City Council Meeting   9/8/2020

I move this council certified by 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 of Information Act and identified in the motion convening the closed session were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed session.

Second.

Ms.

Thomas?

Ms.

Walker?

Yes.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

Hill?

Yes.

All right.

And so we go right into our talk about the meeting, council meeting for September 8th, 2020 to order.

And we'll have a moment of silence.

All right.

Thank you all.

And Ms.

Thomas, would you do the roll call, please?

Ms.

Walker.

Here.

Ms.

Hill.

Thank you.

All right.

Ms.

Thomas.

Ms.

Walker.

Yes.

Ms.

Magill.

Yes.

Ms.

And next we have announcements.

And we'll start with Dr. Bonds.

Mr. Willers, Dr. Bonds on.

Oh, I see her.

Hi.

How are you?

Can I share my screen?

All right, so you all should be a PowerPoint slide, I hope.

I thought I'd walk through a few things.

Please feel free to interrupt me and ask any questions just to give you an overview and some of the new ways that we're looking at data to get an idea of what's happening in our community.

So this is our standard dashboard that you see here.

We have 13 cases in the district today for a total of just under 2,700

with 174 individuals having been hospitalized and 57 unfortunate fatalities.

Charlottesville, if you look at that bottom square, the orange line is just under 800 cases total with 27 hospitalizations and 23 fatalities.

So when we look at cases, hospitalizations, and fatalities by race, ethnicity, and gender, and then by the various age groups, again, we see that blacks or African-Americans are overrepresented as are Hispanics and Latino when considering the proportion of those populations in our district.

And I put over on the side the percentage of the various groups in our

District, so those are district levels, not locality level.

And you can see that that overrepresentation or that adverse impact on Blacks or African Americans and the Hispanic or Latino is seen in both cases, hospitalizations, and in fatalities, so pretty much across the board.

I would point, since school starts,

today, I think actually for Charlottesville or certainly this week, that while we have had some cases in the 0 to 9 and 10 to 19-year-old age group, we've actually had a relatively small number.

We're seeing more individuals in the older age groups that are impacted by cases.

And we've had very few hospitalizations in those younger age groups and no fatalities at all.

I will just also add that we have not had any of the complications, the multi-system inflammatory condition that we sometimes see.

There's been eight cases in children in Virginia, none here in our district.

And we continue to do testing.

This is the data or the information off of our website, and I've put the link at the bottom so that people know where to go.

UVA has partnered with us, and they will offer testing every Monday and Tuesday in Charlottesville.

Mondays is at the Church of Incarnation, and Tuesdays is at Mount Zion First African Baptist Church, and you see the addresses there.

Those are walk up or drive up, either one, so you don't need to make an appointment for either of those two.

The testing events that are hosted by the Health Department are listed below that.

We are in Albemarle on September 9th, Green September 10th, Fluvanna on September 15th, Albemarle September 18th, Louisa September 21st, and Albemarle again September 28th.

You do need to register for those.

Registration is two days before the

Thank you for joining us.

I wanted to give you just an indication of the complaints that are being registered.

We have a number of people who call our hotline to register complaints and we report those to the state.

Individuals can also go directly to the state and register those complaints.

So these are constituent complaints by week starting from mid-June up until the most recent data, which includes last week.

This is for the whole district.

I have some information for locality, and they have started just this week to break it out for us.

So going forward, I can give you the number of complaints specific to Charlottesville.

And you can see we saw a real surge around the mid-July area, and it's gradually begun to taper off.

When you look at the type of complaints, they are primarily either customers or employees not wearing masks.

or not doing appropriate social distancing.

I would say just anecdotally, we've seen a lot better compliance with people wearing masks and adopting 100% mask wearing.

And I think people generally are pretty good about trying to keep that buffer of six feet between individuals.

So overall, we continue to see complaints, but the numbers continue to taper off every week.

So now I wanted to just, this is a data that's off of the VDH website.

And I wanted to just walk you through sort of a timeline to give you an indication of another way of thinking about this pandemic and the impact on the community.

So everyone needs to think back to when we had our first case in Charlottesville, and that was oh so long ago, March 17th of 2020.

And I've shown here and got it marked out.

where that first one was.

And if you then look at when we hit 200 cases, and I've chosen 200 because we're just about the 800 mark and that allows us to look at doubling.

That took 15 weeks for Charlottesville to have 200 cases down.

We did have limited testing at the beginning, and so that probably contributed to the length of time that it took to get there.

really a very slow and gradual and if you look at that curve that we've got marked out there here along this area you can see it's a fairly flat gradual increase and then we saw a pretty steep increase after that so we went from

June 27th, when we hit 200 cases.

And that is right before phase three was entered by the state.

And then it took us just a brief five weeks to double that, to go from 200 to 400 cases.

So really, and you can see that in the curve.

It was a really rapid incline in the number of cases.

This is right about the time that both the city and Albemarle County were discussing the ordinance that was put into effect in August one.

And here we can see sort of the impact of what's happened at this point.

We've actually begun to see a flattening, quite a bit of flattening right in this area here with a little bit more gradual increase.

So it took seven weeks to double from 400 to 800 at that point in time.

So here we are back in March and here we are in September with our nearly 800 cases at that point.

So I think just looking at the slope of this, looking at the shape of this curve can be really helpful to get kind of an indication of how the disease is progressing in our community.

We're unfortunately again on kind of a pretty steep uptick right now and we can talk about what might be the causes of that in just a minute.

So another new dashboard that the state has put out is one that we affectionately call the pandemic metric dashboard.

It is not a public dashboard, but we are taking screenshots of it every week and sharing it with all of the county administrators who are free to share it with you all as well.

This is a picture of the state, so this is sort of the landing page, and this is updated on a weekly basis, so it says the week ending 9-5, so it was updated yesterday for us.

We're here in the northwest region.

And you can see they use a color coding for minimal transmission.

Nowhere in the state is it minimal.

Low, moderate, and high.

So we're in the moderate transmission area.

And then there's a metric, and it's really probably easier if I send you the notes about this, but essentially it's a sum to determine over a period of time whether we're increasing, fluctuating, or decreasing.

And right now the Northwest is fluctuating.

So here is what's happening across the state.

The central has a very high burden right now, as does the far southwest and the near southwest.

Eastern was most recently a very high burden.

They've actually decreased down to a more moderate burden.

Northern Virginia is actually at a low burden right now with low community transmission.

And then, as I said, we in the northwest are at moderate burden with moderate community transmission with a fluctuating trend.

So this is available every week and as I said we do try and share it out with all of the localities every week to give you an idea of what's happening across the state and in the northwest region.

It is based on a whole series of indicators I'm going to show you.

Thank you so much.

here are the measures, the individual metrics that they look at.

So the first one is cases, and this is the case incident rate per 100,000.

So again, this is for the whole region, which is, again, greater than our locality at this point in time.

To give you some indication, that's all the way up to the top of the state, over, so it includes Harrisonburg, Williamsboro, all the way east to Fredericksburg is included in that northwest area.

So our case number has been rising for the region.

And we're at 12 per 100,000 incident rate here.

And that's been increasing.

So we see an upward arrow.

And it's been increasing for 17 days.

The PCR positivity, so this is the test positivity, has actually been fairly flat and under that 10% mark that we like to see.

There's been a slight increase here.

It's really a pretty gradual one and generally I think it looks more flat than anything.

They look at the number of outbreaks.

Our outbreaks have actually been low for the last 22 days and when they looked at this last week we're reporting zero outbreaks per 100,000 individuals right now.

So a very low number of outbreaks.

And then it looks at the percent of cases among health care workers.

This is important because if we have a high percentage of health care workers that are impacted and forced to isolate because they're infected, that's going to leave fewer individuals to staff our hospitals and could lead to a health care crisis.

So we have 3.5% of the individuals, we ask when we interview them with cases, self-declares health care workers.

And you can see that it's generally been a downward trend for the last 20 days.

ED visit rates per 100,000, generally bouncing around in between this 4 and 6%, so fluctuating visit.

And this is an indication of people who may be tested positive, so the number of people coming in with symptoms for COVID.

We look at ICU hospitalizations for COVID.

And again, it's been fluctuating and well below the target number of 3.5, 400,000.

So right now we're at two.

And again, this is for all the hospitals in the region.

So it's not just the two hospitals local to us, but it would include Augusta Health and Culpeper and Sentara in Harrisonburg and Mary Washington Hospital and probably others that I'm forgetting.

and then finally looking at the percentage of hospital beds that are currently occupied.

And we're at about 80% right now.

And hospitals, you know, they don't want a ton of empty beds.

And so the flag really is quite high at 90%.

And again, that's been fluctuating for the past few days.

So those are all the metrics that go into the Northwest region.

And then the final thing that they also provide in this metric dashboard is a

Shorter synopsis by locality.

And that I can break it down into what's happening in Charlottesville.

So here is the Charlottesville pandemic metric page as of yesterday.

And we've given you three different dates with some cumulative cases, the rolling sum, and the percent positivity.

And so in red will be August 24.

In blue would be August 31st and then in green would be yesterday's.

And so the case incident rate for the Charlottesville area as of yesterday was 32 per 100,000.

so right up here in the screen.

You can see we had a dramatic steep increase between August 24th and today, yesterday, with a substantial number of cases of, if you look at these seven-day rolling sums, we went from 29 to 92 to 108, with a pretty big increase in positivity.

We did get a large number of UVA students that tested positive during that time.

And I think that really drove the numbers that you're seeing here.

I want to say more about UVA students here in just a few minutes.

And then here is the PCR positivity.

So you can see we bounced around all over the place.

Had some times where we were up above 10 early on, but generally more recently have been either below or trending down.

But again, we're seeing this bounce up right around the end of August, beginning to come down now over this last week.

No outbreaks reported in Charlottesville right now and the number of healthcare workers is 6%, almost 7%.

Now you'll notice there's nothing about the hospitals on this page and that's really because first, many localities don't have a hospital in their locality.

We're very fortunate that we have two large medical groups, medical centers here.

and the second is they really are a regional asset.

If you think about individuals that might need to be hospitalized in Madison or Green or Nelson, they're gonna come to the Charlottesville area likely and be hospitalized in one of our two facilities here.

So they don't list those hospital indicators at the locality level, it's just these four.

So cases, percent positivity, outbreaks and healthcare workers.

