City Council Meeting   6/5/2023

Is there a second?

Second.

Okay.

The flags are blocking me, but yes, we're good.

Okay.

We're officially out of closed session.

So we'll now call our 4 o'clock session to order.

I guess we've already called the roll once and we don't need to do it again.

Okay.

Cast your vote, please.

So first item up is Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau update.

I'm Courtney Kucation.

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

Thank you so much for having me this afternoon.

I really appreciate the opportunity to come and speak to you annually and update you as to what we've been doing.

And I am looking for my presentation.

I think I can just advance the slide.

All right.

Super.

Thank you so much.

If at any time you have any questions for me, please feel free to stop me.

I don't have a script in front of me, and I'm happy to answer questions as they pop up.

Sure.

So I represent the Visitors Bureau, which is formed through the operating agreement between the city and the county.

So we represent both Charlottesville City and Albemarle County in promoting visitation to our localities.

And we believe in building a welcoming environment for all visitors.

And you'll see that overwhelmingly throughout my presentation.

And we call that tourism for all.

Our mission is to drive overnight visitation.

Our bureau is funded by a portion of the lodging tax and only by a portion of the lodging tax.

So we get 30% of the first 5% of the lodging tax and it comes back to the visitor bureau.

So as we continue to build our

our product here and generate additional overnight visitation.

Our budget increases when we're not successful in that it decreases.

And so we are highly dependent upon the success of the accommodations in the city and the county.

We really strive to build a really better quality of life for our residents and our visitors when they come to see us and to uphold the values of our organization which are resiliency, unity, diversity, creativity and responsibility.

In October of 2020 I wrote a strategic action plan and these are the imperatives on which that was built to drive overnight visitation as I said, increase visitor spending so when we have visitors here we want them to spend as much money as they can before they go back home to develop our new visitor opportunities so making sure that we're building connections among and throughout the industry and providing opportunities for people to enter the tourism industry

to tell stories that uplift and inspire and to utilize our public funds with transparency and efficiency.

I will not read this to you, but this is just a little bit more about our organization and what we call our elevator pitch, but essentially that we are funded through that lodging tax.

Here are all of the sectors of the economy and the community that we support.

Lodging, again, is bolded here because that's where 100% of our budget comes from, but we support restaurants, retail, attractions, agritourism, arts, recreation, the University of Virginia, local government, and our community.

We will shortly have 11 full-time staff members and 15 board directors.

This is who serves on our board.

Councillor Wade represents city council on our board at the moment.

Chris Engle, the economic development director for the city also serves on our board.

And the positions here that are bold are the ones that you all approve to sit on our board.

So between the board of supervisors in the county and city council, most of those positions are appointed through this body or through the board of supervisors.

There are only three positions that are appointed outside of your realm of influence.

Going back to Tourism for All, we work closely with our hospitality partners, community stakeholders, Destinations International, which is the international association that represents what we do, TripAdvisor, and Wheel the World to create a robust, inclusive culture for our tourism economy here locally.

and this is another way of showing that very same chart.

We have a lot of different partnerships in the community that one of which you will have heard of previously.

I made a presentation on Discover Black Seville last year.

We've won several awards for it in the past year.

and it is going on without me.

There we go.

We've conducted accessibility assessments that I'll talk about in a minute.

We have an extensive DEI comprehensive plan that's internal to our organization and we work with many of the affinity groups at the University of Virginia.

My clicker is not working properly.

Thank you.

So Tourism for All is trying to accomplish creating a welcoming environment for everybody who happens to enter our community as a visitor.

So what we want the visitor experience to be is anyone can walk in here as a visitor to any restaurant, attraction, store, experience, hotel,

and feel welcome here.

And that is a lofty goal, but it is something that we feel really passionately about and we're creating the blueprint for how this is going to be done around the world through our work with Tourism for All and Destinations International.

That also means building tourism products that appeal to a diverse audience base and really proposing a counter-narrative to the one that has been in the national news since 2017.

Who is the audience?

We have a lot of different members to try and attract here, but the black traveler has a lot of potential to come here and historically has been a traveler that our product has not spoken to.

And so we are doing that very intentionally through the work of Discover Black Seaville.

We also included Hispanic and wheelchair users here as additional audience members just to show you some of the different demographics and how much the spending potential is for each of those.

And why should you care?

Because there is a lot of there's a delay really in the travel industry in addressing equity and speaking to different audiences.

And so we have the opportunity to be welcoming and at the forefront of this conversation.

And when people see themselves in the advertising, the promotions of a destination, they know that they are welcome in that place and they seek it out.

Our marketing and public relations efforts are centered around our brand pillars.

So these are the five areas where we strive to promote.

They're pretty broad pillars but they represent some of the best of what we have here in the city and the county.

Our current marketing campaign is Historic Vine's New Roots, and that is a campaign that nods to the fact that we have a rich cultural history here, but that we're telling it in a new way.

And we're using wine as an entry point for that, but it's really about trying to create a sense of belonging for people so they want to visit and they want to come back when they do.

Over the past fiscal year we've had a lot of success.

Thank you to City Council and to the Board of Supervisors for giving us some additional ARPA funding to be able to reach a national audience where we haven't been able to do that before given our budget size.

I'm showing you here our success with travel and leisure and food and wine.

Our creative has done well above the industry benchmark for

travel destinations.

If you think about who is advertising and travel and leisure, it's not the city just 30 miles away from here.

It's Paris.

It's Santorini.

It's Bangkok.

These are major tourism hubs throughout the world, and we are competitive with them when we're putting out this advertising, which is really exciting.

Wanted to point out here that the average time spent on articles that we wrote for these publications was 42 seconds.

If you think about how long 42 seconds is anymore for somebody who's going like this through their phone, that is a long time.

And so the benchmark is 31 seconds, that extra 12 seconds gives us that much more intention and that much better engagement.

We are also able to leverage our local enthusiasts when we're putting out that advertising.

We shared this one here because people were asking as visitors or as potential visitors what is there to do here and our local residents were saying well I love this and I love that and it gives them a chance to feel pride about where they live and engage with our advertising and invite people here directly which has been really fun.

Our local pallet buy that we did over this year, we had an insert of black owned restaurants and that received more than two and a half times the page views of any other element of our campaign.

This was really exciting for us to see that we had that much interest from travelers, again nationwide, local pallet is a national publication in coming to our locally black owned restaurants.

And then we've also done some other advertising.

We did a purchase with WJLA up in DC and had them host their whole week here from Charlottesville and Albemarle County, which was an expansion of what we had done the previous year.

And they went all over to different locations and welcomed the news from there.

It was really well received.

We have a number of different target markets.

Charlotte and Baltimore are among them.

I just wanted to show you the numbers here to show you that we are able to track our internet users over time to show a great increase when we're running advertising.

We run our advertising

Most prominently in the winter, which are the months where we need the highest levels of visitation, our hotels are mostly full in the spring and especially the fall.

And so we don't run a lot of advertising during those times.

We run some during the summer when it's a little bit softer, but most of where we focus is during the winter and during weekdays year round.

and then here's an increase in the number of users and sessions for our target market of Washington, D.C.

Our creative content update, we have just hired a social media manager, so we have now three people who work on marketing.

So we have somebody who's dedicated to paid advertising, to earned media, which is public relations, and to our owned media.

And the owned media are our social media outlets and our website.

So our blog content has increased by over 46% again and when we think about people's time focused on what they're able when they're coming across content on the internet an additional minute is a huge amount of time.

We also have a brand new visitor's guide that we'll be sending out shortly which is a collaboration and was all done in house for the first time.

Anything that we do in house saves us

a whole lot of money which means that we're able to put more towards advertising into building product and supporting our locally owned businesses.

For our public relations, we had three day weekend here from ESPN this fall which was great.

We'll be able to play that again when we host the cross country championships in November of this upcoming fall.

We have also seen a lot of success again in the DC and Northern Virginia area from PR.

And here are some additional articles that we have gotten over the past year.

Forbes magazine and Afar magazine are national publications.

For visitor services and destination development, we have mobile visitor centers now.

You may remember that we used to be in the upstairs of the transit center on the downtown mall and we had another location in Crozet.

During COVID, we closed those locations to reach visitors out in our mobile visitor centers.

So that gives us the opportunity to go to where the visitors are when they're there and also to reach different demographics.

We can be at a winery one day and on the Rivanna River Trail another day.

And that way we are able to cross sell throughout the city and the county so that people know they can go to different locations than where they are.

And we end up reaching a lot of those visitors through that visitor guide I was mentioning a moment ago.

The welcome centers are throughout the state of Virginia.

We also ask, we do research when we talk to people at the mobile visitor center.

And most of the visitors who we talk to are staying at least one night, which means that we're reaching our target demographic.

From 2021, we saw a decrease in outdoor recreation.

Everybody was going outside.

I know my kids got sick of hiking during 2021.

So by 2022, they're like, please, no, let's do something else.

Yes.

But not just festivals.

I mean, a special event can be trivia night at a local bar or it can be prolific running on an early morning.

Anything that is an event that is not just a daily occurrence ends up being a special event.

So it doesn't have to be large.

Our top points of interest, this is from our Zartico data.

Again, that Zartico data was funded through ARPA, so thank you.

Show that most of the people who come through Charlottesville go to Shenandoah National Park.

Not a surprise.

And the second most visited area is Berks Road, which is great for retail.

And I'll talk a little bit more about retail at the end of the presentation.

Also thanks to ARPA funds we were able to provide accessibility assessments to 62 tourism partners.

And I have a video here in just a second I'd like to share with you.

The other part of what I'll say here is that we conducted our first job fair with Monticello High School.

We happily do that with the city too if the city schools would like to partner with us on this.

We had 18 employers who shit up that day.

We had space for 24 but a few of them had to drop out.

They saw roughly 650 students over the course of lunch hour that day and they were immediately hired.

We only advertised paid opportunities and it was really exciting to see that connection with our industry and with young people in an industry that's been struggling a little bit to recover.

So can you play the video please?

I say just because I have this disability and I'm using a wheelchair doesn't mean that I can't live and thrive.

My life is worth living and thriving for.

I'm valued.

I should be respected.

I should be heard.

And the travel industry needs to hear that.

The only trip you will regret is the one you don't take.

This is a trip that I will never forget.

Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia have left a special place in my heart.

I've discovered so many people and experiences here that truly reinforce my love for travel.

There is so much to do and see.

from wine tastings at beautiful vineyards to immersive art and cultural experiences.

Oh, this is gorgeous.

My soul feels refreshed.

Don't let anything stop you from exploring.

You are not limited to the walls within your home.

You will never know where you're capable of until you try.

And you will only regret the trips that you don't take.

That was great.

That was really exciting.

Candace Welch came here.

She's Miss Wheelchair California 2023.

And we were scouring the United States for the right person.

And she just really was phenomenal.

And we couldn't have asked for a better person to come here and experience it.

And we learned so much from

her coming here and so did our partners.

We were out at Blenheim Winery and they didn't have any straws because from an environmental standpoint you shouldn't have any straws but she has limited capacity to use her hands and so she can't hold a glass and sip wine and so we had to go out and get her some straws so that she could enjoy the wine and so it was such a great way for us to really make sure that our accessibility assessments were working

and that we'd put the pieces together for her.

So thank you.

All right.

So we also do destination sales.

This is where we focus on our midweek business.

So those are typically we invite groups here.

Those can be reunions, student groups,

business conferences.

We don't have a lot of conference space.

With the new UVA Hotel and Conference Center, we will have more space, and we're hopeful that we're going to be able to get more groups here and create city-wides from having access to that space.

But in the meantime, these are our hotel occupancy rates.

As you can see, in 2013, things have slowed down a bit, and that is in response to the average daily rates being higher than they've been before.

And so I imagine that we'll never see the rates of the hotels go back to where they were pre-pandemic.

because everything costs more than it used to.

But we're starting to see those rates normalize where they've been much higher than they had been in the past couple of years.

Revenue per available room is what the hotels make.

So it's their occupancy and the rate combined.

And so this is really the metric that we use to track the success for the hotels.

This is only for hotels, so bed and breakfasts and homestays, Airbnb, VRBO, they don't report into the system, so we don't have the same access to data for them.

For our sales efforts, as I said, we generate group leads.

We have an employee who goes to trade shows to bring groups here that we think fit the price point and fit the needs and the space for our destination.

She brings back requests for proposals and develops relationships with meeting and event planners to attract people here.

She also hosts familiarization tours with those groups, so she'll take them around town and show them what they could do.

if they decided to bring their group here.

So it is a very competitive process.

And then we work with our hotel sales staff on an annual basis to make sure that we're doing what they need us to do and complementing their efforts rather than competing with them.

And to give an idea of where we've been post-pandemic, these are the kinds of requests for proposals that end up coming in.

So a lot of association and corporate and government business comes through here.

For research, we have access again to Zartico and some of the insights, it uses big data.

And so sometimes the big data feels like it's on point and sometimes we notice some anomalies in the data.

And so I'm only sharing data with you that I feel pretty confident about.

The visitors represent 24% of the retail spending here.

which is a lot.

Visitors are often the difference between a restaurant or a store making money that year and not.

I'd like to give the wineries as an example.

You don't have more than 40 wineries here because you have residents who are going to more than 40 wineries every weekend.

I hope not.

We all probably need to get our health checked if that were the case.

So it's the same with the restaurants and the stores that are here.

The visitor dollar really does make a big difference to our economy.

This is just a little bit of extra data about our retail mix here, and the red line represents where you want the visitor and resident ratio to be, which is residential being at 56% and visitor being at 44%.

It's a national average.

It's the comfort level for a community in having visitors not over visit.

So over tourism is something that we talk about in our industry.

We don't want any

Space that's not an attraction to feel like it's mostly visitors instead of a nice mix of visitors and residents.

Again, we're looking for overnight visitation, so long day trips, day trips and short trips are great.

