City Council Meeting postponed from January 16, 2024   1/22/2024

Good evening, everyone.

Good afternoon.

I'm going to call this meeting to order.

January 22, Charlottesville City Council meeting will come to order.

This meeting was postponed from January 16 out of

Abundance of caution because of the hazardous weather conditions on that day.

Ms.

Councillor Oschrin.

Here.

Is there a second?

Anita Second.

Second.

Please cash your vote.

We did have a question.

I'm looking for the verbiage that you sent me.

I think it would be good.

Yes.

Okay.

I'll second that.

Other business, okay.

The meeting will be divided into three main sections.

The first is a work session to be where we hear and discuss presentations that do not require a council vote followed by closed meeting.

We're now going to hear the report from the Charlottesville Area Transit Alternative Fuel Study results with recommendations.

Mr. Williams?

Thank you very much.

Mayor Wade, Vice Mayor Pinkston, members of council, just waiting for the presentation to come up.

But while we're doing that, I just want to set the stage.

If you remember and recall, it's been about almost 18 months now since we started down this path of putting together the Alternative Fuel Study.

The last time we were before you, which was in July, we said we would come back to you with recommendations.

We're at that point now.

We think this, what will be, sorry, what will be in front of you?

Why is it advancing?

I don't know what happened.

No, it was going by itself.

There we go.

So before you, we were talking about making sure that we brought you a recommendation that looked at where we are as an organization that was going to provide us with what we think is the best path forward to getting us to zero mission by 2050.

Also, we wanted to make sure that we are being good stewards of the public dollar.

The plan that we had put in place

The study plan that we put in place still has the 15 routes, 26 operating blocks or 26 vehicles at peak period of time.

We're still operating the schedules that we're talking about for our operating about 14 to 15 hours per day.

So the models that we're, the recommendation that we're going to introduce to you basically looks at getting us a model that allows us to be reliable,

Dependable and Frequent, because those are things that make transit usable for all in this area.

With that, I'm going to bring up Sam Sink, Kimberly Horne, one of our consultants.

We actually have two other consultants that we can promote them that couldn't make it in person today, but they should be online.

Say their names.

Paul Elman and John Jackson.

Paul Elman is a

a licensed engineer, and John Jackson is actually one of the key planners for the state's transition plan for all transit agencies.

So he's working with VDRPT.

So I think we have the right team that's been helping us pull this together.

Thank you, Garland.

Let's see if I can figure this out.

There we go.

So just a reminder, I know we were here back in July presenting on the study, but the overall goal of this is to achieve that 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and ultimately get to net zero by 2050.

So to do that, we're focusing in on a couple of things.

One is to determine

what that preferred cleaner fuel type for cat buses should be.

We'll also be determining a high level implementation strategy on a timeline for that implementation strategy to bring in that preferred fuel type or types of vehicles.

So in order to look at these different types or alternative fuel types, we're really looking at three considerations broadly.

First, resources.

What are the costs?

Secondly, operations.

What is it going to take to implement it?

And third, sustainability.

What are the benefits?

Under resources, you have things like what kind of new training will it require for mechanics and operators?

Where is the fuel type going to come from?

Under operations, you have things like

How flexible and scalable is this technology?

How reliable is it?

And under sustainability, ultimately, what are the local and global environmental impacts and is it a resilient technology?

So this table, I believe you've seen before.

I won't read the whole thing, but just as a reminder, we did look at three types of alternative fuel technologies.

First was natural gas.

So that can be either CNG, compressed natural gas, or RNG, renewable natural gas.

We also looked at battery electric bus and fuel cell electric bus, also known as hydrogen.

So zeroing in on emissions,

This slide generally focuses more on tailpipe emissions, but global emissions are obviously part of the study and very important.

And it's worth noting that although BEB and fuel cell or hydrogen buses are labeled as having zero tailpipe emissions, which is true, ultimately, the global emissions for these technologies are very much reliant upon the power source that we use to generate the electricity for the batteries,

or to generate the hydrogen fuel.

On the hydrogen side, you know, I think there's, you may be familiar with green hydrogen, which is produced with renewable energy, but there's also things like gray hydrogen, which is much more prevalent in the market, and that's produced with something like natural gas of fossil fuel.

So there are global emissions with one, but not necessarily the other.

Looking at natural gas or RNG,

It's worth noting that although you can reduce emissions with this technology, ultimately you're never going to get to that net zero emissions locally and globally that we're trying to get to by 2050.

Looking at infrastructure, you know, I'll note that natural gas and hydrogen will both require a similar type of investment in refueling infrastructure at the Cat Depot.

you need containers to store the gas, to pressurize it and to pump it to fuel the vehicles.

With battery electric bus, you also need hefty infrastructure investment.

Some of that may be offsite in the form of working with the utility provider to upgrade the transmission infrastructure to be able to provide enough power to the site to power a fleet of electric, battery electric vehicles.

And also, of course, you would need

charging onsite at the depot to charge the buses every night.

So taking the information from that chart and starting to zero in on the pros and cons of each technology with CNG or RNG, it is a cost effective technology.

It's also a very mature technology.

There's many agencies around the state that are using this and around the region.

It's very resilient to operate.

If your power goes down, you can still fuel your buses with CNG or RNG.

On the con side, though, it does produce emissions, which obviously is a very big con for a study like this, where we're trying to get to zero emissions.

It's also noteworthy that when we're talking about renewable natural gas, that may not be commercially available nearby.

You may have to bring it in from a long distance away.

And that is a consideration when you're thinking about the

global emissions impacts of that fuel type.

The battery electric in the pro column, obviously it's got zero tailpipe emissions.

It is a mature technology.

This has been around for a few years now.

Many agencies have piloted it and implemented it.

And there's a definitive source of the fuel.

You know what your grid makeup is, where that electricity is coming from, and whether it's renewable or not.

So you know the ultimate emission story behind that fuel that's being used to power your batteries.

On the con side, it may require a larger fleet.

These buses do have a higher cost than diesel or CNG buses, and there are range concerns, and that's kind of what drives that requirement for a larger fleet.

Obviously, the technology is still evolving.

Ranges are going up, but it's not necessarily a panacea, and it is something that does influence the recommendations and the reliability

of the service that's being put out on the street.

With hydrogen fuel cells, again, zero tailpipe emissions, just like battery electric, and you do have the resilient operations similar to what you have with CNG or RNG.

However, they also have a high cost to deploy.

You not only have the high vehicle cost, like you have with battery electric, but you also have a higher infrastructure cost to be able to bring in that fuel storage and pumping infrastructure to your depot.

It's also, there's somewhat of a lack of supply of hydrogen fuel on the market right now.

This is more of an emerging technology, so the fuel market hasn't quite caught up.

It's especially difficult to get green hydrogen, although the federal government is making significant investments in hydrogen hubs in the region.

Two were announced sort of nearby.

One, the Appalachian Hydrogen Hub, which is centered on

Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and the other is the hydrogen hub centered on the Philadelphia, New Jersey, Delaware area.

So it does look like fuel supply is improving, but that is something where it's an evolving technology.

So it's in the con column for now.

Looking at the overall greenhouse gas emissions,

So this chart shows the emissions if we went 100% in the direction of each of these different technologies shown here by 2050.

This is based on what we call the A-fleet model, which is a nationally accepted model for determining the global operating emissions of these different transit technologies.

will start at the top.

So you do see an increase in emissions initially.

This corresponds with the increase in the number of buses being purchased to use to put into service.

roughly doubling its investment in the amount of service it's putting on the street between now and about 2028.

So that's why you see that initial increase.

And then you see the top line, which is our baseline of diesel buses.

Below that, we see CNG implementation, and you get only about a 7% reduction in your greenhouse gas emissions with that implementation.

Moving down, if we look at gray hydrogen,

or Ray FCEB.

that 99% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and similarly with battery electric that also gets you that 99% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

The different points along those lines correspond with different goals the Dominion has set for how the percentage

of its power generation that's going to be renewable by those years.

And then there's a linear connection between those different points.

Can I interrupt and ask a quick question?

Certainly.

Thank you.

So the line that's plummeted all the way past zero, which fuel is that?

So that's renewable natural gas.

And the reason that it shows up as a greater than 100% reduction is because it is taking methane that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere and using it to generate power and it turns into CO2 emissions.

Thank you.

And this percent reduction is all in.

This is global.

It does not.

So that could be an issue with hydrogen, that could be an issue with CNG or RNG as well, depends on what fuel you're looking at.

But that would, it also doesn't include the emissions related to the manufacture or end of life disposal of any of these assets.

So it is not a perfect model.

So what does it include?

It includes the operations emissions.

So what it takes to generate the power and then to burn that power

This is actually more of an assumption that we could just put in all of these vehicles by 2040 because that's what our model shows that we can implement by based on the current retirement cycle of existing vehicles.

So by 2040 you're looking at 100% of each of these on the graph and then that number at 2040 and forward is based entirely upon the mix but you're only getting credit for like the number

O'Hara

Yes, I believe that we should begin, not to jump ahead to recommendations, but we should begin getting alternative fuel vehicles on site next year.