And again, we take screenshots and we try and share these with the county or city administrators every week on Monday or Tuesday so that you have the information that we have going forward.

So let me just give you a little bit of a comparison.

We've given you the Harrisonburg, we're all familiar with what's happening at JMU.

We selected this because, again, it's kind of a comparable city with a large university.

To a greater degree than what we see here in Charlottesville, they had a very large uptick at about the time the students returned to school with a huge increase in their percent positivity.

And that's in fact led, contributed to the decision to go all online, at least for the next month or so at JMU.

UVA has a COVID tracker.

I'm sorry, I should have put the web link on here, but if you just type in UVA COVID tracker into your search engine, you can come up here and they will give you the total number of cases and then the number of cases for UVA students, as well as the percentage of their quarantine and isolation room that are occupied.

And they did pre-testing for students before they arrived on campus.

So how many of those were positive?

So today UVA has a total of 231 that they are aware of, and I'll explain that here in just a second, and 190 students.

So these are students that would have been tested at their student health.

or were tested somewhere else but allowed us to share their information with UVA so that they could be added into this case count.

We do ask all the students so that we can share information with UVA so that they have the best information possible, but if they don't give us permission, then their information is not shared.

It's a voluntary sharing of data.

UVA has done an MOU with the state of Virginia and is picking up the cost for seven individuals devoted primarily to UVA, but we do use them for other cases and contact investigation.

There's five case investigators and two contact tracers.

That's really helpful because it allows those individuals to really understand all the dynamics of the students and other workers and faculty at UVA and also know who to contact if a student needs a particular resource.

doing still some hiring with those, and we hope to have them all on board.

But we have transferred a couple of our case investigators who were already pretty familiar with UVA to work on those cases.

So UVA is aware of the impact that they're having in the community and has taken steps to try and at least support our efforts in that area.

The other bit that I want to say about the students is I did ask our case investigators today

and I talked with the epi that's in charge of all of the UVA COVID work.

And Kate explained to me that what they're really seeing is students infecting other students rather than students infecting people in the community and vice versa.

So we tend to have community members that we can trace back to a known source in the community.

Someone at their work site, a family member.

They attended some community event that we have an outbreak in.

And we have students that we can typically trace their infection back to another student group.

They were roommates with someone who also tested positive.

They were quarantined as a group.

And that got them, someone in the quarantine group got positive.

in turn infected everyone else.

So we're not seeing a lot of mixing between the groups, which I think is good.

I mean, that should provide some reassurance to the community as well.

But we are definitely seeing higher numbers in our community because then the students are contributing to that.

And then

That might be my last slide.

That is my last slide.

So my first thought was just the last comment.

I'm very concerned about the individuals who work in capacities that will serve the students in some way, because they are not able to separate

It's a good point and I think many of us probably saw the cafeteria pictures of all of the new students that are on campus and waiting in line to get food.

And right now of the 231 total positive cases that we're aware of that are

that have said that they are affiliated with UVA or were tested by UVA, most of those are student cases.

190 of the 231 are student cases.

There is certainly a risk associated with individuals who work

who either teach at the university, although I will say most of the classes are online, which is gonna limit faculty interaction.

But there are very large number of community members that provide supportive services for the university in some fashion.

And my next question was the number of hospital beds at this point that's being used.

That's rather high to be at this state.

And so what's the concern?

So I would say that we do look at hospital beds on a regular basis.

And right now, there is

There's not an overwhelming number of people who are hospitalized for COVID.

So although it's 80% capacity, this is total number of hospital beds for any reason.

So some of these people are going to be post-op from a hip replacement and need to be in the hospital, or because they had a heart attack, or whatever.

Right now, if I can get it to open, it, oh, I'm wrong on this, not the right one.

It looks like they got roughly between the two hospitals.

I would say that there's somewhere between 20 to 30 individuals hospitalized for COVID in the last few weeks.

Yes, an individual who is hospitalized for COVID can be in the hospital for quite a long period of time.

We do know that if you end up needing a ventilator, it's not a one or two day requirement.

It's more like a week to 10 days requirement.

But we have a lot of ventilators between our two hospitals, just under 300, and right now we have probably 200 of those, it looks like, from the BHOS data sheet available.

So I would say there's capacity, and that doesn't include surge capacity.

Hospitals also looked at additional spaces that they could turn into hospital rooms.

And so I don't think that that's a concern right now.

I did not show it, but there is on the UVA COVID tracker

It's an indicator about the hospital beds.

Let me just see if I can bring that up real quick.

So right now on their COVID tracker, they give a number of new hospitalization cases on any particular day and they had none yesterday.

Sorry, none today.

They had two new hospitalizations yesterday, four on the sixth, and these are COVID-related hospitalizations.

I was just curious to get some clarification.

When you say that UVA students, and obviously they have the option

to share certain information, but their cases are still being tracked.

It's the information that's not necessarily clear as whether or not they're a student or not.

That's what's optional.

We investigate every single case.

And in fact, I have yet another dashboard that I could show you about how quickly we can, we investigate those cases.

Generally, somewhere between 90 and 95% of our cases are contactless.

on the day that we get their information.

Now, that could be a day or two lag from the time they got tested.

Someone gets tested, it has to go to whatever lab it's doing, it has to sit in the queue to get run, and then those results have to be uploaded to the state.

And so if it's a UVA, for example, they have a really fast turnaround, sometimes under a day, and we will often get a positive case the very next day.

If it's a commercial lab, it's been pretty variable.

Right now it's not too bad.

For a while it was taking 14 days, which is a really unacceptable time length.

But every case gets asked the same questions.

If as part of that investigation, the individual says they are UVA students, then we have a standard consent that we read asking if we may share limited information with the university.

And if they say yes, then we provide that information.

You're all welcome and I'm going to give back the screen or maybe I did already.

Please reach out if you have any individual questions.

I did have one other question about the

the schools opening.

And even though they're not in session, there are some children that are in pretty closed session areas together.

And so are you all

Right, so we have a group that meets every week and we've been very involved in all of the schools in the district, reviewing their plans, helping them come up with template letters, helping them make decisions about how they're going to manage the students that are in.

And that group continues to meet.

Pediatricians from the area also contribute to provide their expertise about how the disease impacts children.

Ryan McKay meets with them as well as Kenneth Gordon who's our new district epi for the area.

So we try and provide as much input and guidance as we can at this point in time.

I think in the district we have seen a couple of school districts do some successful reopening with students attending

on a regular basis in the classroom.

I think one of the areas that really helps and again we're just getting more and more evidence and that's having all students and teachers at all times except when they're eating wear cloth based coverings or some sort of mask.

Students accept them really well.

We've had reports from the districts that have reopened with students in the classroom and there's really been zero issues associated with that at all.

I think everybody's just really accustomed to it and it's quite helpful.

So counselors, are there any other questions for Dr. Bonds?

OK.

Dr. Bonds, again, thank you.

And we appreciate and appreciate the work that you're doing at this time, and especially trying to keep the community safe and several communities safe during COVID.

So appreciate, and we'll see you next month.

And I'll work that out with you to come on to one of the October council meetings.

We'd be happy to.

And I just want to give a real shout out to all of the staff that work here at the district.

They have worked so hard.

It really would not be possible without them.

So really, it's not me.

It's all of the people who are working really long hours.

So thank you.

Be happy to come back next month.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And counselors, are there any other announcements?

I did want to remind the public that the next deadline for applications for our boards and commissions is on Friday, September 11th at 5 p.m.

And I do believe we had a request to announce from Mr. Alexander that it's the third annual CYM, Close Your Mouth and Listen Day, Monday, September 21st.

And the program will be on Comcast Channel 14.

from 5 to 5.30, as well as alex-zan.com.

And so all area citizens are encouraged to be still and quiet for one minute.

Take a moment to listen and think before you act.

Be mindful when speaking.

Choose words that are helpful, not harmful.

This day and beyond, allow people to share their thoughts and feelings without any interruption.

Respect individual differences and expressions and just CYM and listen.

For more information, you can email

All right.

Are there any other announcements?

And I just have one.

We do have the strategic plan update coming up, and there will be opportunities.

Mr. Willer created a

We had an online submission platform last week where you can submit emails.

I do.

And so you can submit just your ideas around what the goals and objectives that city council should consider when finalizing this document should be.

And so please, please participate.

and we'll also have an opportunity for you to speak at upcoming council meetings and there will also be opportunities to participate during the strategic planning session as we always have

public comments for the public to chime in.

So just be aware that that's coming.

There may be some changes coming up, but we'll announce those if that is the case.

But as of right now, the email address is set up for you to submit your thoughts and ideas and suggestions.

All right.

Are there any other announcements?

Any recognitions or proclamations?

And here I just want to say that

This past weekend, we did lose a community member, Mr. Byers, Bill Byers, who there's been a lot of individuals online talking about him.

But he worked for Parks and Rec.

And I remember, I mean, I think he taught everyone who is probably over 30 how anyone over that age

were two probably 50s, 60s how to swim in the area.

And I know when we were at Walker, I remember him pushing a canoe over with me in it.

So just a really great person that was one of those people who made everybody feel like they were the only person in the world just in that moment.

And you would go to the next person, they would feel the same way.

you would learn pretty quickly that while you were special so was everyone else.

So he was really great and so I'm hoping that you know just to give his family some love and light you know during this time and just want to make sure that Charlottesville that

You know, the community is mourning and grieving with the family.

And he was really great to a lot of us.

And he was still up until maybe two years ago working for Parks and Rec, too.

So it's not as if he really ever retired.

And so just to keep him and keep his family in your thoughts and prayers, I do just wanted to say that.

I move that counsel appoint to the Planning Commission Liz Russell.

I second.

All right.

Ms.

Ms.

Walker?

Yes.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

All right.

So that carries 5-0.

And next we have the consent agenda.

Ms.

Minutes.

July 20, closed in regular meetings.

July 27, special meeting.

August 3, closed in regular meetings.

August 4, listening session on policing.

Ordinance granting permanent and temporary easements to the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority for the installation of waterline facilities in Ragged Mountain Natural Area.

Second reading.

Ordinance granting an underground utility easement to Dominion Energy for the installation of electric power lines in the Ragged Mountain Natural Area.

Second reading.

Ordinance granting a drainage easement to the International School of Charlottesville Incorporated, second reading.

Appropriation of funds received for reimbursement for Crescent Hall's driveway repair, $18,483.73, second reading.

