City Council Meeting   6/6/2022

So do we know whether we've got Ms.

Shannon lined up?

It's 4 o'clock and we're basically ready to go.

Okay, I see that.

The CACVB folks are available if we need them.

Lucinda, are you there?

Do we have the TJPDC program?

I just realized if somebody was trying to respond to me orally that I would not have heard it.

Does someone have their audio rolling?

You may have to leave it.

No, you could.

Christine Jacobs.

Do you want to go ahead and do the CECDB presentation?

Sure.

Do you want me to try to call over there?

I'm just trying to send an email to the Senator.

I know that the consultants were going to be joining on the call too with TJPDC.

Well, it's about 10 after.

Let's just go ahead and get started.

And we'll move on to the CACVB first.

and then we can circle back to the transit discussion.

So the June 6, 2022 Charlottesville City Council hybrid meeting will come to order.

Ms.

Councillor McGill?

Here.

Here.

We have all present.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Motion passes.

So this meeting will be divided into three sections.

First is a work session to hear and discuss presentations that do not require a council vote.

Then there will be a closed meeting to discuss a few matters.

So let's start off with our we're going to rearrange the agenda just slightly and pick up the report of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau update.

I am.

Thank you so much.

Yes we can.

Phenomenal.

Thank you so much for having me this afternoon, Mayor Snook and the rest of City Council.

I'm happy to go through a little bit about what we do.

If you have any questions during the presentation, please just feel free to stop me when I'm making my presentation.

I won't be able to see you.

So just interrupt and I'm happy to answer any questions you have as I go through.

Yes, we can.

Thank you.

All right.

So I am Courtney Kucation.

I'm the Executive Director of the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau.

We are the Visitor Bureau for the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

Starting with this county map, the United States to let you know that there are Convention of Visitors Bureaus all over the United States in practically every city and county and all over the world as well.

So when we're talking about our competition and who else is out there and who we're trying to get here, we are competing with everyone.

And I have the honor of being able to tell people about this great community that I represent.

The mission is really to enhance the economy, specifically in the tourism industry and to generate tax revenue for the city and the county.

And we reinvest that funding back into the tourism economy to start that funnel again.

and our vision for 2025 is to be the most welcoming destination in the Southeast.

And I think we are working well on our way there and I'll tell you more about that in the course of the presentation.

In October of 2020, we passed a strategic action plan that was a strategic plan specifically for COVID.

I had started that just before.

I came on in August of 2019 and we presented

Research in February of 2020 and obviously needed to do it quite a lot.

But these are the values that we determined that we were going to focus on and we also adopted an equity and inclusivity statement.

It is very much my philosophy that if we are not a welcoming bureau that we can't be a welcoming place and the whole point of the Visitors Bureau is to welcome everyone here

to have a great time and hopefully leave as much money behind as possible.

Our strategic imperatives are resiliency, unity, diversity, creativity, and responsibility.

And how that translates into strategic imperatives are by driving overnight visitation.

That means that we want people to spend the night here.

Our visitor bureau is funded

We also have a grant funding exclusively by the transient occupancy tax.

And of course, a portion of that tax comes to the CACBB, not the entirety of it.

But we also occasionally receive grant funding as well.

Mission than just driving overnight visitation we also seek to increase visitor spending and that's where our visitor services come in and I'll talk about those in a little bit we also develop new visitor opportunities so we leverage partnerships and help bring partners together so that we're able to

to showcase our destination in different ways and provide different experiences.

And when I talk about partners I'll show that on a future slide as well but we mean any business or attraction that is in the tourism space.

We also have the opportunity to tell stories that uplift and inspire.

And because we're a quasi governmental agency, we take a lot of responsibility for using our public funds with transparency and efficiency.

And I'll tell you more about that as well.

I am going to read this slide.

I don't usually in my presentations, but this is the elevator pitch that I worked on with my team this spring.

We were trying to really boil down what we value as what we bring to the community.

And so I'm going to read this one.

The CACVB is an innovative, collaborative, and service-oriented destination marketing and management organization that welcomes all visitors to Charlottesville and Albemarle County with the goal of improving the quality of life for residents and supporting a robust tourism ecosystem This ecosystem is sustained and enhanced through partnerships with all tourism-related businesses and attractions in Charlottesville and Albemarle County

The CACVB is funded through a portion of the lodging tanks generated through overnight stays in our wide variety of accommodations.

Therefore welcoming visitors from all backgrounds to stay overnight is the primary mission of our organization.

We do that through a number of different ways.

Primarily we are a destination marketing organization.

So marketing is a big part of what we do and that marketing includes advertising, public relations and sales efforts.

We're the storytellers for Charlottesville and Albemarle and we get to tell people who don't live here what we want them to know about us so that they come to visit.

Our visitor services help people before they make it to the destination through telephone and email inquiries as well as through visitor guide requests and then they help people when they're here at our mobile visitor center locations.

As I said before, we take a lot of responsibility for being the steward of public funds and through community support and service.

We also take a lot of responsibility to be the subject matter experts on tourism in the community, as well as a resource for marketing and other services for our hospitality and tourism partners.

And who are those?

We have nine different stakeholder groups.

You'll see lodging is in bold because again, that is where our funding comes from, but we support all of these elements in the community.

We have nine full-time staff, including myself and 15 board directors.

those board directors include the vice mayor and Chris Engel from economic development and we also have two positions here bolded those positions are vacant at the moment and

Applications for those are being accepted through June 10th, so through Friday, and then a nomination will come back to City Council and where it's appropriate to the Board of Supervisors of Albemarle County to approve those positions.

We have a great relationship with economic development, both in the city and the county, and we spend a lot of time working together to further the goals of the economy and the community.

I'm gonna run through these next slides pretty quickly, but please feel free to pause me if you have any questions.

I'm showing here that our FY 2022 budget, which ends on June 30th,

is stronger than the FY 2023 budget, which is the lowest one we've had in a while.

Because of that, we had saved fund balance from the peak of COVID and you'll see that reflected here.

so that we were able to carry some of that money over to help bolster us through difficult times.

You probably are unaware but our of the CACVB budget comes from the lodging tax collection from two years in the past.

So for FY 2022 we were dealing with March 2020 through June 2020 and now as we start FY 2023 on July 1st we will be

mirroring the transient occupancy tax collection from July of 2020 through June of 2021.

We were also the grant recipients through Virginia Tourism Corporation, the city and the county both received grants and those were passed through in large part to the Convention and Visitors Bureau for us to be able to use collaboratively to help the tourism industry recover.

All of this money needed to be used for new initiatives.

So it did not replace our baseline budget, but it was able to help us take on some new projects.

Because our base budget has been so impacted and the Virginia Tourism Corporation money wasn't able to be utilized for those things, the county

granted us $750,000 starting July 1st out of their ARPA allotment to help recover.

I had asked in June of last year for $750,000 from the city and the county, and I have a budget breakdown for if the city is able to match this, where that money would go.

This is a further breakdown of our FY 2023 budget just to let you know where that money goes.

In large part, it goes to advertising and marketing since we're a marketing organization.

just so that you know that we do take our responsibilities very seriously that we have been able to save a lot of funds through streamlining since I have gotten here just under three years ago all of this cost savings goes back to promoting the destination which helps generate further visitation and so we have made a lot of

progress over the past couple of years, especially knowing that COVID was going to impact our budget to be very smart about how we're using our funds.

These are the CACV brand pillars.

This is where we spend our focus to try and get people here and our different ways that we talk about our destination in terms of marketing and public relations in particular.

One of our biggest public relations challenges as you can imagine is Charlottesville's recent history and past history and so something that we did in that research in winter of 2020 was surveyed perspective and past visitors to Charlottesville

and what we found was the past visitors are on the left hand side in red there are almost no negative words in the past visitor experience however for the prospective visitors we do see negative words

And, you know, when I initially got here, I was thinking that as time moved away from the tragic events of August 2017, that those words would become smaller and smaller and we find ourselves in the position where

with the murder of George Floyd, the insurrection, and most recently the murders in Buffalo that we're revisiting Charlottesville's legacy.

And so a lot of our work has related back to making sure that we are addressing what people know about

Charlottesville and the national media and addressing that head on with real concrete work as well as trying to bring more people into the fold within our community.

Some of that is through our public relations efforts.

So you'll see here a handful of articles that we have generated over the past year.

I think these are all within the beginning of 2022.

And we also do a lot in marketing and advertising because of the way that we have been able to streamline our marketing efforts and cut waste in our

budget, we have been able to get access to national publications we were never able to access before.

This has also been really very much helped through the Virginia Tourism Corporation funding as well.

So it's a really exciting time for us to be able to

since we're being discussed in the national conversation address that through our advertising and PR efforts on a national scale.

This is just a sample of what we put out there for advertising.

It's doing very well.

We're very excited to be 40% above the publisher's benchmark, which is extraordinary.

Our e-newsletter that came out through Travel and Leisure was also 40% above.

So we're getting great engagement and we're directing people straight to our website when they see our display ads, when they're seeing our print publications or any other advertising that's out there.

You may also be aware that we launched Discover Black Seville on March 26th.

This has been after a year of having our social media channels out and active in the community and about nine months prior to that.

So really this got started in August of 2020 with listening conversations within

with local black tourism professionals in our community.

And this is what came from that effort.

It was really important to me that we were making sure that our community had buy-in before we launched nationally.

And you could tell on lunch day how much community buy-in and positivity had been created by this effort

by the people who showed up for the press conference and by the partners who engaged with our national media who were here for the entire weekend.

There was just so much positivity and so much excitement.

And we noticed with some of the travel writers were really hesitant to come here.

and by the time they left they were advocates and totally bought in to why we have such a great place and then they went back and they shared those articles and there are a couple slides from now which is why I was moving forward and I'll show you that in a minute.

Charlotteville has impressive

but in terms of things

It really supplemented everything that I've learned and filled in the gaps in the past.

I lived in Virginia for a few years, so I've heard of Charlottesville.

I passed through two years ago for about three days, so I feel like I had a small taste.

I don't know, being in Virginia, I just had this idea of what Charlottesville was, kind of this one-dimensional view of it, a placeholder in history, I had this one view of it, and coming here, I'm seeing how complex those ideas are, how much they change over time, and how dynamic Charlottesville is with the place, and really how

It's a very modern city, very art-centered, cultural pub and I'm really enjoying it.

I'm shocked how much I like the food and drink in Charlottesville.

I mean, I went to school in Richmond, Virginia, which I think has pretty great food, but Charlottesville has some pretty great chefs.

I love the Black-owned businesses.

I had Angelique's Fish Fry yesterday, and it did change my life.

I am a new person.

I did not know that there was a foodie center as it is, and I've noticed that you cannot run out of options anywhere you turn.

There's a lot more to Charlottesville than I had thought initially.

And honestly, I wish I would have come here earlier.

So these are some of the articles that have been generated from the press coverage from that trip.

We have a handful more that have come about in the past couple of weeks.

But what is great about this is it really speaks to our mission for Discover Black Seville, which is Black people telling stories about the place instead of the interpretation that has historically been told, which is phenomenal.

I'm going to move now into destination sales and give you a little bit of a background into some of the research that we have at the CACVB.

You'll see here our hotel occupancy rates.

Our light blue is 2022.

And so we're recovering a bit.

Our hotel occupancy is still limited because of our workforce here.

While the hospitality industry has really stepped up and provided salary increases,

much more than they had ever done before.

We are still not able to get the people that we need to do the jobs in restaurants and other sectors of the economy as well, but particularly in hotels.

And so you're seeing that reflected here.

The average daily rates are a counterbalance to that.

We have a ton of pent-up demand.

Because we never stopped advertising, we're seeing people wanting to come here, which is phenomenal.

But we're...

And we are also seeing the increase in supplies and the cost of workforce and all of the things that are related to that in the economy right now.

So we're not sure where the average daily rates are going to end up, but it's probably fair to say that we're not going to be able to continue to grow that

in the long term.

Revenue per available room is how much money each hotel room is making and so that has skirted just above where we usually would be so far in 2022 outside of April.

April is a very popular time and this is the first April where we've really been able to come back and have weddings so we had a lot of pent-up demand there as well so as things

If we start to slow down probably late fall, early winter, we'll likely see the normalization of the industry.

But in the meantime, we're just seeing a lot of people return and not be as price sensitive as they had been before.

We use Adara as a tool to measure how well our website is doing in getting people here.

You'll see below that it says, this is an estimated 43% of

our website traffic because people are moving away from pixels for tracking.

We aren't able to capture the entirety of the website.

And I'll show you on the next slide a little bit more about what this looks like.

But this is what we're able to show for sure was here.

In 2021, as things were starting to recover, the average length of stay is pretty typical for Charlottesville and Albemarle County, as is the number of average travelers.

However, the average daily rate is well above what we see in market.

So the people who are coming to our website are spending more money here on their overnight stays.

This is what the enriched data looks like.

So Adara has hotel agreements with only certain brands.