There is grant money in place to buy two battery electric buses.

Okay.

Don't want to jump ahead.

No, no, no.

One quick question.

Yes, so the model actually has baked into it information from actual studies and implementations across the country.

and so the math is baked into the model so I can't take credit for that but it is based on real-world experience and what people have seen.

So if we're looking at the different scenarios for implementing these different technologies

and kind of how the costs and the emissions reductions compare.

I won't read through the whole chart, but I'll note that diesel is the baseline condition here.

The long-term emissions reduction represents where we'd be by 2050.

And the near-term reduction represents where we expect to be by 2030.

And this is all based on the CATS system optimization plan and the service changes and increases that are baked into that.

So we've got five scenarios here.

I mentioned diesel as baseline with battery electric.

We came up with three scenarios, and I believe you saw these in July, but we wanted to show the full range of potential implementation of battery electric.

There's a lot of discussion about, you know, how rosy the picture should be.

So we wanted to look at kind of a worst case scenario, sort of a medium scenario, and then all the way down to the rosiest possible picture for battery electric technology.

So beginning with our worst case scenario, you'll see that on row two here with requiring 94 vehicles.

This is based on needing a roughly 1.6 buses for every one bus that you would have under the diesel scenario.

So obviously the cost or more, however you are meeting that long term emissions reduction goal.

Kind of that medium scenario, the Goldilocks would be battery electric with fast charging.

With that, you're looking at about a 1.1 to 1 vehicle replacement ratio.

Again, you get those emissions reductions.

The cost is significantly less than the worst case scenario, but because this technology is more expensive than diesel technology and you would need facility infrastructure upgrades, you do see an increase in cost with it.

looking at the kind of rosy picture.

This is assuming, this is the battery electric low estimate, and this assumes that battery technology, battery capacity increases exactly as fast as we need it.

Fast charging technology, if part of it would work flawlessly, and that there's no increase in cost associated with that increase in battery capacity or anything.

Not saying that's probable, but we want to assume or look at what that assumption would play out like.

So you're seeing a 1 or 1.1 to 1 vehicle replacement ratio.

Again, you get the emissions reductions you're looking for and the cost is, again, less than the electric with fast charging or than the worst case scenario, battery electric.

Sorry to interrupt again.

Can you help me understand?

battery electric low estimate.

What is that option supposed to help us compare to?

Is it the road just above it?

Battery electric with fast charging?

I see.

So in other words, if it

three years and now they have a breakthrough with some sort of beyond the lithium type batteries and all of a sudden we can essentially use the same number of buses that we have now.

And then moving on to the hydrogen scenario, because that has a range that is very similar to diesel, you wouldn't need additional vehicles.

You do get the emissions reductions you're looking for.

This does assume green hydrogen.

can be sourced or produced, so that is an assumption.

But again, you see those higher costs associated with that zero emission vehicle and with the infrastructure needed to fuel it.

And CNG, again, that's a one-to-one replacement.

The range is very similar to diesel.

You don't get the emissions reductions that you're looking for, at least not with CNG.

And even though RNG is over 100%, as we saw in the previous graph,

We know that there are still local tailpipe emissions associated with that.

No, it's the same vehicle, same fueling infrastructure, it's just

So diesel, you might see something on the order of maybe 550K.

You know, Garland, you could probably speak to this better.

Absolutely.

So right now we're buying diesel vehicles for about $548,000.

We just put in, we will be able to put in within the next 60 days, in order for two battery electric vehicles.

We, when we made our submission to the state, they pointed out that they thought our estimate was low, so they bumped our number up.

It's basically $1.2 million per vehicle for a battery electric vehicle.

So about double the cost?

A little bit more than double the cost.

So depending on what grant source we can get, our numbers can be very low, or they could be, depending on the grant we have, it could be 10%, it could be 20%.

And are those all kind of the standard large size buses we see?

We're an urban style system and part of what we are trying to, it's the capacity to go to smaller vehicles.

We don't have the capacity to carry as many people.

So we would potentially have to double the size of the fleet and have them on a much higher frequency to carry just as many people.

Depending on which route you're asking.

So if there are three routes in our system that are at capacity and having smaller vehicles would be a concern for us with that.

Now, I caveat that because

The frequency on other routes is not where we want it to be.

So the ridership is not where we are hoping that it will be.

If we can get becoming more reliable and more frequent, we know our ridership.

There's pent up demand.

Right.

I know there's a delicate balance between a convenient route and ridership.

But that also probably comes into factor with the routes that are at capacity.

Five, seven, and the trolley?

Five in the seven, we actually have three vehicles on each one of those routes in the AMPM.

Yeah, I've ridden the seven during rush hour.

I know what you're talking about there.

Are there any other questions on this slide before we move on?

So I'm actually going to hand it off to my colleague, Paul Elman.

He is a licensed engineer and he's worked on several zero emissions vehicle studies.

Yes, Paul is being promoted now.

John Mew.

Okay, welcome.

Thank you.

Paul Rahman also with Kimley Ward.

One regional example of another trans agency is currently assessing a transition of their fleet to zero emissions is Arlington County Transit in northern Virginia.

They currently run an all compressed natural gas CNG fleet and they're also looking to transition to zero emissions by utilizing a combination of RNG,

Regulable Natural Gas, BB, and Hydrogen Fuel Cell.

We undertook a study with them that we started in 2022, and we did some modeling.

The BEBs and the FCBs were assessed at different conditions.

with both AC and HEAD.

And it resulted in the very success rates on completing the blocks with an estimate of how many additional buses would be needed to be 100% successful in completing those blocks, as you can see on this table.

A couple notes about that.

So footnote two is about

doing a BB during the winter with heat using auxiliary heat and that would be a fossil fuel auxiliary heater.

So that allowed the success rate to be higher because the heater was utilizing fossil fuels and not relying solely on the battery electric bus.

put node three on there.

We did a modeling effort using on route charging two locations within Arlington County.

But the caveat on that is obviously, you know, that could be challenging to implement more broadly either across the city or county due to great capacity considerations.

And finally, the forward footnote on there.

For the four pilot BBs that Arlington County has actually now purchased, they're expected to arrive for delivery in 2025.

Those batteries have a higher battery capacity, 588 kilowatt hours and 686 kilowatt hours than the modeling scenarios that were utilized.

So this could actually improve some of the performance and change those results.

I can explain that a little bit more.

So essentially, you know, the way when agencies and Garland can tell you more on this too, when you do your scheduling, you break out the routes and the different blocks, right?

And a block is essentially how long, you know,

one operator can operate a route before they have to change over, right?

So under this scenario, you know,

The success rate is the percentage of blocks that could be completed if it's a battery electric bus under the available charging that that bus would undertake, either from the facility if there's no on-route charging or utilizing on-route charging during its actual route.

So it's really the ability

to perform that service that's scheduled in the blocks for that route.

So if it doesn't meet 100%, you know, it's that less, you know, routes that aren't able to be completed based on that.

So, you know, what ends up happening is you need to have more buses available to perform that same equivalent amount of service.

Another question, obviously looking at this data for the winter, the auxiliary heat is, appears necessary.

Yeah, I think it varies, and we can get you some of the information about the cost of different types of auxiliary heaters.

In fact, I think we were talking to Blacksburg Transit the other day, and they've actually had some challenges in this climate, even getting the auxiliary heaters to function properly.

And they're looking at it that they don't know if that's just something on the manufacturing side or just the extreme cold that we've been experiencing.

But, you know, essentially, if you look at the second line on this, it's winter with heat.

You know, only 13% of the blocks were able to be completed because, you know, essentially the battery electric bus battery is performing all of the heat, you know, providing power for all of the heat.

And that significantly cuts back on the ability of these buses to complete the blocks.

As you can see, you know, you would need 46 additional buses for Arlingtonwood.

Wylington Wood for this to complete all of those blocks successfully.

So heat is a significant drain on the battery.

And if you're doing auxiliary heat, that certainly helps on the performance of the buses.

has just practically speaking, what does that look like auxiliary heat in a bus?

Usually they mount, they're rooftop mounted, I believe, right?

Okay, next slide.

So, you know, for the ORD study, there was a number of variables that the county took into consideration and also risks that went into developing and evaluating the various implementation scenarios.

You know, we've obviously mentioned the cost and the potential challenges of

doing on-route charging based on great capacity and available land and impacts on the environment.

In addition, we knew in Arlington, similar to Charlottesville, there's significant space constraints on building new maintenance facilities to house a lot of this equipment.

And there's always challenges in land acquisition for all these agencies.

Arlington had an additional concern because they were doing a transit strategic plan as required by DRPT and they're actually looking at additional service.

So they obviously would need to expand the fleet even further to provide that.

and they're also part of the regional network working with WMATA and Metro Bus there also is looking at an entire bus network redesign which could also impact additional fleet facilities, you know, for the count.

You know, there's a couple other risks on here that apply to some apply to BED.

Obviously, you know, the great capacity is a significant issue and, you know, is it a green grid?

