is not progress.

This is not what a progressive city should be talking about.

You can't call yourself a progressive city if you walk into the kitchen of a trailer and you can't distinguish the table from the cockroaches.

you can't call yourself a progressive city if you walk into the bedrooms and you can't tell the white walls from the black mold you can't call yourself a progressive city if you walk into the bathrooms and you can't tell the overflowing toilets from the water that's coming from the ceilings and you can't call yourself a progressive city and allowing this stuff if you walk into the kitchen and you can't distinguish the tiles from the ground below

The fire department, there are no fire extinguishers in the house.

There are no smoke detectors in the house.

And I will promise this somebody in that house is going to die.

There's no fire escape.

There's no way that two bedridden people can get out if there's an emergency.

When the medical people and the EMT say they can't come anymore because that conditions of the house are really bad, something needs to be done.

We're hoping that bringing this to city council will do two things.

initiate the people who are responsible for this.

Surely there has to be somebody in city government that's responsible to look into these things.

And second of all, to make sure that these individuals are not evicted because we're trying to do justice for them.

Thank you, Dr. Moyer.

We've had someone else on who has apparently withdrawn, so we're on to any new

Speakers, has there been anybody else?

I see, is there anybody else here in the room who is interested in speaking?

Yes, Mayor Snook.

Our first raised hand will be Tanisha Hudson.

Good evening.

I have a few things I want to cover tonight.

First and foremost, I want to cover the

request for you all to fund the Alex Ann's Yogo thing.

I just want to know what are any of you five counselors doing to combat violence in this community?

Because if you think cutting a check is going to help every time, and I hope y'all can hear me okay, if you think that cutting a check and giving money every time is going to combat the violence in this community, you're wrong.

The DMC report once again reflects that black people are more prone to being stopped by the police than any other race in the city.

If we were to get a math, a statistics specialist or somebody that specializes in numbers, with black people only making up 16% of the number of people in Charlottesville, the fact that we're stopped more by police, that says a lot when this is a predominantly white community, number one.

and number two what are you all going to do to help with mental health drug addiction that's where you should be putting your money and stop giving your money to individuals and people that you think are going to combat this stuff that don't specialize in any of this stuff the next thing I want to talk about I just want to talk about the affordable housing issue as well um

This is a major issue here in Charlottesville.

While we always say that we're going to create more affordable housing every time one of you all run for a seat or reelection, you use affordable housing as a crutch that that's what you're going to work on.

It's time that you start really doing that and stop just saying, oh, we gave Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority X amount of money.

to combat the problem.

We need more than that.

And if you really want to combat the violence in the community, what you should do is provide them more money to have armed security in the neighborhoods.

That's what you should do.

Instead of putting this money into individual hands, you could get the black-owned security company that they were using, you could work out a deal or a partnership agreement with them.

The last thing I want to touch on is Juan Diego, I know you're definitely pushing that school reconfiguration.

There was an issue that just occurred at Beaufort where a man walked up onto the premises and threatened a young girl by showing a knife.

Now, why y'all will say this is one of the reasons why we need to do the school reconfiguration?

No, this is one of the reasons why you need to revisit why your IT department is not doing their job and why those cameras don't work inside Beaufort Middle School.

That's unacceptable.

You're paying hefty salaries for people in your IT department and they can't even explain why these cameras aren't working.

So it's not just the condition of the building because when I was at Beaufort, we weren't going too far left, right, north, south, east or west without teachers being around.

So you have other issues to combat more so than the condition of the school.

The camera's not working is definitely a major one.

The security and the safety net of the students, major one.

That has nothing to do with the building but everything to do with people and individuals.

and I know you all haven't heard from me in a little while you hate to see my name pop up but I'm back and have a lot to discuss and I look forward to meeting the new city manager here soon to address some of my concerns even though I haven't been on the meetings I've definitely been engaged and very well informed of what's going on

So I ask all five counselors, I hope that you all start doing something and walking in these communities and talking to the people that voted for you that got you in those seats so you can find out what it is that they need.

Thank you, Ms.

Hudson.

Mayor Snook, our next speaker will be Nancy Carpenter.

Thank you very much I just had one issue but now I have two real quickly to talk about and thank you for this opportunity to bring it up I just wondered if someone could check either with Parks and Rec or see what the plan is from the Historic Resources Committee in reference to that Vinegar Hill

Memorial plaque that had been attached to one of the concrete walls surrounding I think the tree area that had recently just recently been cut down by the code building.

I think that plaque has been traveling a lot over the past couple of years and was hoping that at some point there would either be a plan for it or be reinstalled or just to make sure that it is in a secure spot.

I think the last time I heard a couple of years ago it was.

So seeing that picture of the trees being cut down in that little plot of land brought that back to my focus and just wanted to ask folks to kind of look into that and to see if there will be a plan forthcoming in reference to that plaque because there were a lot of people that were very interested in having that plaque placed and

certainly advocated at the time for it.