Appropriation, Charlottesville Albemarle Adult Drug Treatment Court Grant Award, $240,000, first of two readings.

All right, thank you.

I will, Mayor Walker, and I'll mention we have four people who've had their hand up since the beginning of the meeting.

I'm gonna lower everyone's hands right now and just

Start fresh.

So if you'd like to speak to counsel about an item on the consent agenda, click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

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

Each person will have up to three minutes.

And the first person to speak tonight is Mr. Jeff Fogel.

Go ahead.

You can hear me, I assume?

We can.

Yes.

I want to speak on item number seven, something I've spoken about before, which is the Charlottesville Albemarle Drug Court Treatment Program.

As you all know, this is a program that intends to divert people with drug addiction from the criminal justice system, people who've been engaged in nonviolent or allegedly nonviolent crimes, and give them assistance in correcting that problem of theirs.

However, it requires anybody who seeks that assistance to plead guilty.

I, at the last time I brought this up a year ago, I think the people from OAR were here and they were asked, well, is that a requirement of the Supreme Court that people have to plead guilty?

Of course, if you plead guilty, you don't get to try your case.

Even if you're innocent and you need help, you may plead guilty because you can't get help unless you plead guilty.

You cannot challenge an interrogation.

You cannot challenge a search because if you do, you are not

consistent with the program's effort which is to simply get you to plead guilty and to hold the threat thereafter of prison or jail time in order to get you to comply.

Now of course I don't believe as a matter of therapeutic value that we should be coercing people into drug treatment programs.

They need to want to change themselves.

And for people who do want to change themselves, we should not require them to give up their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendment rights in order to be able to get assistance, because if they don't get assistance in that way, there is little, if any, assistance available to them otherwise.

Now, I'm not suggesting at this point that you vote down this appropriation, which is a pass-through from the state.

But it's about time somebody stood up and said, listen, this is not unfair.

People should not have to plead guilty in order to get help.

And the question that I have always asked, for which I never get an answer, which is why is that a necessary component?

Prosecutors may love it because it takes those cases off the docket, and it makes life easy for them.

But I also know that the two prosecutors we have are devoted people.

And I have asked them and their staffs to reconsider this question and let us know why we have to plead guilty in order to get help.

And the answer has been we haven't had time to discuss that.

So I'm asking that this city council at least say something.

say something that it's unfair to require people to plead guilty in order to get help.

Yeah, thank you.

And I think I probably said the same thing a year ago, but as someone who was one of the clinicians for the drug court program for about five years, I agree that we should not make that mandatory.

and if there's anything that we can do, especially when we're talking about reform in this community, that's one of the easiest adjustments that we can make and give people a fair shot like we would anybody else.

Mayor Walker, we've got four additional hands raised.

Next up is

Reed Byam, who will be followed by Michael Kaplan, then Scott Karas.

Reed, you're on the city council and you've got three minutes.

Yes.

Go ahead.

I live at 1609 Center Avenue.

I'm concerned with the recent ordinance that would prohibit firearms on city property.

This ordinance would only be used as a modifier to already illegal acts such as brandishing a firearm, public endangerment, assault, etc.

Excuse me.

So that one is coming up.

OK.

I thought I was told otherwise that I could speak now.

The community matters section will be after the consent agenda.

I apologize, my bad.

No problem.

And again, for the next three people with their hands up, this is for the consent agenda.

Next up is Michael Kaplan.

I can hear you, but I too am speaking at the wrong time.

No problem, thank you.

And...

We have one additional person who's on via telephone.

So if your number ends in 0488, you've got the line.

Can you hear us?

You'll have to unmute your microphone.

And Mayor Walker, I'm not getting a response on that.

Line at the moment.

That's all the hands that are raised.

Oh, I have another hand.

Tanisha Hudson.

The hand just went down.

Now I think we're good.

Her hand is back up.

Band down.

So my guess is people are trying to get in line for the next part of the meeting.

I would like to just vote on item number two, the minutes separately.

And Mr. Blair, just some guidance.

The meeting on the 27th, the 3rd, and the 4th, I was not present.

for those, and so do we just do the 20th separately from the other three?

Mayor Walker, yes.

To answer your question, I think it's probably fair

So at this moment, there would be three votes.

Is there any other from council?

I just had a comment.

We emailed about this, and we received a lot of some information about agenda item number three related to the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

And I just wanted to comment that I did have questions about information about the impact on ratepayers, as well as timing and history related to the project.

The information I received is that

attaching to the easement a requirement of providing information about potential impact on water rates at the time when the pipeline would be getting ready to get built would not be allowed in the easement process.

So I just wanted to provide that information and hopefully at an upcoming council meeting we'll be able to have an update and a deeper discussion about it that goes beyond just this one item in the easement.

There are definitely

Questions around the project and particularly around potential impact on ratepayers far into the future, decades from now, once it actually starts to get built, that I think it would be important for us as a council to dig into and particularly on that question of costs, just try to guarantee that once it begins to be built in some council in the future from now, that we're providing some assurances that are able to give the community information about what, if any,

So Ms.

It would be the July 20th meeting.

So I move that

Is there a second?

All right, thank you.

Ms.

Ms.

Walker?

Yes.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

Hill?

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Ms.

Thomas?

Ms.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

Okay.

All right.

And next we have the city manager's response to the community matters from the August 17th meeting.

Is that no or abstained?

For me.

So it should be abstained.

All right, moving on.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of the city council, the public.

I got a couple of things, just follow up a couple items from a previous meeting prior to this one.

It is the crosswalk timing at 10th and West Main.

The current time is 21 seconds.

That is for the north-south crosswalk on West Main.

And then the shorter crosswalk that goes east-west on West Main is 19 seconds.

And this is based on a walking speed of 3.5 feet per second.

And this fits in within the standards of the uniform traffic control devices

So the timing for both crosswalks, all four are accurate if you take into consideration the box.

So it is accurate in terms of the timing which we provide for pedestrians to walk across the street.

And then the crosswalk at Preston at Washington Park, that one you get 30 seconds with a much shorter crosswalk.

but as we know the one at Preston in Washington coming up the hill or coming around the corner you know it's pretty dangerous so you know with the flashing light but it does give you a considerable amount of time to get across the street.

The other item was dealing with Cherry Avenue when the question you know as far as it being well that was related to the speed limit

and with that we will have to do a traffic study on that location and we should be able to do that probably towards the end of the month.

We weren't able to do it prior to because with COVID the traffic numbers weren't as high as pre-COVID so we just want to make sure that we get the accurate count and now it looks like

The traffic is starting to pick up a little bit more with the students back in town.

Everyone is driving somewhere now, like it was in March.

So we will be conducting a traffic study on that.

All right.

So next up, we have Community Matters.

It looks like we have eight speakers signed up, one person on the wait list.

So Reverend Ralph Brown, he would be the ninth person, and then we would have seven slots after that.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

I see all but two of the people who signed up in advance, and one of them could be on telephone, so we will definitely

Check the telephone number before we go past that.

But the first speaker tonight is Brian Campbell.

And Brian, you're on with city council.

You've got three minutes.

Okay.

My name is Brian Campbell.

I'm a member of Charlottesville DSA and I live in the Woolen Mills neighborhood.

I'm here tonight to express my deep concern at the city's decision to investigate and find the organizers of the Juneteenth celebration.

Black Joyfest, the Reclaim the Park rally, and other events centered on justice for Black people.

I fear that the city is weaponizing its COVID ordinance against people who are exercising their freedoms of speech and assembly.

The city's COVID ordinance specifically exempts expressive activity on the public street, public sidewalk, spontaneous demonstrations as defined in the city manager's standard operating procedures for special events and demonstrations.

and the standard operating procedure makes an exception for protests in response to newsworthy events between 48 hours.

At the time the amendments to the special events ordinance were passed, I argued at a council meeting that the requirements were contingent using the youth climate strikes as an example of the kind of event that wouldn't be permitted under the new rules.

The public was told at the time that the strikes would be exempt because they were in response to a newsworthy event, climate change, ongoing,

I can't understand then how these events are not exact.

Racism is ongoing.

Police violence is ongoing.

What these fines will do is set up a financial barrier to political expression.

There are people to whom a $500 fine and a misdemeanor on their record is nothing, and others who will find it prohibitive.

Given the history of this city, this state, and this country, we all know which communities that will fall the hardest upon.

Thank you.

Our next speaker is Phoebe Brown.

I do not see her signed in at the moment in Zoom.

We will check the phone number that's on in a moment.

So our next speaker is going to be Dawn Gathers, who will be followed by Sarah Hart.

Yes.

Good evening, council.

Can you hear me?

Yep.

All right, good.

Thank you.

Good evening, everyone.

In May of 2017, a noted white supremacist strutted into town and held a tiki torch lit rally at what was then Lee Park.

In July of that same year, a sect from the Ku Klux Klan out of Pelham, North Carolina, visited what was then Jackson Park.

Of course, in August, there was the fatal Unite the Right rally at what is now known as Market Street Park.

During that time, there was the murder on Heather Hill Way and the attack at the Market Street Garage.

which sits adjacent to the Charlottesville courthouse and the police department.

I frame all that to explain why I feel that my renaming of the street request is rational.

The stretch of Market Street that I'm asking to be renamed bears the brunt of much of the trauma that was inflicted upon our community during the summer of hate.

And we cannot allow ourselves to forget that.

We also cannot afford to miss the magnitude of this moment in time.

The urgency of the moment is manifested by the continued issues that black and brown people face throughout this country.

Renaming this street sends a powerful message, not only to our community, but also to our fellow countrymen, our brothers and sisters in Louisville and Portland and Minneapolis, and in countless other localities where people continue to face oppression.

Please let the word ring out and echo resoundingly from Charlottesville that black lives indeed do matter.

both here and all across this land.

Let it be known that while much of the recent racial tension that has exploded in this nation may have begun here, we definitely are willing to take bold, aggressive steps to attempt to cause it to end here.

On another note, and Mayor Walker, please don't get upset with me about this, but I also want to begin to launch a petition

to once again rename Market Street Park as historic Barber-Walker Mayoral Park.

That is in keeping with, again, the moment that we face in time and the fact that Mr. Barber was indeed the first elected black mayor of the city of Charlottesville and indeed the first elected black councilman.

And of course, Mayor Walker was the first elected black female mayor of our town.

You'll be getting more information on that in the coming days and weeks ahead.

All right.

Our next speaker is Sarah Hart.