You know, Dominion is, you know, on a path to get to a green grid, but that is still several years away.

On the hydrogen side, there's concerns about code requirements.

And I think those are being addressed through the implementation of fuel cell.

But there's always issues in terms of locating the structures and the facilities on these maintenance sites.

So those were a couple of things that were covered by Arlington.

Their current plans are to do pilots of both BB and Hydrogen.

So their approach is a little bit about looking at resiliency, particularly with climate change.

They want to make sure they can still put off the service that they currently offer.

and what they're looking to

for the hydrogen fuel cells.

And they're also looking at a test fit of their current weight maintenance facility to potentially accommodate actually the production of hydrogen on that site.

So that is their current plan.

Thanks, Paul.

All right, let's see if I have control.

There we go.

So moving on to our recommendations.

First, we recommend the CAT transition to a zero emissions fleet by 2040.

This is in support of the city's climate goals for carbon neutral operations by 2050.

I'll get into a chart in a couple of slides.

It kind of shows how that looks.

CAT should pilot two fuel types for transition, both battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell.

The battery electric pilot, as I mentioned,

of those vehicles.

We do have grant fund, or CAT does have grant funding for the purchase of them, and they will be delivered next year.

With hydrogen fuel cell pilot, we recommend that those purchases occur in 2027.

So battery electric should go first because the money's in place, but also so that with the hydrogen fuel cell, we have time to line up a potential fuel source, be that on-site generation, or trucked in from somewhere.

During the pilot testing, CAT should continue to expand its fleet to meet the capital requirements of planned service improvements.

Could I ask towards that?

No, sir, we haven't even gotten there yet.

So this is just our plan.

If you remember, we bought to Council's attention.

We did a system optimization study when COVID hit us.

And that's what this is.

For future hopes and aspirations, it would be even bigger.

So we're recommending that the final fleet mix be determined based on pilot testing and continued improvements that are being made to ZEB technologies.

Certainly with both battery electric and hydrogen fuel cell, these technologies are not static.

They're constant improvements and resources being developed for these technologies.

So that's something that will be evolving while these pilots are going on.

and prior to determination of a final fleet mix.

And finally, we recommend that charging and fueling take place at the CAT facility.

So begin with depot charging.

The city would identify a source for hydrogen fuel and also investigate on-site green hydrogen production as part of the site planning effort.

And the city would also investigate on-site generation of a green electricity

for charging BEBs at the CAT facility as part of the site planning effort.

Can I ask another question?

So the second bullet point, the city will investigate on-site generation of electricity.

We're not actually planning to burn stuff to generate electricity, right?

Are you talking about on-site generation of the relevant transformers and charging systems and all of that?

We're talking about green energy generation, so likely solar panels.

Oh, OK.

And the potential for that, how much energy we could likely expect, and what sites like that would happen.

Yeah, it could either be stored in a battery.

It could directly be used to generate hydrogen fuel.

That seemed pretty complicated.

Yeah, there's actually a few.

One that comes to mind is

MTD in Champaign, Urbana, Illinois.

They leased space next door, which is owned by their, I believe it's the wastewater treatment authority that's local to them.

So we've had a few presentations on this, and so my memory may be foggy, but I thought that there could potentially be a conflict of having hydrogen, battery, and gas and diesel kind of all kind of together, like one spark or something.

What we were talking about is that our current site doesn't allow us to do everything we need.

So there is an adjacent piece of property that we will have to require to build out our new model regardless.

So this slide shows how we would get from today's fleet mix to a 100% zero emissions fleet by 2050.

You'll see we actually, in this model, get to it by 2040.

So that 10 years of difference, that gives us room for the what if.

You know, also, note here, this is, this kind of represents the quickest you could get there.

You know, it's based on 12 year life spans for vehicles and being able to meet those mileage goals.

You know, things may happen, like what happened with the hydrogen buses, or not hydrogen, the hybrid buses that CAT has today, where it may take a little longer to retire them.

So what's kind of the on the field like the average lifespan?

So cat's current average age, I believe is about 14 years.

So I think that's representative of the fleet mix they have now.

That's not necessarily going to be the case with battery electric or hydrogen or some other technology.

Thank you.

Can you help me out with the colors, please?

Yeah.

I guess if I brought it up on my screen, I could tell.

So right now, basically, we've got a mix of gasoline, diesel, and hybrid.

Correct.

I'm reading that right.

And then we go over to 2026, maybe.

The blue comes in in 2025.

Those are battery electric buses.

So that represents those two pilot vehicles that we expect to arrive next year.

at some point the green, the dark green or forest green I guess is just our marker for a zero electric, zero emissions bus whether that's BEB or FCEB or whatever.

That's the purpose of the pilot.

And speaking of pilot,

So during that two years, will Kat do that, or does the sustainability office do that, or...?

So when we get the vehicles, part of why we want to do the pilot is we'll be able to test the vehicles on all of our routes.

So it won't be just isolated to a couple of routes.

We'll be able to see whether it works on the heavier routes or the lower producing routes at this point in time.

So, Garland, would you be able to, you know, sometimes when you get something new, you try and get the kinks out, and so you might have more maintenance, but that's because it's the first or second model.

How will you kind of say, well, this could have, this could be good, but it had a lot of maintenance issues, but that could

Great question, Mr. Mayor.

So part of what we're going to do is, is a part of the pilot is, is one of the things we're going to do is buy an extended warranty.

So it allows us to take care of that.

You got that phone call too?

We made it.

So we're going to make sure we get an extended warranty so we're able to adequately test these items, right?

The technology is rapidly changing and hopefully the model that we buy doesn't have any kinks, right?

Maybe we get to the point where it's one of the older kinks that's been worked out and that we are getting into the model where we're buying something that has a larger range for us.

The goal, though, would be to figure out how, I mean, because, you know, eventually we want to get to zero missions across the fleet.

We're gonna need to figure out what that mix looks like.

I am not in favor of having one single source.

I'll just tell you that because it puts us at jeopardy.

I am concerned about having dual because it allows us an opportunity to be able, in case something doesn't work, we'll always have some source to rely on and have some semblance of transit out on the road.

That is my goal.

And part of that is to also maintain that we have

because our model right now requires us to have ridership to generate, we need to generate ridership to generate funding from the state.

And if we have a long extended period of time where we can't operate, then our potential funding comes down from the state.

So there's reasons for this and trying to test it and get it right.

I have often reminded Mr. Snook when he was mayor that

Council is not just Council, but you're also recognized by the FDA as the Board of Charlottesville Area Transit.

So part of what this study is basically saying is the Board of Charlottesville Area Transit is going to acknowledge

how we're going to get to transition from where we are now to zero emissions.

You're putting your stamp of approval on that so when we go to the feds we're saying this is where we feel good about getting this and going to after funding.

At this point.

Okay.

Absolutely.

Sure.

So hydrogen, it is an energy dense gas.

It is less energy dense than something like gasoline, but it is more energy dense than say, the power used to

charge a battery.

So it's attractive in that sense.

The hydrogen fuel is used to power a motor that then charges a battery kind of as it goes.

It's a smaller battery pack than the large battery packs needed to charge a battery electric bus.

So the bus is lighter and a little less costly in the battery department.

Where it's been implemented, I think

and Paul or John, help me out here.

I believe Sunline in California has a pretty sizable operation with it.

There you go.

Yeah, Sarda.

I believe so, yes.

Canahal.

Thank you, John.

So, there are agencies that are implementing this.

However, it's still more of a nascent technology than battery electric because it does take a lot of energy to produce hydrogen fuel.

So, I think the appeal of hydrogen is that it can be green.

However, you have to have enough renewable

Energy sources set up to produce it in a green way.

And I think we're just now starting to see those large-scale investments in green energy production come to fruition.

John says, also, AC Transit in Oakland, California, they have a mix of battery electric and fuel cell electric buses.

They actually publish a

A great kind of study, I believe it's updated either quarterly or annually where they're comparing how those buses are performing against one another just as a side note.

But I think there's not a lot of interest necessarily in gray hydrogen or hydrogen that is produced with fossil fuels in general.

So I think you will see more implementation of hydrogen, at least in the transit space.

as the renewable energy comes online to be able to produce it at scale in a green way.

I think there's also, you see more agencies looking at hydrogen as more of the limitations with battery electric become clear.

Battery electric obviously still has a lot of promise and is performing well for a lot of agencies, but it does have limitations and so I think agencies are

Yeah, thanks.

And then for the ones you mentioned, Sunline, Canton, and AC Transit, and even though you mentioned the Champaign-Urbana group also, are they all, you said the, I think Sunline was a little more robust, but is that like four buses, or is it like most of their, how much of their

Sure.

John, I'll let you chime in with that.

Yes.

So I would say summary for AC Transit fleet.

Definitely over 20.

They've been doing this for about, gosh, I want to say at least

seven or eight years.

They're in the process of fully transitioning their fleet, but this is definitely beyond a pilot program.

They've been very open.