The second part of my response is in reference to the mother and son that are facing those horrible, horrible conditions by that slumlord, Steve Hulsapple.

I'm wondering if our region 10 community services board housing program there would have perhaps a voucher that this you know that they could use to perhaps access more habitable housing while that place paves in on itself and holds apple can go down there and pick up the pieces

of what's left.

I know that they have several different programs at Region 10.

I don't know.

I'm just putting it out there.

Perhaps it's an option that's already been explored, but I don't know.

But I wanted to put that out there and also support what all three of these folks said about

Carpenter

Our next speaker is Shelby Edwards.

Good evening.

Wonderful.

Hello.

My name is Shelby Marie Edwards.

I'm the Executive Director of the Charlottesville Public Housing Association of Residents.

Also known as FAR, I'm a product of the Charlottesville Public City School System and a Charlottesville native.

Our mission at FAR is to educate and empower low-income residents in the Charlottesville area.

I would like to take this time to reiterate the concerns that Pastor Brenda Brown Grooms and Pastor Liz Emery have uplifted.

It is so important that we have a city of Charlottesville that does a better job listening to low-income residents.

And whether you are paying $35, $600, or $6,000 a month, we need to make sure that everybody in our city is living in conditions that are becoming of their humanity.

The abhorrent conditions described are deplorable.

I connected with Pastor Brenda Brown Grooms this evening like right after her comment and I plan to follow up with them as well as that family because again FAR's mission is to educate and empower all low-income residents of Charlottesville and so I'm I personally gonna make sure that we get this moving so I definitely thank y'all for bringing that to council and council I look forward to seeing how that how you support organizations such as FAR that continue to do this work

And like I said, I will keep my comments for tonight also very brief, but please, everyone on this council, make sure that we're all doing the work to support affordable housing.

And when we say affordable, I don't just mean in the sense of you can afford it.

Think about your neighbor when we're thinking about affordability, right?

Let's think about the person who has zero income a month.

They deserve to live in the city of Charlottesville too.

So as always, I thank you so much for the gift of your time.

Please don't take my brevity or...

seemingly to be levity of my comments for anything being other than very, very serious.

I appreciate all of you for your service to the residents of the city of Charlottesville.

Let's talk to you all soon.

Thank you, Ms.

Hello.

Yes, I am calling in tonight to discuss the housing choice vouchers or the emergency vouchers that have been returned or actually where folks had to turn them in because they were unable to acquire housing.

One, I wanna know, and the community needs to know how many vouchers were turned in.

When is that, when will they be available to community members?

And then I also wanted to discuss the lottery process, which is very unfair if you,

work in with unhoused individuals or are in or in communication with folks why that specific demographic was not chosen first.

The lottery process is flawed.

and not saying that those who receive the vouchers should not have.

I'm just saying that we have an unhoused population here that's in crisis and we absolutely need to be getting the vouchers

to those folk.

So if you could, I don't know if John is in attendance, but we would like to know as a community

where we can one, locate these emergency vouchers for the folks that we are supporting or providing resources for and also looking into changing that process from lottery.

to the most vulnerable populations.

There are several, I'm not gonna name folks, but I can tell you there is a large group of folks

who need housing choice vouchers and need, they need rental subsidies.

If there are folks who are holding onto these vouchers for whatever reason, I'm not sure what that process is like, you know, as far as, you know, who has,

extra vouchers or emergency vouchers on hand.

But I would ask that they free those vouchers up because we have folks who are living in hotels with children and sleeping in their cars, sleeping on the streets, sleeping in parks, some of which who may have income, some of which who may not have income, but we have a unhoused crisis in this city.

and folks need these vouchers.

So please someone get in contact with CRHA and ask what to change the process.

Thank you, Ms.

Okay.

We will now move to the action items portion of the agenda.

And the first action item, Ms.

Chrissy Hamill is going to be presenting.

Ms.

Hamill?

So I'm sorry, Mayor.

Just briefly, before we move on, I'm really concerned about the Franklin Street I was asking before I hadn't really heard of this.

I just want to just request staff to look into that today if possible, but definitely tomorrow and do what they can to, you know, it was sad to hear that they did do some follow-up with staff and there was no feedback or, you know, comments.

So, Mr. Rogers, if you could, I'm sure you probably ought to be taking notes on that, but please, if you could look in that expeditiously, I would appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hamill Good evening, Council.

We are here tonight to talk to you about a bond resolution.

The city is getting ready to engage in a bond sale.

We are going out for, we're asking for your approval for approximately 20, a maximum of up to $26 million in general obligation bonds to be sold to help fund projects that were previously approved in the city's CIP.

These projects were approved in the 22 budget and back further and we have met with the rating agencies to reconfirm our AAA bond rating.

We met with both S&P and Moody's last week and we will be engaging in a sale, competitive sale on June 5th and we hope to hear within the next week or two on the confirmation of our AAA bond rating.

And with that, that's all of my presentation.