And so when we are able to combine this, that data with what we know that we have in market for all the rest of the brands and all the rest of the properties that we have here, this is really what the CACBB website alone is bringing to

the local economy and actual bookings.

So this is not, you know, how much visitor spending we have here.

It's not, you know, our homestays.

This is just hotel revenue that we're able to track through only our website, not our PR efforts, not the advertisements that people see that don't end up with them coming to our website, but do end up with them booking.

Our sales efforts specifically are to try and attract groups to Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

This is a relatively new position.

We hired in November of 2020 and we have been able to start working with our local accommodations and event spaces.

We go to trade shows.

especially student and youth groups, military reunions and some international business as well to try and get people here during the midweek when occupancy is lower and prices are lower as well.

So through this program, we host familiarization tours so that the planners can come and they can experience what it would be like to bring a group here.

And then we put those leads out to our event and tours, our accommodations partners to be able to book that business directly.

As in everything else that we do, we partner really closely with the stakeholders.

And so in...

In the beginning of 2022, we hosted a sales strategy meeting with our local hotel partners to see how things were working and to make adjustments accordingly.

For our visitor services, this is our mobile visitor center.

This is X-Art Park at the farmer's market on Saturday mornings.

This is one of our most popular locations for the mobile visitor center.

And we see a lot of visitors come through every Saturday morning.

but our visitor services team doesn't just run the mobile visitor centers they answer inquiries of all types in person phone calls emails website submissions and they also help residents who are looking for information we have we work on site for special events and we also do bulk orders which means if you're having a group come to town we're able to put together a package for you with visitor guides maps

and whenever other brochures are relevant to your group so that you can pass those out in bags and have a really nice experience for your visitors when they come here.

You get those inquiries all the time with meetings and weddings.

For our mobile visitor center locations, we have all of the stats here on this somewhat complicated chart for you in case you wanted to dive in a little bit more.

We just launched in March of 2021.

So we're in our second season for the mobile visitor centers.

And we've been learning as we go throughout.

We were initially at the wool factory, but now we've moved to Cho to the airport and we run Wednesdays through Sundays at a city and county location during those days.

these are the city sites per month in case you're interested in diving again a little bit more into the patterns of visitation what I love about being able to be at different locations is that we're able to talk to different types of visitors you'll see different folks on the downtown mall than a dairy market than at the art park and so or running along the Rivanna River Trail

And we're able to gather that information, but we're also able to cross-reference people who are running along the trail how to get downtown, how to get to Barracks Road and try and connect the dots for folks.

So we're really going to where the people are when they're there.

This is a little bit of information on the kinds of requests we get at the Mobile Visitor Center by subject.

Just in case you were curious, not surprisingly in 2021 recreation and places to play was top.

That was a travel trend throughout the United States as people were trying to explore outside and stay safe.

And I'll leave this here for a second.

These are some words from our partners on what the Mobile Visitor Center means to them.

And then as far as COVID recovery goes, we just through the Virginia Tourism Corporation ARPA funding were able to get access to Zartico for two years, for a two years long subscription.

And we're just starting to mine that data.

It has some really great data inside of this dashboard.

And I'll be able to share a better report with you in the coming months as I learn more.

But what I thought was interesting about this chart was that through October we were seeing more day trip visitors than overnight and then once we got to November that that trend has changed and so we're seeing more and more people spend the night

Day trip visitors are great you know they spend money here we're happy for them but the overnight visitors are really where we see the the economic impact because they stay overnight they need to eat their meals here they need something to do they're going out to the theater they're you know they're taking in different events and so that's a good sign of recovery for our economy as we see that that ratio shift

This is also really interesting to me that the types of places and activities that visitors are engaged in versus residents.

This is one of my favorite things about Zartacos.

We're able to see how resident behavior and visitor behavior are different in different spots and within different sectors of the economy.

And so, you know, not surprisingly, there are more visitors at our accommodations than residents.

But what we're seeing for the arts, for example, are, you know, we're seeing more residents than visitors at those kinds of events.

So we'll be mining more of this data, but I just wanted to grab a couple of slides to share with you all this afternoon.

Well, I don't have any questions.

I just wanted to comment as a council person that serves on the board is that I've been to, you know, since I've been on council, what, six months now, several meetings, and it's just a very diverse board.

It covers a lot of different areas.

I know we have some openings up for some different categories, but, you know,

So just quickly about that, you know, I was just going to the farmer's market and there was really a lot of activity going on that particular day.

It was the kickoff of the African, what are we calling it again, Courtney?

Discover Black Seabill Discover Black Seabill and it was a room full of writers from different newspapers and I love meeting new people so it didn't take much for me to get in there and talk to them so it was great.

It was just a perfect weekend and as far as the weather, the activity,

was smelling good outside with the different food.

So I hope they enjoyed it.

It looked like they did.

Yeah, I really appreciated your presentation.

I did have a couple of quick questions for you.

It was interesting to me.

I grew up in southwest Georgia, so when I see people or see

this area listed as part of the Southeast as opposed to the Mid-Atlantic.

Is there a reason?

That's a completely trite thing, but are we marketed?

Is that like a certain way that we're marketed in terms of the region we appeal to?

Sure.

And so what I've noticed is that is the case people

put Virginia in different buckets, but we are members of Southeast Tourism Society.

Got it.

Thank you.

And what is your board's relationship to the Virginia Tourism Corporation?

I guess the larger

So we receive grant funding from them occasionally, and we like to, you know, know what they're doing and vice versa.

Got it, got it, got it.

And then in your website tracking, which was very slick and sophisticated, do you also pick up like Airbnb type arrangements, things that don't go through what I guess used to be considered normal hoteling or, you know, the stay Seville or things like that.

Adara does not, no.

There are additional...

There's lots of research that you can buy in the tourism space and trying to buy research that gives us the biggest bang for our buck without spending most of our money on research that we couldn't end up using to buy more advertising.

So the numbers would be higher?

Yes.

Yeah, okay, thank you.

I mean I think you know getting people around with signage I mean our our signage for the visitor center that used to be the transit center is still up and I know that that creates some confusion you know

Trying to attract a workforce here that will help us fill out the rest of our hospitality industry businesses is huge.

We've been bringing in visitors on Sunday and Mondays and trying to feed them downtown is a hard thing to do.

And I totally sympathize with our restaurants for not being open.

at seven days a week for three meals a day.

But it does make it difficult when visitors are here to be able to have those experiences if places aren't open.

And it ends up supporting chain restaurants as opposed to locally owned restaurants for that reason, because they're able to have the support to be open more of the time.

And then we've also seen some

Transportation issues, especially, you know, coming out of COVID, you know, connectivity between the airport and the rest of the county and the city is difficult.

You know, trying to get an Uber to come back from a winery can be challenging.

So, you know, I think workforce is the biggest issue.

that's facing the tourism industry right now.

And it's not just in Charlottesville, it's everywhere.

Great.

Just one question.

I read in recent months that the state had allocated additional money to tourism boards.

So that was the VTC ARPA funding slide that I showed you.

The city was the grant recipient, but then they passed through most of that funding to the CACVB.

$20,000 was used for downtown mall lighting, but the money didn't come directly to the tourism boards.

Is there additional money that will be coming directly to tourism boards after this upcoming state budget was signed?

Okay.

That said, I mean, the two biggest questions I've had have been about, one, the efficiency and quality of work.

In the past, we've gotten from contracting out some of the design and advertising, as well as what data that we're using to measure the impact or efficiency of any investments we make.

And both those questions were answered in your presentation, and I think...

Thank you.

No, I think most everything's been answered.

I really am.

I mean, I like what you're doing with the Discover Black Charlottesville very much.

Are you being careful about the companies?

When I noticed on the website, we have a number of like a whole page about vacation rentals and making sure that those are actually

We don't have access to whether or not they're legal.

We are not doing that.

I don't know if that is something we are able to do, but I can get with the staff of the city and see if we're able to figure out the best way to move forward on that.

Yeah, I just...

Yeah, I have some issues with that.

So, and it's just an area that's a very, it can be, I could see where this could have slipped through cracks because everyone thinks everybody else is supposed to be checking up on it.

But it's, it's kind of a pet peeve of mine.

You're welcome.

I don't really have any questions.

I mean, one of the advantages of going last in all of this is that all the other questions get asked and all the other points get made.

I think that the Discover Black Seaville is an intriguing thing for a whole lot of reasons, only one of which is that it helps very directly to confront

some of the sort of the mythology I suppose you might almost say about Charlottesville and it also gives us an opportunity to change our own reality.

And it's sometimes that opportunity to change the reality is all that we've needed.

So I applaud those efforts.

I'm glad it worked well to begin with.

Let's hope that it persists.

Thank you and please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any more questions.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Courtney.

So our next presenter is going to be the transit piece and Lucinda Shannon and perhaps others.

Do we have Lucinda and perhaps others?

Others here.

Okay, there are some others.

Fire away.

I'd like to apologize Mayor Snook and the council members and also to the city staff for the connection technology errors.

I'm Lucinda Shannon, I'm a Senior Regional Planner with the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and the Project Manager for the Transit Vision Plan.

We'd like to thank Charlottesville for supporting this Transit Vision Plan and today we have Tim Bruhl from AECOM and Scudderwag with Jarrett Walker and Associates to provide you a project update.

Thanks Lucinda and thank you to the council members for having our team present today for an update on the regional transit vision plan for the Charlottesville area I will go ahead and share my screen so bear with me and we have a presentation can everyone see my screen yes okay thank you

So as an agenda, we'll kind of go through the background of where we've been.

Oh, sorry.

First off, my name is Tim Bruhl.

I'm a transportation planner and project manager at AECOM, and I'm based out of Arlington, Virginia.

Today joining me is Scudder Wag from Jarrett Walker & Associates.

So back to our agenda, we'll go over the background of where we've been and what work remains.

We'll have a brief discussion on the transit vision statement, goals and objectives.

And then the bulk of our presentation will go over the different vision concepts we have prepared for regional transit in Charlottesville.

And we'll wrap up with

a discussion on our phase two engagement strategy on how we're going to be reaching out to various stakeholders and the public moving forward into the summer.

And then we'll have an opportunity for question and answer.

So the project started last October.

and this was a collaborative effort to evaluate and establish a clear long-term vision for transit service in the region.

The project is led by the TJPDC and funded in part by DRPT and the local jurisdictions.

As you can see on the process graphic below, we are approaching the end of our project where we have developed our draft network concepts and our soliciting input and evaluating the outcomes.

The project website is the best place to find information on the study, including our intermediate work products to date, as well as information on upcoming engagement efforts, including our survey and upcoming public meeting.

And the link to our project website is listed there.

We are anticipating finalizing the study by late summer, so August, September 2022.

So I do want to make a distinction between our study which is the transit vision study with the upcoming transit governance study The transit vision study will conclude this summer just as the transit governance study commences The focus of the transit vision study is identifying those potential improvements and network to the regional transit system

and the focus of the transit governance study is the governance of that regional transit including potentially a regional transit authority that can collect additional dedicated revenue for transit.

Basically studying how we could implement and operate the vision that we've defined as part of the study.

One of our immediate work products was to develop a vision statement for transit in the region.

And this was a public and stakeholder led effort to identify those transit and community priorities and goals for the region.

During our conversations with the public and also the RTP, we came up, some main themes sort of bubbled up, those being equity, and we define that as expanding opportunities for residents and represents the needs of both urban and rural communities.

multimodality, meaning reduced reliance on automobiles, including improving the effectiveness and utility of the transit network, considering transit supportive land uses and other multimodal solutions, including bicycle and pedestrian connections to transit, intercity rail, et cetera.

And finally, climate change, helping protect the environment, reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector

So this we did provide a the draft transit vision statement goals objectives and measures technical memo and that's included in the packet for today's meeting for your review.

Any detailed comments can be passed along to the study team for consideration as we finalize the vision plan.

Within that document and provided here on the presentation highlighted is our proposed vision statement and it reads as follows.

Develop, design, and provide transit in the Charlottesville area in a manner that reflects a collaborative, inclusive, and equitable process representing needs in both urban and rural areas.

This transit system expands opportunities for all residents, equity, reduces reliance on automobiles, multimodality, and helps protect the environment, climate change mitigation.

Thanks, Tim.

Good afternoon.

It's a pleasure to be with you all today.

I'm Scudder Wag with Jarrett Walker & Associates, also based in Arlington, Virginia.

And we have been helping the team with the service planning elements of this process.

And we have to present to you as part of this two vision concepts that show a range of possibilities of what new regional funding and expanded service might achieve

for the region.

The constrained vision that we'll show you is built around assumptions about what a possible expanded network looks like assuming regional funding sources similar to the levels of resources that come from the Central Virginia Transportation Authority example of sales and fuels taxes that they use to fund their transportation authority.