We've talked to them and discussed with them about their fleet, about, you know, they get calls about having tours to let other agencies come in and see their fleet and what it takes to transition and look at their maintenance facilities and then just to hear the story about why they decided to go with both battery electric

and Fuel Cell as probable options because you do have to look at both because

every place is different.

There's really not a one-size-fits-all option.

So for them, it was more of just a matter of looking at both options and testing them both out and seeing how they both work.

But it seems like thus far, they've had success with both.

They do also have the weather aspect because it is warmer in the Bay Area.

Yeah, I believe they have AC Transit is currently operating 36 FCEBs and they actually have procured to obtain 24 additional by 2025.

So by 25, they'll actually be up to 60.

Fulcel Electric Buses, Fort Hill Transit currently has 33 and they also are in the process of ordering 19 additional so they would be up to 52.

Sunline Transit in Thousand Poms, California has 20 FCBs and Victor Valley has 12 and are looking at ordering 11 additional.

So pretty robust FCB use in California.

Locally Montgomery County in Maryland

also has ordered FCBs.

I believe they ordered two to four as a test pilot.

They have an interesting facility near Silver Spring.

They actually did an energy as a service concessionaire agreement with a firm called

Alpha Structure.

So this Brookville facility they operate actually has a micro grid and then it also has solar panels that provide the ability to manufacture green hydrogen on site.

So it's a fully self-contained both microgrid and then they have the solar panels that help develop the green hydrogen production on site.

And then just to add, put those on the call, I'm going to go ahead and drop a link in the chat.

I don't know how accessible it is.

But CalSTAR, the National Nonprofit, puts out a zero-missions bus census for the United States every single year called zeroing in on ZEBS.

And it has numbers of every single transit agency in the United States that is either

Procuring Zero Missions buses or currently has them in their fleet.

And it breaks it down by FTA region and by a specific trans agency.

So it could be a good source for all of you to take a look at and just see what this is being done.

Okay, the next slide is I think quick.

So the next steps for the study are to finalize the feasibility study, and then we would begin the conceptual site design work that I described earlier, and ultimately complete a zero emissions transition plan.

that is required by FDA to seek some of these special grant funds that are out there right now.

Fantastic.

right there.

So I've seen this slide several times in the RTP and the MPO and the other acronym, the type meetings we go to, the alphabet soup.

I get the fact that

I don't know what my hangup is about hydrogen.

I have some concerns about it.

We have an administration now that's pushing it.

We might not have an administration that's going to be as forward.

I don't know.

I can't predict the future.

But electricity is a lot easier to get in my mind than hydrogen in terms of its access.

So if I look at battery BEB with fast charging, the third one down,

and I understand the point about the heaters and the wintertime and all of those things, but if you're talking about basically having to invest, some of those are like capacitor chargers or whatever that are sort of sprinkled around midway through bus routes, again I can appreciate why you'd want to have two different types of fuel, that makes sense to me.

If BEBs are going to get better and better, and we can invest in fast chargers that are, you know, again, strategically located throughout the network, that just still seems to me to make the most sense because your batteries are going to get better.

And even if they don't add up to what they need to be, if you have enough of those chargers sprinkled around,

You're not having to go with it.

Again, it's a pilot study, so maybe we'll come out of this in hydrogen.

I'll be convinced.

It's amazing.

But hydrogen feels a little bit like fusion.

You know, people have always been talking about it.

The next 10 years is going to be the next big thing.

I just, I'm skeptical.

I hope to be proven wrong, but

I mean, if I were an engineer designing the system and trying to think about, you know, technology that was starting to become mature, which is the electric buses, the batteries that they were using, we're not talking about high rate, we're talking about genuinely those should get better and better.

And then if we think in terms of the fact that our grid should get better and better from Dominion,

May I just give you, no I think your comments are very warranted.

The concern that I have is one, site control.

We're talking about putting fast charging stations around.

The space that it takes not being able to adequately, potentially secure those sites is a little bit of a concern for me.

Concerned for, should be a concern for us as a organization.

The items that you're talking about, the overhead or underneath, the underneath induction doesn't work as well as the overhead is what we're finding out from our colleagues.

But the overhead equipment is large and it's not something that we go into this lightly.

And if we're talking about trying to do it

right outside the downtown station.

I don't think we have enough space.

So there's concern there.

We probably have to figure out a place.

So these fast chargers are a pretty significant investment.

It's not necessarily difficult to work with.

It's the infrastructure that needs to be built out to make it work.

And when we're talking about fast charging, it's not you pull up and like you fill your car, fast charging is 15, 20 minutes sitting there.

So our model gets changed a little bit because you would have to either one pull it out of service to let the fast charging happen, which means you have to have another bus anyway, which could work, but that means we'd have to have potentially one or two or three or four more buses to make that model consistently work because people still need to get to work or get to their point of activities.

Between 15 and 20 minutes to top off, and it's not 100%.

You're getting 10%.

You're just filling it.

We're just topping it off.

That's what the fast charging does.

It tops it off to allow it to continue to add hours.

So we have a model that we are operating between 15 and 18 hours right now.

The fast charging allows us because normally you're getting 10 to 12 hours optimal.

So I'm trying to recall it from the 17th presentation.

But if you go back and you all, I think it was three routes that we were very, that we looked at, there were no problems.

We'd be able to do those.

There were maybe two others that we thought we possibly could do.

And then there were others we were concerned about being able to

without having some sort of, you know, topping off, we know we weren't going to be able to operate the system.

When we're talking about securing everything and fueling it at CAT, we're talking about, you know, eight, ten hours.

We still have to have another bus to finish the second piece of the route, whether that's diesel, whether that's whatever.

In our model right now, while we're testing this diesel.

is our backup.

So as we build up and become more reliable, we're still using diesel to get people on the bus, remember.

So if our baseline is 58 diesel buses, and we have a full build out of a battery electric of 94, that would suggest that we've got 36 of those coming on to finish up the second half of the day kind of thing.

So I want to make sure we understand.

We don't have capacity or space to house 94 vehicles today.

So even if we acquire the other piece of property, we still don't have room for 94 vehicles.

We do have space.

Yes.

Continuous, if we can.

We have 40.

Precedent for building up?

We will be able to tell that when we do the space study.

So that's the next phase.

One of the things that a lot of transit agencies, I shouldn't say a lot, a number of transit agencies are doing is they're building enclosed garages to keep them out of the elements, out of the weather, especially on the BEB side of the house.

In there, you may be able to build a two-tier garage where you'd be able to maximize storage and also fueling.

So that is a possibility.

It just becomes more expensive.

A few questions.

And to the previous conversation, I'll still say, even with difficulties that may exist with fast charging, to me, the more realistic route, if we were talking about a conversion to BEB, would still be fast charging, which seems beneficial, even just in terms of the fleet size.

That seems more feasible to me cost-wise than

having a fleet that's like 94.

But a few questions.

I know that before the results of this study, the city had engaged in a pilot project for electric buses.

I think there were two of them.

Are there two in this study?

The goal would be green hydrogen.

So if we're building out the model, we're going to build it to the green standard.

That would be optimal.

in for acquisition of the fuel.

So, gray hydrogen is available.

It would need to be trucked in.

You know, you can set up for a pilot, a mobile fueler that's self-contained.

You can drop it off anywhere with 120-volt electric service.

And it's a grounding rod, and it's good to go.

You can surround it with jersey barriers.

You don't have to, you know, make a multimillion-dollar investment in your facility to be able to pilot that.

In terms of the cost of the fuel,

I want to say, and John Paul, please jump in, I've seen like eight dollars, what translates to about eight dollars per gallon most recently, but please, John or Paul, correct me.

and I know in the recommendations there would be a period of a couple years where the two BEBs would be online before hydrogen fuel cell buses are acquired.

As just a theoretical example, not saying this would necessarily be the result, but let's say in that period those two BEBs were a success.

By that point, the technology for hydrogen, or at least green hydrogen, hasn't developed to the point where it seems cost effective or deployable.

Do you mean not do the pilot at all?

Part of the reason why we are looking at potentially doing two pilots is to make sure we get the mix of alternative fuel vehicles correct.

I have concerns about putting all of our eggs in one basket.

As a

as a concern like the other night when we had our snowstorm, when the temperature dropped and we've talked to other transit agencies, they weren't able to get the range that they had initially, which means that if we go 100% a model and we don't have the extra capacity, we would have more buses stranded

and not being able to fulfill.

So that's what I'm hedging against as we potentially introduce two alternative fuel cells and still getting to zero emissions.

Because we could basically just do B, B and a diesel, but we don't get 100% B to 100% zero emissions.

So this allows us to be

And so, separate from the exploration of developing green hydrogen on site, the additional infrastructure that's needed, even with that taken out of the equation, to do that simultaneously with the, I guess it would be overnight charging infrastructure at first for the battery electric buses, with both those, the infrastructure needed for both hydrogen

Yes.

We'd have to do that regardless of whether we did just BEB or just hydrogen.

Yeah, I'll echo some of the questions that Councillor Pinkston had raised.