Okay.

So, let's see, the vote that we need to take, it's a one reading, authorizing the issuance and sale

of general obligation bonds in an amount up to $26 million.

Anybody have any questions or comments or are we ready then to have a motion?

Oh.

Okay.

Is there anybody in the public here who would like to speak on the matter?

I see nobody interested.

All right.

So we can close the public hearing.

Well, I'll move for approval of the proposal presented by Ms.

Hamill.

Any discussion, counselors?

Ms.

Mayor Snook?

Yes.

Yes.

So next item public hearing land acquisition for park and trail use with Virginia Outdoors Foundation grant funding.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and members of council.

This item tonight is only a public hearing in advance of a future agenda item.

The Parks Department's been working diligently over the past few decades to acquire pieces of property to stitch together a trail network for the comprehensive plan.

We've been discussing this particular acquisition.

It's on the west end of McIntyre Park, very near where the whale tails used to stand.

and that brings the 250 bypass trail from the YMCA area towards hydraulic road.

So we have a property owner that we've been negotiating with and we have a granting agency, the Virginia Outdoors Foundation that's providing the funding, which has already been appropriated.

The public hearing tonight is to ensure that we get public input on the approval of the grant and the purchase, which would then trigger the $3 per real estate deed transaction that you see in your memo there.

This is something

nearly every the locality in the Commonwealth does.

We are one of the few that has not yet approved that because this is our first use of Virginia Outdoors Foundation money in the city.

It would trigger that.

We did spoke.

We did speak to Lizelle Dogger at the Circuit Court.

She said she's fine with it.

In fact, she refunds a lot of money because people are so used to paying that everywhere else that they pay it to us anyway, just out of habit.

So tonight is simply a public hearing to get input and we will be coming back to reading piece to then

put the easement on the city property once we can close on the property.

We have some paperwork left to do to actually get to closing before we bring that back to you to put the easement on it and finalize the deal.

So tonight's action is a public hearing only.

Thank you.

Do I have any questions of him or do you want to go straight to the public hearing first?

Anybody have a question?

Okay.

Is there anybody in the public who would like to speak on this matter?

No one in person.

Mayor Snook, I currently see one hand raised.

Thank you very much.

Good evening.

My name is Rex Linville with the Piedmont Environmental Council.

For the past 50 years, PEC has worked with the City of Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and other localities throughout our service area to promote smart regional planning, acquire parklands, and to protect the air, water, and natural resources on which we all depend.

The Virginia Outdoors Foundation is one of our main partners in these efforts, and they have a significant positive track record in the region.

Just in the past year or so, funding and staff expertise from DOF has been indispensable in the creation of the City's Hayward Community Forest, the forthcoming extension of the Old Mills Trail along the Ravenna River in Albemarle County, and the Fifeville Trail, which connects Tonsillar Park to Greenstone on 5th and the surrounding neighborhoods.

Like those other projects, the acquisition you're reviewing tonight

is significant because of its location and its impact.

It is a crucial link in the multi-year effort to create a shared use path that will connect McIntyre Park, YMCA, and CHS to Hydraulic Road.

This parcel is also a vital part of a larger four-mile loop that will connect these public resources to Mickey Drive, Greenbrier neighborhood, and the John Warner Parkway.

This parkland acquisition is a good deal for the people of Charlottesville, and I hope you will accept it.

This land sits right at the heart of the Charlottesville and Albemarle combined urban area.

The trail will help connect residents of all ages to jobs, schools, recreation, and of course, everyday access to nature.

It does so in a creative way that promotes health, improves quality of life, and protects the environment, all without impacting the city's budget.

The staff report also focuses on the deed recordation fee that you heard Chris just mentioned.

This fee was created by the General Assembly, which is automatically triggered when VOF holds a property interest in a locality

This fee is already in place in the vast majority of counties and cities across the Commonwealth, and the revenue generated from this fee will help fund more projects just like this one, more projects just like the Council of Park project, and more projects just like the City's Hayward Community Forest.

I encourage you to move forward with this excellent parkland acquisition, and I applaud the efforts of your staff, Chris Gintzik, for making this work.

All right, so we can close this public hearing.

So no vote is required on this tonight at all?

Correct.

I just have a couple of questions, perhaps Mr. Gensler can answer for me, or somebody.

As I understand it goes to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation.

I don't know if that's directly or through the Commonwealth coffers.

Well, and I guess where I'm wondering is the the amount that we're talking about spending on on this one easement is was I saw somewhere $50,000.

I don't know if that's an actual

number being $42,000, I guess.

That $3 per deed, that money would be recouped fairly quickly in Charlottesville, it would seem to me.

That's basically 14,000 deeds, which I'm guessing is probably a couple of years worth of deeds.

Again, I'd have to ask so far the money they've given us for projects has to have come from other localities because we're not currently a contributor.

We have been a receiver.

So my guess it's a Commonwealth wide fund.