Sarah, you're on the City Council.

Yes.

Good evening.

Yeah, go ahead.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I am a resident of Fifeville and I'm speaking tonight in support of the gun safety ordinance that is in front of council this evening.

I'd like to apologize in advance.

I have a young son who is ready for bed and so if you hear that in the background, my apologies.

Thanks for your patience.

I'd also like to just start by saying I'm so grateful for the many community activists and folks who have led efforts to this point to allow our city to consider making this kind of change in our state.

I know

It has been a long road.

Some may say that the gun safety ordinance in front of council may be an infringement of our Second Amendment rights.

I would point to a long history in our country of restricting, sensibly restricting open carry and public carry that dates back throughout our history as a way to keep our communities safe and keep our community gathering spaces safe from intimidation and menace.

I would also argue that the Gun Safety Ordinance protects our constitutional rights to free speech and freedom of assembly, peaceful assembly.

There is absolutely nothing peaceful about showing up to a gathering of folks who disagree with your views by brandishing a weapon with lethal force.

We know from research that just the presence of a visible firearm makes people more likely to be aggressive, it makes violence more likely to happen, and our community right now has an opportunity to

dictate that our public spaces are gathering places where our community convenes to support one another, to celebrate each other, and to push each other for change should not be spaces where opportunities for lethal violence should be allowed to happen.

I also would argue that it makes it very difficult for anyone, whether it's law enforcement or otherwise, to discern whether or not someone has good intentions when they show up to a public space with

publicly carrying a firearm.

One analogy that I continue to think back on is that there is a very good reason that if someone, God forbid, were to show up to a public school with a weapon, we do not have to wait until they show and demonstrate their intentions if they are good or bad.

We are able to intervene right away because we have dictated as a community that our public schools should be safe places for everyone who gathers there and that guns and lethal weapons have no place in our public schools.

Our public spaces should be no different

So I encourage city council to approve the ordinance for gun safety.

I'd also like to just conclude by saying we know that carrying weapons in a public space is a long exploited practice of hate groups and white supremacists who regularly have used this tactic to show intimidation and to menace and threaten violence to folks with whom they disagree, but particularly communities of color.

and in Charlottesville, there is no need for that.

And I hope that our council will be able to lead in this really important endeavor.

Our next speaker is Michael Kaplan.

Michael, you're on the city council.

Can you hear us?

Yeah.

Can you hear me?

We can.

You've got three minutes.

Thank you.

My name is Michael Kaplan.

Charlottesville native, I live at 317 Ryvanwood Place, and I'm here to speak in support of the honorary designation of Second Street Northeast between High and Main as Gregory Swanson Way.

This is a moment when our city needs new heroes and a reaffirmation of our core values, and the story of Gregory Swanson provides both.

And a street named for Gregory will assure that his story is well known.

Gregory Swanson Way will honor the courage and determination of a young man who was willing to challenge an unjust status quo and demand admission to a segregated public university, the University of Virginia in 1950.

Gregory Swanson Way will honor the great team of lawyers, including the legendary Thurgood Marshall, Oliver Shill, and Spotswood Robinson, who helped Gregory make an irrefutable argument for equal access to education.

Gregory Swanson Way will celebrate the power of our courts to enforce our founding principles that all people are created equal and have equal inalienable rights.

Gregory Swanson Way will memorialize the day when UVA was mandated by the court to become the first desegregated public university in the Confederate South.

Gregory Swanson's Way changed the course of US history

helping open public universities to people across the country.

And Gregory's Way began on September 5, 1950, when he and his legal team gathered on the corner of Second and High to demand equal justice under law.

I respectfully urge you to grant the petition to designate Second Street Northeast between High and Main as Gregory Swanson Way.

Our next speaker on the list was to be Elizabeth Stark.

I do not see her in the audience, Mayor Walker, so I'm going to go to the next speaker, which is Jim Hingely.

Jim, you're on the City Council.

Thank you very much for this opportunity to address council.

Jim Hingely, I work in Charlottesville at 410 East High Street.

I'm here to speak on behalf of the proposal to name a portion of Second Street, Gregory Swanson Way.

Michael Kaplan just gave you an excellent background information on why this request has been submitted.

I might add a couple of things, but first, before doing that, I want to speak in favor of Don Gathers

proposal to rename Market Street downtown Black Lives Matter Boulevard.

If council adopts that designation request along with Gregory Swanson Way, there will be an intersection at 2nd and East Market Street, which is the epicenter of this historic civil rights victory that Gregory Swanson fought in the federal

Court, which is located at that intersection.

The courtroom where this historic case took place is in what is now the downtown branch library on the second floor and in that corner, actually the corner of Second and Market Street.

So if you look out from the courtroom, you can see Market Street and you can see Second Street.

I think that would be an amazing intersection and would bring attention to this amazing civil rights victory that occurred in Charlottesville as Michael Kaplan stated.

The legal team that came here to assist Gregory Swanson in pursuing the objective of getting UVA to reverse its position on segregated education

was a legal team sponsored by the NAACP.

So in addition to the legal luminaries, such as Spotswood Robinson, Oliver Hill, and Thurgood Marshall, who were here for that historic hearing, the NAACP was instrumental in pursuing that hearing and achieving

the result that UVA was compelled to open its doors the first time of any university in the states that were making up the old Confederacy.

So this is to honor Swanson, this is to honor his legal team, and especially to honor the NAACP.

I ask that you give favorable consideration to that proposal.

Mayor Walker, our next speaker is Lauren Boggs-Messler.

Thank you.

Hello, I am Lauren Boggs-Messler.

We can't hear you.

Gotcha.

I am Lauren Boggs Messler.

I'm ninth generation Albemarle County, Virginia resident.

And I'm speaking tonight in support of the city's new gun ordinance.

On August 12, 2017, the day of the rally in Charlottesville, 40 minutes outside of Charlottesville, my younger brother was shot and killed.

And since then, I have become involved with our local Moms Demand Actions group, and I've helped host and plan Crozet's Safe Summer Kickoff in June 2019 and participated in Advocacy Days in Richmond.

And while reaching out to representatives in Richmond, I have experienced intimidation by gun rights advocates open carrying.

And I've also experienced the indignity of having to remove my gun violence survivor button upon entering government buildings while others are able to walk in with firearms.

and so I'm strongly in favor of Charlottesville taking measures to correct this absurd situation and to help create a safer community for all.

I thank you for the work you're doing and I hope that we can continue it to create even a safe community.

Mayor Walker, that was our sixth speaker.

Great.

Reverend Brown, you're on with city council.

Can you hear us?

There you go.

Yes.

Madam Mayor and council members, I'm following up on my request.

to have a portion of 12th Street Northwest renamed after my father, the late Reverend C.H.

Brown.

There were two points that I felt that I didn't make in my application or in my

prior talk, the first of which was the fact that there were numerous other homes in Charlottesville that my dad built.

At one point in time, there were at least 100 to 150 homes that he built.

Some are still peppered throughout the community.

One in particular is in another historic area on Langford Avenue on the corner of Langford, what is called Burnett Street.

And the design is almost an exact duplicate of the home that I live in.

I'm sorry, at 706 12th Street Northwest, which I should have stated earlier.

And

working with folk in the historic preservation area, I'm certainly willing to go through and identify those places in Charlottesville.

The other thing that I am interested in is

mentioning that I have the support of the local Venable neighborhood and I think I've been told that there would be a letter written to council indicating that that support was necessary.

Since the rules say that

The project should be connected to an individual who has made a contribution to the community.

And all of these houses are still standing.

I didn't feel like I needed to go around and gather signatures in order to support my request, simply because one can just visit the places my dad built.

And particularly here, where I'm asking for the name change and see much of that

history.

He was also responsible for the demolition of some of the buildings at Jefferson School in the Vinegar Hill in our early days.

So again, I'm just following up to make sure that there is a broader context of his work recognizing Charlotte Hill.

Thank you.

Mayor Walker, if I may for just a second.

Mr. Reverend Brown, I would recommend that you get in touch with the Virginia Humanities Foundation.

They are going to be looking into talking to people in the neighborhoods and collecting the histories of the neighbor of those, especially the Venable and Pennington Page communities.

and I'm sure they'd be very interested in hearing from you about identifying various homes as well.

I just, this isn't to do with the street renaming or anything.

Right around the corner.

Okay.

All right.

We have, yes.

And we only have eight hands raised at the moment.

So I'll start going through the hands in the order in which they went up.

Tanisha, you're on the city council.

Okay, so I want to speak on a few things.

First and foremost, thank you Michael Payne for reaching out about the tutoring and the use of the recreation centers.

I seriously think council needs to reconsider that.

I know Mayor Walker and Heather Hill were concerned

for safety reasons, but I think you guys need to understand like today Charlottesville City Schools and Albemarle County Schools had issues with Zoom not working and not operating.

We have a ton of kids who are having issues with no internet access, if internet access at all is in their home.

You have a lot of parents on Facebook and other social media platforms that are absolutely just going crazy at this point because some of them are essential workers and they have to work.

And let's be real.

There's not enough support staff at Charlottesville City Schools to support all these kids with 504 and IEP plans to go around to each home every single day.

So there has to be some type of tutoring

We're not asking you for anything.

We're asking for space.

That's all we're asking the city for.

We don't need nothing from you.

We don't even need to clean the building.

We don't want you to clean them.

We have the disinfectant stuff to clean the building.

We just want to serve the children because ultimately they're going to be the ones that suffer at the end.

Also, as far as the honorary street, I want to speak on my request for 4th Street to be renamed Vinegar Hill Way.

We all know what happened when Vinegar Hill was raised.

We all know how the families were displaced.

We know the black businesses that were displaced.

We know the rich history that goes through the corridor of Preston, Fourth, and Main Street, and Commerce, all the streets that intersect that particular street.

We have Engis Store, Bell Funeral Home, the Jefferson School, Dr. Jackson's office.

I mean, there's so much rich history.

that was basically hidden from a lot of people.

A lot of y'all probably didn't really know a lot of this stuff until I showed my film.

And I'm not saying that you did, I'm not saying you didn't, but I know the messages that I got from a lot of people, they didn't know a lot of stuff that was talked about in my film.

Zion Union Church used to be on 4th Street.

It was then moved to where it's located now on Preston Avenue, right across from Washington Park.

So it's just a lot.