It seems to me

at least initially it would be gray or probably blue hydrogen acquired seems most realistic unless there's a large breakthrough in the technology because I don't think even the new hydrogen hubs whenever they're built are going to be doing green hydrogen at least initially

So particularly when I mean just seeing like production of green hydrogen on site, some of the redundancy in terms of two different infrastructure investments.

I don't know.

I'm not a scientist, maybe I'm wrong.

I mean, I hear your concerns.

We also echo your concerns.

Transit works well when it is fast, frequent, reliable, safe.

We're trying to make sure we do our due diligence.

We build out our model.

We test it before we make tremendous capital outlays.

in time and costs and the amount of money that we're going to spend.

Sorry one final question that that raises is, you know,

I know this is, whatever path is taken, it's extremely difficult in terms of both technology, planning, capital investment, procurement, and as you've mentioned, this is occurring in the context of a fleet expansion, particularly with the regional transit vision plan, a substantial fleet increase

When you're looking at the complexity of this change, both in terms of the management of buses, routes, the changes, and I guess I would assume both for both technologies, hydrogen and BEBs, additional training that's need for maintenance staff, is this something that you would see would require potentially like a new position in terms of like managing this fleet transition?

Several new positions.

There's no way one person can take care of all this.

This is an effort not just by CAT.

The Office of Sustainability is going to play a major role.

Neighborhood Services and Neighborhood Development is going to pay a role.

There's a lot of folks, public works, public utilities potentially in this model.

Yeah.

You know, my question, a lot of them have been already asked, and I'm looking at the time.

I had one, a couple of points.

One, I would like if we could get that Oakland study, I think, that you mentioned, where they're doing a quarterly comparison.

If that's something that's free or whatever, I would love to have that.

I would like to know if any locality looked at all of this, because the double in the cost really concerns me, if you says.

I mean, that doesn't concern me.

I know it's more expensive, but I mean, that any locality say, you know what, this is just a lot.

What if we double our diesel buses?

Make it more frequent.

It may not reduce the mission of the cat or the

Bust System.

But if you are able to say, you know, we can provide service every 10 minutes, that would take a, I think it would take a lot of calls off the streets.

Overall, the numbers will go down.

Has anyone looked at that?

I mean, because 1.2 to 1.3 million dollars for a bus compared to half a million

I mean, and you know, that's just the bus.

We have a lot to do.

I'm looking at storing a fuel cell, you know, and you mentioned offsite support for it.

There's a lot that goes along with this, and we're really not at this point doing a lot to increase the frequency of it.

It's going to be cleaner, but and

I'm not a regular user of the bus, but I do work professionally with a lot of people in my position as a career services person that they want the frequency

They want, you know, they're not saying they necessarily want it clean.

I'm not saying that they don't.

I do, sir.

So great points that you pointed out.

So allow me to paint a, quickly paint a picture for you.

Charlottesville area transit, if we double our size and we make our system more reliable and more frequent, I am confident that we will get people out of their automobiles.

The study where we have looked at how people use our system, where they want to go, and the changes that we need to make to make it more direct to those points of activity centers and points of origin.

If we were to make it double our size, make it more frequent, I think it has an environmental impact by just getting people out of their automobile period.

that would impact would be positive?

That would be a positive, right?

So right now we're, and maybe I shouldn't say that, but I will.

We're at a point right now where we are, we have a system where we have 40 vehicles on our property.

Today, I only had access to 20 of them.

10 of them are the hydrogen, I mean, hybrid battery electric vehicles.

They have been down.

They don't work.

We, they stay in our shop more than they're on the road.

And then on any given day with the temperatures being so cold, we have had breakdowns with some of the other ones.

So we only had 20 vehicles to our available to us today.

My concern is

I want us to become as clean, but I also want us to be paid attention to providing this region with fast, frequent, reliable transportation.

I think we can do both.

Let's just do it in a very measured way.

Let's do the testing and figure out how to make, figure out what that complement looks like.

A question that came to mind in that discussion, as I know, part of this is obviously with the Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, there's a substantial amount of federal money available for the first time for both buses and infrastructure, changing for the locality, the cost of those buses, what we incur.

At what point

So if we were to assume in one scenario that a substantial part of the zero emission bus fleet years out from now is BEBs, it would seem like fast chargers are probably part of the infrastructure to make that work.

Is there any point over the next several years where we would be evaluating as a result of this pilot or something that's coming after this?

if fast charging infrastructure is necessary when we would seek federal money for that, because whatever that phase out period is for when that federal money is available will obviously substantially change the feasibility in terms of cost to us as a locality.

And so there's kind of like a time window on the availability of that money.

Absolutely makes sense.

So I would say that

By you bringing it to our attention, it's on our radar now.

So we would, as we're doing our testing, we're going to be able to tell whether, with the charging just being done at CAT,

how much, how reliable it is, whether they can make the whole route or not.

And then we look at where we would potentially have to acquire property to do on-route testing, on-route charging, and have a real conversation with council about the infrastructure needed, locations that we'd potentially have to buy, and what that costs, what that looks like.

And what specific are you looking for us tonight?

Tonight I'm actually just providing.

In other words, is this the direction that the city is planning to go?

We're giving you an update if you would like to give us what I would say is today we were giving you the information to allow you an opportunity to

get the information, digest it, and come back and figure out whether this is the direction you think you want us to go.

If this is the direction you want us to go, then we move to the next phase where we start to do the site planning and start to work towards getting the actual transition plan written.

Yeah, so yeah, I'm supportive of that, but we haven't

You know, we haven't done the test, the piloting yet.

Correct.

Oh, okay.

To do both, to do the pilots, both of them.

That's correct.

No, not tonight either.

The thought process that I have on this matter, because it's multi-layered, but financial specifically because I'm in budget world right now and no one wants to join me there at the moment.

You need time with this, is my opinion.

So the desire was for you to have this information this evening and have you spend a little time with it, thinking further about any other questions.

Allow Mr. Williams to get you any additional information that came up in this discussion.

I'm sure you will hear from our advocates who have interest in making some different decisions so that you'll be able to have that information as well.

And my desire was to have you come back into another work session, more like what you did during the zoning ordinance back in city space.

You anticipate that like after the budget?

Nope.

Oh, next month?

We don't have time because I have yet another big issue for you coming right after that.

So we're going to do it while we do the budget.

So the goal will be to figure out when a work session could occur.

I've actually spoken to Mr. Freeze about potentially using the joint session time period that you all have kind of in reserve for your meeting with the Planning Commission.

Once that's all done, though, there will be a formal resolution we do need to bring to council that support of whatever decision.

Could I, before we leave the topic, could I just express a couple of concerns that I didn't come up in any of this discussion?

The first discussion, the first concern that I have

is the question of long-term supply of lithium and rare earth elements.

Over 90% of the world's supply of rare earth elements is in the hands of countries that don't like us.

We would be in a really bad spot if we wound up getting things sideways enough with China

Russia, Brazil, India, which are the four largest.

The world supply is 115 million tons, I guess it is.

We have 1.5 million in our reserves.

If I'm looking at things 15 years down the road, I don't know that I can predict how that's going to work for us.

That's point number one.

Okay.

At this point, I know that Joe Biden has invested billions of dollars in various hydrogen technologies, but when the Secretary of Energy came here last year to talk about it all, it was always quite clear that it was at least five years away and probably more like ten years away before anything was going to get to market.

and so that concerns me.

I looked at the operating costs of say for a 20 year period plus the vehicle and facilities costs, adding it all up and battery electric buses come out by far the most expensive.

Second is hydrogen all the way down at the bottom end of things.

The cheapest for a whole lot of reasons is if we can somehow get a market going of some size

in Renewable Natural Gas.

I've been looking up biogas kinds of things, and all I see is a lot of research being done about, oh, we've got a prototype here for getting biogas out of this cow manure operation or something.

Yes.

So actually, Arlington, the example that Paul went over earlier,

their wastewater treatment facility is going to

begin producing the R&G that they'll be using by 2028.

Like that's in design, it's happening.

Do we know, is there enough research done on this to know what the capabilities would be?

For example, could we take the water treatment plant at Moores Creek and somehow capture whatever is coming off of that?

Is that going to generate enough

I don't believe that that would generate enough for you to power a fleet this size.

Okay, so we got a closed session.

We have to go.

No, that actually takes care of it.

Any other questions?

If not, can I get a motion to go into closed session?

You guys rocked it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

We were throwing questions that you left and right from the get go.

Thank you.

I'm happy to do it.

Motion for a City Council closed meeting pursuant to Section 2.2-3712 of the Code of Virginia.

I move that City Council close this open meeting and convene a closed meeting as authorized by the Code of Virginia Section 2.2-3711A8 for consultation with the city attorney regarding legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice for the following purposes.

One, legal matters related to the offer and acceptance of proffers.

Second.

Second.

Please cash a vote.

Motion passes.

City Council is now in closed meeting and will return at 6.30.

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

Thank you.

Everyone ready?

Madam Clerk, are we good to go?

Okay.

Sure.

Okay, we're going to begin our business meeting with a moment of silence.

Thank you.