We have not placed any land within the city limits under a VOF easement.

The Hayward Forest is outside of the city and the consular project that Rex mentioned was a grant to a local nonprofit, not the city.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, those are just some sort of basic background questions.

I don't have any other questions about either the program or the proposal at this point.

I guess it's a little premature to be talking about the proposal yet.

Any other questions or anybody?

Well, then this item will come back to Council for a vote at some point, but not tonight.

Thank you.

Next item on the agenda, Aaron Attac to talk about the CDBG funding and the annual action plan.

Mayor Snook, just before Aaron gives the agenda item, I do have home CDBG next steps to try to outline for council and the public, just because there have been some recent concerns about what actions we were going to take.

Great.

The time in this test for FY21 has come in from all clear, so that's positive for us.

We're happy to have that information.

We continue to work hard to highlight any conflicts that may bring a challenge to being able to maintain that for FY22 and years going forward.

Tonight you're going to consider the annual action plan for FY22-23.

But before we hear that, I just want to give you a little bit more about what steps we are actually working on as it relates to some of the various concerns that came up in the past few weeks.

Staff will not be proposing any changes to the citizen engagement plan.

We're going to allow that to continue as it is and work harder to make sure that we can bring more residents to the table.

Staff will no longer request that the task force be changed to staff advisory.

Instead we're going to focus on identifying income eligible participants to ensure that the diverse voice is always available.

There was some reference to compensating low income individuals to serve.

That is not an eligible activity under CDBG.

We take no position on that matter as we believe that council needs to consider that and determine if there's a source that you would like to provide to remedy the concern of individuals who are low income being unable to participate.

But in the meantime, we will continue to work with FAR and CRHA and other organizations that work with low income programs to try to help recruit candidates for the task force.

And then we'll also bring back to you the opportunity to consider compensating individuals for their service.

Staff is not gonna recommend priority neighborhoods going forward.

We believe that there's been significant demographic changes that prevent that from being an effective manner for which we consider home and CDBG dollars.

Instead, we will continue to work to identify projects that prioritize investment in those areas for the targeted low income population to benefit from.

But what we will do is bring forth those options for you when you do your council priority setting work in September.

The CAPA report will come to you in August.

That's our report on the closeout of all previous work.

And then we will begin our next five-year plan, the consolidated plan in September.

That report will be due to HUD in May.

It'll be a great opportunity to connect community on identifying needs, priorities, and requests for various interventions.

So we'll continue to figure out different ways that we can in this day of COVID still being something to contend with to figure out how to do some public engagement opportunities to reach additional individuals and to work with other departments within the city government.

So I'm going to pause there and let Ms.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and members of City Council.

Good evening.

So as an entitlement community, the city receives grant funding from the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development each year.

We receive two types of grants, the CDBG and the home.

For fiscal year 2022, the CDBG program has an estimated total of $433,471.

And for the home program, we have an estimated total of $84,576.88.

We don't know the exact entitlement grant right now until

Hopefully later this month or in June when HUD sends out the grant award to the city.

Right now we're working with last year's totals.

On September 21, 2021, city council set priorities for fiscal year 2022 for the CBBG and home program, which included prioritizing access to affordable housing, workforce development, micro enterprise assistance, access to quality childcare, homeowner rehabilitation and down payment assistance.

This year's request for proposals were based on City Council CDBG and Home Priorities, the 2018 to 2022 Consolidated CDBG and Home Plan and HUD CDBG and Home National Priorities.

It's important to remember that all RFPs went through an extensive review by the CDBG and Home Task Force and the Planning Commission as a result of that competitive RFP process.

Today's discussion will focus on the following areas that the CDBG in-home task force reviewed as a result of that competitive RFP process, public services, economic development, housing and the 2022 action plan.

Under the competitive RFP process, all applicants were required to undergo a technical assistance meeting with the grants coordinator prior to submitting an application into the city.

During these sessions, applicants were able to meet with me, walk through the grant requirements and talk about their potential CDBG in-home programs.

For the home program, I met with a total of six interested applicants.

And for the CDBG program, I met with a total of 11 interested applicants.

We ended up receiving two applications submitted under the home program and six applications submitted under the CDBG program, which are all included in your packet today.

This year new restrictions were imposed in the RFPs with regards to timeliness and having shovel ready projects.

Anyone who did not have a shovel ready activity or who had outstanding balances with current CDBG and home funds were considered ineligible to apply.

This was shared with the CDBG and home task force prior to application deliberation.

As for the action plan,

Each year the city of Charlottesville and the regional home consortium assess local housing and community development needs in the region and adopt a strategic action plan to meet those needs.

Then localities are required to submit an annual action plan that detail goals and specific activities to be carried out for the upcoming program year.

This action plan ties back to the five year 2018 to 2022 consolidated plan and begins from July 1st and ends June 30th, 2023.

No funds can be accessed or spent until the start of that program year.