And while we're in this process of wanting to tell the truth, I think you guys need to have an open mind with this, that there's a lot of people who should be honored, like Ms.

Virginia Carrington on 8th Street.

Her home was

to house all the attorneys that will come here when they were fighting for schools to be integrated during the civil rights movement.

I mean, so there's a lot more requests that are going to come.

Mayor Walker, our ninth speaker is on via telephone.

When you join us, please give us your name and place of residence.

Can you hear us?

You will have to unmute your telephone.

Can you hear us now?

It looks like you're unmuted.

I'm going to move on to the next person who has their hands up, and that's Harold Foley, who will be followed by Brett Lansdale and then read by him.

Harold, you're on with City Council.

Can you hear us?

Harold, there you go.

Yes, can you hear me?

We can, go ahead.

So, it was a great presentation that Dr. Bonds did about COVID in Charlottesville, but my main concern is three other issues, nursing homes, jails, and prisons.

So, to prevent a prison, just clocked 40 people who have COVID.

and the numbers probably going to increase.

The jail just recently had up to seven folks.

And I don't know how many more people in nursing homes have COVID.

but I hope that the city council will bring her back to have a conversation about the prisons and jails and nursing homes because folks work in prisons, they live in community.

Folks work in the jail, they live in the community.

Folks work at nursing homes, they live in the community.

And so I think that's a very valuable issue to talk about and

The issue that I raise up is in the Thomas Jefferson Health District.

Flugvanna is in it, the jail, and the nursing homes.

So I hope that city council could wrangle back so she can give us update about what's going on in these prisons, jails, and nursing homes, because it's a big concern for me and a big concern for the community.

So I'll talk to Dr. Bonds about that.

But we do have a jail board meeting this week, Thursday.

And I think it's Thursday.

Is it Thursday?

Yeah.

And so we will have an update there.

And I don't know if it's Dr. Bonds, but one of our staff members, I think, is supposed to be there presenting too.

So if you want to participate in public comment at that meeting, that may be helpful.

And I'll also talk to her about adding

Our next speaker is Brett Lansdale who will be followed by Reid Byam and then Scott Karas.

Fantastic thank you.

Hello, my name is Brett Lansdale and this is the second time I have proudly addressed this council concerning your gun control ordinance proposal.

Let me be clear tonight, this proposed legislation is currently written without amendments, which sadly mirrors the legislation passed in Alexandria and Arlington were served to do nothing except keep the good guys, us, from having our defensive weapons in Charlottesville.

You're only giving more destructive space to those that don't even listen to the rules in the first place.

And I sadly get to say I told you so to Alexandria's city council.

Only days after passing their gun control legislation, Alexandria had their first horrific homicide in 2020.

Officers found the body of Carla Elizabeth Dominguez Gonzalez.

Carla Elizabeth Dominguez Gonzalez.

This is a name worth repeating tonight.

She had gunshot wounds in her upper body and died at the scene of her assault.

Governor Northam, Delegate Mark Levine, and the Council of Alexandria have this murder and dark red blood on their hands.

Alexandria stupidly released a convicted rapist back into the town and he went to go kill the woman he previously tormented and raped.

How many other criminals have been released across Virginia?

It is an unfounded gun control legislation and if this moves forward, how many people will not be able to defend themselves and will die like Carla, simply because of a farcical political promise

I'm asking you to please listen to your constituents and do not move forward with this gun control legislation in Charlottesville.

Many Virginia locales, over 30 of them, are adopting and supporting the no local gun control resolution drafted by the Virginia Citizens Defense League.

And I urge you to have a further discussion on that proposal.

But if you're inclined to move forward with this ill-conceived gun control measure, please, because you are being forced to, I know you're being forced to politically, please have a further discussion this evening about your respectful concealed carry holders.

and allow an exemption.

Let me proudly defend myself in Charlottesville.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you for listening.

And for the young lady that said she had to have her button removed, I'm as equally as appalled by that.

She should have probably been able to wear her button inside.

And I'm not a brandisher of an open carry.

I'm a concealed carry holder.

I deserve my rights just as much as she does.

So please, please have a better conversation and education about the Second Amendment tonight.

Vice Legislation that makes me and countless others never step foot in Charlottesville again.

We, the good people of Virginia, will take our families and our money to safer locations in the Commonwealth.

Our next speaker is Reid Byam.

Reid, you're on the City Council.

Hello.

Yes, go ahead.

All right, sorry.

I live in 69 Center Avenue.

I'm concerned about the recent ordinance that's proposed about the prohibition of firearms on city property.

This ordinance would only be used as a modifier to already illegal acts such as brandishing a firearm, public endangerment, assault, and etc.

A ban on firearms on city property is in no way prevents such acts from occurring and is redundant as we already have laws preventing such use of firearms both on private and public property.

This ordinance would not prevent violence in our community and at worst waste presses resources enforcing an ineffective ordinance.

I ask that council consider other forms of violence prevention than this ordinance or at least exempt concealed carry from this ban as it is reasonable doubt that concealed carry permit holders present no risk to public safety.

And our next speaker is Scott Karras.

Scott, can you hear us?

Yes, I can.

Can you hear me?

We can.

Yes, hello.

My name is Scott Terrace.

I live at 109 Burnett Street, and I'm also an active duty member of United States Air Force.

I want to talk to the council about the proposed local gun control that you have on the docket.

And I want to hope you oppose that, because as a legal firearm holder, as a member of the armed forces,

We're here to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Concealed handgun permit holders and firearm holders, they are law-abiding citizens, concealed handgun permit holders.

They've already had to go through multiple background checks, not only for the permit, but also on a firearm.

They've also had to go through the necessary training.

And so we're responsible law-abiding citizens and this ordinance saying that we can't

to carry a firearm, to go to the park, go for a walk downtown, to protect ourselves and our families.

It's totally ridiculous to have these laws in place not allowing us to do so.

So I strongly urge the council to not vote this ordinance into place.

Thank you very much.

Our next speaker has the first name Taman and we'll now bring you on

ask you to give us your full name and place of residence to be followed by Katrina Turner.

Taman, you're on the City Council.

Yes.

Yep.

My name is Taman Smith.

I live at 827 Orange Dale Avenue.

I have a 19-year-old carpenter, and I call with great concern regarding the local gun control legislation being proposed for Charlottesville.

I apologize in advance.

This is not a scripted, you know, speech.

But I'd like to offer some kind of anecdotal evidence.

Every morning, I leave for work at 6 a.m.

I leave my girlfriend home.

She goes to school full-time.

And every morning at 6 a.m., she leaves next to me, and I drop her off at Tonsler Park so she can run around the neighborhood

and come back home.

It's her exercise.

And every morning she puts her .22 caliber legally owned handgun in her purse, and it makes her feel safe.

Not only as it makes any woman feel safe when running in public, but she was sexually assaulted at a Charlottesville park, and with great concern to me.

I fear that happening again without any defensive strategy for her to have.

What do you want her to carry, mace?

In all seriousness, I understand Mrs. Sarah Hart's point that a firearm being exposed can heighten aggression in some, but I'd also like to

Thank you for

Without any doubt in my mind that having a gun open and able to be seen by the public deters criminals or potential criminals.

The old saying says, a locked door keeps honest men honest.

And a firearm in public does the same thing.

I don't live in the best neighborhood, but it makes me feel safe knowing that I can open and carry my handgun wherever I go.

and I don't ask you to reconsider.

I beg you not to rob me of my right to feel safe in my neighborhood, in my town, in my parks and anywhere I go.

Thank you.

Our next two speakers are Katrina Turner followed by Robin Hoffman and there'll be one additional slot open.

You can click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar to get in line.

Yes.

I'm speaking tonight because of the march that was had on the 28th of August.

We had permission to do that march

you know, contrary to what everybody says.

We worked with someone for over a month on that march.

We spent a lot of money doing this march.

And I would like to know why, if this statement was supposed to have been out before August 12th came,

I'd like to know why you could not wait until after our march to put this statement out.

We were told that this statement did not pertain to our march, but it was still put out before our march.

Many people were scared that they were going to get arrested that day or have charges

put against them just for coming to our march.

We had somebody that was going to donate 100 meals to us on that day.

But because the police said that we were having an illegal march, that person also dropped out.

I'm kind of glad they did because

you all scared everybody away from our march that day and I just want to know why did you have to threaten people the way you did for our march but every other march in Charlottesville was allowed to go on and I understand everybody else got warnings but they only got warnings of fines

Why were we threatened with arrests, criminal charges, and a $500 fine over this March on the 28th?

Thank you.

I really need an answer for this because our rights were literally taken away that day.

We were told the day that the statement came out, don't worry.

We were told the morning, don't worry, to continue our march.

But then you all put that statement out and I'd like to know why.

Ms.

We had a police that told us, don't worry about the fine.

We worked on this for a month and a half with the police.

For a month and a half, we worked on this.

We did not just do this and walk out and just hit the streets.

That's the reason everything was closed down the way they were closed down.

We didn't stay at the intersection, but the few minutes that we did for people to catch up, that was all planned.

And we had meeting after meeting.

And on the morning of the march, the police called Ms.

Parker and told her, don't worry about it.

It didn't pertain to us.

I spoke to the city manager and I'm not putting anything on him because we were speaking to the police for a month and a half over this rally.

And if they did not tell city council about our plans, that shouldn't go against us.

But we did exactly what we said we were going to do.

We didn't.

We didn't dance in this.

We didn't do all that.

We just wanted to march from, from downtown to Tonsil Park.

And that's all we did.

And it was, we did work with the police when we did this because we didn't want anybody hurt.

So I think that needs to be looked at.

because we lost a lot of money, a lot of money over this.

Thank you.

Well, I don't have any comments on this.

I'll still have another conversation with Ms.

I didn't have a conversation with them that morning.

I guess I misheard.

We had a conversation afterwards.

I had a conversation.

OK, I guess I'm asking, based on what she's saying, she thought that they could still continue without issue.

If they continued to move along the sidewalk without impacting the streets or having a gathering at the park more than a certain number of people, then it wouldn't have been an issue.

Yeah.

And keeping distancing.

Did they share that?

Next up is Robin Hoffman.

Okay, so first of all, I want to thank the mayor for the condolences to the mayor of their family.

I really think that that's so necessary that

You know, we have a mayor that acknowledges really good work in our community.