In this case, we've applied similar assumptions and then assumed almost all of that funding would go towards transit, which would be about $26 million in regional funding if we applied similar funding streams to this region.

and assume that most of those dollars replace the local funding that's coming from general funds from you and other localities in the region alongside the continuing streams of funding from federal and state sources which is about nine and a half million dollars a year currently

And that would put a budget of nearly $36 million a year in current year dollars to fund a transit network compared to in pre-pandemics of fiscal year 2019, for example, CAT and JAUNT combined

spent about $19.5 million operating transit service in the region.

And I want to emphasize the operating cost because that is the primary cost of transit, is operating service day in and day out, paying operators, maintenance staff to keep the service running.

The second part of the vision, the second piece we'll talk about is the unconstrained vision, which is a network that shows what could it look like if you built a system that was really trying to need your land use, climate, economic development and lots of other goals that you have for your communities.

And so this vision had no constraint, no specific defined limit on when we were drawing it up along with staff.

and representatives from various jurisdictions.

And we estimate that the total cost of running that network would be about $70 million per year to give you some sense of the scale.

Next slide.

So I'm going to talk about some outcomes first.

And one of the ways we can measure outcomes is by looking at how many people have access to some different kinds of transit service.

So this bar chart is showing you residents and jobs that are near transit service of different

and I will emphasize frequency regularly when we're talking about transit because frequency is so key to the usefulness of service.

The more frequent a service is, the more likely it is to be really useful to go where you want because you don't have to wait very long for it to show up and it makes it much easier to transfer between services.

So these bar charts show you that in today's network, or what we call the baseline network, actually the network that will exist as of next year, about 8% of residents and about 12% of jobs are near service that comes every 10 minutes or better.

There are in total about 60% of residents in the urbanized MPO area.

It's important to note here that these bar charts represent have access to some kind of transit service.

If we add up all of these bars of 10 minute, 15 minute, 20 minute in purple, 30 minute in blue, and so on, you get 60% of residents

and about 72% of jobs.

And we can look at low income residents, we can look at households without cars and see how they compare in the next, the constrained vision.

And in the constrained vision, you see

that a lot more people have access to 15 minute service and 20 minute service and there's a bit of an increase in the percent of people and jobs covered in the constrained network.

And this tells us that in particular with the improvements in people who have access to 15 minute service and 20 minute service that you would have a significant increase in the usefulness and the ability of people to access places.

And for a variety of people in particular households with that cars, low income residents and residents of color, you see those percentages go up a good bit, which is a way of saying that we're trying to put the resources in a more equitable fashion or as a more equitable network.

Next slide.

If we look at these same comparisons to the unconstrained network, you see that dark red part of the bar chart on the right grow up dramatically because the unconstrained network has a much higher level of investment.

You get far more people and jobs that have access to 10-minute service or 15-minute service, which are very useful services, the kinds of services that you don't even have to think about a schedule anymore and where it's extremely easy to transfer and get places with much shorter waits.

So the unconstrained network has an enormous improvement in access because of that increase in frequency.

Next.

So we can visualize this kind of increase in access by using these maps we call a wall around your life.

So this gray blob on this map is how far you can go in 45 minutes from 1st Street South at Lankford Avenue down the Red Street neighborhood near Mount Zion Church.

And as you see, you can't get really that far in 45 minutes.

You can reach about 29,000 jobs and about 32,000 residents in 45 minutes.

And this counts waiting time, your time riding in the vehicle, your time to transfer, your time to walk after you get off the vehicle.

So it accounts for all of those potential aspects of your travel time.

Next.

In the constrained network, because we've improved frequency, we've improved some things in the network, you can get a good bit farther and reach more of the city, more of the region.

And it's 34% more jobs that you can reach and about 50% more residents that you can reach.

And both of these are really useful measures because if you live there, you could reach 34% more jobs, which might be jobs you want to compete for to work at.

Or they also represent, you know, places you might want to go for other reasons.

There's a whole lot of jobs at hospitals that represent medical services you might want to go to, lots of jobs at shopping centers that represent the shopping destinations and retail services you might want to reach.

So it's a good measure of the potential overall increase in your freedom and access to all the things you might want in life.

And the access to increased residents is useful for thinking about workforce.

If you had a business here, how many more employees could reach you?

How many more customers could reach you?

And that tells you a lot about how transit can improve the usefulness of a place from that perspective.

Next slide.

The unconstrained network from the same location, because we have a really big increase in service and a really big increase in frequency, you see really big increases in the potential to reach jobs and residents across the region.

So now this green blob representing where you can go in the unconstrained network gets much bigger.

And that's 122% increase in jobs and 140% increase in residents reachable.

Next.

So we can effectively create a heat map.

Yeah.

Is there a reason if you go back to the last three slides?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

So 45 minutes.

And then if you go to the next one, 45.

And then with the unconstrained, you have an hour.

Oh, I apologize.

That should have been a 45-minute version.

And we have more of these examples that we can provide for different areas as well.

So my apologies that that should have been a 45-minute.

And I think that might have just been an error in the output of the number of minutes there.

Okay.

Yes.

All right.

Sure.

So we can do a similar assessment of this change across all different parts of the city and the region and produce an effective heat map of that change.

The darker green areas showing increases, the darker the green, the greater the increase in job access.

The pink actually a small decrease in the constraint network, for example, there's a few bits and nooks and crannies where

Some changes may mean a small decrease, but by and large, there's a vast improvement across most of the city and the urbanized parts of the region.

Next slide.

And the unconstrained network you see with the large investment, a sea of green of improvement and job access across large parts, all of the city of Charlottesville and large parts of the developed areas in Albemarle County that arise from the significant improvements in frequency and additions and extensions of routes.

Next slide.

And we can give you then a summary of what does this mean for the average person.

So if we take that green on the map and we effectively multiply it by the number of people within each of those areas and then compare it, we can tell you, for example, that in the constrained network,

For the average person trying to travel in the middle of the day on a weekday, they would be able to reach about 12% more jobs in 60 minutes overall, in this case.

The red bar is 30 minutes, the blue bar is 45 minutes, the green bar is 60 minutes, how many jobs you could reach.

And at 60 minutes, you could reach 12% more than you could in today's network.

The unconstrained vision, the middle chart there is showing you a 57% increase in jobs reachable in an hour on average for the average person across the urbanized area of Charlottesville and Albemarle.

Next slide.

So just a quick tour of what is in these networks.

These maps are in our draft framework memo.

These are maps of the existing networks within the urbanized area on the left and across the entire region of our study area on the right.

Again, color coded by frequency of service, which is

always critical to describing the usefulness of service to people.

And the thing I'll highlight in the urbanized area network, you see a lot of that pale blue color.

And that pale blue color means service every 60 minutes.

And relying on service every 60 minutes is extremely hard.

You can think about relying on a 60 minute route is a little bit like if they were a gate at the end of your driveway that only opened once an hour.

You had best be in your car with your coffee ready to go at 7 a.m.

if you needed to get out at 7 a.m.

to get to work.

And if you miss it, then you're not leaving until 8.

That is obviously a very difficult schedule to live your life around.

and that is the experience of a lot of folks in Charlottesville and Albemarle with the current frequency of service.

The dark blue shows you 30 minute service and most of the higher frequency services are actually circulators in and around the university and the trolley.

Next slide.

The Vision Network includes significant expansions of service across the region, including some fixed route all day services to surrounding regional jurisdictions, Louisa Nelson, among others.

And within the urbanized area, a significant improvement in frequency and access.

So you see a number of red routes now in many corridors, Fifth Street, Avon,

going through the grounds as well as dark red every 10 minute services going through the grounds to Fontaine Business Park and going up the U.S.

29 corridor, for example, bringing much more frequent service to many people and many jobs.

And then most other corridors in the urbanized parts of Charlottesville and Albemarle are every 30 minutes in this unconstrained network, meaning much better service for many people.

And you also see the yellow-colored zones indicating on-demand services highlighted in Pantops and in 29 North, north of Fashion Square Mall, for example, and in a few of the outlying communities, like in Esmond Scottsville, for example.

Next slide.

The constrained vision network, because it is constrained to a much smaller budget than the unconstrained vision, has a significantly less investment, relatively speaking.

So on the left is the fixed route network recommendation in the constrained vision network.

And here you see fewer red lines than you do in the unconstrained network.

So there's 15 minute service on Avon, but not on Fifth, for example.

There's 15-minute service on High Street as opposed to 10-minute service in the Unconstrained Vision, for example.

And the U.S.

29 service going up Route 7 is every 20 minutes instead of every 10 minutes, for example, because of the much more constrained budget in this network.

It is still a significant improvement and you see a number of other corridors and routes where service is every 30 minutes instead of every 60 minutes, but not all the corridors in the city and the developed areas like in the unconstrained vision.

Next slide.

One of the things that does not quite come through in some of the earlier analysis outputs that I showed you that I want to really emphasize as an important aspect of the constrained vision is a significant improvement in span of service, meaning the hours that service runs in days of the week.

And so this is a chart that we call span of service chart that shows you the frequency of service by time of day.

On the left is weekday, in the middle of Saturday, and on the right is Sunday.

and this is your baseline network and it's one of the things that stands out in this that I want to highlight is there are only five routes that run on Sunday in the existing or baseline network and many routes do not run very late into the evening many of them in by 8 or 9 p.m.

on Saturday and weekdays which is obviously very limiting for people who work evening and night shifts at hospital who work at restaurants who work at hotels next slide

The constrained vision network includes a significant investment in later hours of service and Sunday service so that many more people could consistently rely on that service seven days a week.

And in our experience working across the country, these kinds of investments have enormous payoffs because

There are many people out there today who are driving to work because they work a kind of job where they need to be able to get home at 9 or 10 p.m.

And if you're not there for them like you aren't now on many of your routes, they're going to have to have a car, even if they can barely afford it.

Could you please go back to the slide just before, please?

Yeah, thanks, Skutter.

Yeah, so we are entering our phase two of engagement.

And so during this phase, we are confirming the draft vision and concepts that we just presented to you.

We're exploring long term transit alternatives for the region and, you know, collecting preferences on scenarios and other future needs.

June will be a very busy month for us.

We are presenting to the local elected bodies, including, you know, right now to the city of Charlottesville, but, you know, we've already presented to Elboro County Board of Supervisors, and we are also reaching out and presenting to the local rural jurisdictions surrounding the urbanized area.

On June 9th we will launch our survey and that will be available online and with hard copy distribution at the transit center and that will be a date to be determined.

So the goal will be to engage and interact with the existing riders of transit there.

Also on June 9th, we will provide a significant update to the project website, kind of introducing these concepts and having the website available as a sort of clearinghouse for information and avenue for the survey.

During the June 13th week, we are

holding some focus group discussions with community leaders and other community groups that have special interests and that pertain to transit in the region.

and towards the end of the month on June 23rd we'll be holding our second and final virtual public open house event and I say second we had a public house event public open house event earlier in the study in October and so this is a revisit to the the public at that point

During July, we'll be completing those local presentations that I talked about and providing another update to the project website with a summary of our phase two engagement activities that happened in June.

In August, we'll hold our final meeting with the RTP to present the completed plan and to wrap up the study at that point.

And with that, we are

will be happy to entertain some some questions.

Thank you.

Yes, I was fortunate enough to see this presentation on the RTP, so thank you.

I hadn't really picked up on the fact that even the constrained vision shifted shifts, so to speak, until later in the night, later in the evening, and also on the weekend, so that was good.

Are you able to say sort of if we were to go with the constrained vision versus the unconstrained what sort of cities or regions this might put us into a comparable class with?

In other words, I know that those are really kind of hard things to compare

there's always apples to apples comparisons like that are difficult but could you say for instance if we went to something like the constrained vision that would be similar to what Richmond has or is it too many differences between those two places or say to Charlotte or to

We could.

I don't have the numbers in front of me to say with a high degree of certainty how comparable you might be to other places with, say, the constrained network or the unconstrained network.

I would generally say that you all...

We've been working a good bit in Chapel Hill recently.

And my impression is that the constrained network would get you something closer to where Chapel Hill is now in their overall level of service, just based on my impressions of what they run.

And they're a somewhat comparable place in terms of being a major university town with a lot of other activities as well.

So that's, at a high level, a kind of impression of kind of on a per capita basis, you know, where it might lead you to.

And if you went in the unconstrained direction, then you would certainly be much above them in a kind of per capita service levels, which I think

Right.

That's very helpful.

Thank you.

I guess the second question I have is the field of dreams question.

If we build it, will people use it?

I was talking to someone in the transit arena a few, maybe two months ago, and this individual said, you know, it's great to have these

This would be a great system to enact, but how do we change behavior such that people would use it?

I mean, I think the unconstrained vision is fantastic.

How would we, and this is not a question to be answered tonight, but just wonder what your initial reaction is to that point?

Sure.

I mean, a major reason people don't take transit today is because it's very unlikely to be useful for the trip they want to make.

You know, if you go and plug in a trip today in Google Maps and ask the question, you know, can I get from Pantops to...

Community College.

You're going to get a trip that will take you an extremely long time.