This document serves as the city's application to HUD for CDBG and the TJPDC's application for home funds because they administer and manage the home funding for the region.

The action plan is due in its final form to HUD on June 15th.

The draft action plan that you have before you today is a working document.

Comments that we received tonight from the public hearing today and data that council recommend for inclusion will be incorporated into the final document.

And comments that we received from TJPDC's public hearing, which were none, were included into the action plan.

The draft action plan was advertised for over 30 days via the daily progress and was distributed with the housing directors via regional partners.

All comments were also incorporated into the draft as you see before today.

During the deliberation process, the CDBG and Home Task Force recommended the following public services, housing and economic development activities for funding, which were later approved by Planning Commission for City Council approval on April 12, which we'll talk about today.

So the staff recommendation would be to approve a home award of $105,721.10 per lead.

In addition to that, we are also recommending approval for the group of CDBG projects that are identified, Community Investment Collaborative Microenterprise Scholarships for $25,000, Lead Workforce Development $30,130, FAR Resident Involved Redevelopment $37,510.32, LVCA Workforce Tutoring $27,510.32,

Leap Solar Maintenance $40,250 and Administrative and Planning $86,694.20

That is also what we're recommending approval for.

We are actually not recommending approval for the Ridge Street Priority Neighborhood Sidewalk Project.

It is $186,376.16.

The reason for that recommendation to not approve is because we have had historic issues with being able to deliver complicated sidewalk projects through the home

through the CDBG program.

As we have talked about more recently, we've had difficulty being able to get those to meet our timeliness obligation to HUD.

We foresee this being yet another example of why we would be in a timeliness crunch in a matter of a very short period of time of trying to deliver this particular project.

It is not an indication that we do not support the idea that the sidewalks are necessary and important for the residents in that neighborhood.

We just believe that there is a better approach that we should take in adding this sidewalk project to the CIP using other resources and not tying up CDBG funds and therefore putting us in a place to not meet our time on this obligation.

So with that, Erin, did I miss anything?

Great.

All right.

Well, first question I have, maybe I'm just not understanding what you all did or didn't do.

You've got $186,376.16 for the Ridge Street Priority Neighborhood.

which you said was the amount that was to have been going to the sidewalk that you're not recommending doing.

Sorry, if you were to not approve that item, that $186,376.16 would go back into an available pot for us to then put out in the form of another RFP.

There still remains a little over $33,000 that was not allocated by the task force when they met based on the number of projects that arrived.

And do you know like a rough timeline for what that RFP process would be?

And to be clear, I think for multiple reasons, both the timeliness issues and I think the kind of projects I think we should be prioritizing.

Aaron, would you like to say how soon you can get an RFP?

I could put it out towards the end of the month.

Okay.

Maybe if there are any other clarifying questions, we can take them now, or if not, then we can just move on, get any public comment that folks may want to make, and then we can return to the discussion.

Okay.

Okay.

Is there, there's nobody here?

Mr. Sayles, do you want to come and say something for us?

Yes, we're opening the public hearing.

Thank you.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

I wanted to come out in front of you all and

Second, what Deputy City Manager Sanders said about the recommendation of not funding the sidewalk project.

If you go back the last few years where you all had to reallocate money, it was because of sidewalk projects.

And so I think that is a great recommendation.

I do think the sidewalk project needs to happen.

I just don't think it needs to happen through CDBG money.

It's restrictions and timeliness that needs to

You need to meet the townlies in order to continue to receive the money.

And there's other options where the money could be spent in that community from other residents.

There are other recommendations that were on the table.

And I think if you open it up, you may even get some other recommendations from other organizations that want to do work in a Ridge Street community.

I also support all the other recommendations for funding.

All of the recommendations are good recommendations, good programs, and I think it's a good way to spend CBG money.

I do want to point out that it would be nice to have a little more robust community engagement process where the residents in the community are actually pitching projects instead of nonprofits pitching what work they would like to do in the community.

Thank you, Mr. Sales.

Good afternoon.

I just want to say that I

Thanks for listening to some of the concerns we had about CBDG process.

Thank you, Sam and the staff.

I do wanna ask, we sent a presentation to you all.

I'm pretty sure Mr. Sayles sent a presentation to you all where the students did a research

on CBDG money and that I think is somewhere in California who has a process that seems to work well.

Just want to remind you of that.

Thank you, Ms.

Johnson.

All right, so we can close the public hearing portion here.

I really don't have any, you know, I just had a comment and I like the approach that we're taking now that we're not designating neighborhoods because they're just changing so much.

I mean, every neighborhood now is

just had some level of gentrification or something that is hard to say completely.

And the approach was the sidewalk.

It's just working and doing planning for many years is always some type of

Hiccup with those projects, whether it's a utility easement or something that can just delay it.

And delay is something that HUD doesn't want.

And I understand that because there's other localities that could be using those funds if one locality is not using it.

So I like the direction.

I appreciate staff working on this, Aaron and Sam, really kind of taking the lead.