Then also I want to say that I have been trying very diligently to contact

the Albemarle County Supervisors, Dr. Bynes from the Health Department, Heather Hill for our Willam Mills Neighborhood Association about the fact that we need to conduct an OSHA-like investigation of the schools, list all the things that we need to remediate.

And one of the big issues, which I don't hear at all,

is the fact that the filters of the vent systems have to be changed to MERV, M-E-R-V-15 filtrates.

They are virus prohibitive.

Also probiotics can be installed into the vinegar even, into the duct work to keep out so that we can have companies like Dyson

has wonderful air purifiers and that sort of thing.

If you want to conduct classes, then list those remediations, the costs of the remediations, as I said, and also

Do it through the health department, through the health agencies, certified school nurses to go around from room to room, hallway to hallway and do motion sensors and things like that because that cost should be given to the governor.

and then therefore we can continue going to school.

Kids should not have to worry about wearing masks if there is no COVID in the air.

We all in our homes don't even know that from our HVAC systems.

We have to correct our filters right now.

The grade of filters you can buy at Lowe's.

You can get four of them for 16 bucks each.

and then change them every 30 days or more depending on how many people you have in your house.

So there's a lot of things you can do and then also the strip malls, fashion square malls going for sale and that sort of thing.

I've been saying all along that we have to remediate them and then have house for testing and for people to be able to go there if they have IEPs where they have to be in a room together.

Mayor Walker, the last hand raised is the telephone number.

We've been trying to connect, so I'll try one more time and see if we can get this person.

Hello, you're on the City Council.

Can you hear us?

Hello, can you hear me?

We can.

Great, thank you.

This is Cabell Marshall of 239 Stribbling.

Last week I tried to participate in a community meeting concerning the PUD development on Stribbling and it was very difficult to hear and several people who wanted to speak were not recognized and I have five other reasons why I would like for you to require the developer to host another community meeting.

Another thing that had happened is that

The developer did not provide a picture of the streetscape of the PUD before the community meeting, which meant that the neighbors had no way of knowing what the streetscape would look like.

As it turned out, the buildings are proposed to be right up on the street, whereas all of the neighboring houses are set at least 50 feet back from the pavement.

So we couldn't tell and we couldn't discuss or challenge.

I think this guideline number six is that any PUD must be harmonious with the neighborhood.

And number eight is that the architecture needs to be coordinated with the neighborhood.

We didn't know, we couldn't see in time to discuss that and that that's a major discrepancy and needs to be discussed and resolved with the developer before things push forward.

Also, there's a real problem with the street study, the traffic study.

There was one done right at the beginning of the pandemic when no one was driving.

And then supposedly we were told that another one had been done previously, but we were not given any dates.

We've not been given access to the analysis of the data or anything.

So I request, please, can we have another traffic study done now that the students have come back so it will more accurately reflect the traffic flow and a good decision can be made.

Another way of looking at this is that they're going to be a lot more rental assistance participants, and that would be great, but I think we need to have an ombudsman appointed to protect their interests.

For example, the elderly have a hard time with stairs.

In this particular PUG, the design is very vertical.

It looks like four stories in some places.

I think they'll probably be children and they need playgrounds and so far we're not seeing much space for children and then as a matter of people are sensitive to automobile pollution and that will inevitably accumulate on windless days because of all the underground parking and I think the study needs to be done to make sure we don't create a place where children will grow up with asthma but you know that could be avoided.

Another matter is it would be very helpful if the developer would post information and notices of the hearings actually on the property and also at the head of where Stribling meets JPA because there are many, many cars and pedestrians that are going to be affected by this.

And people are just totally unaware of what's going on.

And then lastly, in order to avoid the taint of cronyism,

I request that all of the friends of the developer, who I've been told worked for five years in the planning office, that all of his friends need to recuse themselves from the review process.

Charlottesville has gotten a very unfair reputation on stuff, and I just don't want it to happen again.

So, please, if you would, consider those requests.

The main thing is that we need to have another community meeting

by the developer to clarify a lot of these matters.

Thank you.

And so we're going to have a conversation about all of those.

And I answered

The other question I was asked, in terms of Ms.

Turner, I'll just speak from my viewpoint.

I have shared my concern from a public health aspect with consistently

Facebook messaging you know all of those and that's where every decision that I've been a part of has that's the foundation that it stems from being very concerned about what could potentially happen if people became ill and if there was widespread outbreaks throughout the community and had some of those conversations with individuals

who had some of these events like the event at Washington Park and the even testing event.

I think that was the last event that happened at Tonsler.

In terms of, I will say that it wasn't a push from council to do anything outside of making sure that the ordinance

was that we had passed was followed.

And my thought was that everyone who had had events previously had already received the citations and had already had those conversations.

I know the morning of the event that you're talking about, I had a Facebook conversation with Jojo regarding trying to get some clarifying information, not just with her, but with other people that morning.

On my end, I have always been, since this pandemic started, making sure that we had the conversations around public health.

And I hope that from the police department or the city manager that that was the clear, consistent message about

how this happened.

I know the August 12th that Councillor Payne and Councillor Magill was very vocal about the message that was potentially going out then and they had some concerns about that date.

But I think there has been agreement since we passed the ordinance to make sure that from a public health standpoint the same thing that we are

telling, talking to the UVA students about that those messages were clear and that those were the guidelines that we were operating out of.

So just want to just say from my perspective, no one was targeting your event and the decision about that announcement.

I hope Dr. Richardson explained from his end how when the decision was made to submit that information, that that information came from

from him.

I just want to make a comment on that.

As city manager, when the ordinances aren't passed, I have to carry them out.

This was a decision I had a conversation with the council about, about even sending the letters out that we were in agreement that that was going to be done.

pertaining to those who violated the ordinance had consensus from the council and I move forward with that.

I hope we're saying the same thing or not.

I want to make sure that it wasn't what I heard Ms.

Turner say and what I heard

Jojo say that morning was that council was pushing this on their event.

And that is not what occurred.

And I just want to make sure that that.

And I had no knowledge that they had worked with any of our officers or any conversation that had taken place regarding that.

All right.

Counselors, any other comments?

OK.

All right.

I do think it's appropriate.

I just want to follow up a little bit on that discussion.

We had a couple of points of conversation.

One was that we had adopted various ordinances and that it made no sense for us not to enforce them.

One of the pieces of that is an important principle of First Amendment law, which is that you don't discriminate on the basis of viewpoint, that you don't say, well, okay, we're going to allow marches in favor of liberal causes, but we're going to prohibit marches in favor of conservative causes.

or that we are going to apply ordinances only against conservatives and not against liberals.

So one of the issues has to be in any enforcement context, are you prepared to enforce the ordinance?

And if so, are you prepared to enforce the ordinance even handedly?

That was a large part of the discussion that we were having because one of the things we did not want was to get to the point where

if a conservative group came along and wanted to do the exact same thing that we felt we had no choice but to allow that to happen because we had expressed by our passivity before the feeling that basically anybody can use the streets for any purpose they want no matter what the expense to the city, no matter what the

The issue may be as far as COVID and everything else.

So that was a significant part of why we decided what we did is that we wanted to be sure that we were enforcing the laws fairly and even-handedly, and both liberals and conservatives should those kinds of issues ever arise.

So I think that's an important point that needs to be made.

We also recognize that even basically any one of those groups, one of the problems with those marches is that it involves police overtime, it involves additional costs.

It involves expenses of various sorts that the city incurs that are substantially higher than the fines that we're talking about.

This is not an effort to recoup costs, but it I think is appropriate to reflect on the fact

that when people go out and particularly if they do so in violation of laws and without permits and so on, when they do that, that they still are imposing costs on the city as well.

So I think overall, I don't know, frankly, I don't remember the dates well enough to know about October, about August 28th as opposed to any other meeting date or exactly when some of these things happened.

But that was what we were trying to do, was to make sure we were enforcing the law fairly and as written.

And again, I just want to state that my foundation has always been a public health standpoint.

And even in the discussions that you're referencing, I thought that we should have handled this differently from the beginning so that we could have less confusion moving forward.

I would just add, I mean, this is all information out there, but the two pieces of it are there's the special events ordinance, which is the civil fine of up to $500.

And then separate from that, there's a coronavirus ordinance we passed in conjunction with Albemarle County related to the pandemic, and that's the misdemeanor.

And I will say, I think all of us, when we were discussing that and to this point, have concerns about criminalizing anything.

And even the fact that it's a misdemeanor is still an impact of criminalization, and I think we all have concerns and are uncomfortable in ways about this, but obviously the difficulty is weighing that against

You know, a global pandemic, you saw the data from the health department, particularly with UVA students coming back to campus, of a large spike in cases and the potential for that to turn into widespread community spread and becoming an outbreak that is no longer contained.

And that is the motivation both behind that coronavirus ordinance

And it's the motivations Mayor Walker mentioned.

And I think the motivation for us on council is that concern about the pandemic, particularly because we don't want to be in a situation where if we pass that, we can't enforce a UVA party or other things happening.

And so maybe if other people are aware of ways to try to

You know, prevent a spike in cases, particularly with UVA students coming back and have alternatives, certainly let us know that.

And I think we all hope that we can get to a point as a country where we don't need pandemic restrictions.

Obviously, that's not going to happen anytime soon, given the failures of the federal government.

But that's really the concern, and it's a concern I have.

about a lot of things going on in the community is just the danger of community spread and entering a phase in terms of the spread of the coronavirus that is far greater than we've seen so far and just wanting to try to

All right, thank you.

Music playing...

you

you

Good evening, Council.

I'm Chrissy Hammel with the City Budget Office.

I'm here tonight to present to you a bond resolution which would authorize up to an amount of $27 million in new debt.

This bond represents part of the funding plan that Council previously approved and adopted as part of the capital improvement plan in both FY21 and also prior years.

The table on page one of the memo in front of you provides a summary of the project categories and more detailed project descriptions can be found on page three.

We met with the rating agencies last week, and I'm happy to report that the city has once again been assigned a AAA bond rating by both S&P and Moody's.

And as you may recall from prior conversations, this is quite a distinguished honor.

As I believe at last count, there were four cities in Virginia with a AAA rating.

That's the city of Charlottesville, Alexandria, Fairfax, and Virginia Beach.

If you include counties, I believe there are roughly 12 in the state.

The sale that we are discussing with this memo is scheduled for mid-September.

We anticipate closing by the end of September.

Interest rates are at historically low right now and that along with our AAA rating leads us to believe that this is a really good time for a sale and that we will be able to get the best rates possible moving forward to finance these projects.