They're great for getting additional funding and economic

opportunity in for the city and the county but as far as the CACVB focuses we're really focused on overnight and that's where we see the large portion of the spending if you think about if you go on a day trip somewhere how much money you spend as opposed to staying overnight you know when you're staying overnight you have to get eat dinner you have to eat breakfast you're probably going to fill your car up with gas you're probably going to go shopping and do some other activities in the destination and so in addition to wanting to generate the lodging tax we also want

people to stay overnight because the economic footprint is larger.

And then this data also gives us access to not only who's coming here, but how much money are they spending.

So we put a lot of advertising dollars into Raleigh-Durham.

They come here.

When they come here, they spend more than any other locality.

So it's great to have this intelligence to go, all right, well, New York comes here, but they spend the least amount of money.

Maybe we won't focus our spend in New York, and New York is a very, very expensive market to advertise in, so we don't advertise in New York.

and I'll just end it on we have won some awards for Discover Black Seaville over the past year.

The Adrian Award is an international award.

The Destiny Award is a national award and we are a finalist for the Monticello Wine Trail.

It's really pretty incredible for an organization our size to have been up for two national awards in the same year.

We're hoping that Wheel of the World and our video with Candace and our work with our accessibility assessments will earn us another one this summer.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

I just wanted, you know, I have a comment.

I've been part of this community for 30 years and a year and a half I've been on the board.

I've learned a lot about, you know, about attracting people here and getting them to stay here and things.

And some of the things I, you know, I found surprising maybe several months ago at one of our meetings, we got information who's coming here.

You mentioned some of them in that.

I jotted down some just from I think number one was DC and I think number two to kind of put Roanoke and Lynchburg together which was kind of surprising to me that you know they're number two

Richmond was number three.

I thought that they would be up there.

Norfolk and New York, those kind of, I remember as the top five.

I know Atlanta, Charlotte, and Durham, they're in the top ten and things.

So I just found it fascinating.

And one reason that we don't have

like big conventions here.

We might have the hotel space but I think as I understand we don't have that keynote space where all of the people can get together in here.

We're kind of missing that here and so that could be something that we could think about as a community.

And a few months ago also we did some advertisement in newspapers, the leisure section of

of think Charlotte, Baltimore, Sun, and other to, you know, to say, you know, Charlottesville is a great place to visit.

And was that successful?

Yeah, print advertising is a little harder to track.

But when we see visitors show up in destination from places like Baltimore and Charlotte,

Yeah, I just want to add and I'll let others chime in instead.

I know this morning I did a

interview with a consultant that we have trying to understand Black Seville and how that's working.

Really, we're good consultants that you have for that.

We'll see what comes of that.

But I think that we as a council in Albemarle County has compiled a great board because there's great insight from the different industries giving you advice and your staff advice on how to move forward.

I was curious about the visitors from Raleigh-Durham had the highest average visitors spending.

You know, it's big data, so you have to infer things, right?

We don't know for sure.

What I noticed about them and also the Roanoke Lynchburg is we have different stores here.

So it's not surprising that people from New York aren't coming here to shop when they have

everything at their fingertips, right?

But we are only a four hour drive from Raleigh-Durham and it's a different kind of place.

And we also see them coming up for football games and things like that.

So I think that's probably why is we have a different store mix than they have down there.

I feel confident that's why with Roanoke and Lynchburg.

I used to live in Bristol, Tennessee.

If I was coming from Richmond, this was the closest Trader Joe's.

Human Rights Commission 2022 annual report.

Yeah, I've got my cheering section.

Moral support.

Do these things.

And notes.

I'm not as good with my memory as Courtney.

I'm also going to bring up a little piece of paper here just in case you guys have questions that I can't answer and I need to go back and look them up.

Let's see here.

I assume there's a button I hit, but David's got control back there.

He's already on it.

First of all, let me just say thanks for making time for us to do a report.

I really appreciate that.

I think it's one of the things that the Commission

had really looked forward to in previous years and I know with all the changes in the city that's sometimes hard to orchestrate and so I was really excited to hear from Ashley and Kina that oh there's going to be a date coming up for you to present an annual report and we're going to get you on the calendar well in advance so really appreciate that I think it's a great step forward because it gives us a chance to tell you about what we do and I think also just thanks to Kina and David for helping me work out the logistics of making the presentation

and I got to name my team here because honestly both the work that I'm going to talk about tonight but also just the preparation of the report itself these folks here made it really truly possible so just to name everybody the Victoria McCullough is our Community Outreach and Administrative Specialist

Saad Khalifa, the newest addition to the team is our intake and administrative specialist.

And then Ginny Hellmendall and Lily Gates have been interns with us since June of 2021.

And I can tell you that when they sent me an email back in 21 and said, hey, we'd like to help.

And I was the only one in the office.

I said, I'll take you up on that offer.

And so they've been with us ever since working on a very part-time basis, but doing really important work for the office and the commission.

So just shout out to them.

What I want to do is

obviously there's a detailed report attached to your agenda packet and so I'm not going to go into all those details today but what I would like to do is just hit a few highlights and so let's see if I do the big button I think I remember in David's email oh I got it okay so in this presentation I just want to hit kind of three main things here and so I want to give you some background so I'm going to talk a little bit about the roles of the officing commission I know and when we did two two ones

ahead of our ordinance revisions last year, or maybe it was earlier this year, we talked about the role of the office, and I think it's always good just to review how the role of the office and commission differ.

Also going to talk about some key takeaways from last year.

Specifically, I want to give you some highlights of the work, but also talk about a few of the observed trends that we saw.

And then also kind of capping that off with

What conclusions did we draw from the work in 2022 and what are we working on now?

Okay, so this little chart just to show just as to kind of give you a sense of how things are structured.

So the Charlottesville Human Rights Ordinance, which was passed in 2013, established a Human Rights Commission and an Office of Human Rights.

We work in concert, and I think that's an important thing to know.

I have to go back and forth between glasses and eyeglasses here.

We've amended the Human Rights Ordinance twice since it was passed in 2013, once in 2021 and then again in 2022.

So that was the two two ones we had the fall of last year.

And since then, basically what I want to make sure that you understand is that

You know that the Commission is an appointed body by City Council.

Oops, I'm hitting the wrong button.

There.

Oh, got to go the other way.

And their focus is on addressing systemic issues and then providing advice back to you.

Whereas our office handles the individual work that comes through the public and then we support administratively the HRC.

So just to give that quick overview so you remember how it's structured.

So the Human Rights Ordinance is the document that basically is our instruction manual for how to do what we do in both the commission and the office.

And the detail in the Human Rights Ordinance is extensive.

It's gotten much bigger since we passed the amendments back in 2022.

What I want to give you here is sort of a plain language summary of section 2-433, which is really where it defines the roles of the HRC and OHR.

First, and again, this is translated into plain language from the original language in the ordinance, but we assist individuals with complaints of discrimination.

We provide awareness, education, and guidance also could be read as outreach to the community.

We also do reviews of city policies.

That's mainly a commission task.

We're working now to seek federal work share agreements with the EEOC and HUD.

Make legislative recommendations to city council for your annual legislative agenda.

And then finally, prepare recommendations for city council related to the actual function of the commission.

So quick question, sir.

Yeah.

The first bullet, number A, I just want to make sure I understand exactly what that means.

Like if a person has an individual with a private company

Do you help them go through that company's grievance process?

That's a great question.

So obviously each time somebody comes to our office they bring something unique to the table, right?

No two are the same.

Within the ordinance we have a very clear process for handling employment discrimination, housing discrimination, public accommodation discrimination, credit and private education.

So by the time somebody comes to our office, what we're going to do is hear what they're saying, look at our ordinance and make sure it's one jurisdictional.

So geographically, did it occur in the city of Charlottesville?

Number two, does it meet the timeframes for filing a complaint?

And then ultimately, are they presenting a case of discrimination that is covered by the ordinance based on the identified protected class that they say they are a member of?

And then what actually happened?

What harm happened?

and what evidence do they present to support that something took place.

So in going over that, so to answer your question specifically, if somebody had a grievance within a company or something like that, we do ask them, what did you pursue internally to resolve that grievance?

So it is important.

It's something to say

if it was an employer, for example, right?

It's something that the EEOC or the Attorney General's Office of Civil Rights would also ask them.

Did you pursue to the fullest extent possible the internal processes that were available to you?

And sometimes we'll say, just depending on the situation, we'll say, you know, it looks like this is something that you might want to pursue internally.

You're welcome to file a complaint, but

If they haven't explored any of the options internally first, we do suggest that they do that.

Yes.

Thank you.

I think that's a good point.

Yeah.

That was my point with saying that the EEOC or Attorney General's Office would suggest the same because they want to make sure that they've pursued those.

Yep.

Thanks.

Great question.

Okay.

So there's a lot of words in the report that are kind of terms of art for our work, right?

In the report you'll find in the appendices there's a data dictionary.

It has lots of definitions for the terms that you'll find in there that you might not know what they mean just in casual conversation.

And props to Lily because she worked a lot on updating those definitions.

We think about it a lot because how we talk about the work is very important to understanding what we're doing.

There's three words that I want to talk about in here that will help you understand the data that I'm going to present.

So first of all, what is a complaint?

So a complaint is an incoming contact in which an individual who wishes to pursue action regarding an allegation of discrimination that falls within the jurisdiction of the Office of Human Rights as defined by the, I put CRHO, Charlottesville Human Rights Ordinance.

I think I, Human Rights, HRO, typo.

We caught that one.

So in any case, that's the thing that our office is really tasked with addressing is complaints.

But we get a lot of the next thing, inquiries.

So an incoming contact involving services provided to an individual by the OHR that are unrelated to a complaint and or an individual allegation of discrimination that falls outside of our jurisdiction as defined by the ordinance.

So we get a lot of contacts

People asking questions, people trying to navigate a system, people thinking something's discrimination, but it might not be.

So we receive a lot of those things as well, and that takes quite a bit of time to help people get to the right resource, right?

So we do a lot of that, that bit of it, which brings me to the next definition here, which is navigation.

So while this is not

is something different from a complaint or an inquiry.

It's actually navigation is a classification of an inquiry.

what we end up doing when somebody comes in with something that's other than a complaint.

So it's an incoming or outgoing individual service contact originating usually as an inquiry, always as an inquiry, but oftentimes with many follow-ups afterward that may include referrals to other service providers or assistance to access services or communication with other agencies or sometimes just clerical support, helping people write something to present to another agency.

So I just want to make sure that those things are clear because we use those terms throughout the data discussion.

Okay, so going back to that 2-433 of the ordinance and the piece about assisting individuals with complaints of discrimination.

So the commission has a really specific role in complaints of discriminations, the individual complaints.

They do appeal hearings.

So for a complaint that was dismissed, they can appeal it to the HRC and they also review findings once a case has been investigated.

To date, they've only held one appeal hearing, I think in the history of the commission and they've never held a public hearing on a final determination on a case.

So there were none as well in 2022.

From the office's perspective, this is just a few numbers that we'll look a little bit more in depth on in a few slides coming up, but we had 3,253 incoming contacts.

So we're talking about complaints, inquiries, requests for information, things like that.

Those all came into the office.

67 of those inquiries and complaints were originating in Charlottesville.

So that's 54% of the total of inquiries and complaints specifically.

Housing was by far the most often identified protected activity in our inquiries and complaints received by the office.

Also to note, 58% of all the contacts we classified as navigational.

So that means they were not a complaint of discrimination, but something else, guiding somebody to another service.

And then specifically covered by the ordinance, because navigation is not covered by the ordinance, but complaints are, we opened nine new complaints in 2022.

I think by the end I think we had I can't remember what the total was somewhere around 12 13 things that were ongoing because we had cases that were open the previous year and still going but nine new ones just in that year okay so grabbing those three numbers from the top of that OHR list

Here's some more details about what those things entailed.

So, ah, I have some numbers wrong there.

So 10 new complaints.

I thought that was wrong.

So 10 new complaints rather than nine.

Look at that.

The numbers are right on the same slide even.

113 new inquiries, 1,931 client follow-ups, 181 general contacts,

1,018 third party incoming, that's somebody contacting us about somebody else or something, some sort of interaction we're having with a third party service provider, all to make up those 3,253.

Another thing that's important here, here's the numbers of incoming contacts over the years.

I think maybe important to note is that from 2021 to 2022, that was a 60% increase in incoming contacts.

That's a great question.

I don't honestly know.

I think, well,

that's a good question I think that what we saw was certain people coming in repeatedly so I think sometimes when you have a really complex issue you see the same person a lot of times and I think some of those are related to that or we're doing a lot of outgoing outreach to try to find resources sometimes for people so that could be part of it too I think what I will say is in

this year we're going to be tracking a little bit more of that navigation piece in greater detail to say what are we navigating to specifically when we do that.

That's a good point.

I've been thinking about how we can suss out the data.

I think we can make our data collection do that.

I mean, the reason I ask, my law firm

ends up getting, because we advertise that we give free initial consultations.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I would say that's probably true for us as well and sometimes we're able to do small things for people and then they come back because they can't do the next thing.

So it's a good point.

I think hopefully with our data collection this year we'll be able to give you even more detail on that.

Thank you for that suggestion.

I'm going to make sure we do that for 2023.

So continuing on in that other bullet that was under the OHR takeaways, housing again is the thing that people ask about most often.

So maybe to answer your question, I think that is the thing that we hear about most often where it's people asking for

I can't find housing, I can't find affordable housing, I'm having difficulty negotiating with a landlord, I'm having difficulty attaching a voucher.

All these kind of housing related issues and the reason people come to us, potentially because we're very accessible, so we're an office that people can walk right up to and get the supports that they need and ask questions and we can help them connect to the resources.

But I think super important to note that, you know,

281 contacts, inquiries and complaints over the past five years have been related to housing.

It far outstrips all the other protected activities.

So just a point to note.

Next, here's the other piece, and this is where we get back into that navigation piece, probably that why are we seeing so many people?