Yeah, I just want to say as a neophyte to this whole process of CDBG and the home funding, sort of observing it from the sides in the conversations that I've had with the deputy city manager, Sanders and others, it does feel like we're turning this particular initiative in good ways, positive ways.

I'm glad to hear and observe the sort of

People coming together and supporting one another in terms of trying to find the best way to move this process forward.

Yeah, likewise, just echo.

Thank you to Mr. Sales, Ms.

Johnson, and Ms.

Edwards with Farr for continuing to raise this issue.

And thank you to staff for listening and adjusting and really taking the time to hear their concerns and figure out how we can move forward constructively.

The only question I have is just was so just getting a sense of the timeline in terms of some of these changes that you had brought up and

are in that report that was presented by the students.

No, that's correct.

Okay.

Okay.

If we approve this and send it on to the second vote, the second reading and vote next time, the 186-376-16 is still dedicated to the Ridge Street Priority neighborhood but not to a sidewalk.

Correct.

And that's what seems to be on page 75.

I just want to be clear that that's the intent.

We would move them all at that point.

That's fine.

It's just me trying to understand.

Michael?

Yes.

Sena?

How do you feel about it?

You're cool with it.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

Next item, 12, appropriating a grant of public funds for housing assistance to low and moderate income homeowners in the city of Charlottesville.

Todd Divers introduced the item.

There will not be a vote on it.

tonight.

It's the first of two readings.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of council.

I was hoping we were only going to get one reading on that, but I guess two is what we'll have to do.

So, yeah, I'm bringing chat back to you.

This is what I would normally do this time of year.

We got kind of

thrown for a loop when I guess it was pointed out that the way we were running the chat program was not entirely kosher.

So we've kind of scrambled to put together a program that I think is going to get us close to what we were doing.

We can't, you know, this, this

Instead of running this under the charter provisions, we're now gonna be doing this under the social services provision of the code.

The director of social services in her capacity as the local social services board will be the official administrator of this program, though I will be working on a cooperative agreement with her and we'll still be effectively managing the program the way we always have.

Since we're no longer under the restrictions of the charter provisions that had some things to say about home value limits and things like that, we can adjust some of the parameters, which I know folks have been wanting to do for a long time.

So we're going to go ahead and do that this year.

We're going to increase the home value threshold to $420,000.

The basis for that is the average assessed value of an improved residential parcel in the city of Charlottesville.

And so, you know, that was kind of where we picked it.

We're going to go ahead and increase the income threshold to $60,000, which is

According to the one I last checked, that was the average AMI for Charlottesville.

And so, you know, going forward, I'm hoping that those two criteria can kind of can stabilize and then, you know, we can look at where they are each year and then that will inform the parameters of the program.

As far as the tiers go, we can no longer, we won't be running this as a percentage of the real estate tax bill.

This is a grant program.

This is a grant for needy folks.

And the way that we are defining that is folks who make less than $60,000 a year and who own a home in the city of Charlottesville.

So the tiers that we're putting forward, if a homeowner, if the...

Combined household income of a homeowner is $35,000 or less.

They are eligible for a grant in the amount of $2,500.

If the income threshold falls between 35,000 and 45,000, they'll be eligible for a $2,000 grant.

If the income falls between 45 and 55, they'll qualify for a $1,500 grant.

And if their income falls between 55 and 60, they'll qualify for a $1,000 grant.

We think, you know, we think by raising the home value and raising the income, we can maybe pick up about 100 more people than we would have otherwise.

So, you know, folks may not get quite what we're going to get before, but we think, you know, more folks will get something and this will help a lot of folks.

If you have questions, just hit me and...

Otherwise we're going to get rolling on this.

We've got to get some forms updated.

Thank you, Mr. Divers.

Question, you know, I know in our budget we allocated about a million dollars to combine the CHAT program with the real estate relief for the elderly and disabled.

My understanding is that would no longer really be feasible given how much this program is changing.

Do we know

You're correct.

We won't be able to merge the programs this year.

And so there will be some money left over that we had kind of counted on to make that merger because there was going to be some overlap the way the programs fell in the year.

So that's not going to happen.

Now we are going to spend, you know, it's not all going to be available because we are increasing the home value threshold and increasing the income limit.

So that's going to eat up some of it.

As far as when it's available and what you're going to do with it, I see Ms.

Yeah, I was just going to say we won't know what the final outcome is until after Commissioner Divers is done with all of that, which would be December, correct?

Yeah, so it would be January or February before we would actually know what the extra may be.

I guess I could answer that.

Oh, I was just going to say so by tying this to the AMI of the area and also to the median home value of the area

I would hope that we can as those numbers change year to year you know then we can have a systematic way of adjusting the program year to year you know as the AMI changes

we can change the parameter of this program.

As the average home value, average assessed value of residential parcel changes, we can adjust that as well.

Is there also going to be a factor then to stabilize the increase necessary in amount amounts?

Yeah, we'll have to get to that.