One question that I had was I remember early in the COVID crisis, there was significant concern about even the ability to sell bonds at all, that the credit markets had sort of seized up and not quite sure where things were going.

It has.

In fact, several localities have gone to market already.

And the rates are good.

Municipal bonds are a safe investment right now.

And so this is definitely a time to sell.

And according to our financial advisor particularly, we want to get in the market before the presidential election.

So we don't anticipate any problems with this sale.

There are no other sales that are scheduled at the same time.

We're monitoring that.

So we do have a little bit of flexibility on the sale date.

This may be outside of just the bond issuance, so please feel free to just let me know if it's beyond the scope of this.

But relating my favorite hobby horse, the parking garage,

So a couple things as that relates to the bond sale.

The money that is included here is contemplated to be used for the design of the parking garage.

That being said, you'll notice from the memo, we're very clear to say that these project categories are

the way that we plan to spend them, but we have flexibility to move funding in one place or the other.

So all that to say is, it's our plan to use it for the design of the parking garage.

If something changes, then we can use it for something else in one of the other categories.

And as that relates to your plan questions, I'm not sure, but we can follow up with Chris Ingle and get those questions answered in terms of,

I think the planning stage and the design is very early.

Okay.

Any other questions?

No.

All right.

If you want to speak to council on the bond sale.

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

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

We've got three hands up at the moment.

It'll be Brandon Collins first, followed by Brad Slocum, followed by Jake Gold.

Brandon, you're on the city council.

I can.

Good evening, city council.

I am Brandon Collins.

I am a staff person for FAR, the Public Housing Association of Residents.

We are the federally recognized resident council and resident advisory board for residents of public housing within Charlottesville.

and we deeply support the issuance of this bond, in particular the $4.5 million for affordable housing, most of which will be going to public housing redevelopment and phase one of the redevelopment effort.

Really appreciate you all being able to uphold the historic commitment that you made over a year ago to contribute $15 million over five years.

towards the redevelopment effort.

And we really appreciate you following through with that commitment.

It's vital, as you know, to have the city's input to combine with the LIHTC money, get this process underway and paid for and be successful.

And I really just want to highlight how historic that is.

The city council is putting more money into this redevelopment effort than anywhere else in Virginia.

and you should be commended for that and I hope you uphold that.

It's also an historic change, it's an historic effort and an historic process that really places residents in control of the process and you know City Council your role in this historic process is really money and we really appreciate you seeing the need for that and living up to that commitment.

Phase one will hopefully begin by the end of the year.

COVID really has slowed a lot of things up and there's been some other challenges, but your funding

is going to make a dent in an affordable housing crisis that existed before COVID hit and is certainly exacerbated now under COVID.

And fortunately, we've got a leg up in providing more affordable housing and redeveloping our public housing.

I would just say as a note, public housing is probably one of the most stable forms of rental housing in the country right now during this pandemic.

because of funding and it's of course never enough but I think it's really showing the vital role that public housing can play in addressing the affordable housing crisis and we sincerely appreciate the city and the City Council partnering to make sure this historic effort can move forward.

Thank you.

And I probably would have a stronger statement to say if we weren't in a pandemic.

But I, too, appreciate the council and the city that we are continuing to support.

our public housing residents in this way and the notion that everyone deserves a safe, secure place to raise their families and thrive in.

And the only thing that I would probably make is if you look at the projects that we're funding, and I've been here, I guess, long enough, I've been paying attention to the budget long enough to know that some of these commitments have been made long before now, but sort of along the lines of what Councillor Payne was stating about the parking garage, that we, you know,

If only we could reverse some of these commitments and focus on things like the affordable housing requirements when we're going out for bonding and the lasting impact that that would have on our area overall would be my only point.

And it's toned down a lot because of the crisis that we all find ourselves in.

Mayor Walker, our next speaker is Brad Slocum, who will be followed by Jake Gold and then Rory Stolzenberg.

Brad, you're on with council.

Excellent.

Can you all hear me all right?

Yep.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

My name is Brad Slocum, live on Harmon Street in the city.

And I'll try to keep it pretty quick tonight.

I wish I had had more time to go over the

information that's included along with the agenda, but I was hoping to know if any of the council members or city staff can speak to whether or not there's any way for city residents or folks in the area to actually invest in these bonds themselves.

I think I see that there's a minimum denomination of $5,000, which is out of the reach of most people, but given the apparently great

credit rating that our city has earned and the fact that a lot of folks are thinking about the long-term viability of this community.

It would be nice if there was some way for regular people to be involved in this sort of thing and maybe see some of those bond yields over time and not have all of those dividend payments just go to mysterious bankers.

And just on a related note, as we think about how we're going to pay for improvements or other initiatives in the city, I think it's great that we've

current council and staff have taken the initiative to push this through because I think there was a lot of contention about whether it was appropriate to do a bond issuance and I wonder if the city is considering other

funding structures because it seems like tax increases are fought so hard, but we do need ways to pay for some of these sorely needed improvements.

So, curious again if there's any way for regular people to invest in these bonds and also what future funding options the city is considering besides bond issuances.

Yeah.

I can address that.

So there is a way for city residents to purchase city bonds.

It is not through this sale process.

This sale process is a competitive process whereby we basically go to market, and an underwriter will purchase.

The way that a consumer like you and I would be able to purchase a bond would be to work with, if you're working with a financial advisor or an investment advisor,

to seek advice from them and typically you can purchase the bonds on the secondary market.

So in other words the underwriter who purchases the bonds at the competitive sale in the middle of September they will then be working and reaching out to you know

for private sales like you and me.

So if you have a financial advisor or a contact, you might want to contact them and let them know.

And to briefly sort of answer the other question regarding like other funding sources, like with affordable housing, there are a lot of projects that aren't bondable, that we are making cash contributions to and obviously, you know,

Thanks for having me.

Not nearly as far as it might seem.

They make a relatively small dent, especially relative to the amount of money needed for affordable housing or other things.

And there's just a lot of especially larger infrastructure projects that

just couldn't really work without bonds, at least in my estimation.

It's the only way that it could feasibly work.

For example, the idea of school reconfiguration, a substantial part of it is bondable.

There are other funding sources, and I think they've even looked at private donations.

But there's no way around them.

It can only really happen and come together if we're issuing those bonds.

I think it's also appropriate to note that there may be some situations where a public-private partnership may be able to come bring some money into the process, not certainly for schools, but for example,

Getting back to Councillor Payne's point about the parking garage, whether it would be possible to build the parking garage with both the public component and a private component where the private money, for example, might go into housing that would go

into a larger structure.

When we discussed that probably six months ago, I think I was told at that point that it was too late in the process to be able to do that sort of exploration.

And I never followed up on that because with COVID and everything we were doing just sort of got knocked into the corner.

Our next speaker is Jake Gold who will be followed by Rory Stolzenberg.

Jake, you're on the City Council.

Yeah, thanks Brian.

I just wanted to say I love the investment in public housing and I wanted to cosign Brandon's comment earlier about funding.

The most important thing y'all know obviously is fund these projects.

So I just want to say as a excited constituent keep at it.

And our next speaker is Rory Stolzenberg.

Hey, good evening, Council.

Thanks, Brian.

I just wanted to quickly ask a question while this is up of roughly what true interest rate staff expects to get on this bond issuance, or maybe put another way that's more directly useful, what do we expect that the annual debt service will be per, say, million dollars of bonds?

I think that will help us in the future judge how to prioritize CIP projects.

Yeah, so with this bond sale right now with interest rates, we are looking at probably a rate of close to or around 1.6%.

That's for the tax exempt piece.

There is a small taxable piece, which will probably be roughly around 2%.

Debt service at 1.6 on $10 million is roughly $660,000 a year.

At 2% it's roughly $700,000.

So we've typically, I think last year we got a, I'm pulling this off the top of my head and I apologize.

I should have looked this up, but I think last year our TIC was just around two something.

Okay, so thank you.

Make a motion.

All right, the additional questions?

No.

Ms.

Thomas?

Ms.

Walker?

Yes.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

Hill?

Okay, so that carries five to zero.

So next we have another public hearing.

Public hearing and ordinance for rezoning a property at 909 Landonia Circle from a B1 business commercial to a B2 business commercial.

Hi, City Council.

I'm Joey Winner, a City Planner in the Department of Neighborhood Development Services.

And this item is a rezoning request for 909 Landonia Circle.

And as the Mayor said, this is the second time that this item has come before City Council.

On August 3rd, 2020, City Council considered a request to change the zoning district of 909 Landoni Circle from B1 business to B2 business subject to a proper for the purpose of expanding the car wash on an adjacent property.

Council declined to approve the rezoning at that time over concerns that the property could potentially be redeveloped as a hotel in the future.

The applicant indicated that they were willing to amend their proffer to prohibit the future use of the rezone property as a hotel and then bring their item back to council on September 8, 2020.

And that's exactly what happened.

So this item is back before you tonight with the amended proffer that will prevent future redevelopment of 909 Landonia Circle as a hotel or as any of the eight other uses that were previously proffered out.

listened to the Planning Commission meeting and was aware of Commissioner Green and Heatons, I think, concerns regarding being able to use this for other, you know, in the future if the property was sold like hotels.

And so my only concern was something that you can't fix is just the owner of the property before they purchased it.

and the daycare center that was there.

So the small business in the community, but that is nothing that we could do here.

So that would have been my only point that I would have made then and I'll make now.

All right, council, are there any, anyone has any additional questions?

If you'd like to speak to council about this project, you can click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar.

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

All right, thank you.

So we'll close the public hearing.

And so the point that I was making, the property was formerly a daycare center.

It was a small black owned business in the community and had friends and family members who've been at the daycare over the years.

And so that was

Just said when we talk about where these properties go when they're up for sale would have been my only concern.

And hopefully we can do something one day to address some of this.

But that's it.

Is there a second?

All right, Ms.

Thomas.

Ms.

Walker.

Yes.

Ms.

Magill.

Yes.

Ms.

Yes.

Okay.

Thank you.

Um, and now we have an ordinance renewal of the, um, continuity in government ordinance, um, first reading and it requires fourth, fifth of vote.

Good evening, Mayor Walker and Councillors.

As you probably recall, once Dr. Richardson and Governor Northam in March declared a state of emergency over COVID-19, there were a lot of questions in the air about how local government was going to be able to continue its everyday governmental functions.