And the fundamental basis of changing that dynamic of will someone choose to ride is making it far more likely that the trip they look up will be reasonably competitive to take transit.

Now, that doesn't mean every trip from every possible origin and destination should be

incredibly easy to take transit with because that's very, very hard and very expensive to do.

But your most dense and active places in your community, if you tie them together with frequent and useful transit, that will make it far more likely that transit will be useful for someone's trip.

And that's the baseline foundation for making it more likely that people will ride transit.

There's a whole range of other things that you can do on the streetscape, on the land use development side as well.

to make it more likely that people will choose transit.

But we like to say, you can't take a bus that's not there.

So we just have like five minutes left.

So I just wanted to kind of make a comment.

And I know probably can be answered from doing planning, transportation planning for the county for 20 years.

I'm glad to see this project.

This information is something that we have been yearning for for a long time.

So I'm glad it's being done.

I am, you know, kind of going to what Brian said as far as the information that for when I'm seeing is

from the process of getting input that that may have a big say in the usability of it because what I've seen from the plan is from the focus group.

I didn't hear who was going to be in the focus group, but the virtual kind of hearing and the survey sheets, I'm just afraid that you may get just input from

the same people, and we kind of know what it is.

I mean, if you're not going to go out into the community to ask people authentically who may use it,

how you know what do you want to see you know we're going to get you know I'm not sure I'm not going to sure about the end result I'm not I don't see anything innovative here as far as getting input it's just like we're going to put up a survey let people respond and if they don't you know so I would like to see and I know it may be kind of late in the game a little bit extra effort on how getting input maybe the focus group will do that so um

and so that's just my spiel I'm saying to a lot of now that I'm in this position now being on the other end for many many years that we got to do a better job of getting input we just I can tell you if this all you're going to do I can almost assure you what we're going to get because we've been getting emails on it already so secondly that a lot of information as far as

really thinking outside the box as far as providing transit or some type of service for those who work overnight and need childcare.

And we may not need a whole big bus or van or whatever just for one or two persons to get off.

Maybe if we can look at some innovative service like

a car service or something like that that's been vetted and they feel safe that they can call that one person to come pick them up like a taxi cab or something like that instead of like having a whole big bus on the ready for someone who might get off at 3.

I think when I was doing this UVA hospital alone had 30 some shifts you know and so you can't really pin you know one or two you may be able to pin one or two but it's a lot of different shifts and

So, public input, we got to kind of think about how we're going to approach that, or I'm going to have a lot of eebie-jeebies about the results.

The technical term, thank you.

You planners, you use this fancy language.

Sure.

I'll just make a few comments.

I attended the earlier presentation I think last week at the RTP and we'll just share again some of the comments I had then.

One, I wonder if it may be worth explicitly including bus drivers in some way in this plan or the vision of it because we can drop any plans or changes we want but if we don't have sufficient drivers

to run those routes, it won't work.

And I know that we're already seeing significant problems in being able to even maintain frequency of our current routes because of a shortage of bus drivers.

The second is I think at last week's meeting the Executive Director of Jaunt made some really important points.

Can't remember all the details but to the effect of should this plan really focus not just on route frequency but the travel time of the route particularly in the context of our density and the population of our metropolitan area whether

Also frequency being important, but the total time it takes to go on that route really being critical to having routes that people end up taking and work.

The third, I would echo Vice Mayor Wade's point, you know, you look at the survey, it's very unrepresentative of what the actual ridership of CAT is based on my understanding.

I think like the overwhelmingly the average income was like almost $200,000 in this survey.

And how do we, if we're making decisions, how to ensure that it's including people who are already using the system and who are going to rely on the system for their employment and day-to-day travel.

And the final point just sort of how do we, I do think that the model of the unconstrained vision should be our goal, but how do we sort of, once this is finalized,

bring it back down to earth and figure out what are the level of investments we need to specifically plan for here in the city and what are the specific steps needed to start to get Jaunt, CAT, and UVA Transit Services working together and moving to that Regional Transit Authority because I think even reading this you know it won't work without a Regional Transit Authority and so how do we bring it back down to earth and figure out in specifics what the next steps are

The only comment that I wanted to add, and I heard the presentation last week as well, is that I think that one place that I want to make sure we

that we tap into for their advice on this is major employers because I think that wherever the bus service can be of great assistance

is for helping people get to 6 a.m.

jobs at UVA or Sentara or places like that.

There are some major employers, and if we can figure out a way to make sure that they feel like they are partners in this effort as well, then we may have greater luck moving forward in getting everybody to

Well, for one thing, getting people to have the bus schedules and the work schedules somewhat aligned.

That was my only thought, and as I've had my other comments made at various other meetings, so I won't belabor them at this point.

We've said our piece.

Is there anything you all want to say back?

and the unconstrained model is beginning to look like a real transit system.

So I hope we can figure out a way to get to that point.

Okay, that is, thank you so much for your presentation and for bearing with us as we shuffled things around a little bit.

That's it for our, do we have anything?

Is there a motion now to go into closed session?

Pursuant to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that the City Council close this open meeting and convene with any closed meeting as authorized by Virginia Code section 2.2-3711 A1 and A8.

Is there a second to that motion?

Second.

Right.

Okay, so this one we can just do by voice vote.

All in favor?

Aye.

Any opposed?

Okay, the motion passes.

City Council will now go into closed session and will return to, I guess it's to a new link at 630.

No.

Are we ready to go?

Let's see if I can figure out what I just did.

Well, anyway, I'll figure it out as we go.

So first thing we have to do is to come out of closed meeting.

Is there somebody want to read the closed meeting certification motion?

Second Ms.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, it is kind of a statement to make concerning the recent shootings and tragic events that have taken place since we've last met.

It's been something that really has been in my heart for the past several weeks.

I've been praying for peace.

I've been praying for the families of those impacted.

My heart particularly goes out to my former school board colleagues in Udaldi, Texas.

You know, as school board members, our first priority is

is provide a safe environment to learn, for the students to learn.

And I just can't only imagine what that community is going through now.

And I will continue to pray and support initiatives to see that this doesn't happen again.

Thank you.

I haven't really had words for this.

The amount of

Mass shootings our country has seen since January is astounding.

And the fact that we have had insults at our own middle school, in the bathrooms, racial slurs and threats to our children is not something that I ever want to see in this community.

I don't want to see it in this country.

and yes, I know it's here and I know as soon as I know when we had the opportunity we restricted guns as much as we could and we're going to continue working towards that where we can.

At least I will.

This is just, it's got to stop Other counselors wish to add anything?

the next thing on the agenda, which was to be the resolution on Gun Violence Awareness Month.

Gun Violence Awareness Day was June 3rd, 2020.

Gun Violence Awareness Month is the month of June at the moment.

And I did a resolution which, you know, when I do these mayoral proclamations, it is not just Lloyd Snook opining, it is usually the product

of a lot of discussion and drafts that have been circulated among other counselors.

And this is a draft that I wanted to make sure that other counselors felt comfortable with.

And so I circulated and we made some edits to take those suggestions.

I'll summarize it basically, but it starts off, whereas in 2020,

More than 45,000 Americans were killed by firearms, including about 26,000 by suicide and more than 19,000 by homicide, an average of about 70 gun suicides a day and 50 gun homicides a day.

And whereas, as I wrote this just last week, hardly a week goes by in this country without news of another mass shooting, whether in a church,

a synagogue, a grocery store, or an elementary school this week we could say hardly a day goes by and in recent years Virginia has had more than a thousand gun deaths and more than 330 gun homicides annually or about one gun homicide a day in Virginia and whereas localities across the nation including Charlottesville are working to end the senseless violence with evidence-based solutions

and so on.

We go on down to renewing a commitment to reduce gun violence.

We pledge to do all we can to keep firearms out of the wrong hands, to encourage responsible gun ownership, to help keep our children safe.

And so now, therefore, be it resolved, we declare that we as a city must do more to reduce gun violence.

We encourage all Charlottesville citizens to advocate for meaningful legislation.

at the state and federal levels to stop mass shootings and gun violence, to support our local efforts to prevent the tragic effects of gun violence, and to honor and value human lives.

This, at some level, feels a little bit like a thoughts and prayers kind of a resolution, because there's nothing in specific that we're saying, I, Lloyd Snook, am going to go do this in particular.

Partly because, for political reasons, it's easy for us to say, well, these are state and federal problems.

And certainly the regulation, the law dealing with guns is not a local problem.

We don't have the power to do that.

But there are a lot of things I think that we can work on, a lot of gun violence or violence prevention in general.

and violence prevention is not only, it is partly, but it is not only the work of groups like the Buck Squad, like Peace in the Streets.

I think there are a lot of other things that we should be thinking about in terms of violence prevention efforts.

And what I think that, without getting terribly specific at this point, because I don't have an agenda

you know four point plan or anything like that just offer my commitment to do what I can where I can for as long as I can I think that that's all that any of us can do and I think that we all need to reaffirm that commitment to make that effort and to figure out what the answer is because thoughts and prayers all by themselves are not solving any problems

Our kids continue to die, our adults continue to die, and it's unacceptable.

So that's my little soapbox.

I want to say that this is not directly related to it, but it's close.

I really enjoyed yesterday going to the Tonsillar Basketball League tip-off, and thanks to Wes Bellamy for organizing that and also for organizing the

the bike giveaway.

I particularly though enjoyed his t-shirt.

It said blame Wes.

And I thought any one of us could have a t-shirt like that saying you blame fill in the blank because we get a lot of pot shots taken at us for a lot of reasons and some of them are good reasons some of them are bad but

We still get a lot of blame.

But the important thing for Wes, I think we need to acknowledge that despite all of the difficulties that I'm sure he was dealing with, he persevered, he pushed through, he got the league off to a good start, he got the bike giveaway going.

It was a wonderful event.

So as Wes would say, much love to Wes.

Yeah, and Mr. Mayor, the event we went to on Friday night, held over at Mount Zion African Church by the Buck Squad and by others, I guess Moms Against Gun Violence, it was a very good event.

Yeah, I guess the thing that I came away from that in particular was meeting with some of the members of the Buck Squad and the work that they do in those neighborhoods and wanting myself to learn more, to know more, and to consider how we can support that work going forward because it

The prevention that they're doing in terms of meeting with people that have disagreements, they get mad at each other, angry each other on social media, and then take it out with weapons.

They're in the middle of those sorts of conversations and preventing bad things from happening.

And so I was really impressed with them and I was impressed by the event.

Any other comments to this point?

Okay, so we'll move on.

Time for the Consent Agenda.

Ms.

Consent Agenda number three, resolution appropriating supplemental funding received from the Virginia Department of Housing and Community Development for HOPWA

Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, HIV, $10,098.

Second reading.

Resolution appropriating anticipated supplemental grant funding from the Virginia Housing Solutions Program to be used for contracted services, $141,000.

Second reading.

Five, resolution appropriating funding received from the United Way as reimbursement of community resource hotline staff costs, $35,311.50.

Second reading.

Six, resolution community development block grant funding and FY 2022 through 2023 annual action plan.

A, Resolution Appropriating Community Development Block Grant funds received from the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development for the FY 2022 through 2023 Action Plan, $433,471.

Second reading.

B, Resolution Appropriating Home Investment Partnership Program funds received from the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development for FY 2022 through 2023.

$84,576.88 second reading C resolution approving the FY 2022 through 2023 annual action plan for the city of Charlottesville CDBG home programs second reading seven resolution approving the Ravenna water and sewer authority northern area projects allocation agreement one reading eight

By motion, pursuant to the continuity of governance ordinance, authorization for regular meetings of the Planning Commission and Board of Architectural Review to be held in hybrid format.

One reading.

Nine, resolution, amending the contract for City Manager Services with the Robert Bob Group to extend the contract through December 31st, 2022.

One reading.

Ten, resolution appropriating the amount of $15,000 to be expended for the local emergency management performance grant.

Thank you, Ms.

Thomas.

We will now take public comment regarding items on the consent agenda that 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've joined us by phone, wish to speak on the consent agenda, press star 9.

We will alternate in person and virtual speakers.

Is there anyone in council chambers who would like to speak on one of the consent agenda items?

Okay.

We can just barely hear you.

Our first speaker is Robin Hoffman.

I just want to remark that the consent agenda, and then I want to go into the public speaking, but I think we're not prioritizing

What we need to do for our schools right now the kids are scared to death and they've been scared to death before the pandemic and now it's increasingly they can't even get on a bus I mean there are so many things in this city right now that should be prioritizing the safety of our citizens and I think that we need to

How do you say show some leadership?

We had a chief operating officer who was able to stop people from bringing guns into the city on August 12th, 2018 by just making an ordinance that day, that minute.

And I'm sure we can do the same for our city and our county.

I don't think we need to do anything else right now and that's what I think should be our priority is to eliminate the guns the military style weapons period we have to look at the post office and FedEx and we have to look at all the ways that these guns are getting here and the ammunition

and just stop it.

Just like every city is beginning to realize that they have to eliminate the military style weapons and that's it.