So 58% of all of our contacts, so 2,503 in 2022, were navigation related, so guiding people to other resources, trying to help them sort out systems.

So again, we're going to collect more data on that in 2023 and be able to be more specific about what are all the little things, particularly so we can highlight some trends.

So moving on to that outreach piece.

So section 2-433B, providing awareness, education, and guidance.

So we,

In 2022, and I've got to advance my notes here to keep up, the HRC kind of took on some new things that they hadn't done before in terms of community outreach.

While they attended one community event, I believe that was one in conjunction with something that Victoria had organized, they also did a public discussion and two public polls.

And to talk a little bit more about that piece,

The Commission organized a public poll to identify topics of concern in the community and in doing so they then set up a public discussion and I believe that was back in March that they had a town hall that was focused on emergency housing and the availability of quality affordable housing.

They used the results from their poll to decide on a topic and then held a discussion about it.

In September they did another public poll to identify issues of legislative concern by the public in their development of their legislative recommendations to council.

So this is new for them.

They hadn't really done this before and I think it's a good tool that they're going to try to use more in the future.

From the office's perspective, and this is largely in part thanks to Victoria's organizing efforts,

We did 160 different community outreach activities and partnered with 57 different collaborators to do outreach events around our services that we provide, develop networks for referrals.

So going back to that navigation piece, it's hard to do navigation when you don't know who's out there doing the thing that people are asking for.

So Victoria has been instrumental in developing those.

And then just providing general guidance to other with, in partnership with other service providers on projects that support the community.

So that's our piece for outreach.

the next piece is talking about that review of city policy which is a thing that mostly the commission holds and so in this case you you may recall getting a couple of council recommendations we had two resolutions within the HRC and then two public discussions centered around some of this work as well so first of all the recommendations you got were around a language access plan for the city of Charlottesville which I believe

Deputy City Manager Marshall has also been working on.

Thank you.

We appreciate that.

Just to provide greater accessibility from a language perspective to community members here in the city.

And the other recommendation they made were around COVID-19 precautions at ACRJ.

I think they had heard from a community member that they were concerned about, maybe family members or people that they knew that were incarcerated.

and had some concerns about that.

So the commission provided some recommendations and eventually led to a discussion, which is one of those two public discussions with Colonel Coomer and I believe Sena Magill who was on council at the time about those recommendations.

So that was a productive conversation for them.

The two internal resolutions were one to promote a language access plan, but also to

The second one was to develop a community engagement plan for the commission itself, which is talking a little bit about what tools are in our toolbox to engage the public and learn from the public about what they want the commission to be focused on.

The other additional discussion that they had publicly was around the conditions and availability of public and subsidized housing, again, originating from that poll that they did with the public to learn about what is the concern in the public that they would like the commission to address.

In all these things, our role in that as an office is just to provide support to the Commission, to help them get that poll out to the public, to help them get organized to receive the public when they want to do these things, and just to help them codify the resolutions and so forth.

So our role is smaller than the Commission's under this section of the ordinance.

Next piece, this is a newer one that got passed when we passed amendments to the ordinance back in 2021.

Got to get my years straight here because that was our first time we amended the ordinance.

And this was to enter these federal work shares with the EESC and HUD.

So that was when we first amended that ordinance was back in 2021.

We did it again.

amended ordinance to have substantial equivalence to federal fair housing law so we can enter into this work share agreement with HUD's fair housing office.

So we're still working on that.

I'll talk a little bit about more of that later.

But again, our purpose in that in terms of the office's role is to provide the administrative support for the commission to review these things and then ultimately lift them up to you all for consideration.

and I'll talk a little bit more about where we have landed in the process of moving toward that federal work share in a little bit.

Second to last, 2-433E making legislative recommendations to council.

You may recall receiving a letter from the commission outlining their recommendations.

Again,

partly guided by what they heard from the public, but also what they valued as a commission.

So they talked about recommendations with regard to housing equity, transportation equity and access, health and food equity, as well as equity in law enforcement.

And again, our job is just to provide data and information to the commission and then help them craft whatever they would like to make in terms of recommendations to you all.

The last piece in the ordinance that guides what the roles and duties are, 2-433F, providing recommendations to you all around their own function, around their own function of the commission.

So you probably have seen their rules and procedures at some point, but they have their own internal rules and procedures that guide how they conduct their meetings and their business.

They redefined the quorum, especially after, I think in 2021,

the commission was limited to nine members.

So they wanted to make sure that their bylaws or their rules and procedures

met that so that they could redefine the quorum and still get their work done.

So that's where that is.

And then, of course, they also adopted recommendations to the Human Rights Ordinance, not only for the substantial equivalence for fair housing, but to improve some of the organization and procedural stuff that they handle and how that was represented in the ordinance.

And it looks like I did CRHO again.

I think I write CRHA far too much.

We'll get there.

And again, our role in this is to do the typing.

We do the clerical and administrative support to make sure that these things can happen.

All right.

So moving on to this, let's talk a little bit about conclusions and updates that we drew in terms of the commission's work in 2022.

So first of all, I think what I've noticed, and I've been here a little over five years, I've seen that the commission, whenever they spread themselves a bit too thin, and this is probably true for any of us, they struggle to achieve the goals they set.

They're often very ambitious about what they want to do, but what we found is that

If they can narrow their focus, they're much more successful at actually getting something tangible done.

And so the commission has realized that as well and in their strategic planning meeting this past March, they really narrowed their focus into housing issues.

And so that's really what they're going to focus on.

So you can expect in the fall to probably hear what their recommendations are around housing issues.

I think the other thing that was a takeaway from 2022 is that they do have a toolbox for engaging the public and they tested that out with some town halls and public polls.

I think they're going to continue to do that this year, but they're also thinking about ways to engage with groups on a regular basis.

For example, now that their focus is housing this year, they're going to send liaisons from the commission to various housing focus groups to inform their work.

So they're going to be sitting in on meetings of CLIC and Livable Seabill, probably the HACC, different things like that.

And I'm hitting all the wrong buttons.

Here we go.

Okay, back there.

So they are trying to gather more information because I think one of the things that makes their work stronger is when they feel informed about the piece around which they're concerned.

So they're doing that this year.

And finally,

What we've also noticed is when we we had for a while a lot of volatility in the commission a lot of change a lot of changing faces and this past year we only added one commissioner as we moved into 2023 and we didn't lose anybody and in fact the chair and vice chair were reelected and I what I'm seeing is that when we have some stability in the organization they actually can can coalesce as a group and get more work done so I'm excited to see what they come up with by the end of this year all right I'm going to

hit you with some takeaways from the commission's or the office's work, and then we'll wrap it up and you can ask any additional questions that you have.

So again, we noticed a 60% increase in intakes from 2021 to 2022.

And so for us, again, in 2021, it was me and then halfway through the year, Ginny and Lily joined, which was a tremendous help.

When Victoria joined in the beginning of 2022, again, it was a tremendous help to field all these incoming contacts because these are people walking in, people knocking on the door, people sending us emails, people making phone calls, leaving messages.

So in order to be a responsive office, we need the staff that can do that.

In 2023, we were excited to be able to hire Saad.

Thanks to your support.

I think you provided ARPA dollars for that hire.

Thank you so much for that.

And it's, again, improved our ability to be responsive.

What I really dislike, and it still happens sometimes, but is when we get a call and we can't get back to somebody in time, and then they call us again because we haven't gotten to be able to respond to them quickly.

And so trying to keep ahead of that and trying to make sure we're responsive to the public is very important.

The other thing I think to note is there's the number 15 open complaint cases.

So I think I had a nine and a 10 in there, but 10 was the number of new complaints that we had.

But that means we had five other complaint cases that had carried over from previous years.

So one of the things that I think is important is to make sure that we have the ability to address those concerns.

And that's one through mediation.

Mediation is probably one of our most powerful tools for getting resolution for people who file a complaint.

but investigation is secondary so if mediation fails investigation is our other option and so as we move toward these federal work shares so the the Fair Housing Assistance Program in particular there's a likelihood that we will have a higher workload we actually have a I think Lily sent out a FOIA request to HUD just to see over the past maybe five years what is the level of housing discrimination cases that are coming to

HUD at the federal and or state level to see what can we anticipate as coming to us once we enter that work share.

But in any case, given that we had 15 open complaint cases at the end of 2022, having somebody that can constantly stay on top of that, again, in that same customer service spirit, being able to be responsive and follow through with those as quickly as we can.

and there's nothing worse than knowing that we have cases languishing just because we're dealing with new incoming things and not getting to those investigations.

Last, again, 58% of all of our incoming and outgoing contacts were navigational in nature.

And most of those were related to housing concerns.

So I think what I want to take away from that is that there seems to be some unmet need in terms of helping people connect to housing resources,

and I think the other piece that we note, and this is anecdotal, but it's something that we've observed and continue to observe is that there's an unmet need for mental health care in the city because a lot of people are bringing issues that they are unable to address with our current local resources in addition to their housing concerns.

So we're going to know more about that.

I say it's anecdotal right now because this is just based on what I experienced working with people

In 2023, we're going to define those navigation and advocacy.

We added the advocacy piece because we do find that a lot of time we're serving as a liaison or an advocate for an individual comes to our office, but we're going to be able to further define the exact services we're providing at each of those contacts, and we'll have those numbers for you at the end of this year.

So I think that's all I had for you.

Yep.

There's the contact if any member of the public would like more information.

We're going to be

One note is I'm going to post this same report that you got in the agenda packet.

We'll put it on the city website on our webpage.

I'm going to make a few adjustments to the definitions of inquiry and navigation because I think I noticed some things.

As you see in my own presentation, I find some typos.

So always editing, always a work in progress.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

I just thank you for all of the hard work that you all do.

It's very important and I'm grateful.

One question I have is would it make sense to have when you do this report a year from now to also include the HRC as well?

I just wonder maybe that's something we on council could think about as well it seems to me that that would be a good combination so thanks for that yeah and we thought about that I actually talked about that a bit in the commission like to decide like who should come today right and I think one of the things I think about too is you know just you all have already have 40 boards and commissions right now and all these folks are

are very capable individuals with full-time jobs and families and all those things.

And so our job is to provide administrative support to them.

And so I said, how about this?

Be available.

I think our chair may actually be watching the Zoom presentation right now.

But I said, if they have questions for you,

listen so you can answer those and respond afterward.

But we did take on the role of doing the presentation.

Yeah, I think so.

Thanks.

Yeah, I have a comment.

Day Job.

I work with a lot of individuals looking for work.

They're leaving.

And over the course of the last 10, 12 years, I have a sense of some good places to work and bad just by talking to helping an individual with their resumes or job searching.

So have you?

Do you?

see a pattern of places that you see people come in and maybe it might be worth an unofficial conversation with that places that listen we get a lot of complaints is not that you're trying to scare them or whatever but it may be something that they're not working

reports of employment discrimination from the same employer.

But one of the tools in our toolbox in the ordinance is informal dialogue.

And so it sort of depends on what the individual presents and what they're comfortable with actually doing with their complaint, right?

Sometimes we do have really successful conversations, and I can say this is also true, has also been true for housing situations where

what they really just want is somebody to kind of help them talk to their employer or help them talk to their landlord about an issue so that it gets straightened out and I think that can be very powerful just in terms of it's not just the two of them in the room there's a third person there saying like what can we do to resolve this and again the formal aspect of that would be mediation and again that's I think that's a super powerful tool where we work with a company called Resolute Mediation and Arbitration Incorporated and

and I would say that that is one of the most unique things that the office offers is that ability to mediate a complaint and potentially reach a settlement outside of court.

So yeah, I think there's opportunities for those dialogues to happen on a like mass scale like this is the worst offender kind of thing.

So that's helpful, and I appreciate this information, but I'm just trying to get a sense from you of how do you, as someone who is working, is grinding, is doing this every day, what do you feel like?

Is there anything that you need that you feel like, you know, if I could do A, B, or C, or you feel like it's heading in the right direction?

What can council do for...

Thanks for asking.

I'm not saying we're going to actually do it.

Yeah, I saw Mr. Rogers.

I felt the eyes, you know.

Well, I actually have a list right here.

I don't have a list.

I think by being interested in the work, number one, that's amazing, right?

The fact that you all scheduled time for us to be able to present a report.

I know that

several years ago we were we were clawing to try to get in front of council and I think it was just there was pandemic there was everything going on there was lots of transition so this is a great step in the right direction I think also if there are things that you want the commission to do or to look into like there's an issue for example because one of their charges is to provide you recommendations right that is that is one of their biggest that is basically their biggest charge to give you some recommendations and and they have the ability to

look into things maybe more in depth than you all have time to do.

Thank you.

A couple questions.

One, I know this wouldn't really be the 2022 report, but I know you've recently taken on the FHAP agreement and everything that comes with that.

What has been your experience in terms of how that's going so far?

I'm glad you asked that.

I think that was one of those points where I got out of sync with my notes and the slides because I wanted to drop a few updates on that.

You all passed the ordinance right back in November of 2022 with the amendments for substantial equivalence to federal fair housing law.

We then took that and I sent it to our contact at the HUD Fair Housing Office and then we had a subsequent meeting with their interim director.

So that's Eric Steinecker.

I think maybe some of you have seen him.

He attended one of our

Commission meetings as well to discuss this when we were in the early stages.

We went through it with a fine-tooth comb again.

We had done this previously, but I think that as they review things and think about them more, looking at them more closely, they're saying, I think you should change this, this, and this.

We got maybe a list of, I would say, five major things that they want us to change.

When I say major, it's not the 15-page amendment that the last one was.

It's

wording changes, some specificity in there that they want to see.

So we're going to work on those things.

I figured we'd get through this annual report bit and then we're going to go look in depth at that and then present that to you probably in the fall.

Yeah, got you on that.

And I think that so part of what

what you all approved funding for with the ARPA dollars.

Again, that's been super helpful because this is the biggest the office has ever been.

I think for the longest time, it was just two people.

And so now we've got three full-time staff and two interns still with us.