Lord, I forgot to ask you how long did you usually make your moments of silence?

somewhere around there.

One announcement.

The Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail Authority is hosting a series of public meetings as it relates to the proposed jail renovation.

ACRJ will be hosting a community forum on January 25, 2024 from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m.

at Carver Rec Center, Classroom Lounge 233.

The authority seeks input from the community regarding its renovation project.

Light refreshments will be provided.

There is a Zoom virtual option for this meeting.

The purpose of the meeting is to review and discuss three design options as presented by Mosley Architects.

Tony Bell, Mosley Architects and his team, as well as jail superintendent Martin Kummer, will be present to facilitate the meeting and answer any questions.

Two more public meetings are planned for February 12th and February 29th from 5.30 to 7.30 p.m.

also at Carver Rec Center.

For more information about the project, go to www.acrj.org slash renovation project or contact Colonel Martin Kumar, Superintendent of ACRJ at KumarM at acrj.org or 434-977-6981 and again would encourage anyone with thoughts about the project to attend those three sessions.

and then one other announcement just real quick.

The Virginia Breeze is proposing, is a bus service that goes from Charlottesville to Northern Virginia.

They are proposing potentially expanding service from Charlottesville to Richmond and Virginia Beach.

If you believe that that should happen,

I would encourage you to go to VirginiaBrees.drpt.virginia.gov and fill out the survey to let them know you would like that service expanded there, which would be a huge opportunity for the city.

Great.

Absolutely.

The Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, in conjunction with some other local organizations, including UVA Sustainability and Rivanna Trail,

Groups are hosting City Neighborhood Walks the second Sunday of every month.

They did the first one last weekend and in recognition of it being Martin Luther King Jr.

Holiday Weekend, they led the site to various

They led the walk to various sites around town that had to do with the civil rights movement and locations that had been in the Green Book.

So that was a really cool way to launch the walk schedule and to get a little more history about neighborhoods.

So they're going to be doing that throughout the year.

Again, the second Sunday of every month.

If you want to join those, check out the

B-PAC Facebook page, but also get on the mailing list.

That's great.

It was really fun.

Yeah.

And there was a great turnout.

It was a great turnout.

I saw that.

Any other announcements?

So we do have a proclamation.

Last week was National Day of Racial Healing Recognition, but we didn't meet last week, so we have a proclamation.

Oschrin, can you begin with this?

Whereas the Charlottesville City Council envisioned Charlottesville to be a place where everyone thrives and is committed to justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion through the implementation of equitable practices and policies across its activities.

and, whereas we understand and recognize that we must all work earnestly to heal the wounds created by systems of oppression and exploitation founded on false ideals of racial difference.

And I apologize.

Now, therefore, the City of Charlottesville City Council in unity with others throughout the United States of America takes great pleasure in recognizing Tuesday following Martin Luther King Jr.

Day as National Day of Racial Healing and urges the community to organize for the promotion of racial healing on this day and throughout the year.

Signed and sealed this day, January 16, 2024 by the mayor, Juan Diego Wade.

So thank you all for participating in that.

Thank you so much.

If not, Ms.

Consent Agenda Number 3, Minutes, November 13th Work Session, November 14th Joint Public Hearings with Planning Commission, November 20th Regular Meeting, November 29th Zoning Ordinance Work Session, January 9th Joint Meeting with Planning Commission, January 10th Joint Meeting with School Board.

For Resolution to Appropriate Funding,

from the FY23 State Criminal Alien Assistance Program grant for Albemarle, Charlottesville, Regional Jail, $16,768 second reading, five resolution to appropriate funding from the Capital Improvement Plan Contingency account to Virginia Supportive Housing for Premier Circle.

Thank you.

We'll now take public comments regarding items read on the consent agenda by just read by the clerk.

Each speaker has up to three minutes.

If there's anyone in the council chamber who would like to speak on an item that was just read.

Is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda?

So moved.

Okay, second.

Second.

Okay, please vote.

Yes, sir.

A couple of things this evening.

I'm going to turn it over for a couple of presentations.

First, our city sheriff is going to give his budget presentation.

He was unable to make the round that you all just completed.

And I didn't want him to miss the opportunity to be able to speak to you about his budget.

I skipped ahead a couple pages.

Can you go back the other way?

I'm James Brown.

I'm the sheriff of Charlottesville City Sheriff's Office.

I've been in that position since January 1st of 2010, so it's been a little over 14 years.

The Sheriff's Office is committed to providing the best possible service in a timely manner while being fair to all citizens, employees, and management.

The sheriff is to make the best use of his various talents while at the same time maintaining an environment that encourages others to show their initiative and pursue their interests.

Everyone is important at the sheriff's office and the sheriff will respect the diversity and worth of every individual and will cultivate trust in our organization by delivering our services with honesty and accountability.

just do this.

Okay.

So this is an organizational chart for our office.

We have we're actually we're fully staffed at this point for the first time in just over two years.

We hired a new person and they've completed everything.

So they're ready to go.

One of the first questions that people ask, because we have a police department and a sheriff's office, so people often ask, what is the difference between the two?

The police department handles criminal and traffic laws, so, you know, they respond and are dispatched to various calls where you see them running around flights and sirens through emergency calls.

We assist when we can, but we're often tied up in court, and then we handle civil law.

So when we're going around, you know, some of the papers we can post, we don't necessarily have to arrest

folks when we're going to serve papers, garnishment for wages, subpoenas, various paperwork that just gives them a court date so they know to come to the court.

Those are the big differences.

The duties for our Sheriff's Office are defined in the Code of Virginia.

It's pretty straightforward, but we have courthouse and courtroom security for our jurisdiction.

We're charged to transport inmates for the various courts and sometimes that means going to other localities to pick up prisoners anywhere throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia and we serve civil documents.

Other duties that we have, extraditions, we haven't had as many recently with COVID.

Folks just kind of work things out and that's still been kind of been going on.

But we have extraditions.

We transfer mental patients and assist the police department.

We do that primarily during the day.

And then on the weekends, we do that 24 seven.

It helps keep law enforcement officers on the street to help keep, you know, folks safe.

So that's one of the things we do.

Visions.

Levies, we have businesses that may be found, I guess, at fault for things, and we have to seize property and do sheriff sales to make everyone whole that was ripped off or whatever happened with that business.

Jury duty orientation, lobby duty, security station, trespass notices, unclaimed bodies.

That's in the code of Virginia.

So if we have a deceased person and they don't have family members or someone that can claim the body, then we end up processing

that individual, concealed handguns permits, and then we have staff and training updates.

The civil papers, these are the stats for 2022.

We're currently gathering the ones for 2023.

We have to report those to the comp board every year.

So for 2022, the civil papers and subpoenas that we processed was 39,245.

We do have that number for 23 and it's 43,000, just over 43,000 this year.

Inmate transports, 257 have been locals, so that's between our local jail out here in Avon Street, Dalmarshall's Regional Jail,

and the 119 non-local, again, are from jails from anywhere else in Virginia.

Mental patient transports 10 local.

That's when we have folks that sometimes just have to be moved from one floor to another at the hospital.

We have

and so on, and so on.

you know, have good safe vehicles for the person that they're transporting as well as for the deputies.

The jury summons in says 1,817 from 2022.

With the juries, we have those set at what's called a docket call.

And that's when we try to get as many people there as we can to go over

the process of what it would be like when you come to court, so we serve those.

Total between the courts that we serve, we screened 34,000 people in 2022, and that's going to be a little bit higher.

And then for the unclaimed bodies, which I had talked about, we had 18 in 2022 that we processed.

Additional things that we do or I do, the jail board, we are on the

Police Academy over in Ware's Cave.

We have to do our budget every year.

We have to submit some to the COMP Board as a constitutional office.

The COMP Board reimburses the city for a good bit of the monies.

and with the way it works out, it's typically around six to seven hundred thousand dollars.

With that being credited towards the amount of our budget, typically we're under a million dollars and our budget represents less than one half of one percent of the city's total budget.

So it, you know, works out well in that sense for direct monies from the city taxpayers.

Weddings or Crest of Speaking engagements, and then there's some groups that we do.

We do triad, which is a program to assist seniors.

Helps prevent them from being victims of crime and also goes over safety.

We do fight crime investing kids, which is a program that tries to help youth stay on the right track so that they don't end up going through criminal justice system.

Rad is the women's self-defense course.

We actually developed a basic self-defense course that we do, and we'll be offering that.

that's open to everybody and anybody that wants to learn different ways to defend themselves.

And emergency preparedness is one of the other things that we do.

We work with Department of Social Services and the Red Cross in regards to setting up shelters when we have emergencies.

We've had to do that before, you know, during bad winter weather.

We had to do it during microburst a few years ago.

We opened up a shelter for about three days.

When that happens, we are the people that actually secure the shelters.

The present challenge we have, our courthouse and courtroom security assignment, we're working on some issues with that.

And we are in the process of becoming an accredited agency.

We've been working that for a few years, but we've had turnover in the office.

And with the turnover, the person that was accreditation manager ended up leaving.