If you carry one you have to report it to the FBI or you have to report it to your local police and you have to lock it up.

and for sure you're not allowed to use it.

If you're seen using it, you can be arrested and put in jail for life.

And that's what we need to talk about in terms of an agenda.

Thank you, Ms.

Hoffman.

And I will note that was not relevant to the consent agenda, but I figured it'd be easier.

We don't seem to have a lot of competition for these spots at this point.

I'm not going to worry about it too much, but I hope that the next comment will be related specifically to the consent agenda.

Who is the other speaker?

Yes, Mayor Snook.

I see that John Hall is set to speak as well.

Mr. Hall, you are listed as the first speaker during regular public comment, so this is not actually the time designated for you.

Could you wait for us, please?

okay well why don't we I'm going to assume that what he wants to talk about the other speaker did you have one for us yes Mayor Snook I see that John Hall is set to speak as well he might also be he just unmuted himself comments Mr. Hall you are listed as the first speaker during regular public comments so this is not actually the time designated for you could you wait for us please yes sir

Okay, I'm not quite sure how that happened that I got replayed that way, but we accomplished the result.

So let me mention we got a question from Dee Dee Smith.

came just a few minutes ago asking about why the Northern, why the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority Northern Area Projects Allocation Agreement provides that the city is splitting the costs of decommissioning the North Fork Rivanna Water Treatment Plant that serves exclusively the northern sector of Albemarle County.

New water projects up there are being paid 100% by the county and I think the question is

Why are we having to pay some portion of the decommissioning of that plant?

I see Ms.

So during the discussions when we were trying to decide about payment, it was decided that we should pay our fair share to decommission that plant.

And since

We have, over the last 30, 50 years, we have paid to keep the plant in operation.

I don't believe we paid to build our share.

Okay.

Okay.

That's correct.

Thank you.

Anybody have any other questions about anything on the consent agenda?

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay.

Ms.

Councillor McGill?

Yes.

Yes.

Next item is the update from the City Manager's Office.

Yes, sir.

You have a written report before you with a number of items.

I will just highlight a couple of items myself and then have Sam and Ashley highlight some areas from their section.

At the last Council meeting, an issue was raised about an incident at Beaufort School where the cameras did not work and did not capture an incident.

The cameras at the schools are operated and maintained by the school system.

In conversation with Superintendent Gurley, the camera in question is operational and captured the incident and is being handled appropriately at this time.

No further comment on that, but I just wanted to get back to you as promised that we followed up on that.

At the invitation of the Executive Director of the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, the City Manager spoke at the Chamber Board retreat.

The message focused on needed collaboration between the business community and the City Government to move the City forward.

I visited also the Public Housing Resident Association, FAR, to learn more about the operation and programs and met with Shelby Edwards, the Executive Director.

I attended also the Charlottesville Airport Authority Board meeting representing the city on that board and for the approval of the budget also attended the Ravanna Water and Sewer Authority Solid Waste and the Solid Waste Authority Board met with the executive director of the United Way

and the Executive Director of the Charlottesville Convention and Visitors Association Bureau, rather, and attended the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council Awards Gala last week.

I also presented with pleasure certificates of completion to 15 supervisors who participated in the supervisors leadership development program sponsored by the Department of Human Resources and a big shout out to them for an excellent program Deputy City Manager Sam Sanders and I

have been focused on working with Director James Frias on a variety of issues in Neighborhood Development Services.

We are experiencing critical manpower issues and regret the current pause on processing permits and inspections.

We have made multiple offers to a new building official and have to restart the process again with the most recent candidate changing their mind about relocating here at the last minute after we thought they accepted the position.

We had previously contracted with the firm to help us with the inspections to offset our shortage.

The two employees assigned by that firm also left us recently, so we are scrambling to catch up.

The way of getting out of this situation is our constant discussion and we're looking to reach out to the industry council and collaborate and see how they can come in and assist us.

Employees are working as much as they can, as fast as they can, but this is an area that is kind of overwhelming us, but it has our full attention.

We do have in the FY23 budget a new building inspector position that was created to help expand the capacity in advance of the new electronic permitting system which goes live the spring of 2023.

But we have to focus on reengineering our system before we computerize the system.

We just can't computerize the same

broken procedures and processes that we have.

So we're going to be working on that.

We have completed the negotiations for the contract for collective bargaining.

An award would be made in the next day or so.

We expect to have an ordinance coming to Council in the September, October timeframe, hopefully completed by that time.

We actually expect that we will submit a draft for your review in early one of the meetings in August and that's our objective.

Tomorrow the city will be issuing bonds for $26 million to fund our capital program.

Our bonds were rated by Moody's and SP at AAA again for the 41st time in the city's history.

Hats off to the finance department for continuing doing a great job

and making sure that our bonds are rated AAA.

When I say finance department, I mean the finance cluster with the treasurer and the commission of revenue and the budget office working with Chris Culloden and his staff.

Good evening, Councilors and to the members of the public.

Just wanted to share a few specific updates from the written report.

With regards to emergency management, staff is working with Launch Consulting to facilitate a continuity of operations plan for the city.

This is a long overdue process following the events of 2017 that we are finally being able to deliver on.

The goal is to make sure that we are prepared for anything that may happen in the future.

Secondary to that, staff is currently working with Charlottesville City Schools to participate in an upcoming summer safety workshop.

As was mentioned previously, we know that the feelings on campus are a little challenged at the moment.

We're working with staff and leadership there to make sure that we can put in the appropriate plans and to make sure that our response would be what the community would expect at large if something were to happen on any campus in the city.

In the transit area, CAD has hired Kimley Horn as a consultant to complete the Alternative Fuel Vehicle Feasibility Study.

This is the study that Garland mentioned in his January presentation to Council.

This is to help look at the ability for us to convert our fleet and to lay out for us what the various improvements that would be necessary to support a conversion of the fleet from current fossil fuels to using

more of an electric battery operated version of buses across our system.

That plan will be coming out later in the year and we look forward to them being able to take advantage of the infrastructure dollars that are coming as well to make it possible for us to convert that fleet in a timely fashion.

NDS and traffic engineering staff is working to respond to the Safer Streets grant funds to develop a comprehensive transportation safety plan for the city.

This plan is required in order for us to access infrastructure dollars that are coming in that area.

We wanted to make sure that that was known.

We know that there were a few inquiries from members of the public who were aware of this funding source.

and they wanted just to make sure that we were attuned to this opportunity.

So I just want to make sure I share that with everyone to know that we are on top of this and looking forward to submitting a proposal for that.

The environmental sustainability team has been hard at work since their presentation to you council members in April.

They have been working on also having retained Kimberly Horne to do an addendum to the contract that they are working on with CAT.

This will be to examine climate and health implications of transitioning the current CAT fleet to an alternatively fuel fleet.

It gives us the ability to also look at some of our peer city comparisons and helps us make sure that as we take our next steps forward, we're using as much information as available from those who have gone ahead of us.

In addition, the environmental sustainability team is working on the climate vulnerability assessment which began fall 2021.

They are actually hosting workshops on June 8th and 9th as the final engagement step before drafting the assessment report.

The June 8th workshop is for city and government staff and the June 9th workshop is for community members and organizations

that'll be held from 5 p.m.

to 7 p.m.

From our Department of Finance Office, the Board of Equalization met on May 17th through 19th to hear appeals of the real estate assessment, and there were 11 appeals scheduled at that time.

The city also successfully submitted its quarterly report to the U.S.

Treasury for its use of American Rescue Plan funds as of March 31st.

And by way of an update for the community on the utility disconnections for nonpayment, as of today, actually, the utility billing office notified 282 accounts of pending disconnections by hanging cards on their doors.

and to date 246 of those accounts have made payment arrangements which equals 47%.

So utility billing is mostly up to date in its arrears.

The Office of Equity and Inclusion will be hosting a virtual groundwater session later this month and we're very proud to announce that it is full to the gills.

by individuals from our staff, our local libraries, and also we did invite our CRHA family and our United Way family to attend.

We are considering hosting another event later in the summer so that there may be more opportunities for participation.

And the office would also like to thank our facilities team for providing assistance in lighting City Hall green

in remembrance of Mental Health Awareness Month last month and currently lighting the building orange in honor of gun violence awareness.

Our Department of Social Services wishes to make sure that eligibility for the child care subsidy program continues through June 30, 2022.

This expanded criteria includes relaxed income qualifying requirements up to 85% of AMI, a waiver of family co-payments for children,

and use of childcare subsidy during the job search period.

Please contact the Department of Social Services at 434-970-3400 for additional information.

Our Department of Human Services Community Connector Program serves residents of the City of Charlottesville and the County of Albemarle by working with residents and providing trauma-informed care to meet individuals where they are and connect them to resources based on their needs.

The staff currently serves those who have housing choice vouchers, those who have an income and or those individuals who have criminal records over five years ago.

Clients who are unhoused and experiencing homelessness are referred to the Homeless Information Helpline and other key nonprofit partners in our community such as Pacham, The Haven and Salvation Army.

Further, seniors who need rental assistance and survivors of domestic violence are referred to the Alliance for Interfaith Ministries.

In fiscal year 20, the program served 38 residents.

In 21, they served 78.

And in fiscal year 22, at the end of the third quarter, they had already served 60 residents.

The residents served are 82% female, 18% male, and racially, 76% of the residents identify as African American,

20% white non-Hispanic and only 1% of the residents served have not reached successful completion of their care and supports provided while 84 of the residents were already successfully served.

Finally, we would like to announce several key hirings.

The hiring of Ms.

Mary Ann Hardy as our Director of Human Resources, the promotion of Mr. David Dillahunt as the Deputy Director of Communications and Public Engagement, and the promotion of Ms.

Misty Graves as the Director of Human Services.

Several key hirings are in their final phases of completion, including the Director of Information Technology, the Public Safety Information Officer, and our Public Engagement Coordinator.

We're beginning the first round of interviews shortly for the Director of Communications and Public Engagement and we'd like to make sure that the community knows that they can go on our website to see all of our openings and we encourage eligible applicants to apply.

No, thank you for that comprehensive report.

I do have one question, and this is not about anything that you all have talked about, but it was about something that you sent to us a couple days ago, and that's a just sort of outlining where we are with outdoor pools for the summer.

I can take a stab at it.

I'm also looking to see if we have anyone from Parks and Rec, depending on the question.

Well, there was a memo on May 19th that was sent to you from the Director of Parks and Rec

was talking about things.

I get more questions in the last week or two about pools than anything else.

And I just thought it would be nice to be able to put out the word.

First of all, are the pools going to be open?

Second, I've gotten a couple people saying last year I made a donation to scholarships for pools for

for neighborhood kids.

Can we do that again?

Well, what I will say on that, I don't want to go too far and say the wrong thing, but I'll just say that the staff has been working very hard to push to get all of our aquatic facilities open.

That includes Smith, which has been closed for quite some time.

Everything is open.

Everything is working well.

I rode around myself this weekend just to take a look and see that people were at the various pool facilities.

We are experiencing a very critical shortage of

We've been able to push through with a few incentive opportunities to be able to bring a few more people on just as we were bringing the pools online.

Those pools still continue to operate fully staffed at this moment.

We're cautiously optimistic that we'll be able to get through the summer.

We will continue to push for trying to expand our lifeguard pool.

So we are definitely sounding the alarm to any and everyone who is interested

and serving in that capacity with us.

We will welcome you to join the team so that we can keep these facilities open.

We at this moment don't think that there will be an issue being able to keep the pools open.

We have already developed an alternative plan that if we were to find ourselves losing lifeguards because COVID is still a real situation for us and we anticipate that there will be some manpower shortages from time to time,

that if we were to experience the shortage we would adjust versus closing so we may cut back on the hours of operation to start with before we would actually shut down a facility but at this time we have not had to approach that I just met briefly with the director this morning and asked the question about how was everything going with pools over this past weekend and so far all the reports are good to go

Community matters.

All right, Community Matters.

There are seven pre-registered speakers leaving nine slots for additional speakers on Community Matters.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes to speak.

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

And let me say, by the way, some people may not be aware that one of the items, probably the item that was going to attract the most attention to tonight's meeting

was the proposed special use permit for 2005 JPA, which will not be on the agenda tonight.

If you want to talk to us about it, happy to hear from you, but it's not going to be on the agenda tonight.

So we'll now open the floor to preregistered 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 you may raise your hands to be recognized and will alternate with virtual speakers.

So our first speaker was John Hall and Mr. Hall was patient enough to wait and is Mr. Hall with us still?

I can hear from you but it's not going to be on the agenda tonight.

Mayor Snook, John Hall is with us.

You're hearing his audio feed right now.

Uh-huh.

So our first speaker was John Hall and Mr. Hall was patient enough to wait.

And is Mr. Hall with us still?

Can you hear me?

It's not going to be on the agenda tonight.

Uh-huh.

I think we've got a loop.

Yes, I can speak to you.