So right now,

We're able to do investigations, but we're not super efficient at it just because we're still kind of sorting ourselves out with the recent hire of SAAD.

We have money now to hire an investigator as well.

So I think that that is our next big move is to get that process rolling so that we can really have somebody specialized and kind of focused in their own space on investigations specifically.

I think that with that

we'd be prepared to get rolling but again kind of without that information from HUD that we sent the FOIA request for about what is the anticipated or what were the over the last five years or so what were the cases that would have come here had we had the the FAP work share in place then I think we'll really have a good sense but what you know in my experience if you have like five investigations full-fledged investigations rolling and you have a person that's about as many as

Yeah, and I think it definitely makes sense that you would need a new staff position just to do that.

And I know you kind of have already just swallowed the elephant in terms of housing discrimination investigations.

One of the things we also hear from the community is, you know, the long history of could the Office of Human Rights have the authority to do investigations on its own of employment discrimination as well.

Thanks for that question.

So to clarify, we do have the capacity, or we all have the authority, I should say, under the ordinance to do investigations in all of the protected activities.

So that's employment, housing, public accommodation, credit, and private education.

What I think you may be asking about specifically is will we enter into a federal work share with the EEOC to have the Fair Employment Practices Agency certification?

And I think that that, yeah, I think that is, you hit it in the sense that I want to

get into the fair housing assistance program, the work share with HUD for housing cases first, see how that manifests and what that impact is on our workload and our staffing.

And then once we feel like we kind of have that under control, then pursue the federal, the fair employment practices agency status.

I think that's valuable.

Obviously it's part of the ordinance, right?

So we need to be in that process, but I think there's a, there is a timeframe and I think it's after we get through interim certification with HUD,

on the Fair Housing Assistance Program and then sort of get that solidified as to full certification and see what the workload looks like and our ability to contend with that.

But yeah, I think they're both possible.

And last question is, I know one of the other things that's been talked about in the community is the desire or possibility of the Human Rights Commission doing that kind of on a yearly basis, deep dive on a specific issue, delivering reports in terms of policy changes the city could make.

I know you talked about that.

tonight in your report.

What would it take from council in order to see that happen in a way that more clearly results in city council making actual policy changes in your opinion?

Is it council kind of just as a body giving a clear directive like we want to study on this issue with policy recommendations?

I really appreciate that question yeah I think that is a really good it's something that the Commission has wrestled with I think since I've been here is how do we one decide what to look into and number two how do we how do we go about actually doing the the investigation and by by which I mean not I should use a different term how about the we'll say the research necessary to create a work product for you

I think a couple of things could be helpful from Council and kind of goes back to the the comment to Councilor Wade is that whenever Council has an issue that they would like the Commission to look into let us know like let me know or you're welcome always to come to a Commission meeting and let them know but I think that would be helpful because then they know that it's it's important to you and I think that would kind of light a fire under them

and make sure that they're kind of interested in doing that work as well.

What it would take, I think, notice that they are getting to the point where they're more laser focused on what they want to do.

So they're narrowing in on housing, mostly because I provide them data that says, this is what people are asking about.

And they're also interested in it.

And they know people who have had personal experience.

So they're invested in that.

Part of what they need to figure out is what aspect of housing, because that's pretty big.

and then number two, what do they need to know in order to get that done and or what resources do they need to get the information that they need to create a work product?

I think that one of the things that with Ginny and Lily being here and we've now expanded our full-time staff, I'm talking with them about how can we engage our interns while they're still here for as long as we can.

with the commission, is there something that they need researched?

Is there something that they need written or provided to them that we can facilitate their process as they go forward?

Thank you.

And again, as others said, just thank you for all the work that you do.

I know that you and your office work incredibly hard and, you know, you look at the information you present us here in office that's basically doing social services work, community organizing work, investigations.

And I talk to people all the time who have experiences where the work that you've done and your team has done that has made a huge difference in their life.

And I think

I don't think I've ever heard anybody say anything bad about an experience with you which is very rare for local government.

But you really all do work incredibly hard and I really appreciate it.

Thanks.

I really appreciate that.

It means a lot.

If we as council could invest even more and even more staff capacity, I think I just see all kind of even greater opportunities.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And if you do at some point want to engage with commission, just let me know.

We're always happy to make time for our councilor.

I know that Councilor McGill would come periodically to council meetings just to talk and get updates.

So happy to schedule that.

I just had one thought conscious of the fact that we're about 15 minutes behind.

On page 18 of your report, page 89 of our packet, you make a reference to the fact that the high number of navigation contacts may be indicative of gaps in housing and mental health services available.

Many of the people seeking navigational support present with untreated mental health and substance abuse challenges.

What do we do about that?

If that's more than- You got another hour?

So the people that we are seeing in our office, right, the mental health supports that they would probably get come from our community service board or would come from our community services board.

And this is by no means to say, ah, they're doing a terrible job.

Quite the contrary.

I think that they do good work, but I think that they're really struggling to meet the need, right?

And I think that's maybe less than, that's probably something more than council can fix.

I think that's a statewide issue, right?

That's a state problem, a state funding issue.

And that would be being able to fund the work of the CSB enough to hire sufficient therapists, paying enough to hire therapists

in competition with private clinician fees and that sort of thing.

I think being able to make sure there's sufficient case management for individuals through the CSB because we see a lot of that.

People just kind of in need of those services and they're as a result struggling with housing, struggling with whatever it happens to be, employment, all those things because they can't get those basic services that would have

I wonder whether you all end up becoming an initial point of contact for people who are in distress, who may not even know what you all could do to help them.

Yes.

Yeah.

And to be clear, like the ordinance doesn't contemplate that.

It doesn't say that that's what we should be doing, but it's happened because, I think because we're accessible, like you can walk in and there's a human there that's going to answer the door and say, what's going on, right?

I think, and people bring people to us, or if we've helped somebody, they tell their friends and they come.

But I think the key here is why is that happening, right?

Why are they coming to our door rather than somebody else's door?

And I think that that may point to holes in the system of services that are available within our community.

And so again, hopefully this year, thanks to Lilly's work on the database, we're adding this extra bit of tracking to figure out what is it that we most often see in terms of that navigational piece to say, where's the hole really?

Well, thank you very much.

All right.

Next on the agenda is the Americans with Disabilities Act.

I'm going to be really quick.

Good evening.

I'm Paul Verticelle.

I'm the ADA coordinator for the city.

As you may know, we recently entered into an agreement with Precision Management in our structure to go over and redo our self-evaluation and transition plan.

Thank you so much.

Great.

Hi, everybody.

Can you see me in here?

Yes.

Okay, I do have a presentation.

I'm not sure how that would be shown.

Got it.

Okay.

All right, I'll do that then.

All right, just give me one sec.

Okay, now we do.

Great.

Okay.

All right.

Scared me for a second there.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Appreciate the time.

Appreciate the opportunity to work with the city of Charlottesville.

We're very excited to get started and truly we are just getting started.

Apologies for some of the lack of detail here, but we've just signed a contract and we're very excited to dig in and work with Paul and his team to work on this project.

So I'll just be doing a quick overview of what a transition plan is, who we are, what a transition plan is, some of the opportunities that you can identify by having an updated transition plan.

And please, as with the prior presenters, if you have any questions or thoughts or concerns about anything I say, feel free to interrupt.

all right so who we are precision infrastructure management quite simply this is our business we do municipal asset management so we do condition assessments of municipal sidewalks we also do ADA transition plan development we've been doing this from for many years in various forms for about 15 years and we're very excited to be working with Charlottesville

So who will be working on this project?

You have me, Charlie Zold, I'm one of the managing partners of PIM as we call it.

This is my headshot that is a few gray hairs and a few children old at this point so probably should get it updated.

Aaron Hester as well will be working on this project and really we're

The titles are different here, but we're kind of a tag team.

The idea being that at all times there's someone available to take calls early in the morning, late at night, weekend.

If one of us happens to be out for whatever reason, Aaron can very easily step in and handle anything that needs to be taken care of and vice versa.

So what is an ADA transition plan?

As part of Title II of the ADA, which prohibits discrimination against people with disabilities in state and local government, it's a requirement that municipalities with over 50 employees have a transition plan, which simply is saying, look at what you have that is public.

look at how it's out of compliance with some of the tenants of the ADA and develop a game plan to bring it into compliance.

Charlottesville has actually done a few of these.

So this isn't new to the city of Charlottesville.

It's just that part of the requirements is also periodically updating it.

to make sure that it never gets too stale or too old.

The idea of a transition plan is not to become a dusty binder on a shelf.

It's supposed to be a living document.

And while a transition plan can have a long life, periodically it is smart to sort of start from scratch, look at what was done in the past, and do a whole new self-assessment of both your programs, your services, and also your rights away.

So a couple of requirements within there, public input.

So there's a strong public input component to the transition plan, which is exactly what it sounds like, soliciting feedback, explaining what a transition plan is to the residents of Charlottesville, and quite simply asking if they have any issues with accessibility.

if someone has an issue with accessing any program or service within Charlottesville or if they have an area of a sidewalk that they find to be particularly inaccessible, that's something that they can share with us that we will add to the report and then also prioritize repairs or mediation for those issues at a future time.

so public input is one very important component of the transition plan in addition an assessment of your public rights away facilities parks services and programs for barriers to people with disabilities so we'll go a little bit deeper into what a barrier is and what it means in future slides but that's an important component remediation and implementation so once you've identified the barriers how do you fix the barrier

and also implementation in the sense of making goals and plans for the remediation.

Identifying staff responsible.

So Paul is already the ADA coordinator, which is a great start.

Many municipalities don't have an ADA coordinator.

So we're very excited to work with Paul.

So working with him to identify any other additional staff that might be responsible for the implementation of recommendations.

and then also a review of the grievance procedure, a review of the procedure that Charlottesville already has just to make sure it's up to date with best practices and identify any ways that we might be able to simplify the process for both residents and staff of Charlottesville.

So just some high level stuff here.

The most recent ADA transition plan wasn't 2013.

This timeframe is about when it's right to do an update.

There's plenty, I was just reviewing the plan for getting onto here and there's plenty of great stuff in that plan.

I can work with Paul to identify goals that were in that plan to see if there's been any progress made.

And of course, that's the type of thing that we would highlight in the future transition plan.

For the right of way, there's about 170 miles.

That's not necessarily an exact number.

It's pretty difficult to get an exact number, but once we have surveyed everything, we will have a very up-to-date amount of right of way in the city, which is a useful number to have for any number of things.

And facilities and parks, there's 156 of those, and we'll be doing access audits, self-assessments for each one of those.

So what is a self-assessment?

On the right-of-way, we're looking, first of all, we're using a pro-wag.

It's called Public Rights of Way Accessibility Guidelines.

These guidelines are still not technically regulations.

It's been a long time coming.

Again, I was reviewing the 2013 plan

It referenced them as imminently implemented.

They're not quite there yet.

It is a good practice to use those guidelines when doing your assessment.

For the most part, they are stricter than what is found in the ADA accessibility guidelines.

So if you're in compliance with PROAG, you're in compliance with ADAG.

And it does seem imminent that they will be implemented at some point in the near future.

There's a number of things that make them better than the ADAC guidelines for specifically public rights away.

The ADAC guidelines, not to get too deep in the weeds here, were initially created with facilities really in mind.

They weren't necessarily intended to be applied to sidewalks.

So what we're looking at, curb ramps, trip hazards, pedestrian signals, inadequate sidewalk width, and a whole number of other things.

The pictures here, these are not from Charlottesville.

These are from another project that we've been working on, but just as examples.

So that first picture on my left

of the curb, there is no curb ramp there.

So that's one thing we'll be looking for.

Areas where there should be a curb ramp, where there is no curb ramp, that's easy enough to identify that.

We have a geolocation pin for that.

So when the city of Charlottesville is making budgeting decisions, it has an exact count of areas that need to have curb ramps, that don't have curb ramps for remediation.

on the right there is a picture of a curb ramp that is not compliant curb ramps have been built for decades now the guidelines have changed dramatically in that time so what was once compliant might not be compliant anymore or

just as frequently something was built that was not compliant from the moment it was built.

So in this situation, this is a curb ramp that just based on the looks of it here, you're missing a detectable warning mat.

The slope looks to be probably too steep.

The cross slope, I'm sorry, the counter slope of the street also looks a bit steep.

A whole host of reasons why this curb ramp here is not compliant with Pro-A.

So we'll be finding that and we'll be detailing exactly why it's not compliant and then working with Paul and other members of the team to come up with a criteria to rank compliant and non-compliance so that again, the city can make very educated decisions about which ramps to spend its budget dollars on.

Other things we'll be looking at,

on your right there that's a trip hazard sidewalk panel that for one reason or another is no longer flush with the sidewalk panel next to it.

This creates a tripping hazard for people who are walking.

It creates a barrier for people in a wheelchair.

It's a serious people in strollers.

I mean, you name it.

It's a problem.

it causes lawsuits it causes lack of accessibility so we identify any any lip like that that's over a quarter inch believe it or not is out of compliance with with pro-wag and adag so we'll be looking for all quarter inch and larger hazards of that nature on the right

On the left, there's a walkway there that is less than four feet wide.

Four feet wide is the pro-wag requirement.

So that looks to be about two feet, maybe two and a half feet.

So that would be out of compliance.

In addition, that fire hydrant right there in the right of way like that, often if you do have a four foot sidewalk and that fire hydrant was there, that would also be non-compliant because there's not actually four feet of space for a wheelchair or a person to walk past.

So we'll be finding all of these.

cataloging them all in a geodatabase and providing them to the city and working with them to develop an implementation plan for how to remediate some of these which deserve to be remediated earlier which can be put off into the future that's that's sort of the meat and potatoes of the right-of-way section so I'll keep going ahead unless there's any questions at this point facilities and parks

We'll be doing a similar self-assessment for facilities and parks, slightly different things obviously that we're looking for.