Sure.

Lisa, you're awesome.

I do too.

And a couple more questions.

You had mentioned about 100 more people will be able to qualify under the changes you discussed.

That is what my dad used to call a SWAG, which stands for a scientific, wild, you know what guess.

And then...

maybe this is the same situation where we just can't really know but you know will the average person you know obviously some people see changes some people will get a little bit more than they did before some people get a little bit less and obviously overall more people will be able to qualify so I think on the whole it's a positive thing but we have any sense about you know what those changes look like you know at what AMI level might people get a little bit more than they did before is again that just going to be very

Well we're trying to give sort of the average amount that we were projecting to give for each of those tiers so I you know as we were working on this I had in my head that I wanted a tier from 0 to 35 and 40 35 to 45 and 45 to 55 and 55 to 60 and and we looked at kind of laid it out and ran the numbers on how much we thought we were going to give out in each of those tiers and

The average amount that we were going to give out is roughly what we're giving out.

Now, you know, previously, if you'd been in the zero to 35 tier, you would have gotten 100% relief.

Well, you're going to get $2,500 now.

So if your tax bill is less than $2,500 you're going to get a little more.

If your tax bill is more than $2,500 you're going to get something less and that's going to be somewhat true through all the tiers.

I haven't teased it out much beyond that though.

No, it does.

And I think it's just going to have to be something that we very closely watch and figure out how we adjust going forward.

And the final thing I would just comment is obviously the benefit of this is even though there's some, I think there's going to be some rough edges rolling it out around things like that.

I think the benefit is we've clearly seen, despite expanding the amount of subsidy

over the past several years the number of people participating in CHAP has declined and I think this reverses that and allows us long term like you said to be able to tie it to either AMI or median household value.

In other words to continue to expand the program so as assessments continue to rise people aren't just kicked out which I think was our fundamental problem is that we could have

would expand the subsidy level substantially, but that hard limit every single year would just kick more and more people out.

And so I think this long term provides us a lot more power to make this a more expansive tool to make our real estate tax more progressive.

Remember, it's not an exemption program.

It's a grant.

Right.

And I'll come back every year.

If I know what those parameters are, I can come back every year and I can give you an estimate of what it's going to cost.

If I know to adjust the home value and I know to adjust the income limit, you've still got to pay for it.

One question I guess I've got.

You have referred occasionally to the average value of the house.

We have tended to refer to the median value of the house.

Statisticians will know that those two are not the same.

Median?

It's average.

So if there's a $5 million house out there, that's bringing the average way up.

That's what we ran.

Okay.

There's not a lot of those out there, and there's also some pretty low-valued ones as well.

Mr. Mayor, did you see Ms.

No.

Two readings are required per city code.

The requirement can't be waived for any appropriation.

That would be the 24th.

The 24th.

Okay, I haven't gone to find that, so let's see.

Assuming that that is a correct statement of things, and I assume it is, then

I'm good with that.

Okay.

Sena's good with that, see if it's a thumbs up, okay?

Sounds like a plan.

Thank you all.

Todd, if that'll help you get a little bit moving a little bit faster, hey.

We need to get moving.

And Mr. Divers, as was said earlier, thank you all for pulling this together so quickly.

I know that you've had a lot on your plate, to put it mildly.

And we should note that it was only six weeks ago that this whole issue sort of got dumped in everybody's laps, and all of the people who need to work on this have worked hard, fast, accurately, well, and I think we, I would say I'm proud of you all.

We'll talk about it some more in a couple weeks.

All right.

One week.

Yeah.

Okay.

There are no items of general business for discussion.

Nope.

I have a few things that I was asked to read.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay I'm sorry I should have read these before blame blame my spaciness no problem um so first announcement last week was transportation week and we'd like to thank the transit and pupil drivers and staff that form our Charlottesville area transit

As we know, they're amazing.

They have done amazing work throughout this pandemic as well and kept our bosses and kept our kids going back and forth to school.

So thank you.

It takes more than a week to thank them.

This week is EMS week and we thank our men and women who provide our critical service to our community.

We include cars in extending our appreciation as well as the fire department and all of our EMS personnel in the area.

Thank you.

And again, COVID has been incredibly hard and we appreciate you showing up every single day.

And this is also public works week.

and we thank the fine people who work hard every day to serve our community of Charlottesville all year, especially during the snow season and flooding season too.

I just want to mention one other thing that after the discussion of 800 Franklin Street,

The last item is any final speaking opportunity for members of the public.

Speakers up to three minutes, you may join the speaker queue by selecting the raised hand option in the Zoom webinar or by pressing star nine if you've joined by phone or if standing in line in front of the microphone here, we only have one member of the public here and we can alternate between in-person and virtual speakers.

Mr. Sales, you're standing up again.

I wanted to address Ms.

Kahn's comments about the voucher program.

Thank you.

So we did receive 15 emergency housing vouchers.