So then you have downtime in between while you're getting a new person.

So we've been working that for a few years, but the person we have now working on it, we should be in good position to be

accredited in 12 to 18 months and space for staff.

We had the renovation, but we are pretty much maxed out right now for a space for staffing.

And so that's pretty much it.

That that's where that's where the money goes for a budget.

It goes to those things.

It's not a lot of flashy things with lights and sirens.

We do assist the police department.

You know, we have

emergencies or things like that.

Our folks will stop civil process to go help if there's a crime in progress.

There are times I know we had a there was some there was a shooting incident involved out near the bypass and hydraulic road.

And when that happened, our folks stopped civil process and we started answering calls for service for the citizens so that we still have law enforcement.

All the people for the sheriff's office of fully law enforcement certified officers

So they can cover the calls when the police department gets tied up with various things.

Thank you.

Thank you.

What do you end up doing with 18 dead bodies?

So we work with one of the local funeral homes, and they primarily will.

Yeah, because they don't have folks that can think of our recognition.

Does the person that person get buried someplace or kept in a

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you for your presentations.

It's very interesting and thank you for your service.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, Sheriff.

Testing, can you hear me?

Thanks.

Thanks Mayor and Council Members.

Today I'm very happy to announce that we secured and ratified a contract with Hoof Josie, a very important study.

It's the Downtown Malltree Management Plan.

It's a local homegrown which I'm very happy that won the bid.

The office is just downtown and it's nice to have a local consultant that actually knows what's occurring within our city and especially with the downtown trees.

So, I'm very confident and happy that they won the bid and they would do a really, really good job.

Alright, thank you members of council and members of the public for coming.

Just making sure this works here.

So I'm Paul Josie with Wolf Josie Landscape Architects.

We're based here in Charlottesville, Virginia, where women owned landscape architecture firm in town.

And you'll see a number of us wandering around the mall probably.

But myself and Peter Russell, who's the project manager, who's also licensed landscape architect and arborist, will also be involved throughout the project.

Our background, we do a lot of campus tree planning as well as institutional tree planning as well as major urban waterfront and downtown design.

So we worked on the 100 year tree plan for the mall at the University of Virginia.

as well as the tree plant for the Duke Central Campus Quad, the Abel Quad.

We've also worked on soil management plans for all the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.

as well as the District Warf, which is a 27-acre development in Washington, D.C., which we are involved with all the landscape and all the streetscapes and trees.

So we have a lot of experience in urban planning, urban design, and trees and soils.

that brought us to this project.

So we're joined by a great team, Keith Pitchford, Arbor Associates, right back here.

He's an arborist who worked with the city on the 2015 Mall Tree Assessment.

We're also working with Lining Grade, a local firm who knows the utilities of the mall very well as well as a cost estimator as we get into proposals for how to keep the trees healthy and potential replacements in the future, what those costs might be.

So this project is the pedestrian areas of the mall.

So from the omni all the way to the trees at the edge of the Ting Pavilion lawn, this is the extent as well as some of the side streets as well.

The project has four phases, and we'll go into these quickly in a second.

But just briefly, there's a startup phase, as well as a site analysis and research phase, which we're in the middle of now, followed by recommendations for what to do in the future.

And then after we sort of have a consensus for many people, we'll have a final plan, a management plan for the trees at downtown mall.

and how these occur now.

The project start-up is just us collecting surveys and such.

All the data we can get and then that's what we're now as the site analysis where we test, we looked at all the trees, the trees health.

We're also looking with working with all the members of staff to understand how they interact with the trees in the mall from fire to utilities, safety as well as cafe space.

So we'll be collecting all that information now.

and then you'll see us again in a month or two with recommendations and a proposed plan for the trees.

Through this process we'll be working with the city management team on Parks and Rec with Rianne, Steven, the city arborist and Robert Mathis and so we'll be working with them as well as two different subcommittees, a city steering committee as well as a community advisory committee and those are broken into

Two groups, the city steering committee is really Parks and Rec, Public Works, and yes, Economic Development, Public Utilities, as well as the fire department.

Groups that have some involvement with the downtown mall, as well as from a community standpoint, a member from city council, the tree commission, BAR, architecture school, friends downtown mall.

So a number of different groups will be really gauged and involved in this process for recommendations for the future of the trees.

So again, we're right at the beginning of January as of two weeks ago when we submitted this towards the end of January.

But we're working with city staff right now to really gain all their information.

And we're just going to look quickly at the tree inventory and assessment and where the trees are currently.

So this is the extent again of this area.

The trees were planted in 1976 by Lawrence Halpern and Associates.

That was the first phase and the second phase was done.

in 1980, which is sort of the central place trees, as well as the end by the movie theater.

Those are done in the second phase.

Then the Omni was 1985.

And then a few phases before that led to the re-bricking effort in 2009.

And the most current is the area around the code building, which was done in 2022.

So it's comprised of a number of different parts.

And then this is all of the area that we're looking at.

We looked at 91 trees initially.

We've also expanded the scope slightly.

But with these trees, I'll just point out, 15 have already been removed of these trees.

There's a high proportion of trees in central place that are missing.

You'll notice those giant steel grates where trees used to be in those areas.

So we're starting to see a lot of trees in decline on the Mall.

from a species type.

Over about 60% of those are the large willow oaks, those tall canopy trees you see in the middle of the mall with the number of ginkgos on the side streets and schumart oaks towards the pavilion itself.

A quick question on a couple slides back when it says existing trees, inventories, 91 trees, additional 38 trees to be added.

Thanks, yeah.

That's actually around the omni.

So we weren't sure if those were in the scope when we did the initial assessment.

Some were sort of on the property line of omni.

So we ended up adding all the trees at the omni as well and in front of the code building.

So we also looked at how big the trees are, how they're growing, the trunk, the canopy, how much live canopy, how much dead wood we see in the trees.

We're also looking at any damage, any required pruning, maintenance requirements for these trees.

So we're capturing these all in a very large spreadsheet, which you don't have to read.

But it really prioritizes overall condition of the trees and gives a place, a datum for future generations to look at the trees and how they're doing and also for the city forestry to sort of track the different trees' health and if they have concerns to keep going back to those trees.

We are looking at the health of the trees.

Roughly 40% of the trees are in fair to poor or already removed shape.

So that's a sizable amount of the original willow oaks have already are in poor shape and declining shape.

And of other trees, it's almost, it's about 35%.

So the trees are in decline, generally, as a large grove.

It's due to a number of reasons.

But there are still a number that are really healthy.

And when we started to look at where they're located, you can start to see here.

Generally, in each grove, there are groves of five to seven, sometimes three trees, throughout.

And these groves sort of shift back and forth.

So the movement of them all is sort of a circuitous movement.

But they're planted about 18 feet to 12 feet on center.

They're very tight.

And so the trees just outcompete one another.

So you'll notice one tree in each grove sort of in poor shape.

That's not growing as well as others because it's being outcompeted for resources.

Just like in a forest, you know, the trees would naturally decline and some would win out over others because of their close spacing.

Some areas are in very poor shape.

There's one boss that, you know, the majority of the trees are in very poor shape.

You can see

on the plant right there at the top.

So we're sort of noting these.

We're also taking their caliper of their growth.

So some are at 30 inches.

That's only about 20% of those are really large trees.

So it's a highly variable down to 24 to 30 inch, down to 12 inch caliper trees.

So even though they're planted all at the same time, they have a very different growth rate.

And again, that's because

The trees are planted with so much density.

So you can see each grove has different colored circles.

The darkest being the largest tree, the lightest being the smallest tree.

So they're, again, competing for nutrients with one another.

Some are growing on the edges better than the ones growing in the middle.

So we're sort of tracking how healthy these trees are and their growth changes.

We're also looking at risk of these trees.

Being a critical pedestrian area, we're looking at there's

The consequence of free failure has a significant risk associated with it, so we're cautious with these.

We're also looking at which ones are immediate concerns and we went through this and noted

A number of trees with some potential risk.

This doesn't mean that all of these trees have to come down.

This is really just pointing out that there are some with maybe a co-dominant leader where the bark is included and it may cause a propensity for that tree to split in time or maybe there's a hollowed out, it's been topped and there's a hollowing of the tree.

So we're noting these things just to be observed.

There was one tree that we noticed that had

and

some other issues.

These are just examples of trees that maybe have, again, that co-dominant leader with the two leads or maybe they're missing a top here and there's a cavity forming and hollowing out the center of the tree.

If it's the main leader, so typically you want to have a tree with a really straight leader.

If you lose that central leader, other leaders will sort of form, but then there's still that hole at the top of the tree that water will collect in and then rot will work its way down into the tree to hollow it out.

So if it's been topped, it's lost its main leader.

So these are sort of examples of trees with other conditions.

This is the tree that was removed at will number 19 due to significant concerns of immediate failure.

One element that was a significant concern, unfortunately a result of the pandemic was the addition of heaters on the mall.

And so nine of the original 55 willow oak trees were impacted by heater use.

where the heaters were placed next to the bark of the trees and that actually burned away the cambium and the tree.