There's four priorities and a whole host of other things to be looking for.

These pictures here sort of help you understand what it is we're assessing.

So the picture on the bottom left there, that's showing is there an accessible route into a building.

So that person in a wheelchair, can that person get from

the van that they're exiting all the way into let's say City Hall.

We're going to be assessing to make sure there's an accessible route.

There are regulations for what an accessible route means.

And we'll be going over each one of those to make sure that each entrance way into a building is accessible.

And then within the building, a similar assessment is done.

Can that person get from inside that front door up to the second floor, up to the third floor, to this classroom, to this office?

It's a very detailed assessment.

and we'll be doing that for each one of the city buildings.

Additional things just again to sort of showcase what it is we're assessing for.

We're looking to see if handicapped spaces in parking lots are the correct width, whether the landing zone outside of that space is wide enough for someone in a wheelchair or someone with disabilities.

And then all the way on the right there, the width of a corridor is supposed to be a minimum of 36 inches.

so things of that nature are what we'll be assessing for in some other examples again just to illustrate the point bathroom sinks are they at the right height is the plumbing underneath the sink insulated to prevent someone with a wheelchair from from burning themselves on on the hot water pipe are there grab bars near the toilets or is there an accessible stall within a bathroom these types of things

Ritt large over the entire network parks pools will be there.

There are special regulations and guidelines for each one of those.

And we'll be looking into all city of Charlottesville facilities and parks to determine their compliance.

Keep going here.

Programs and services.

So Dr. Janet Burke will be working with us on this.

Dr. Burke is an ADA coordinator.

She has extensive experience when it comes to assessing programs and services for municipalities.

She was actually the ADA coordinator for Colorado Springs for a good bit of time.

She's a nationally known expert on these particular items.

And she will be looking at the non-physical items that we're assessing.

So programs and services, ensuring that

Any program or service, any department has a plan to either ensure that what's being provided is accessible or has a plan to make it accessible if there is a grievance or if there was a special accommodation requested.

So Dr. Burke will be working on that.

She will also be doing a review of the city website.

So implementation.

This data is extremely interesting and useful, of course, just in its own right.

Figuring out what's accessible, what's not accessible is an important goal on its face.

In addition, though, it's an opportunity to support other initiatives in the city of Charlottesville.

So one of the things that we pride ourselves here at PIM, Precision Infrastructure Management, is using this data to create really good asset management plans for our customers.

So we have this incredible wealth of data about what's there, what barriers are on the sidewalk.

and we will first work with the team to develop sort of a timeline, you know, when you want things to be remediated, what the budgeting would allow for, and then also to focus on initiatives such as the green initiative.

So one of the things we like to focus on is alternative maintenance activities.

So if you have a sidewalk issue, you don't necessarily need to jackhammer out the concrete and pour new concrete.

That's a very wasteful process.

The concrete cannot always be recycled.

Even if it can be recycled, you're still hauling it out to the dump and then pouring new concrete, which is a significant carbon emitter.

So we have alternative maintenance activities that use less concrete that we would suggest.

and other items you can use polyjacking or mudjacking to improve or remediate certain issues.

So using our background in the remediation side of asset management, we develop tailored plans that should help save Charlottesville both budgetary dollars and also carbon emissions.

Engagement just to briefly go into this very important component of what we're doing starting with fact-finding situational awareness this is the stage that we're in right now just understanding what the lay of the land is I'll be working with Paul to to get a list of people to speak with boards to meet with a few of the the people who spoke already today I think would be very interesting to speak with about what they're doing when it comes to accessibility

Two, starting to have meetings, both large format meetings where people can sort of come as a larger group, but also as importantly, small format meetings.

One of the things we really work on is ensuring that we have a diverse group of people who are giving their public input.

If you just do the classic methods where you sort of just broadcast out and wait for people to respond back, you often get a

one-sided view of what's going on so we take active steps to make sure we're getting a diverse a diverse group of people who are responding to our questions and then taking that feedback and incorporating it into the data that we're finding so we find it to be a very powerful tool you take public feedback you you add

incredibly high quality detailed data and you can create a very strong asset management plan, ADA transition plan with that information.

So additional items beyond the transition plan.

Using that data, looking at it from a risk-based approach.

With all that data, you can figure out what your highest risk areas are or your highest areas with the most barriers.

So you can prioritize those areas over other areas that maybe don't need the funding.

And then very importantly, equitable implementation.

One thing we've done with other customers is we look at census data.

and if there are any equity groups that have been historically disadvantaged or under invested in you can use that to change exactly how dollars are allocated from a location or we use FIP zones which are census zones from a census zone range.

Just to put a visual to that

Work orders often in the past work orders come in.

It's from the public is telling you what the issues are.

Again, this is often gives you sort of a skewed view of what's really happening out there on the sidewalks or out there in your facilities.

And we get into a more proactive approach where we're looking at it from a risk-based plan, an equity-based plan.

And then we weight that equity lens further with city input to give you a really tailored, really powerful asset management plan that will reduce your barriers, increase your accessibility for residents of Charlottesville.

Just some visuals based on what I'm talking about here.

How we'll present the data.

So, you know, looking at this here, you can see deficiencies per mile by FIP zone.

So this is for a project we did for the city of Durham in North Carolina.

And you can see that area one here in the upper left, that FIP zone has the largest number of deficiencies per mile.

So you can very quickly look at a graph like this and understand which areas need your investment fastest.

a little bit more on the alternative maintenance activities that we'll be focusing on.

Precision concrete cutting, it's a way to remove those trip hazards in an environmentally friendly, financially friendly, and time advantageous way.

Ponding mitigation, so often at the bottom of a curb ramp you end up with water ponding.

You can use ponding mitigation technology to reduce those ponds so that what was once a blocked

area becomes accessible again.

So these are all the types of things that we'll bring to a report so that Charlottesville can move quickly, increase accessibility for the residents.

From a scheduling perspective, field collection on the right-of-way will be starting sort of in beta phase, we'll say, this week.

We will have two surveyors on the ground starting, we'll have one starting tomorrow, Tuesday, and then we'll have another joining him on Wednesday.

I have good news one of them is from Durham so he's probably going to spend a lot of money according to the earlier data

and he will be staying in a hotel.

So double whammy there.

But yeah, this week we're going to start, really it's more of a training week.

We have a list of exactly what we're collecting.

So we're going to collect it.

We're going to make sure that the data is flowing the way we want it to flow.

We're going to speak with Paul and his team to make sure that the data looks the way he wants it to look and it's being collected in a way that's organized in a way that works for him and his team.

so we want to get that going ASAP because the goal as you'll see at the end is to get this done by the end of this year and that is a heavy lift it absolutely can be done but if it's going to be done on time we need to get the field collection started and finished as quickly as possible because the report generating component often takes a lot longer than expected I'm sure everyone here has experienced this

I'm going to go ahead and do a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit

and while most of that activity will be done in the first few months really the plan will be to have it ongoing until the end of the project and once we have good processes in place really it can continue on until whenever it will become baked into the ADA transition plan into the grievance procedure to make sure that people always can let their voices be heard when it comes to accessibility

so field collection on the right-of-way starting this week we will do facilities and parks after the right-of-way is is finished and then the program services and website with Dr. Burke that will be ongoing we'll probably get that started I think July is probably a good estimate for when we'll start that process as well and as part of that process there will be some some requirements from city staff

for brief interviews with Dr. Burke just to learn more about how their departments work, what their best practices are.

It's not at all intended to be a gotcha of any kind.

The goal is to just find areas that find out what the default is right now and any suggestions for improvement.

So that'll start in July.

And then as mentioned earlier, the report, we hope to deliver it before the end of this year.

And that's everything.

Just one question.

I know we're very over time.

But you referenced at the very beginning, you know, a consultant report that sits on a shelf, not much changes.

I know the city's never done that, and we would never contemplate doing that in the future, but what would it actually, what does it actually take for these ADA improvements to get built out?

Is it a problem of project manager capacity, investment departments in terms of systems to track and manage projects, money that city council's allocated for actual infrastructure?

Great question.

I would say you have the most important component already, which is you have Paul.

So Paul, not to put pressure on you, but the fact that you have Paul who is already in his position, engaged, excited about this process.

I know that he's been the champion for getting this report done.

That's step one.

As part of the deliverables when we bid on this project,

it was coming up with a plan to do exactly what you're talking about so we have built out a project management plan and tool to have semi-regular check-ins for I think it's built out for five years right now sort of you know goals objectives and then results to help to help keep everybody accountable and on task when it comes to reducing these barriers but you did hit on the most important one which is budget and funding

You know, if you can be as on task as possible, but unless you have the dedicated funding to reduce some of the barriers, you know, you're not going to make much headway.

So while there are some things that won't require a ton of investment, you know, on the programs and services side, there might be some small suggestions about language or things to provide if necessary that can be done quite easily.

You know, there's no way to affordably

and I will add a curb ramp.

You know, a curb ramp has a fixed cost and it will always have a fixed cost.

In response to the Councilman's question,

Our ADA coordinator has been given the directive to create a culture of compliance with respect to ADA.

That is our commitment.

This transition plan will help us along the way to get there.

Now, when we get the transition plan, it's going to have a lot of recommendations that will have dollar tax attached to them.

We have to see where it fits in the CIP plan, but it's got to be scheduled.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Very excited to get started.

Thank you.

Okay.

So that wraps up our 4 p.m.

We're due to come back at 630.

I do.

I've got one here.

Okay.

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

for one discussion and consideration of candidates to be interviewed for upcoming vacancies on the Planning Commission and two discussion and consideration of candidates to be interviewed for upcoming vacancies on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

Is there a second?

Okay, all in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed?

Motion passes.

Council will now be in closed session.

We will return at 6.30 p.m.

For those joining by Zoom, there is a separate link, a different link for the 6.30 meeting.

See you all in a little bit.

Yes.

I move that this council certify by a recorded vote that to the best of each council member's knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom Reformation Act and identified in the motion convening the closed session were heard, discussed, and considered in the closed session.

Second.

Please cast your vote.

Okay, passes, there you go, five nothing.

Councilors, are there any announcements?

Well, and both for Piedmont Housing Alliance and also for CRHA, a lot of hard work finally coming to some fruition.

And for those of us who are baseball fans, yay UVA.

Yes, I know I have laryngitis.

I can tell everybody it's not COVID.

I've tested and I'm negative.

So let's move on then.

Consent agenda?

Number four minutes April 17 regular meeting May 12 special meeting May 19 and 20 strategic planning work session five resolution appropriating additional funding received from the Virginia Department of Social Services for adoption assistance $450,000 second reading six resolution appropriating funding for Virginia Department of Social sorry Virginia Department of State Police

Help Eliminate Auto Theft or HEAT program, $4,000.

Second reading.

Seven, resolution appropriating additional funding received from the Virginia Department of Social Services for the VIEW program, $46,000.

Second reading.

Eighth, resolution appropriating additional funding received from the Virginia Department of Social Services for various programs.

$56,634, second reading.

Nine, resolution appropriating funding for the COVID homelessness emergency response program, CHIRP, to the City's Department of Human Services for expenditure.

$14,419.60, second reading.

Ten, resolution

appropriating a grant of public funds for housing assistance to low and moderate income homeowners within the city of Charlottesville $1,360,000 second reading 11 ordinance amending and reordaining section 30-254 exemptions section 14-19

Class 4 Repair, Personal, Business and Other Services and All Other Businesses and Occupations Not Specifically Listed, Accepted, Exempted in this Chapter and Section 34-1200 Definitions to Update Language Second Reading 12 Resolution Appropriating Insurance Claim Reimbursement for the Avon Fuel Station Replacement Project $40,000, one of two readings 13 Resolution

Resolution appropriating grant funding from the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, Emergency Shelter Upgrade Assistance Fund,

$445,307, one of two readings.

15, resolution, accepting Oak Lawn Court, Oak Lawn Drive, and Porter Avenue into the city street system.

One reading.

16, resolution amending resolution R23-063, appropriation of community development block grant funds anticipated from the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development as a part of the City's FY 2023-2024 Annual Action Plan, approximately $410,468.

Thank you.

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

this is only on those what's that 13 items if you're signed up for if you signed up in advance your moment will be coming in a few minutes this is not that time so we'll now take public comment regarding those items any person wanting to speak on this you have up to three minutes in the zoom webinar you can select the raise hand option to be placed in the speaker queue if you've joined by phone and wish to speak on the consent agenda you can press star nine

will alternate in person and virtual speakers.

Is there anyone in council chambers who would like to speak on a consent agenda item?

All right.

Is there a second?

Second.

Any further questions or comments from council?

Please cast your vote.

Passes five, nothing.

Yes, sir, Mayor and Council.

There is a written report.

I'd like to highlight a couple of items.

On Wednesday, we will be selling bonds, about $16 million on Wall Street to support a number of our capital improvement projects.

The rating agencies visited us a couple of weeks ago, both Moody's and S&P.

We gave them a tour of our fine community.

I've explained to them our plans for further development and the opportunities here.

They rewarded us with a rating, double A, triple A rating, both of them, that maintains our record of 40 years of triple A rating.

That's important because it certainly keeps our interest rates low.

We're glad that at the national level that the debt ceiling controversy was averted and we can go to the market.

We were concerned about that.

We were prepared to stand down and wait, but now we won't.

So we're going forward and I already understand that there are a number of brokers waiting to

to put in bids on our work.

I want to acknowledge our finance staff, Christy Hamel, our budget director, and Chris Cullinan, our finance director, and Chris Engel,

and our constitutional officers, the revenue commissioner and our treasurer for the work that they continue to do working with the city manager's office and making sure that the finances of the city are where they should be and we can maintain our rating.

I'd like to also highlight that we continue to work with KTEC.

There's an item on the agenda tonight that will appropriate funds for the acquisition of KTEC.

We're working with the superintendent to imagine the KTEC of the future and the next steps and how we're going to work that into our

our educational system and our workforce development system and provide outlets for students who choose not to go to college but still can have a great career with good paying jobs.