We partnered with TJAC, the continuum of care for the Charlottesville area.

We have MOU with them where they are in charge of assisting us with finding clients that qualify for the voucher.

So they do the initial intake and then we do the follow-up lease-up and getting the individual any services they need.

So we received additional funds to assist with like purchasing furniture, paying security deposits, utility connection fees, moving expenses, really almost anything.

And it's like the first time HUD has ever done this and attached it with a voucher.

and so we have leased up seven of those vouchers we have issued all 15 some did come back one is awaiting lease agreement one expired one that we're currently I don't have an update on one and five are still searching for housing out of the 15 so there's one that will be reissued we're going through our wait list to see who actually qualifies

if we have someone on our waitlist qualify or is TJAC waiting on them to send us someone a referral.

On the regular voucher program, which is a much larger program in the city, we currently have 437 vouchers leased up out of a voucher capacity of 624.

That has increased significantly.

We had about $700,000 additional in funding this year, which is the most we've ever received because we leased up 100 additional vouchers last year.

So you lease up more vouchers, they give you more money.

And so we have

a plan to issue another 75 vouchers within the next three months.

That's 25 vouchers a month to get us to the 80 additional vouchers they believe we can lease up.

There is going to be some attrition there and CRJ does plan on project basing 24 vouchers at South First Street Phase 1 when it is completed at the end of this year.

We have only had 10 families return their voucher due to them not being able to find a unit.

Due to COVID-19, the search period has been extended.

Typically, it's 60 days with two extensions to go no more than 120.

We've given families 120 days straight as soon as they receive their voucher and then gave them an option

do one extension for another 30 days, so up to 150 days to search.

And so that is way more than what is typically allowed.

Our voucher success rate hasn't improved much, but our lease up rate has improved a lot.

And so we are now leasing up families within two and a half months instead of four months when I first got here.

A majority of our families didn't get leased up until the

120 to 150 days.

Now it's a lot faster.

A couple of things have played into that.

We had some landlord incentive programs where we provided an additional bonus to landlords who leased up a new unit with us.

And so that played a little factor in it.

And we also had some security deposit assistance.

So families who typically didn't have the funding to lease up a new unit

We had some security positive assistance that was there to provide them a grant that went straight to the landlord.

I think that's all I have.

If there are any more questions, oh, one more thing, sorry.

The SISRAP program, I know you all did fund that again this year.

We have gone through the entire waitlist, so that waitlist will be opening up again.

And so that will be an opportunity for the individuals that are unhoused now to get on that waitlist and get assistance relatively quickly.

The HCV waitlist is over 900 families.

So it's a very long waitlist.

We don't use a lottery system.

Sorry, I'm trying to remember all comments.

We don't use a lottery system.

We use the waitlist.

We advertise in the beginning of 2021 to open up our waitlist.

We have one preference, which is local live or work in the city of Charlottesville.

We don't have the homeless preference anymore.

That was removed.

I want to say in October or November of 2020, and it was removed so we could do the project basing of vouchers.

And so when we removed it, it allowed us to move public housing residents to the top of that list because they are going to be displaced through redevelopment.

So like Crescent Halls, when we had to move all those families out, one way to get those families out was giving them a voucher.

That was possible because we didn't have that preference in there for the homelessness.

Because secondly, well, more than secondly, everyone at Crescent Halls lives in the city of Charlottesville.

So it allows us to move them up to the top.

And that's it.

Thank you, Mr. Sales.

We just had a hand go up.

Let's see.

Joy Johnson.

Good afternoon again.

As you know, I advocate for, I've been advocating for affordable housing now for some time when, you know, people felt like, you know, it's not

affected me.

But right now in 2022, it's affecting a lot of people.

And Mr. Sayles just explained to you about more vouchers that is gonna be on the street, but there is something going on with landlords who are jacking the rents up.

They're increasing the rents to the point where it's taking people a much longer time to find a unit

or they have to settle for unit that are just terrible.

I think there has to be a conversation in this town about true affordable housing.

And most of the units that are going up,

the brand new ones who are gentrifying the neighborhoods.

Most people with a voucher cannot find affordability in those units.

So I urge you all, I'm committed.

Joy Johnson is committed until, you know, I'm not here anymore to fight for more affordable housing.

I would hope this council will be also committed.

to making sure we have true affordable housing.

I can never think of the name of that place, but the clause is a success.

It had taken some people off the street.

They have services.

I think we should be doing some more SROs.

I know in the planning with CRHA, we're talking about SROs.

Some people don't want a full one-bedroom because of whatever issue.

A one-bedroom is a bit much, but if they just want an efficiency, and that's what the cross is in.

So I think this council needs to be committed to looking at what's going on with landlord and jacking up the rent so that people can afford it.

Again, thank you to Sam and the staff about the CBDG and that's all I have to say.

Thank you, Ms.

All right, so we will close the community matters and I've got nothing else on the agenda except adjournment.

We're adjourned.

Thank you all.