I think we should start with the Pledge of Allegiance and observe if this is the 78th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.

You're lucky that we have a country, and I'm starting to wonder

Do you hear me now, Lloyd?

Mr. Hall, can you speak to us?

Yes, Lloyd.

What promises did you make to me, Lloyd?

This is the 78th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.

You're lucky that we have a country.

I don't think this is working.

I think we should terminate this and try to figure out some other way if Mr. Hall wants to talk to us because it's just not working.

Second speaker, I'll leave it to the staff here.

Sure, Mayor Snook.

The second name on the list is Daniel Watkins, and I don't currently see him on the Zoom, so I'll go to our third speaker, Megan Bushy.

And I do not see her in the list either.

Oh, okay, Kate's here.

All right.

Yes, please.

I wrote a really nice thing, but because of some of your comments, I'm going to have to change it a little bit.

So I must say it's really nice to be in a place where I can see you all in three dimensions.

I wish more people were here.

So I've spoken to City Council about, can I take my mask off?

So about how money is spent and how the police department gets a lot of it even though other people might be able to get it in the department.

So I don't know if you remember when I spoke about the

Byrne Bureau of Justice Assistance U.S.

Department of Justice Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistant Grant.

This was back in 2021.

And I was a dollar short and a day late because I hadn't seen about it or understood about it, but the police department got that grant and apparently has been getting that grant over and over and over again.

But when I researched the grant, it said that

The money could be used for wider functions, including prevention and education, drug treatment, planning, evaluation, technology improvement, crime victim and witness initiatives and mental health programs, including behavioral programs and crisis intervention.

So I hope when that grant comes up again, somebody else in the city applies for it so that the police department doesn't get new helmets and new bicycles and

stuff like that.

So recently, obviously, there's tons of money coming from the federal government and the state government for public safety.

And a lot of the talk in the news is that, for instance, an article by Brian Dalliner says jurisdictions nationwide are moving to use the funds to recruit police, weaponize SWAT teams and build jails.

and Biden said that the 350 billion out of the trillion in some could be used to fund the police.

When in fact, he said that it could be a proven strat, it could be spent on proven strategies like community violent interruption and prevention programs.

So public safety, the definition of public safety.

is wide in all of this in the state one in the federal ones and I'm afraid and from the history in Charlottesville it seems like public safety is kind of automatically heading to the police department so I was really relieved that you all talked about the buck squad and peace in the streets and trying to find other avenues and I want to share with you some other places that are doing that so in Indiana

they're spending AARP funding 2.7 million for a new crisis center.

So they don't have to spend these funds that way on SWAT teams and in Roanoke.

there's an article from 2021 got a 10 million dollar grant as part of the ARP funds and they gave many grants to address specific things including violence interruption.

All city departments in Roanoke were involved in trying to figure out how to spend the safety money in different ways.

Oh my gosh.

Well, anyway, there are a lot of ideas about what to do.

Happy to get a list from you.

I will.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Next on the list is John Fultz.

I hope so.

All right.

I want to talk about traffic on hydraulic road, which can be horrific at rush hour.

I know.

I have to drive through it sometimes.

But the proposed roundabout at hydraulic and hillside is not an acceptable answer for at least three reasons.

First, it just won't work.

If you have the proposed scheme with you, try to visualize yourself leaving Whole Foods on Hillside and crossing two lanes of almost continuous traffic to make the left turn and come back into the city.

Even the traffic manager is somewhat dubious about this.

Second reason, eliminating the stoplight isolates the affordable housing on Mitchie Drive, and there's a lot of it.

We shop at Kroger's almost every time we see people from Mitchie Drive on one side or the other waiting to cross the street.

I just came through this evening.

Two people were there.

Painted zebra stripes do not stop traffic.

Else we would not need a pedestrian bridge across US 29.

We want our city to be walkable.

Let's keep it that way.

We must keep the stoplights so pedestrians can use the intersection.

Third reason, we are a city with city streets.

Through traffic should never go through a city.

In other metropolitan areas, it goes around the city in ring roads.

RMPO already has a partial four-lane ring road.

It's Rio Road.

We spent over $150 million to grade separated from US-29.

Now it must be extended at either end, connect with 250 East and to the US-220 South.

Doing that is a much better solution for heavy traffic on hydraulic road and elsewhere in the area.

I'm in a plea.

Please never let our city become a regional cloverleaf.

I don't know if I have more time.

OK.

Have any city residents or many cities complained about hydraulic road?

You Lloyd Snook and Mr. Pinkston are both on MPO.

Do they?

Our next speaker on the list is Nina Barnes.

Our next speaker will be Tony Winter.

All right.

So are there any other speakers, first of all, any other speakers here in the room who would like to pipe up at this point?

Okay, we've got a hand raised.

Come forward.

identify yourself.

Thank you.

My name is Gretchen Brown, and I'm the new co-lead for our local Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America chapter.

And I just wanted to thank you all for your commitment to gun violence prevention in all of its forms.

I know that at the city level, you know, we're kind of limited, but we're anxious to work with you and many violence interruption programs.

So thank you.

Anybody else online?

Anybody else here in person?

Okay.

Our first raised hand will be Tanisha Hudson.

Tanisha, you're on with counsel.

So Lloyd, it was very inappropriate of you to bring up the swimming pools and not mention what we discussed yesterday at the BCBA game or the Tonsor League game.

So I want to start with the parks.

First and foremost, glass backboard rims were promised from Brad Daly and also Todd, who was the former Parks and Rec director.

And Sam, for you to have drove around yesterday, making sure that everything worked, you missed the basketball hoops.

Now I'm going to give y'all a little history because the BCBA started 12 years, 13 years ago, to be exact.

Damien Banks has been putting up new rims in Townsville Park for about the last seven years, even after you remodeled the park.

He would also bring additional nets because the nets are often ripped.

Lloyd, you saw yesterday, one rim is up, one rim is down.

You have spent more money on these sprinkler systems

than you do for any other piece in the park.

It's unacceptable.

And then when you talk about equity, inclusivity, and diversity, you know more black people play basketball.

You know this league has been happening for the last 13 years in this city, and you have yet to provide any assistance

to that league to make it even better.

And then I was told by Wes Bellamy that you told him he had to play on the front court.

So let's talk about the safety hazards.

One, the generator was sitting in the grass.

And I don't know if y'all know, but gas is not, that's not too safe to be sitting in grass and somebody throw a cigarette butt or something and that generator catches on fire and it's sitting in the grass.

The generator should be on the court, which makes more sense for them to play on the court where the fence is because it offers them a safety net.

Sue, I was told you told them to play on that side of the court because of handicap accessibility.

Well, with everybody covering the ramp, how's a wheelchair going to get down there?

Did you think about the safety net of the players?

and that if they're dunking the ball, that big cement wall that you're going to have a lawsuit against your risk management for if somebody go out there and harm their self because you told them to play on that front court.

To act like y'all have all the sense in the world and this goes for all five counselors, all of y'all, it makes no sense that you would even promote anything like that

when you've clearly violated all types of safety problems.

It just doesn't make sense to me.

Now onto affordable housing.

Woodard, you allowed a water tax incentive to keep certain units affordable, where those units aren't affordable to anybody because they telling them they need to make three times the rent.

So with you all getting all this additional federal funding, Florida is doing a rent,

Relief, where they pay the difference in the rent.

Charlottesville should look into doing that because you know everybody's raising their rent anywhere from $500 to $1,000.

And your citizens can't afford to live in the city in which they work.

So that's something that you all can put money to use for.

Ms.

Hudson, your time is up.

Thank you.

Our next speaker on Zoom will be Greg Weaver.

Hey, City Council, this is Greg Weaver in Fry Spring.

I'm looking forward to digging into the transit vision draft more, but at first glance from the presentation earlier today, the plan may be a vision, but I wouldn't necessarily call it visionary.

From what I saw, the plan is flawed.

It doesn't take into account or suggest any changes in land use or changes to our roadways when we need to be thinking transformationally.

That is, we can have even better service than what the maps show if we adjust our land use and transform our roadways to limit the mobility of cars.

Mr. Pinkston was asking how we can change habits.

And I would say that we do it by making these material changes in tandem.

And on that note, I want to voice my support for the Fifth Street Road Diet.

I think we need to be looking in a similar way at all of our streets.

Where can we cut personal vehicle mobility partially or even fully in favor of bus lanes, protected bike lanes and sidewalks?

I am encouraged by y'all's response to a potential road diet and look forward to seeing how that turns out.

One thing I think is important to keep in mind, though, is that habits won't change overnight.

So, for example, while we may see a slight change in bus ridership due to the addition of the bus lane,

Six months of testing with the current levels of service won't cause many, if any people to upend their daily routines and ditch their cars.

That is gonna take more time and a more complete transformation all over the city.

And that's something that we can do as long as we have the vision.

Our next speaker on Zoom is Robin Hoffman once again.

Hi, I'm sorry I got very irate about myself having to talk about gun violence, but it's really important that we concentrate on how relieved we'd be if we didn't have military style weapons in this country given out so liberally.

So every city right now, including Richmond is gathering all of their ordinances, every single thing that they are empowered to do to eliminate military style weapons.

Charlottesville is a small city.

We don't have enough management, I guess, to start imposing

those restrictions, but we do have to do that.

I think it has to be a priority.

Look, if you have children in schools right now, they're hiding in cubby holes four times a day.

This is stupid, okay?

This is just moronic that this has been allowed to happen in the first place.

Second Amendment means that you can't do harm to others as well.

And so that is the law.

If you are holding a military style weapon you have to be in the military and by the way if you sold every single gun that everybody's carrying 400 million people military style weapons in this country and gave it to the Ukrainians we would be able to save our 34 billion dollars that we're sending them to arm themselves and

By the way, Chief Brackney told me personally, the reason why people do have those guns is because Russia sends them to us and so does Hungary.

So that's what is the reality.

So look at FedEx, look at all the different ways that it's being sent and mailed.

They have x-rays, they know if something, like if you want to send a package, they'll look at your package.

So they know that these are coming here and there has to be restrictions, period.

And each city needs to coordinate with every other mayor, every other governor, every other senator and say, that's it.

We're not having any more of this, period.

And that's what Australia did.

And they're not walking around and their kids aren't walking, you know, not being able to learn because people haven't taken the

steps, and those are the steps.

That's it.

It doesn't have to go through Congress or anything else.

Those weapons harm people.

That is the law.

You can't carry something that harms people, period.

And it shouldn't be that if we have Martin Luther King's

birthday, people are standing there with their military style weapons in Richmond and saying, oh, look how powerful we are.

We have military style weapons.

No, these are not normal things.

And we have to stand up.

Our next speaker will be Chris Meyer.

All right, good evening, counselors, and thank you for this opportunity to speak with you.

I'm a resident of Charlottesville.

I'm speaking as resident of Charlottesville, not as executive director of LEAP, the Local Injury Alliance program.

My comments this evening are about Charlottesville Gas.

I read its report as part of the rate hearing later this meeting, and some things in it not related to the rate were very concerning.

I do know that I think Charlottesville Gas is a very well-run part of our city government.

However, it is a gas utility, which means that there are things they just can't get rid of even with good management.

Although we'll start with that there were 90 leaks of methane in 2021.

90 leaks.

Report doesn't say where, for how long or how big, but I'd venture that one leak is one too many.

I also note that there are, I guess, hundreds of abnormal operating conditions.

That term, I think, is a euphemism basically for corroded pipes and meters that need fixing.

Please do fix those sooner rather than later, as they sound like they're quite leaky too.

Next, I'll go to its climate plans, which are essential for the city to achieve the climate goals it took on.

While I will credit Charlottesville Gas for having energy efficiency programs and starting to offset some of its related emissions, the fact of the matter is that between 2016 and 2019, according to the latest city emissions inventory, had both Charlottesville Gas's total greenhouse gas emissions and the units consumed going up by 15% and not actually down.

This is likely because Charlottesville Gas continues to add customers rather than stopping to add customers.

Another concerning part of their climate strategy is getting free emission offsets from British Petroleum who supplies the gas according to the report.

I went down the rabbit hole to find the offsets Seville Gas is claiming to use and wound up looking at a blurry map of the world supposedly showing where all these offsets projects are.

I'll just note that free doesn't usually get you anything of quality so this strategy really needs to be examined and I'd highly suggest they start looking for local projects to get these offsets from.

I sent you a memo late last week and all this information is in that memo.

In closing I'm not suggesting that we shut down Charlottesville gas right now today but we do need to plan for how we'll meet this ends

or being decommissioned in the near future.

And we need to figure out that plan sooner rather than later.

Our next raised hand is Joy Johnson.

Good evening.

My name is Joy Johnson.

I am a public housing resident and an affordable housing advocate.

Ditto to what Ms.

Hudson had to say, but I would like to enlighten you a little bit more of some of the problems we're having with people with vouchers and people who are in a domestic situation who is looking for a place that they can afford.