So we're working with them on that.

I have designated Chief Kochis and Misty Graves, Director of Human Services, to lead an in-house task force on gun violence.

This is not to substitute for the task force that President Ryan appointed at the university, but it's really a supplement to.

want to galvanize all of our resources in the city and see how we can have a full course effort to address the issues of gun violence in our community to make it a safer community and provide outlets for young people to have productive activities.

They've met once and they'll be coming back with another meeting.

I'll keep you up to date on that.

It's in the written report but I would like to highlight the great work that's being done in the community to provide a resource for individuals to find activities for youth.

The Charlottesville Albemarle Youth Opportunity Center website which is

AlbYouth.org, and it is in the written report because that's a little awkward, aimed to provide an accessible centralized resource to match young people to programs in the community.

Okay.

And I'd like to note that Melinda Crawford, the CEO of Charlottesville Airport, has indicated she is retiring.

She's, in my time working with her, she's been an outstanding leader of that organization and the airport has really grown and

and flourished under her leadership.

She will be missed.

As a member of the board, we will be working together to select the next leader in the coming months.

Community Matters is next up.

We have four preregistered speakers leaving 12 more slots.

So any speaker, you'll have up to three minutes to speak.

We'll now open the floor to the preregistered speakers.

Our first speaker is Greg Frank.

Is he here?

Mr. Frank, come forward.

Thank you.

My name is Greg Frank.

I live in Charlottesville.

And I'm here to talk to you about emergency dispatch policies at Charlottesville Fire Department that have been undermining the city's 60-year-old volunteer emergency rescue squad cars, the Charlottesville Albemarle Rescue Squad.

They not only inflate costs for taxpayers but also possibly jeopardize lives due to slower response times and they dampen job satisfaction amongst our hardest working firefighters.

Recently, my journey to become a licensed volunteer emergency medical technician opened my eyes to these realities.

While undergoing practical training at CARS, I noticed how their ambulances only received a trickle of calls in stark contrast to those at CFD, which at times seemed overwhelmed by the volume of these basic medical emergencies that CARS volunteers are trained and licensed for.

During a visit to the CFD station, I observed how dispatches repeatedly prioritized CFD despite the CARS team's readiness to take action.

The CARS team parked at the very same fire station and armed with solid training and eagerness to serve was sidelined.

Meanwhile, the CFD, an expensive specialist firefighting force, found itself stretched thin, taking repeated basic medical emergency calls.

The strain on the CFD staff was visible, not only in their fatigue, but also in their relief and even applause when the car's ambulance finally got dispatched after four hours of waiting.

The imbalance seems inefficient at best.

There's a dedicated volunteer talent in cars eager to make a difference, yet underutilized.

Conversely, CFD specialist talent is diverted to tasks that they might not find fulfilling and the imbalance could be contributing to CFD's high staff turnover and overtime pay.

I had phone calls with both CARS leadership and CFD's acting Chief Thomas and they acknowledged the problems.

CARS has been working hard to foster a good relationship with CFD that yet feels stuck with no tangible change in sight and Chief Thomas although not responsible for the current dispatch policies showed openness to investigate and resolve the issues and I very much appreciated his willingness to engage with community members such as me.

Scrutinizing the data, I found the dispatch policies implemented in 2001 resulted in increased response times to the sickest patients, and I have data if you'd like that, and more calls directed to CFD.

It appears that financial motivations originally may have driven those policies.

Despite their negative operational impact, inertia and inaction has allowed them to persist.

CFD is an irreplaceable asset to the city and stands on shaky ground today and may not survive if current policies persist.

It really does provide an essential service that if lost would cost the city millions.

Thank you.

With CFD and CARS apparently meeting about this very soon, I hope for a resolution that benefits both entities as well as our community.

As a taxpayer, a volunteer EMT, a concerned citizen, a business owner and an employer in Charlottesville, I urge you all to ensure that volunteerism in emergency services remains a vital part of Charlottesville.

It boosts community relationships and it fulfills those involved, helps to train the next generation of medical providers, and most importantly gets the right help to those in need fastest.

MR. Thank you, Mr. Frank.

MR. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of Council.

and also City Manager Rogers who actually I'm addressing tonight.

I'm here to speak about noise.

I'm here on behalf of myself, my friends, my neighbors and the North Downtown Residents Association.

Did I mention I live at 311 East Market Street?

I'm right down the street.

I'm here to ask that the city manager task the incoming city attorney with another look at our unenforceable noise ordinance.

It's been in place since 1976 and things have changed since 1976.

The current ordinance requires you to go back to the police department and get a noise meteor and then return to the scene of the noise in order to measure it.

Well, since 1976 they have invented cell phones.

And this is a noise meter right now.

None of you exceeded about 55 decibels.

I can tell you that at about 70 decibels is what the EPA recommends as being, you should need to stay below that in order to avoid hearing damage.

The reason that our noise ordinance does that, requires you to have all these technical specifications and have the police go out and make scientific measurements, is because the original authority for the noise ordinance was criminal law.

And in criminal law, you have to have exact proof.

You have to meet a beyond the reasonable doubt burden of proof.

However, again, since 1976, new laws have been passed.

Among them,

In 2010, a new ordinance that allowed noise ordinances to be enforced by civil fines rather than criminal fines.

The difference is the burden of proof, but also a civil fine is kind of like a parking ticket.

From the perspective of the person getting the fine, it's the same thing, but from the perspective of enforcement, it's much easier.

So, now that we've got that option, I think we should use it.

The main objective to noise ordinance is usually free speech.

However, a noise ordinance that is indifferent to the content is not a violation of free speech.

If you're just measuring the decibels, that's fine.

The other question is how you deal with competing free speech interests, that is, people sitting at a table on the mall talking versus the busker with his electric guitar

making too much noise for them to hear.

The answer to that is distance.

That's what the Supreme Court has said when you've got a conflict of rights, distance.

That would be easy to do if we had an ordinance that allowed us to do it, but this ordinance requires you to measure ten feet from this and four feet from that, and it just doesn't work.

So in sum, I'm happy to work with the incoming city attorney.

I understand we have a new one who might be hired tonight, Mr. Stroman, as I've worked before with the city attorney on dog ordinances and parking ordinances to review what's possible.

Finally, in my remaining 32 seconds, I'd like to talk about a specific kind of city-caused noise that can be fixed.

That's the audible crosswalks at Fourth and Market.

They're currently set at 100 decibels.

They're set to out-shout fire engines.

That is above the EPA limit.

We've had neighbors trying to get that fixed, but it's fallen on, if you will, deaf ears.

So I hope you will see something done about that.

And finally, I've made enough noise myself.

I have never exceeded, however, about 60 or 70 decibels right now.

Thank you, Mr. Yellett.

Next up is Terry Smith.

Mr. Smith?

Did I get your name right?

Did we spell it right?

Terrace.

Terrace?

Okay.

Good evening.

Thanks for letting me speak.

I am the executive director of a newly found nonprofit here in Charlottesville, Virginia called The Village.

And I'm here to talk about the Charlottesville Black Knights football team, the youth football team.

Last year there was not a youth football team in Charlottesville and thus our kids were separated.

Some went to Albemarle, some went to Monticello.

They were split up.

So my nonprofit has been tasked with bringing that team back.

So that's the goal, to bring them back.

It used to be the feeder program for Charlottesville High School.

With that being disbanded, there hasn't been a feeder program, thus Charlottesville High School hasn't been very good in football.

So I've spoken with representatives from Charlottesville High School, Andy Jones, and we have reestablished the relationship with Beaufort and CHS as the feeder program.

We had a football camp on April 29th to gauge the community response.

We had 57 Charlottesville kids, local kids come out.

We partner with CHS Cavs, Cavs Future Foundation with UVA, Do Good Seaville, Charlottesville Police Foundation, Motivate the Game, Prolific Run Crew, DLH Sports Shots, and Celia LLC to put that camp on.

What we're hoping to do moving forward is to provide Charlottesville youth with resources year-round, educationally, not just when their respective sports are in session.

We will do volunteer activities with our local youth to ensure that they are giving back to the community that is given to them.

This will provide them with positive outlets not only through sports but throughout the year through mentorship, thus limiting the opportunities for negative outlets such as drugs, gun violence or gangs.

Based on the income level of the children that are participating from local areas, and since this is a football team, we do need to protect them and we need the proper equipment to do so.

With that said, we are requesting a partnership with the city and an investment of $30,000 to purchase new equipment and uniforms to ensure that our Charlottesville youth is protected on the field.

and at this time I'd like to request a meeting with you guys to discuss it further and we also have a camp coming up July 21st, 22nd and 23rd at Charlottesville High School so if any of you guys would like to volunteer to come out and kind of see our mission

We'd like to invite you.

Okay.

Mr. Smith, I know that you made a specific request and I don't want to be responding to it this evening specifically.

Could you send me an email with your contact information?

Absolutely.

And I'll use that as a way to start making some contacts.

Yes, sir.

I'll give that to you tonight.

Thank you.

So as Bill is coming up, I just want to add that Terrence was one of my first mentees, fifth grader at Walker, and it just warms my heart.

As a now young man, he's giving back to the community.

Thank you very much, sir.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Next up is Bill Emery.

Okay.

Good evening, councilors.

It was mentioned at the March 30th budget workshop that Charlottesville and Dominion will be partnering to replace a significant portion of the 6,000 plus street lights in the city with LED fixtures.

From a power usage global climate point of view, this effort is welcome.

I haven't heard more about the plan, but there is one step I'd like you to consider before we go further down this path.

I hope you will consider developing a process where the existing placement, brightness, and number of light fixtures can be addressed.

Many of our street lights are overly bright.

They distribute light skyward.

They light the interiors of bedrooms.

They light the exteriors of resonances.

They provide light sufficient to read the New York Times 8-point type.

Overly bright, misdirected artificial light at night damages the environment and negatively affects people's health.

Many of these lights, which the city considers capital assets, were installed at a time when a three-car garage and a perfect lawn were considered socially beneficial.

We've come to realize there are negative externalities to many of our mid-20th century practices.

So before replacing all the street lights, consider offering residents the chance to weigh in.

For example, if a plurality of residents living adjacent to a street light would like it removed rather than relamped with LED bulbs, grant their wish.

Turning off the lights at night saves money.

The basic principle is simple.

Use the right amount of light.

Use only where needed, only when needed.

Lighting affects health.

Letting create serious environmental issues.

Please, while minimizing greenhouse gases, minimize glare, light trespass, sky glow, and tax burden as well.

Thank you, Mr. Hemmery.

Okay, that gets us through the preregistered speakers.

Now, again, we'll do the alternating thing.

Is there anyone else in council chambers who would like to speak to us?

Ms.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak tonight, Mr. Mayor, members of council, city staff.

I'm here to address an item, I think it's number 20 or number 21 on your agenda, so it'll be much later in the evening.

I'm a downtown resident and I'm an architectural historian preservation planner and I happen to be president of Preservation Piedmont and most of our board and

all of our advocacy committee are aware of this proposal to demolish an IPP on Stadium Road, but we have protocols that means that our advocacy committee has to take it to the full board, there has to be a vote, and we just haven't had that sequence of events in the right kind of timing.

So I'm only here

speaking on behalf of myself as an architectural historian and preservation planner.

I followed your last meeting with interest and then I was Googling as we all do and I went to Zillow and I saw

a fairly intact interior and that sort of piqued my interest and I had reason to correspond with someone from the Department of Historic Resources staff about another matter and I said I just happened to ask if what they had in their files was this a tax credit rehabilitation project for example and he said I don't really know anything about it Jenny but I'll check and I'll get back to you and he got back to me with a series of emails which I'm going to share with you

One of the things that I was most concerned about, was it a best practice for an IPP, really for anything that's a contributing resource in a historic district would be to follow up a certain protocol of

identifying whether this building could be preserved on site and could be incorporated into some new redevelopment scheme.

I'm not going to the wall for this building.

I'm not going to the wall for this neighborhood.

I know there are other things, but I will go to the wall for the process almost any time I have an opportunity to do so.

And I felt that the out of town consultant was just downright flip in dismissing the building as, oh, it's a nice old building, but there's nothing there.

The staff person who's worked for decades in Central Virginia and Charlottesville seems to have some other opinions.

But really, when it comes down to it, only the Historic Resources Board of the Commonwealth of Virginia and the keeper of the National Register can opine

with great certainty and determination whether a building or a district is actually eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

And so I want to share with this information with you tonight.

And I've circled the statement that I think is most compelling to me, which is the out-of-town architect does not know his Seville architecture, the context.

So I'm just going to share these emails with you.

Did you place them in the basket?

In the basket.

Yeah, thank you.

Happy to do that.

I'll get them to you.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

And then at the end of this, I would just like to invite any of you who happen to be in Richmond on June 13th to visit the Black History Museum in the old armory, Preservation Piedmont, where I've just completed three years as chair of their board.

is very proud and pleased to present our first class of African American Preservation Fellows who will be presenting on rural funeral programs in Cumberland County, African American music venues in Gloucester County in the early 20th century,

and perhaps of more interest to city residents would be a third generation member of a family displaced by urban renewal in the city of Richmond.

Thank you, Ms.

Gillum.

Yes, Mayor Snook.

Ms.

Hello, everybody.

I frequent farmers market at Mead on Wednesdays, a visitor.

And this year they've had a downturn on people coming to support the local farmers.

They work very hard to set up.

bring all their fresh, very fresh produce on Wednesdays.

So that means you can have another day to be able to get fresh produce.

And I noticed that and I decided to start a

Art Park.

So it's sort of a Mead Farmers Market Art Park.

And for two Wednesdays so far, we were able to invite Eli Cook and some other artists.

I set up a canopy and I did free caricatures.

And I hope to do that again on Wednesday coming up.

Hopefully it will become a more frequently visited park.

And also I want to congratulate Michael Payne on community matters.