On March the 25th of this year,

the council adopted a continuity in government ordinance and you know at the time that this occurred again there were a lot of questions in the air and one of the biggest questions was exactly what we're doing right now meeting through zoom

and the Freedom of Information Act didn't actually provide for this format for meetings at the time.

And so one of the reasons the continuity in government ordinance was adopted was to allow this rather than having to physically assemble in city hall for city council meetings.

Since that time of the ordinances enactment,

We have seen that the state through budget amendments has also provided a temporary reprieve from the physical meeting requirement in FOIA.

But I did want to highlight that because that's part of what's before you.

And what is before you is, in fact, the exact same ordinance that you enacted on March 25.

and its provisions are really about, number one, statutory deadlines, both city and state are waived for the duration of this ordinance until the council resents it.

Why is that important?

Well, as we saw in the spring, actually there's a city code provision that required that the budget be adopted by April 15th and based on

This ordinance that you adopted on March 25th, you were able to continue your budget discussions and that deadline was waived.

Additionally, a number of land use deadlines that could be applicable are waived due to the ordinance.

I think this is important because

We heard right at the community matters portion of this meeting, kind of the council later after this ordinance was adopted, approved a set of procedures for land use public input.

And one of the things we heard about with the Stripling Avenue comment was one of those procedures that the council enacted.

And it's important because

This ordinance allows that greater public input.

You're not, quote unquote, subject to a shot clock on certain land use applications.

Additionally, the ordinance provided that the city manager had the authority to open and close parks.

At the time, and you know this has not disappeared or dissipated in the ensuing six months, there are constant debates about crowds in terms of parks and using them for recreation and large gatherings.

While not a park, I'm sure people saw over the weekend there were some photos from beaches in California that were quite crowded.

And again, I think

Different local governments are looking at, if we have huge crowds at recreational activities and people don't abide by social distancing, this, again, at the local level in Charlottesville, gives some ability for the city manager to close parks temporarily.

Those are the main highlights of this and while I know that some of this feels ancient and some of it's been kind of handled at the state level through budget amendments,

I don't think you can be too safe as a council to have your own continuity of government ordinance that still maintains what was adopted in March.

And it does provide that the city council reserves the right to rescind or amend this ordinance at any time.

So if there's something about this ordinance in the next six months that you don't want, or you feel like,

This is passed.

We need to change it.

We need to rescind it.

It can come back at any time.

But again, this is sort of the stopgap measure that was implemented in March once all of the pandemic began.

And this would extend that ordinance for an additional six months.

OK, thank you.

Council, are there any questions, comments?

No?

Second.

Okay, Ms.

Thomas.

Ms.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

At your last meeting in August, Councillor Snook asked that he and I meet with the Commonwealth's Attorney and ask for a delay on the vote of this firearms ordinance.

Also at that meeting, Mayor Walker, you raised the concern about the use of inoperable firearms in a special event.

Since that meeting, I will address the inoperable firearms question.

And the ordinance now provides that if somebody wants to use an inoperable firearm in a special event, such as the Dogwood parade, the city manager will issue a permit.

And that permit will designate a city official to inspect the weapon to make sure it's inoperable before it's used in the event.

As to meeting with the Commonwealth's Attorney, I'll just speak briefly and turn it over to Councilor Snook.

But it was a productive meeting, and he did bring up a concern about police officers.

And so there's been a technical amendment that says police officers can possess their firearms in public buildings, parks, and rights of way that are adjacent to special events.

when they're performing their public duties or when they are providing security to the event, to the special event.

But there is no just blanket immunity for police officers based on this technical amendment.

And let me just add, there were a couple of concerns that we had, that I had, that are technical concerns, I suppose, that only a lawyer could love, that Mr. Blair and Mr. Plutania and I discussed.

And I just wanted to make sure that Mr. Plutania, if anybody is going to have to enforce this, it would be he as the chief prosecutor.

make sure that he was comfortable with the language and that we didn't end up foisting language on him that would be unenforceable or unintelligible or make no sense when it actually got to court.

So he was comfortable with it.

I was comfortable coming out of the discussion.

So that was basically the kind of issue, the technical wording of a few things that I was concerned about.

And I think we've addressed that.

And I want to thank you both Counselor Slick and Mr. Blair for going through those steps to get us to this point.

I appreciate that perspective.

I also wanted to clarify based on some public comments we heard earlier that

You know, while it mentions public streets, alleys, sidewalks or public wideaway, those that only applies when that space is being used or is adjacent to a permitted event by the city or an event that would otherwise require a city permit.

And I felt like some of the comments were leading me down the path that if I was listening to those comments would have thought that all the city streets applied.

This is truly just for city property, which includes our parks, our recreation spaces and our other building facilities.

unless there is a city permitted public event that's been approved, in which case that would also apply.

And I would add that we had this discussion before.

Some people who may be watching this time were not part of the discussion before.

There are the three basic things that drive me and I think drive most of the rest of us in adopting this ordinance.

The first and foremost for me was the experience on August 12

of coming down Market Street at 1030 in the morning and seeing groups of people in camouflage and body armor carrying AR-15 style rifles, the self-styled militias, and knowing that there was no authority under Virginia law or state law or city law or federal law, there was no authority for anybody to regulate what they were doing.

They were supposedly there as the three percenters, and they said that their purpose there was to protect the First Amendment, whatever that meant.

It was clear from some of their insignia, which it would include a flag that was a combination of a Confederate flag and a United States flag.

and some other, I think it often had the numeral three, the Roman numeral three in there, that they were certainly not federal troops, they were certainly not legitimate authorities.

I was also aware, by the way, that there was another group, I think they called themselves the Redneck Revolt, who were described as a bunch of

You know, leftists, agitators, communists, whatever, who were saying that they were there to protect the folks on the left.

And the last thing we want in a city is when we have a situation like that.

And we have no authority to stop any of it.

We have no authority to say to somebody, this is a place where guns are not permitted.

Get out of here.

Or this is a place where guns are not permitted.

If you want to come in, we are going to run you through a metal detector.

we had no authority to do that.

And so if you were on the street on August 12th, you saw this armed militia there that we had no authority to stop.

The second concern is a concern that we've seen, fortunately not in Charlottesville much, but it does happen, is where people who are armed come, for example, to a city council meeting.

a place where hopefully they don't feel that they need their gun to protect themselves, particularly since we would have armed security there, a police officer in any event.

But there's no reason why somebody needs to be bringing their gun to come see the city treasurer, no legitimate reason.

And so to ban the use of guns in places like City Hall and government offices also seemed to me to make a lot of sense.

It's a little closer call in dealing with the question of guns in parks, but we've seen in other parks in other areas around here the situation where

Parks have become sort of a battleground.

There have been some sort of late night gang activities and things like that.

This is not a situation where the purpose of the bill is to find one more charge that we can add on to somebody who is shooting his gun off.

The idea is that it gives police the authority to intervene.

when they see a gun, hopefully before it gets fired.

So it's a much broader problem than, it's both a narrower problem than some have described and a broader problem than some have described.

OK, thank you.

So any other questions, counsel?

Second.

Ms.

Thomas?

Ms.

Walker?

Yes.

Ms.

Magill?

Yes.

Ms.

Hu?

Okay, thank you.

Next we have resolution, sale of city-owned property amendment, first reading.

We got you on mute.

Sorry.

Good evening, Mayor Walker and Councillors.

Time for the triple play here, I guess.

Before you tonight, as you may recall at your second August meeting, there was a proposal to purchase a portion of Northeast Park.

And once that was placed on the Council's agenda,

A number of Councillors, I believe all five of you, kind of expressed your discomfort in the idea of selling parkland to a private interest.

And I tried at the August 16th meeting to explain that, per the current sale of city property policy,

There's no differentiation between parkland and any land owned by the city and so under that policy if it meets certain parameters it goes on to a city council agenda and that's how the proposed sale of Northeast Park ended up on your August 16th agenda.

At that meeting there was a discussion that all five of you did not favor selling parkland and I proposed that if that was the case that your policy should be amended to reflect that the city will not entertain offers to sell parkland.

So the policy as you've seen there's some amendments which in effect

Legally, the city can't say we will never sell this property.

But what the policy now states is if somebody would like to purchase a portion of parkland property, they need to have three councilors contact staff and then staff will initiate the staff review for selling city parkland to a private party.

but if a private party comes before staff and wants to to make an offer for parkland the staff's not going to do anything at that point until three councilors tell staff to proceed and I think this amendment captures your policy preference as stated at your August 16th meeting.

There is one thing that in the policy

that I would point to and it's kind of an interesting legal issue and you know pardon me if it's too esoteric but there actually is not a true legal definition of a park in Virginia code.

If you take a look at 15.2-1806 it talks about parks but there's not an actual

you know, specific definition of parks.

And so what I did in the policy was for purposes of this, I wrote for purposes of this policy, public parks shall include any parks designated in chapter 18 of the Code of the City of Charlottesville.

So that's how parks would be defined for purposes of this policy.

Great, thanks.

Well, and I certainly am going to support this amendment, but I did want to just kind of follow up because I had opportunity to talk to the applicant who, you know, kind of prompted this step.

And I do think that there is still a challenge that exists because it did seem that it wasn't even their real intention to want to buy a city's property and to begin with, but they were really running out of options when this portion of the city property was really impacting their own property and it's well, you know, just

and hazards of what was being caused there, whether it's tree maintenance or water issues, which is resulting in like insects.

And so I just, I do feel that we do have to kind of consider like, what are some ways that we can address these things?

Because we do have many residents that are abutting our parks.

And I think that what happened was they met with our park staff around this issue and that were ultimately recommended.

This was like the best path to have this addressed in a meaningful way.

And so,

I'm sorry for that because I think it certainly was an exhaustive process for many.

And I think this is the right direction to go, but I do have to recognize that there's still a concern.

This concern still exists for this constituent and there's likely others that fall into that category.

And I don't know what the answer is.

All right, thank you.

I move we adopt the resolution to amend the policy for the sale of city-owned property to prohibit consideration of the sale of city park property.

All right, Ms.

Thomas.

Ms.

Walker.

Yes.

Ms.

Magill.

Yes.

Ms.

Okay, so that carries five to zero.

Next, we have a resolution to support listing Jackson P. Burley High School on the Virginia Landmark Register and National Register of Historic Places.

We're going to go from the John Blair show to the Jeff Warner show.