Most of the apartment complexes are asking you if a one bedroom unit is $1,094, they want you to make three times the amount.

You have to be making three times the amount of rent per month.

That does not make any sense because most folks is not making $4,000 a month.

You might have some middle class and upper middle class people making that, but the working poor does not make $4,000 per month.

And on top of that,

They're still holding criminal backgrounds against some people.

University Heights is one of them.

So on one hand, you have a list of criminal activities, even if it was 10, 20 years held against you.

And also you have to make three times the amount of rent.

I want you all, counselors, all five of you, to understand this problem is getting worse.

Even with Mallside right now, they have went up on their rent.

A one-bedroom has gone up $122 extra.

Everyone is going up and I don't see, we need some kind of rent cap or something in this city because working poor people cannot find affordable, deeply affordable housing, not even with a voucher.

I hope you all put some highlight or some attention to this or else you are going to have a lot of homeless people on your street.

Thank you, Ms.

Our next raised hand is Dee Dee Smith.

Good evening.

DeeDee Smith, City of Charlottesville.

And I promise I did not coordinate with Chris Meyer, but I was really pleased to hear his comments because my comments are actually along the same lines, but kind of different about climate, your commitment, your laudable commitment to climate change and the irony of the fact that you own the gas monopoly.

And what I really just wanted you to pay attention to tonight as you hear your presentation

is the millions of dollars that you profit into the general fund.

It's moved from the gas enterprise fund into the general fund.

Millions.

It's six million altogether in something called payment in lieu of taxes.

And most of that is from gas.

And the reason I bring it up is because

As you are going to have to cut back on natural gas in order to meet your climate goals, you are going to then lose that income.

And it's

It is something that councils have not really been very willing to talk a lot about.

You will be told it's not a profit, but it is a profit.

It is moved out of Enterprise Gas Fund into the General Fund.

So I just think it would be wise to start thinking about and planning for not being dependent on this very high revenue source out of

what is actually something that is worsening our climate.

Thank you for listening.

Thank you, Ms.

Our next speaker will be Lakeisha Washington.

Hi, everyone.

My name is Lakeisha Washington, and I'm a resident in the Fry Springs area.

I just wanted to make a comment as well about the climate goal.

I feel like sometimes when we look at these plans we neglect to see how this factors people who actually rent and don't have the ability to make a lot of changes to be able to save money.

And so I do hope that

when considering these goals that you will be encouraged to push landlords more to more and better proper insulation in these apartments and also looking at taking out baseboard heating and implementing a new approach or central air for a lot of apartments because this is where

Thank you, Ms.

All right.

So that was our final speaker then for Community Matters.

And the first of those is the rate report, proposed utility rate report for FY 2023.

Chris Cullinan and Lauren Hildebrand are in front of us there via Zoom.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of Council.

I'm Chris Cullinan, Director of Finance, joined by Lauren Hildebrand, Director of Utilities.

This agenda item is a public hearing and first reading of the ordinance, setting water, wastewater, natural gas, and stormwater rates effective July 1, 2022.

for fiscal year 2023.

We have a presentation this evening covering an update on the utility operations and infrastructure and followed by the rate report itself.

I'm going to turn over to Lauren and I'm going to share my screen, hopefully.

Thank you, Chris.

I'm going to give you a brief overview of the operations.

Here's a little information about water and wastewater utility.

We serve 14,500 customers in the city.

We deliver 4.5 million gallons of water daily.

We maintain 183 miles of water lines, 172 miles of wastewater pipelines, and last year our workforce handled

over 8,500 work orders that were completed as part of the operations and maintenance of the systems.

From a water quality standpoint, we just recently completed our community, a consumer confidence report, which indicates the quality of our water meets and exceeds all regulatory requirements.

This report is published annually as required by the regulatory

agencies, and it can be found on our website at charlottesville.gov backslash water quality, and we urge people to look at it, and if they have questions, they can email or contact us at the, there's contacts listed within the report if people have questions about what information we've supplied.

We also try to minimize water loss within our system.

Because if we minimize water loss, we reduce costs.

We have a meter testing and replacement program where we test our large meters that are greater than one and a half inches.

And the reason we do that is meters age, they tend to slow down and they're inaccurate when they bill.

And so we make sure that they're operating within the 5% tolerance.

If they're not, we replace them with in-house staff.

We also do an annual wide system wide leak detection survey.

This has been going on since 2010.

Annually, and we go through our entire system because we find some of our leaks don't come to the surface, even though they're from a pressurized water system.

And we want to make sure those leaks get addressed as well as the other leaks that come to the surface every day.

These leaks, we totaled 13 leaks last year.

They estimate that we saved over a half million gallons and they were repaired by NL staff.

We also have recently changed our meter installations from positive displacement meters to ultrasonic meters.

We find the ultrasonic meters are more accurate and they measure the lower flow on the spectrum so that minimizes water loss.

We also have an asset management program where we have a pretty aggressive

replacement rehabilitation program associated with our water mains, our wastewater systems, as well as our stormwater system.

Since 2010, since the program's inception, we've prioritized our water mains that tend to be more leaky.

We want to make sure that we have proper

Redundancy in the system and proper fire protection and we've replaced 11.6 percent of the entire water system associated with water and main replacement along associated with water wastewater rehabilitation we've rehabbed to replace since the program's inception about 28 percent of the wastewater system and regarding the stormwater rehab system we rehab to replace

about 10.4% of the system since 2009.

We do a customer satisfaction survey every year, and this year we were very satisfied with the response.

People find the reliability of our water and wastewater system, they're satisfied with the reliability.

From a value standpoint, which is the value that they pay for water and sewer, they're 95% excellent, good, and fair as far as value related to water service.

and 92% excellent good and fair related to sewer service.

Now we shift to the natural gas system.

We actually, we serve 21,300 customers and this is city customers as well as county customers.

In the city, we actually serve out of the total water wastewater customers, they're 88% get gas service.

We maintain 342 miles of gas lines, 300 miles of gas service lines, and last year we completed over 11,500 work orders to maintain our system.

We also recognize with the gas system we are part of the fossil fuel industry and we try to be conscious of that.

and reduce our greenhouse gas reductions with certain strategies.

We offer rebates, and one rebate I want to highlight is our attic installation of $300.

This was started a few years ago, and we encourage people to ask us about that.

We also have a free weatherization program associated with income-qualified natural gas households, and we coordinate this program with Chris Meyer and his team at The Leap.

offices here locally.

We have been able to help assist 124 households so far with this program, contributing over $173,000.

And we actually have been able to quantify the reductions in gas consumption over the winter months of about on the average of about 20%.

So we feel this program has been a pretty big success.

We also purchase carbon offsets.

These are considered high quality carbon offsets to offset our carbon emissions by 25% of our natural gas operations.

We do this at a cost.

It cost us about over $340,000 a year.

We started this program last year and we were able to reduce other budget items so that currently

This is at no cost to our customers and it's not proposed to be any cost to our customers in next year's budget.

We were able to take a really close look at how we could do this and we really wanted to do this in order to be in order to meet our our help assist meet our carbon offset goals.

In addition, we

We also participated in an energy saving tree giveaway program with the Arbor Day Tree Foundation.

This occurred this past year where we gave 250 trees and it was kind of a cool program where people are able to go on a website and position the tree in their property so that it offers them the biggest

benefit from an energy savings and a cost savings aspect.

And they have to make commitments.

They're going to plant the tree.

People were very excited to come pick up their tree, and we will be doing this program in the future.

We also are very conscious not only of energy efficiency, and we want to make more homes more energy efficient, we also are conscious about our emissions that can result from leaks out of our system.

and we have the best state-of-the-art leak detection equipment with in-house people doing annual surveys of our systems.

They do the business surveys and our critical assets on an annual basis and all residential customers, our leak survey is completed every three years.

This is actually a little more, we're required by regulatory

agencies to do this.

And we are actually a little more aggressive with those timeframes than what the requirement is.

And I might add our gas system is a fairly new system.

My predecessors before me in the late 90s and early 2000s actually did a complete replacement of our gas system, which minimizes the leaks out of our system.

In addition, we have an award winning gas safety awareness plan which we try to promote with people so they can detect what gas actually smells like when and reported immediately us to address.

In addition, I'd like to also highlight that

The city recently released in 2022 their city's greenhouse gas reduction by sector and fuel type report.

This was based on data was collected in 2019 and associated with the natural gas system.

There's a greenhouse gas reduction of 30 percent.

Along with that, there's customer satisfaction survey from a liability standpoint.

People say they can rely on their natural gas service 100% of the time.

They value their natural gas and what they pay for natural gas.

91% is excellent, good and fair.

And how important it is to have gas available to your home is 95% extremely very or somewhat important.

We also launched an online billing Paces service last year in October, and this offers paperless billing, pay-by-text, and enhanced automated payment options.

More than 6,400 customers have already signed up for Payless,

paperless billing, and we continue to want to promote that by people getting online and looking at charlottesville.gov backslash bill pay, because the more people that sign up, it saves us money, it's a convenience for people, and we recognize it.

So far, in over a year's time, we'll save over $38,000 just by those 6,400 customers signing up.

and this was in response to last year and the year before's customer survey where people really wanted an online billing system.

So we really do take these customer satisfaction surveys very seriously.

So with this year's survey we asked people what they thought and they're extremely satisfied with the online payment portal we've already launched.

Thank you Lauren.

This is just a brief overview on

How we operate the utilities financially, they operate on a break-even basis.

The rates for water, wastewater, and stormwater are set on July 1st of each year and don't change during the course of the year as those costs are known and are projected to be, the revenue requirements are projected to be recouped based on the predicted usage.

Gas rates are a little unique.

Natural gas is a commodity that's traded on a daily basis.

and so the gas rates are adjusted every month to account for changes in the cost of gas it's called the PGA the purchase gas adjustment on your bill when the price of gas goes up we pass that increase along but when the cost goes down we pass that that reduction along as well again to ensure that we're breaking even I'll touch a little bit more on that in a couple of slides here the rates and charges are used only to cover the costs of their respective utility to put another way

Water rates pay for expenses of the water utility, wastewater rates for the wastewater, etc.

And the rates that are being proposed this evening will be effective this upcoming July 1st.

And so for the average customer in the city who receive all four utilities, as Lauren mentioned, that's roughly 88% of the folks in the city,

The bottom line is they're going to see their utility bill go up by just slightly less than $4 a month or a little over 3%.

You can see the relative contribution of each of the utilities to them.

Again, this assumes an average water customer.

Wastewater customer uses roughly 100 gallons per day.

You see the assumption there for natural gas as well as the average

lot size in terms of impervious surface area for the stormwater calculation.

So overall rates are going up by slightly less than $4 and we'll go through each one of these in a little bit more detail.

So to cover the costs of the operations, the infrastructure, the debt service for the various utilities that Lauren highlighted in her portion of the presentation, the revenue requirements for water is about $15.2 million in the upcoming fiscal year.

Wastewater is about $15.8 million.

As you can see with both of these, the largest segment of that is for

Purchase of Services and the city's share of debt service from the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

To break it down even further, it's roughly for Rivanna, it's about a 50-50 split in terms of operating costs in the city's portion of the debt service, which is attributable to us.

We also see this portion of the pies going for city operations.

These are for Lauren's folks and for their operations and maintenance efforts.

On the water side, it's about 27%.

Wastewater side, about 25%.

We also see debt service attributable to each utility.

This is debt service for bonds at the city issues, for our wastewater collection system or our water distribution system, for our pipe systems for those utilities.

And then you also see the smallest piece of each one.

This is for our customer service and utility billing office, meter reading, and those related activities.

Gas is the largest of the four utilities.

The revenue requirement next year projected to be $31.4 million.

The largest piece of that, the purchase of gas from British Petroleum.

You see there is 45%.

To put that somewhat in perspective, that segment a year ago was 40%.

And again, I'm going to talk a little bit more about gas in depth in a slide or so.

But that piece of the pie has certainly gotten much larger.

And again, you see the contributions for city operations and maintenance, the payment in lieu of taxes attributable to the gas utility, capital improvements, and then the customer service segment of that as well.

and then down there in the lower right for stormwater, it's roughly $3.6 million for the upcoming fiscal year.

And again, the biggest up there is related to capital improvements and debt service, again, infrastructure, utilities,

generally have a much larger ratio of debt service given that they are intense infrastructure oriented operations higher than say general government some of the figures that you've seen when we do the budget each year and then you see the relative contribution for salaries and benefits and operating expenses of the stormwater utility and so to meet these revenue requirements

for each utility.

The volumetric rates for water, wastewater, and natural gas are projected to change as follows.

The water increase of about 15%, wastewater about 3%, and natural gas going down slightly from current bills.

I'll note that there are no changes being proposed for the stormwater utility and no changes to the monthly service charges for water, wastewater, and gas.

This is the portion of the bill based on how much

you consume of that utility.

Just a couple of notes here.

For wastewater, we do have some available fund balance that we're going to use to help offset some of that rate increase to try to keep that rate increase manageable.