He invited Dr. Schmidt to talk about the taxation with UVA.

and I just want to say his show is amazing because they intellectualize everything in the conversation and so you can make your own decision about what's going on.

But yeah, so that's about it.

Thank you, Ms.

Hoffman.

Is there anyone in the room here who would like to speak to us next?

My name is Louis Schultz.

I live in Charlottesville.

Virginia State and Local Government Conflict of Interest Act, specifically Section 2.2-3103.1, says that no officer of a local government shall accept money for services performed within the scope of his official duties except the compensation paid by the government of which he is an officer.

Michael C. Rogers, who pretends to be Charlottesville City Manager, is a subcontractor to the Robert Bob Group.

A Washington, D.C.-based firm, the city pays $25,000 a month for its services.

All of the money Mr. Rogers accepts for the role he plays as city manager comes from the Bob Group.

Rogers has no contract with the city and no legal or ethical obligations to it at all.

Although city council approved his hiring, the contract they have with his actual bosses doesn't even let council fire him directly, which is in violation of the city charter.

In early April, Charlottesville's Commonwealth's attorney, Joe Platania,

appointed Greene County Commonwealth's Attorney Wim Consalvo as Special Prosecutor to investigate whether to prosecute Mr. Rogers for violating the Conflict of Interest Act, or COIA.

Last Friday, Mr. Consalvo wrote to me to say, and I'm quoting, as part of this review, I spoke with numerous subject matter experts as it relates to COIA and its applicability to the situation in Charlottesville.

This included individuals that work at the state and local level

on issues related to state, county, and city governments in our Commonwealth.

I have also consulted with Virginia's Conflict of Interest Council.

The primary question revolves around Mr. Rogers' status as an employee or officer of the city of Charlottesville.

Based on the facts currently before me, it does not appear that Mr. Rogers is an employee or officer of the city of Charlottesville, and as such, COIA does not apply.

End quote.

Consalvo says Rogers isn't an officer, meaning he can't possibly be a chief administrative officer, which the city manager is under Virginia law.

Mr. Rogers is lucky, but counsel now has a dilemma.

Rogers ignored.

Oh, boy.

Rogers is lucky because a violation of COIA constitutes malfeasance in office, and an officer who knowingly violates Section 2.2-3103 shall be subject to a civil penalty in an amount equal to the amount of money received as a result of such violation, meaning he might be fined for 18 months of salary.

Counsel's problem is that the Code of City of Charlottesville, Article 5, Section 2-211, states that the city manager is authorized to appoint a city attorney with the advice and consent of the city council.

In just a few minutes, Council will vote on whether to consent to Mr. Rogers' choice of a new city attorney.

If Mr. Consalvo is right, then Rogers isn't the city manager and Section 2-211 doesn't allow him to appoint the city attorney.

If Council and Mr. Rogers ignore that problem and both continue to act as though Mr. Rogers is a public official, then I will go to the local magistrate on Tuesday morning and swear out a criminal complaint using that as evidence of a crime having been committed.

Mr. Oh, yeah, great little thing here.

As reported by Molly Conger at a recent council forum, Mayor Snook says he ran four years ago because Charlottesville's government isn't working.

There was just chaos at the top.

He says he wanted us to work together and generally just wanted to make Charlottesville work again.

Thank you, Mr. Schultz.

Anybody else in person who would like to speak to us?

The first public hearing deals with conveyance of a city-owned sanitary sewer line easement.

Mayor and Councilors, a sanitary sewer line believed to have been constructed about 1920 was previously conveyed from Water Street to West Main.

It previously conveyed wastewater from Water Street to West Main.

In 1995, the city gave approval for a building to be constructed

over a portion of the sewer line.

As part of the approval, the owners of the building agreed to protect the sewer line during construction and also maintain the sewer line under the building after construction.

Fast forward to 2019 and as part of the code building construction, the building and sewer line were demolished and a new sewer line was installed in Water Street.

The deed of vacation specifies the sewer line be vacated

since the sewer line was in conflict with the code building is no longer needed since the new sewer line was put in Water Street as part of the code building installation.

A public hearing is required by law to give the public an opportunity to comment on the proposed conveyance of a public interest and notice that the public hearing was advertised in the local newspaper at least seven days in advance of the public hearing.

Staff recommends approval of the attached ordinance and the deed of vacation.

And I might note that we've got a small minor suggested change in the ordinance in the last section where it's just for clarification that we changed the word Exhibit A to deed of vacation.

And that's one small minor change we recommend in the ordinance.

Could you repeat that again?

If councilors have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them Could you repeat the modification again?

It would be changing the word Exhibit A to Deed of Vacation rather than use the term Exhibit A Do you know what page of the packet that's on?

So the ordinance references Exhibit A, which they're just changing it to reference the deed of vacation.

Like page 221 or so.

Okay, so subject to that change.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So no clarifying questions.

We'll open the public hearing.

Is there anybody who would like to speak to this matter?

All right, so we'll close the public hearing.

Is that good to people?

Consent agenda for the next meeting?

All right.

Thank you.

Next public hearing, also Ms.

Hildebrand, but with the assistance perhaps Mr. Cullinan, I don't know, talking about utility rates.

We have a presentation.

David's going to load.

Mayor and Councilors, Chris Cullinan and I are pleased to be here to present the annual utility rate report for the enterprise funds that include water, wastewater, stormwater and natural gas.

I will go over the operations overview and Chris will review the financial aspects in today's presentation.

A little bit about water distribution and the wastewater collection system.

Currently we serve 14,800 customers in the city.

We deliver 4.6 million gallons of water daily.

We maintain 179 miles of water line, 160 miles of wastewater pipelines.

And last year we worked over 8,300 workers in the utilities department.

We take water quality very seriously.

Every year we prepare what's called a consumer confidence report, which it's a summary of the thousands of tests that are done on the water treatment process and the water in our distribution system.

And it says basically that the quality of our drinking water meets and exceeds all regulatory requirements, expectations for safety and reliability.

And this can be found

online in our consumer conference report.

It actually went out, was posted in May, and we do this in May of every year for the previous year.

And we also have paper copies available if people don't have access to the city's website.

A new initiative we have that also expands on water quality is

EPA is now requiring all water providers to inventory their water service lines whether it's in the public or the private part of their system and identify any lead service lines that exist and we have till October 2024 to survey or do an inventory of our public and private systems.

We know that there are no lead service lines that exist in the city system and basically these service lines are the lines from the

Water Main in the street to the meter and then but what we don't know and then the private takes up after the meter to the household and we know of the 30 they're about 35 percent that we know that have been surveyed the private system and no lead's been found but we need some help from the community and we have a lead service line inventory survey that's been created and

and a video that people can look and figure out what material they've got on the private side of their system.

And this can be found on the city's website or you can contact someone in utilities to help you figure out what your material is of your system.

But this further, I bring this up because it's some

It's input we need from the public, but it's also we take the water quality very seriously.

We also don't anticipate just based on looking at both sides of the meter.

We don't anticipate any lead in our system.

Prior to 2008, there was very little replacement or rehab of water, wastewater, and stormwater systems.

So we put in place an aggressive capital improvement program to address the aging infrastructure and also the deficiencies in the city system.

Just to go over what we've accomplished since 2008 with regards to water lines, we've replaced almost 23 miles of water line which constitutes about 12.8% of the water system and we've spent $30.6 million of total construction cost.

In the wastewater system we've replaced or rehabilitated 65 miles of the system or 38% and we've spent about $33.6 million.

For the stormwater, we've replaced or rehabilitated 14.7 miles, or 11.3% of the system, and we've spent $11.8 million.

I also want to highlight a little bit about Rivanna's five-year capital improvement program and then go over some financial forecasts that we do with Rivanna every year.

I want to note and just kind of highlight the three largest pipeline projects that Rivanna has in their future five-year CIP.

The first one is the South Rivanna Reservoir to the Ragged Mountain Reservoir pipeline.

and this project has been except they've accelerated the completion by 2030 rather than the previous 2033 timeframe.

And this project's really needed because it transfers untreated water from the South Ravenna Reservoir to the Ragged Mountain Reservoir and back and it can have that flexibility transfer back and forth between the reservoirs and it will enhance the capacity, reliability and resiliency of the community's water system.

And we decided to really

accelerate the completion of this project because you never know with climate change occurring and we certainly don't want to experience what we had back in 2002 with the large drought we experienced back then because you know we just so that was one reason we decided to accelerate that project by three years.

The total cost for that project is $80 million.

It's estimated to be right now.

And the city's responsibility is 20% of that project based on agreements that are in place.

Another project that Rivanna is undertaking in the five year CIP is the Ragged Mountain Reservoir to Observatory

Water Treatment Plant Pipeline and Pump Station Project, and this replaces pipes and pumps that convey untreated water from the Ragged Mountain Reservoir to the Observatory Water Treatment Plant.

Facilities that are in place have reached the end of their useful life.

They're about over 100 years old.

The project's estimated to be $44 million, and the city's responsibility is about 48%.

Another project that the city

will see undertaken soon in 2024 is the central water line project.

This is a project that Rivanna and the city have communicated to neighborhoods that may be affected over the last year.

It entails five miles of 24 inch and 30 inch water line to connect observatory water treatment plant to Longstreet.

So this is conveying treated water from the plant.

into the system and there will be interconnections along the way.

It improves hydraulic connectivity and efficiency of the urban water system.

It's estimated right now at 41 million and the city's portion is 48 percent.

Now I know there's been a lot of communication in the community about how large the Rivanna CIP is right now.

and if you look at the total dollars of the Rivanna CIP the city's responsibility is about a third and then Rivanna's other customer which is Almer County Service Authority their responsibility is about two thirds if you look at total dollars of their capital improvement program.

And I might want to add that city staff is involved with Ravana as they're developing their capital improvement program and their operating budget.

And we have multiple meetings.

Chris Cullen and I are involved in those meetings that occur over several months.

They usually start in January and we finish them up in March right before Ravana presents their budgets to their board.

and we like to look at forecasts when we look at this and look at the increases so I just wanted to convey Rivanna increases and what they're proposed for the city customers over the next five years and then we actually put those dollars into the city's rate model

and then we can forecast what our increases will be over our rates over the next five years.

So this just gives you a little perspective on how we coordinate with Rivanna and staff's input to them.

Also want to go over our customer satisfaction survey.

We do this customer satisfaction survey every year.

Usually takes place in February.

And the numbers from this year are very positive.

People think their water service is very reliable and their sewer service is reliable.

About 99% are satisfied or neutral.

And then we also have people rate the value they pay for their water service.

and 97% rated as excellent good or fair for water and for sewer it's 94%.

Also want to review the natural gas utility system.

We serve 21,300 customers of which these are city customers as well as we also serve the growth areas of Albemarle County.

We maintained 343 miles of gas main, 303 miles of gas service lines, 32 regulator stations, and last year we completed almost 1,100 work orders.

are unlike our the water wastewater and stormwater systems the natural gas system is fairly new we've actually replaced most of it in the last 20 years so it's new we do have a small section of cast iron legacy pipe that's located in the West Main Street corridor that we were that legacy cast iron pipe is it's the only cast iron pipe in our system it can be prone to leakage

and we were fortunate to receive a grant from the federal government to replace that system of $7.1 million and as you guys know we were notified in April.

So we're going to get started on design of that project and hopefully construction in the next year or so.

We recognize we operate a fossil fuel utility.

but we are taking an environmental stewardship approach by reducing the carbon emissions through energy efficiency programs like rebates and free home weatherization that we make available to income qualified households.

We coordinate this free home weatherization program with LEAP and so far in the last few years we've actually served 120 homes in our region.

We also

have a carbon capture program and this is where we sponsor an energy saving tree program that we coordinate in partnership with the Arbor Day program.

This is a very popular program.

We give about 250 trees away every year and people can strategically place them in their yards so they get the most bang for their buck in the households in reducing their energy.

We also through our supplier offset carbon

by buying carbon offsets that offset 25% of our natural gas emissions.

And I want to point out the carbon emissions related to the natural gas utility.

This is input that we got from the environmental group with the city.

And this is the baseline of the carbon emissions in 2011.

And then they just released their numbers for 2021.

As you can see, we have a

Greenhouse gas reduction due to these programs about 35%.

And that's really due to the energy efficiency.

And then if you take in addition to the 25%, it'll be these greenhouse gas reductions are about 51%.

So as you can see, we're on target to meet Council's goals of 45% reduction through the Climate Action Plan by 2030.

and carbon neutrality by 2050.

I will add of these totals, and you look at the total carbon emissions by the city, natural gas constitutes about 20% of the total emissions the city generates.

And then we also want to look at the future of our natural gas utility.

So we've hired an outside consultant to conduct a decarbonization study.

And this consultant will do a legal review of discontinuing natural gas distribution operations and new connections.

Now this is, you know, in the future.

And they'll also evaluate multiple pipelines, which is pathways, excuse me, which is looking at our fee structures, energy efficiency operations of our utilities,

electrification, look at carbon offsets, renewable natural gas, certified natural gas, and hydrogen as alternatives.

They'll look at the emission impact and also with consideration to our rate payers and look at equity.

Just to go over the timeline, we did a kickoff presentation to Council where we kicked off our study in March of 2023.

and we anticipate we'll be coming back to you with an update on our study about at the halfway point in October 2023 with the final report early next year in February 2023 2024 excuse me.

and looking at the customer satisfaction survey with regards to reliability of our natural gas service people are 100% satisfied and neutral and the value they place for their natural gas service is about 96% excellent, good and fair and we also ask the question how important is it to have gas available to their home and 92% are extremely very somewhat important.

I will point out as part of our customer satisfaction survey and we you know we try to take the input we get very seriously to put in programs for the future and a few years ago people really wanted paperless billing and other ways to pay their bill online and more convenience so in October 2021 that we launched a new bill pay portal that offered paperless billing pay by text and enhanced automatic payment options and more than 9,600 customers have already signed up

for paperless billing and over 4,000 customers have registered for auto pay.

Thank you, Lauren.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of Council.

I'm Chris Cullinan, the City's Director of Finance.

and so in addition to being the city service which impacts the highest number of persons who live here, work here and visit the utilities are also a significant part of the city's finances.

When you combine the four utilities together the total budget is about 65 million dollars which is exceeded only by the general fund and the capital fund so hence for those reasons we'd like to spend some time with you

a little more in-depth than maybe the average work session or topic this evening than we normally might because of the significance of both the operational impact on the quality of life as well as the city's finances.

I want to mention this briefly but I'll just touch upon it again.

The utilities operate on an enterprise fund basis.

That means they support themselves and they're structured on a break-even basis.

and so as we look at the average the impact on the average customer heading into July 1st into the new fiscal year to support the items that Lauren just mentioned in terms of operations and infrastructure for the average city customer which we're showing here is roughly 87 percent of city residents receive these four utilities in some way shape or form for the average customer

who uses the average amount of water, generates the average amount of wastewater, uses the average monthly amount of natural gas, has an average lot size.

We are looking at a monthly increase of slightly less than $10.00.

You see that 942 listed there as the change for all four utilities.

and you see up above the relative contribution to each one of those to that total by each of these utilities.

You'll note the stormwater fee we are recommending to stay flat.

We're going to take a little deeper dive into that next year to check.

It's been in place for roughly nine years.

It'll be the 10 year anniversary next year, which is an appropriate milestone to reevaluate the overall stormwater utility and its revenues or its finances, I should say.

And so you see the relative contributions there.

We'll take a little deeper dive into each one of these as we go forward.

But again, for the average customer, we are projecting an increase in their utility bills of a little less than $10 per month beginning July 1st.

And so for each one of the utilities for water, the budget projected for next year is about just shy of $17 million, which is about a $1.8 million increase over the current year.

That increase is attributable to both our costs from Ivana, but also for the city as well, as you're very well aware.

Our employees have received some very large cost of living increases.

We have a 6% one plan for July 1st.

Our colleagues at Rivanna have done things like that as well.

Also, the materials, the services, the sort of things that Lauren and her folks buy have experienced supply chain issues.

They're in high demand.

There's a lot of infrastructure dollars out there chasing a scarce supply both on the public side and the private side as well.

So we've seen those costs increase.

And so as you look at these dollar bills and we put these two together because Rivanna is the primary driver for both of these on the water side, you see roughly 50% of that budget goes to the city share of Rivanna's operations and capital expenses.

$0.28 is for Lauren's staff for the Water Division of the Public Utilities Department.

And then we have debt associated with the city's investments that we've made in our distribution system.

And then that last sliver is for customer service and billing.

On the wastewater side, again, the Rivanna piece is the biggest.

It's slightly bigger on a percentage basis than on the water side.

and then again you see those other slices there.

Interestingly enough, while both of these budgets have gone up from last year, this very same graphic a year ago that looked exactly the same.

So while costs have gone up, the structure of those costs hasn't changed much.

We've seen those cost increases kind of across the board and really hasn't changed sort of the makeup of the water and sewer finances.

On the stormwater side, again we're not proposing any significant changes to this.

The budget is the same as it is this year and thusly the rates are remaining the same as well.

Here roughly 44% goes to capital improvement projects.

These are cash funded projects.

Roughly the other, you know, 52 cents goes towards operations, both for salaries and benefits for those staff, but also for some of the operational costs as well.

And we do, we have issues, some debt related to stormwater, so there's a small piece there on the end representing their share of the debt service for their, for the bonds we've issued for their projects.

For gas rates, the overall budget $27.8 million is the largest of the four.

That budget is slightly lower than it was last year and that's primarily due to the cost of gas.

If you look at the dollar bill from a year ago, that $0.37 slice was actually $0.45.

The price of gas, if you've been

Checking your gas bill or following the news, that price has whipsawed back and forth quite a bit over the last 12 to 18 months, primarily due to the war in Ukraine, the sort of weaponization of natural gas in Europe vis-a-vis Russia.

Those things have an impact here because we're all chasing the same – we're in the same markets, we're buying the same gas.

and so that price has changed quite a bit and recently we've seen that come down to some degree and so that's driving that sliver is a little bit smaller than it was a year ago.

But the other slivers have increased in terms of city operations, the payment of taxes, customer service and billing and then that little piece on the end is again we do cash finance the gas utility improvements.

The gas utility has no debt right now.

As Lauren mentioned the system is relatively new

and we've repaid all the debt associated with that so it actually is debt free at the moment.

And so when we think about your utility bill, there are really two pieces on the bill.

One is a monthly service charge, which is based on the water.

For water and sewer, it's based on the size of the water meter.

And for gas, it's a flat $10 per customer.

And then the volumetric piece, based on how much you actually consume of water, how much wastewater you generate, how much natural gas.

So for the volumetric piece of the bill, based on how much you use, you see the various changes to those rates here.

as well as the percentage increase and again noted below there no change to the stormwater fee.

For the monthly service charge,

For 95% of our customers who have a 5 eighths inch water meter, that's the size that typically serves a residential customer, it's currently $5.50 for water, $5.50 for wastewater per month.

We're proposing a dollar increase to each of those, overall a $2 increase.

And then as the meters get larger, there's a proportionality based on the size and the demand for that meter that drives the rest of those.

But again, 95% of folks, it's a $2

per month increase for the monthly service charge.

And as I touched on there, no changes being proposed for the natural gas monthly service charge.

That concludes the sort of the slide, you know, the comments on the slide.

But one thing that was asked to address were our assistance programs.

As you're aware, over the last three years, we've received a remarkable amount of money for utility bill assistance, especially with water and sewer.

We've received funds from CARES, the American Rescue Plan, also LIWAP, the Low Income Water Assistance Program.

All total, it's about $640,000, which is going out to our customers to help them with their bills during COVID.

Also, the Pathways Fund has been utilized for that as well.

We don't have quite a good handle on the exact number because it's a little bit of a pass-through, but we do know for a fact

that we've directed folks to Pathways and that we've received money back to help them pay their utility bills and obviously City Council has made an investment in that in the new year as well and then because of that we've had these opportunities to spend other assistance dollars we haven't had to use our own and so we've actually been building up a fairly large assistance

Gary over from previous fiscal years as well.

We currently have about $200,000 in the water, wastewater, and gas assistance funds as well.

For that reason, we don't have any new money programmed into next year's budget because we want to spend that money down first, not just keep adding it on to the rate base.

And then I've also been in contact with the Commonwealth to find out are there some additional

There's additional money coming and I haven't heard anything yet, but obviously we will jump on those opportunities should they present themselves.

But we will continue to monitor how we're using up those available assistance funds and then possibly back to you next year putting those monies back in going forward.

That concludes our presentation.

As Lauren mentioned, this is a public hearing so we can either take questions now or if you'd like to wait until afterwards.

The one that we have active right now is the Low Income Water Assistance Program.

That's actually being administered by the Commonwealth Department of Social Services and it is a means-based criteria which we in utility billing don't do.

So instead we're referencing folks and referring them to LIWAP and they walk them through that process.

And to the extent that they need information from the city about

Correct.

I could go back and find those numbers.

But I do know, for example, with the Low Income Water Assistance Program, I believe it's slightly over 100 customers that we've helped with that.

And I think it's been about $70,000 that we've received.

So it's been significant.

And again, this is sort of an unprecedented amount that we've received from the federal government through CARES, ARPA, and now LIWAP that we've

There is.

It's on our website.

We can direct folks to it.

All right.

Thank you.

The question I have is obviously if you're looking at cost of living in our area, this is not the major contributor in terms of

the rise of cost of living the past couple of years.

But still, the past three, four years, you're talking about a couple hundred dollars, I believe, in terms of an increase in your annual bill, which can be pretty significant for some folks.

You've talked about the inflation side of it with the natural gas supply access issues.

I think I would start off by first acknowledging that we're asking folks to pay more for their utilities.

Absolutely.

It's, you know, $10 per month increase for some folks.

That's not very much.

For others, it is.

And I certainly appreciate that.

And I know city staff does.

I know you do as well.

I think I would

Before answering your question directly, I think what we always think about is the value proposition.

What are you getting for what you pay for?

And we want to make sure that, yes, we're asking folks to pay more for the utility services, but we would argue, and I think the survey results that Lauren referenced bear that out, that people see the value in that of having that safe, reliable service 24-7, 365.

And so back to your question about what's driving these increases, you know, every year we set the, you know, we do projection of rates, you saw that for water and sewer, and that's based on the best information that we have available from Rivanna, also looking at the city's sort of historical costs as well, and those have been going up.

I think one of the interesting things with Rivanna is that if you look at their, you know, I think there's more of an emphasis coming up on the water side of things.

And so you see some of those large CIP projects related to water pipelines, water safety, security, reliability, some of those sorts of things.

I think if you looked at it ten years ago, it was a little bit the other way.

It was more on the wastewater side, some of the improvements they were making at Moores Creek, some of those sorts of things.

And so again, those get evaluated every year, but there are some ebbs and flows with that.

On the gas side, the cost of gas is a big one, but one thing that we do is, as I

first stated we operate these on a not break-even proposition.

But the cost of gas, you know, it's a commodity that's traded every day.

The price goes up and down.

We buy it on a monthly basis.

And so we do adjust the gas rate on a monthly basis using the PGA or the Purchase Gas Adjustment.

You'll see that on your gas bill.

And the idea is simply if the price of gas goes up,

The PGA goes up.

If the price of gas goes down, the PGA goes down.

So we do account for that on a month-over-month basis, which makes the gas rates a little unique compared to water, sewer, storm, which don't change over the course of the year.

But the base operations, you know, the cost of Lauren's folks for their salaries, their benefits, all of the supplies that they do, they're a city department, and so they're subject to the same

the sort of cost of living adjustments that council approves the benefits changes those sorts of things and as I mentioned they also purchased some very unique things that you know frankly folks have monopolies on and so whatever it costs to buy a water meter we're gonna pay it whatever it costs for some of the line material from some of the construction costs or unique engineering services we pay that and so you know we do you know

Oftentimes, you know, Lauren talked a little bit about, you know, since 2008, how much water line they replaced, how much wastewater, those sorts of things.

And I know a few of you and I know members of the community ask the question, well, when are you going to be finished?

We're not.

We have 180 miles roughly of water and sewer pipe.

That's here to Virginia Beach and back.

We have 300 – am I going to get this right?

343 miles of gas lines.

I often say that infrastructure is a marathon, not a sprint.

when it comes to utility infrastructure it's really a marathon you're constantly in that renewal rehabilitation replacement cycle and so we're actually it may not feel that way looking at some of those numbers that were very far ahead compared to some other communities but I can assure you we are we're much further along than some places who have been making no investments over the last 30 or 40 years and now suddenly are having to undertake this so

So all that being said, again, I think we're always very cognizant that we are a monopoly.

You know, folks don't have a lot of choice when it comes to water, sewer, wastewater, stormwater being provided, but we don't want to operate or act that way.

So, Chris, I have a question.

Yes, ma'am.

How are you?

Thank you both to you and Lauren for your presentation to council members.

Since I've met with you, I've been thinking about the $10 rate increase.

As Michael says, for some people it's negligible, for others it's a lot.

Do you and Lauren feel that the monies you have

for low income assistance or others in our community that receive the services who cannot afford the $10 increase.

My answer to that would be yes.

And I would offer a couple of thoughts on that.

Firstly, we have been, you know, during the height of the pandemic, we did receive this influx of outside assistance.

And so I think we were able to help get folks caught up

and make those the amounts that were in arrears a little more manageable to the extent that they're they're manageable our utility billing staff will work with folks to come up with a affordable and a sustainable

Payment Plan, and I emphasize the word sustainable because it certainly doesn't do us any good to put somebody on a payment plan that in the next month they're not going to be able to afford.

We're going to be right back to where we were.

So those folks, you know, will work with people to get them onto a payment plan that works for them.

I'll just take a moment to say, but folks need to reach out to us.

The utility bill is not going to go away, we're not going to forget about it, and chances are you're continuing to use the utility, so it's just piling up.

I know that is stressful for folks, but our customer service folks are very understanding, very empathetic, and will certainly work with folks to

to get them to a place where they can meet those payments.

The other piece I would just also remind folks is so they're really, you know, the other part of your water or utility bill is how much do you use?

And so it's in not only the best interest of the environment to conserve those resources and to make sure that your toilets aren't leaking, that your

that you're not taking 25-minute showers, those sorts of things, that you've got the most energy-efficient appliances, those sorts of things.

It's not just good for resource conservation, it's also good for your checkbook.

And so folks still have a good amount of control over their bill.

As I mentioned, the two big pieces are the monthly service charge, which is fixed,

But then that volumetric piece accounts for like 85% of the bill.

So you still have a lot of control in terms of your usage to impact your final bill.

And we talked a little bit about it's in the, you know, we talked about it with you during our briefings.

It's also in the rate report about all the rebate programs, thermostats, tankless water heaters, you know, insulation, all of those things, again, help folks with managing those utility costs to the greatest extent that they can.

I believe it is, but I will double check.

I do know we have it on the website that's on there, but I will double check to see where it shows up on the bill.

I will say having myself recently moved to the paperless option, I don't scrutinize it quite as

And the only other question is more tangential to the rates themselves, but I know in your report you did mention some of the climate initiatives on behalf of the utility.

Out of curiosity, do you know if the natural gas utility at this point is working on anything to, one, in bills or other avenues get information to customers?

So we don't

I currently have anything that's advertised now, but it's certainly something we're going to look at as part of the decarbonization study, because that's one of the pathways we're going to look at, just the future of the natural gas utility.

Anything else?

So we haven't done the public hearing part, right?

Okay, so if there are no other questions from Council, we'll open the public hearing.

Mr. Bill Hunt, are we ready?

First of all, is there anybody in the room here who would like to address Council on this matter?

All right.