On the natural gas side, the decrease, we're using about $2.5 million of cash to cash fund the capital improvements related to natural gas.

Lauren noted in her presentation the foresight of some of her predecessors in terms of replacing the natural gas system.

We are actually, the gas utility is debt free at this point.

We made the last payment maybe about a year ago for those

upgrades undertaken decades ago.

We actually do pay off debt sometimes.

It seems like we're in a constant issuing and paying, but we do pay it off in its completion.

And so we're in that state of the natural gas funds.

We're going to use cash to do that.

We're also using $1.3 million from a settlement with our transportation provider on our pipeline for gas.

We were improperly charged along with other customers on the pipeline.

And so again, we're going to try to get that

Get those monies back into the hands of customers as fast as we can to offset some of the rising natural gas prices.

And so that that accounts for that decline that you see there.

One thing to know about the natural gas rates, as I mentioned, these are these change on a monthly basis.

And so when we do this analysis, we are setting the rate, the base rate for July 1st.

But it is a projection based on the April 1st cost of gas.

This is an approach that we've used for a number of years.

It meets the financial and legal requirements of how we do that.

It also ensures that we're using an apples to apples comparison year over year, again, based on the notion that these do adjust on a monthly basis.

The price of gas has been going up.

What folks are paying today is higher than it was a year ago.

The events that we see in the world on the global geopolitical stage in terms of a war in Ukraine, inflation, those things impact us here in Charlottesville as well in terms of the prices that we pay to purchase gas.

And so, again, we're using some cash to try to mitigate those impacts.

Certainly folks have some degree of control in terms of their own consumption, in terms of weatherizing their homes, some of those sorts of things.

But still, gas prices are higher than they have been a year ago and higher than they've been for a number of years.

not quite as high as we saw in the late aughts.

We saw some much higher rates than we do now, but I'm not in the business of trying to predict natural gas prices, but based on what I see in the news, and I'm sure you do as well, there doesn't seem to be, you know, the war in Ukraine seems to be something of a stalemate.

Inflation in the short term at least continues to be where it is, and so again, I would anticipate the natural gas prices to continue to be

at levels where they are.

Certainly it's something we monitor on a regular basis and to the extent that we can help mitigate those, we certainly take those opportunities.

But one final thing for your consideration this evening, this is something which you haven't really seen before.

These are our proposed facility fees for water and wastewater.

What these are, what these represent are

the cost of new development for their proportionate impact for additional capacity on our water and wastewater systems.

So these are only assessed against new development.

This is a program that was put in place in 2008.

There was a minor modification made to it in 2012.

So it's been a little while since this has been looked at.

But the change that we're bringing to you this evening

really focuses on the water meters that are three inches and larger.

So if you look over on the left hand side of the column there, we're looking at the meter size of three, four and six inches.

As Laura mentioned during her presentation, meter technology has improved the meters.

You know, a meter now provides more capacity today than perhaps one of its predecessors years ago.

And so in order to make sure that new development is being charged its proportionate share, we need to recalibrate these.

And I'll use the three inch for example.

So under the current schedule, the older three inch meters, you could measure 15 ERCs or equivalent residential connections.

Think of it as 15 single family homes is what a three inch meter can provide in terms of capacity.

and so under the current fees they would pay $46,500 for their proportionate share of that capacity but we know the new meters a new three inch meter can actually accommodate 25 ERCs so it provides that additional capacity much like a old four inch one did as you see in that in the row below that there and so for 25 ERCs the water facility fee is $77,500 and so

It's really just ensuring that we're maintaining that proportionality and that new development is paying its share.

And so to think about it this way, if a new development came before us and they required 25 ERCs,

Under the old meters, they would get a four-inch meter, pay $77,500.

But under a new one, they're still paying the same $77,500.

They just need a three-inch meter now.

And so that's what this attempts to do is to recalibrate these fees.

And that concludes our presentation.

Thank you, Mr. Cullinan and Ms.

Hildebrand.

Counselors, questions?

Anybody?

Just so folks will know, we actually have talked with Mr. Cullen and Ms.

Hildebrand.

It's not just we're staying here dumb, having no clue about anything that's going on.

We've had some fairly extensive discussions on other occasions.

Mr. Dillhunter, we... Mr. Mayor, could I ask one more question?

I'm sorry.

Yeah, thank you for the presentation and for the information you've given us by email as well, and I recognize a lot of hard work went into

that report and all the work with the rate setting.

I'm on the board with Rivanna and have enjoyed and appreciated the professionalism that you all have brought to your side of all of this.

One question I have has to do with

When we bring on new users to the system, so we don't have more land that we can acquire to develop, but when we have infill developments or things like that, is there any thought to when new water supply is brought online for a new development, those rates somehow subsidizing the rates for existing customers?

I don't know, does that question make sense at all?

So the facility fees are

the mechanism by which new development pays into the infrastructure system for additional capacity so that existing customers are not subsidizing new development, that they're paying their proportionate share.

But then in terms of the rates themselves, at the end of the day, the litmus test is you pay for what you use.

And so when the rates are set,

Certainly the additional number of cubic feet over which we're spreading those costs.

If you think back to our middle school math, it's a numerator denominator.

And so that we can make the denominator bigger in terms of additional additional usage.

It helps that rate.

The reality is, is that on the water and wastewater side, we add maybe 10 new customers a year.

It's not a lot.

It's very, very different than, say,

our counterparts at the Elmar County Service Authority.

And one of the other things to keep in mind when there is new development, or I should say redevelopment, if there was already a water meter there, they get credit for what was there already.

And then they only pay the difference if there's an increase in that meter capacity needed.

Again, it's the idea that

This new whatever is replacing something that was already there that had paid its share into the system.

And so if there's any net additional capacity, they just pay that net difference, if at anything at all, sometimes it's a wash.

No, and that's, well, the only thing I will add is that's the reason the facility fees were put in place so that the historical customer didn't necessarily pay for development and the capacity that development needed.

Thank you.

And then I guess the second question has to do with the carbon offsets for the natural gas and just thinking in terms of the natural gas utility itself and some of the points that have been brought up both outside of this meeting and then earlier in the public comment.

How are your efforts tied into the ongoing work that the city's trying to do in terms of climate?

So we are very aware and trying to support the climate action goals that were established by council previously.

For example, it's 45% by 2030.

And so we want to do our fair share in trying to align

that carbon offset purchase with our really align that with our our energy efficiency programs resulting in lower emissions and trying to align that together.

Got it.

Yeah, so we certainly listened to the comments made by Council at the Climate Action Plan presentation at a work session in recent months and took the suggestion of studying the natural gas utility very seriously.

And so we are currently putting together a scope of work with the assistance of the Environmental Sustainability Group.

their input along with others at the city and try to make sure we look at all aspects of it from a legal standpoint, look at the technology that's coming, you know, being proposed and hopefully we'll be here, you know, in the near future and take all that into consideration

We're developing that scope as we speak.

I would also add that we want to look at obviously from dollars and cents standpoint in terms of how do you

How do you maintain the utility in terms of a safety, reliability, as at the same time you're decommissioning it?

It seems sort of, you know, to be two thoughts that are at odds with each other.

We also want to be very conscious for our customers of what that impact is, what alternatives are available, how does that impact, you know, for some folks they can make a choice, they can exercise that choice,

in terms of finding an alternative energy source.

But for some folks, they may not be able to.

There was a comment earlier about renters or some folks who just simply don't have the means to do that.

And I'll just add, we hope that somebody can really think seriously about affordability and the impact to our customers.

Thank you.

Mr. Maris, I just wanted to add on because I was going to just kind of make a question or comment about kind of the decommissioning of the system, of the gas system.

So thank you for responding to what I was going to ask.

And just kind of as a citizen, at least for me, the issues with gas, it seemed to

to just to come up over the last few years, even though the studies and things may have been out there, because I know that maybe six or seven years ago, we my wife and I, we kind of redid our kitchen and we intentionally added gas.

And I'm pretty sure we were up on the issues, you know, in the environment.

I just don't recall the negative reports and things that we hear about gas.

You know, as we hear now, I'm sure we probably wouldn't have done it.

and so it is challenging because I know we probably wouldn't do it but it wouldn't be cost effective for us to go in and change the whole system out and so I understand what you're going through so we will

Okay, so let's move then to the public hearing phase here, and I will now open the public hearing.

We do, Mayor.

Chris Meyer will be the first person to speak.

Thank you, Councillors, and thank you for the opportunity again to speak at this public hearing on the rates for Charlottesville Gas.

I want to thank the management at Charlottesville Gas, Lauren and Chris.

I think they did a great job presenting and had addressed a lot of the concerns that I had seen in the reports.

and happy to see, I think, the direction that they're moving.

Regarding the rates, though, specifically, and I'm happy they clarified this, that they're not providing free offsets or getting them for free, but actually paying for them.

But they're still not...

including the full cost of the pollution, unfortunately, they're only covering 25% of the cost of pollution.

So from an economics perspective, Charlottesville gas is not actually correctly pricing the product because that negative externality, that pollution that's not getting offset is being put on society.

We do need to think about kind of what that actual cost is and that should be included in the rates.

I will note that Dominion Virginia Power is paying for its emissions or pollution and you can see it represented in your bill.

See the gas to do the same thing.

In those rates, and it was mentioned in the capital improvement plans, there's a project that is the West Main high pressure pipeline or new piping that would replace the existing pipe there.

It's a $1.5 million gas line going down West Main.

I do not think we should be including that in our infrastructure plans or the civil gas infrastructure plans and because it will ultimately be to be commissioned and we're going talking about that in 10 to 15 years when these I think these pipelines are supposed to be meant to be amortized over 30 or 40 years so we should not be investing 1.5 million dollars and tearing up West Main for I don't know how many months to again replace that pipe

Secondly I would ask and I think this is getting what they're getting to in your plans and some of you mentioned but at the last Dominions again Virginia Power Stakeholder Meeting they were asked by its shareholders and the resolution was approved to have

a plan for an analysis on the mitigating of the stranded assets, i.e.

the value of our system and what happens when there are less people paying for the gas on it and or it gets getting shut down.

So that should definitely be part of the analysis.

I think that sounds like they're scoping and I'd love to hear about that in the near future.

Finally, I think the presentation of the bills and rates should be overhauled to better explain what people are paying for.

The gas bill does not reflect every month the $10 for the standard meter charge, nor what you're paying for fuel versus transmission.

Those things should be separately discussed and presented at each bill so people understand what they're actually paying for the fuel, i.e.

the gas, versus again the transmission of the system.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate the time.

Our next raised hand is Dee Dee Smith.

Thank you.

And once again, I'll piggyback on Chris Meyer's comments.

And my comments are about rates this time.

I've tried to be appropriate here.

And I also on our bill, there should be a separate, I've argued this for years, a separate accounting of how much is this payment in lieu of taxes.

and do note that the payment in lieu of taxes on both water and gas are actually added to the rate and then that rate is then taxed again

in what is called the utility tax.

The utility tax is on the bill and the utility tax is separately listed in your revenue section in your budget, but it actually, the pilot, which is a payment in lieu of tax, but it is a tax.

It's about 25% on some part of that gas.

I think it's on the gas itself and I think it's about 10% on the water itself.

and that is taxed again on the utility tax.

So that's double taxation for one thing.

But, you know, all of this comes down to affordability and

Ms.

Washington earlier in the public comments talked about this is that those of us who can find alternatives Mr. Cullinan talked about those of us who can find alternatives to these expensive utilities and these climate changing utilities do so toilets is an absolutely perfect example of this is that the city is still has a lot of toilets that are high flow and they also have the

The oldest housing which has the leakiest toilets and those toilets are not in any of your houses or in my house.

They're in people who are struggling.

for the most part.

And I would actually just ask that you clarify, I couldn't figure out what the water rates were going up.

It said 12% in one chart, and then it said 15% in another chart.

You are going to hear at your next meeting about another $200 million in the next five years of debt service that's going to be added to Rivanna, $500 million over, you know, in the total CIP.

I mean, it's just going to

I think we have to really anticipate how this is going to impact people.

And just one last note, if I have time, is the problem with paying for all this debt is that our water use has not changed in 20 years.

It was supposed to have gone up another 50% and it didn't.

And that is largely this toilet thing.

I mean, the toilet's reduction was like 75% in a flush.

Same time, those for those of people who have new toilets.

But how are we going to, by the point, bigger point being, is putting all this debt on there, the demand is not going up.

In the county, number of customers is going up, but again, you heard tonight, Mr. Cullinan told you, our customer numbers are not going up.

Thank you, Ms.

Okay, so with no further speakers, the public hearing is now closed.

Fine with me and would just add to that I would echo comments Councillor Pinkston made earlier be curious at some point how we get more specific follow-up about the scoping and timing of that report that was mentioned about the future of our natural gas utility as well as for a follow-up

with some more information about carbon offset programs and how it compares to other industry standards.

Quite frankly, I just don't know enough to say.

All right.