Two of those trees have already been removed there in very poor shape.

So you can see here where those trees occurred and these are the cafe enclosures of shame and in yellow.

And so some were really, you know, the heaters were left too close to those trees and ended up killing those trees.

Some of them had already been removed to have the hollowed out symbol.

So this is just an image of what that looks like.

You can really clearly see the damage the heaters have.

The trees are trying to grow over some of those wounds, but they are lasting wounds forever for these trees.

Some of them, again, have already been removed.

It's been already removed here.

So just an important thing, this led about to an NDS statement to all owners of cafe owners right away.

There's now a minimum 10-foot clearance requirement.

Any heater locations have to be approved in advance.

If there is any wrong placement of heaters, they could lose their cafe permit.

So it's being taken very seriously as a result of this and we're hoping we don't see this issue in the future.

So that is a very, very quick summary of what we're doing and a start to this just to introduce it and we will have a lot more recommendations and work with members of the public and staff to sort of come up with our next generation of plans for our trees.

I'm glad this work is being done.

I guess we take it for granted, but

You have to take care of the trees.

That was last week and sort of also a result of some of these concerns where we saw dead wood in the trees that there's typical annual pruning that happens every

O'Hara

Do you think about a large replacement?

Next phase gets into those recommendations.

And if you diversify the tree types, do you keep them the same?

How are you observing the original design intent of them all while also the safety and also thinking about climate change?

How these trees respond?

Originally, it was all maples that were planted in city plaza.

Maples are not urban trees.

have all failed repeatedly.

They were replaced in 2009.

They all died again.

And so thinking about different species that are going to tolerate increasing droughts, increasing heat elements that are stressed for trees.

And so we'll take all those into account, as well as how does it impact businesses if you have to remove trees and replace them?

And so how do we really realize

and the life cycle of these trees and of our downtown mall.

And this will be wrapped up by Jean, is that right?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah, it's very interesting.

and the symbiotic relationship between the city as owner of the landlord of the space in the downtown mall with all the businesses that use it and then all of the pedestrians and tourists and citizens that use it.

It's like so many things with a city.

We take these things for granted.

The trees are there.

They're always going to be there.

We don't have to worry about them.

But I remember, I guess it was a year ago, maybe two years ago when I first came on council, hearing about the need to do something specifically with these trees because of a safety issue or something.

And it just, to me, goes to show not only how these things are connected, but just we have to focus on doing things that seem like

Littles, not the right word, but sort of basic and do them consistently and right and pay attention to them.

And I'm just really glad to see that this is happening with our tree cover downtown.

So thank you.

I had the pleasure of being on the tree walk last fall with Mr. Gaines and getting to see a lot of the trees and hear about the specific issues that many of them had and being really bummed by the heater damage.

Has this letter worked?

Good question.

Thank you, Council.

So for the most part, yes, businesses are following the recommendations we have specified areas within a radius of 10 feet of each tree.

Theoretically, all the businesses, if they do have a heater, they're supposed to be talking with MDS and planning accordingly.

There are some heaters that are there.

I don't know if they are in use that are not necessarily sanctioned.

But as far as I know, everybody's playing nice.

Great.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I will add that this will fall right into the downtown mall committee that you all might remember hearing.

when Mr. Rogers was here as the interim city manager, he had formed the downtown mall committee with the purpose of trying to identify the next 50 years of what it will take to preserve them all.

This tree issue came up as a part of that conversation and the committee that has worked for the past year is finalizing their recommendation.

So this will layer right into that and that'll be a part of how we continue the conversation about caring for the amenity that we have as the downtown mall.

Just a few other updates, and then we are done with my report.

I wanted to update Council and the public in regards to an item that came up.

It's been a repeat item in community matters in regards to the pursuit of a land bank for the city.

I just wanted to share that I did recently advise Council on the recent formation of a working group.

That work group consists of myself, our city attorney, the housing program manager,

and two planning commissioners, Phil Duranzio and Laos-Soliates.

We met recently to have some beginning conversations.

This was initiated by Mr. Duranzio, who's been a key proponent of this particular action.

In that conversation, we were able to get through a lot.

and left the conversation with the ability to see that there is some work that we can do and that we believe that we can bring back to council for your consideration sometime later in the summer, some consideration of actually pursuing a land bank for the city if that is your choice.

The goal would be for us to bring a quality set of information for you to then process at that time and then make a decision

on if that is what you would like for us to pursue.

It is a part of your affordable housing plan, so we will associate that with that work that was previously done and then allow you to give us some further direction on next steps.

In addition to that, I have updates regarding two big deals to be, and that is update to staffing in the city manager's office.

Last week I announced the selection of Eden Ratliff,

and experienced public administrator who will join our team.

He is moving here from Pennsylvania to serve as our deputy city manager for administration.

His portfolio will include budget, finance, HR, and IT.

and then earlier today I announced the selection of Lionel Lyons, a seasoned veteran in local government who will join us as the deputy city manager for operations, my old job.

He will be overseeing neighborhood development services, public works, transit and utilities.

Both of these deputies will join us on the fifth year next meeting and I am so looking forward to them getting here.

I have a lot of work to pass on to them.

And then I want to remind the public at large that tomorrow I'll be hosting a community budget forum at Carver Rec at 6pm.

Please come.

We don't want to have this event and no one show up.

It's really your opportunity to talk to me about the budget since I am responsible for putting it together.

and bringing it to the council on March 5th.

So it's an opportunity for you to come and engage.

I will have our key team members there to talk about various things and we will hopefully have some good quality discussions about things that you all want to prioritize in that conversation and my goal will be to align those things with what council has given me as priorities and then the hard work of putting this budget together and as I have been honest with council up to this point

This is the hardest budget this city has ever had to produce, I promise you.

But we're going to get it done, and everyone will be able to say we got it done.

So thank you.

That's my report.

Thank you.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

All the works as well.

We have announcement of two internal promotions thought I'd share with everyone.

Michael Goddard, he will be the new deputy

Public Works Director.

We're seeing Facilities Management and Project Management.

He was a Facilities Development Manager.

And then also Joe Shiflett.

He was our structural maintenance manager.

He was promoted to Facilities Maintenance Manager.

And so I thought I'd share that.

Also, kudos to our operation team for the recent events we've had with Snow.

That includes Public Works, Utilities, Park and Rec.

But at the same time, our

our cat folks, our transit folks for making sure the visitors are being moved in public transportation as well as our community members.

Thank you.

It's now time for community matters.

There are eight preregistered speakers leaving slots for eight additional speakers on community matters.

If they're one of the first eight speakers unavailable, we'll move up someone from the wait list to move into that slot.

Each speaker has up to three minutes to speak.

We'll now open the floor to the first preregistered speaker.

Yeah, I'm Charles McCurdy.

I live at 216 Commedia Drive, which is on bus route four.

I'm a former co-president of IMPACT, the Interfaith group of public service agitators in town.

And our

Our transportation committee has been working for about three years on improving bus service in the city.

Our initial studies showed that one of the problems, there weren't enough drivers.

And the reason, and because there weren't enough drivers, so many of the buses, not bus four, but many of the other routes, couldn't stay on time.

And in our effort to make bus service more reliable,

We think it's a bad idea to have a hiring freeze on new drivers at the very time when we need to expand its number.

We think that CAT drivers deserve to be pay comparable to what Richmond's GRTC system pays its drivers in Greater Richmond.

The city bus drivers reached top pay after two years and yet 71% of cat drivers can't make ends meet without a second job or working overtime and 57% of CAT drivers have to hold a second or even a third job to manage the cost of living.

This is not how it should be.

This is not the time for a hiring freeze.

The local faith community is on the side of the drivers.

Transport advocates are on the side of the drivers.

And I urge the city council to be on the side of the drivers as well.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. McCurdy.

My name is Dr. Dan Miller.

I live on 1107 Avon Street.

Normally, I don't like to pull rank, but I figured I could do it here and sound a little bit more official and not just like I'm complaining about traffic, which really is what I'm doing.

I also wanted to add, I'm happy to, I think maybe the

and the gentleman left who was speaking about this earlier.

I'm happy to snitch on any businesses that are putting heaters too close to old growth trees.

That was an upsetting piece of information that I just learned.

So I'm going to try to collect myself and maybe make my original point.

I had originally planned on coming and giving a small list of official city and county vehicles that I've noticed going well over the speed limit past my house on Avon Street.

but in an effort to be more politically savvy and polite I'll skip all of the different designations of official vehicle and just note that I think we have sort of instantiated or created something of a traffic emergency on both Elliott and Avon streets given our work to understandably alleviate traffic on Ridge Street and redo the Belmont Bridge and what we're looking at in particular on Elliott and Avon is a situation that the city traffic engineer says is

Average speed limit, average speed that's about 38 miles an hour, which is well over the speed limit there.

So I wanted to come and kind of be a squeaky wheel on that and basically say that I think when we see all these folks who are here to serve the community, who are serving the community in an official way, these are obviously folks who believe in our city and believe in our laws.

And what that tells me, once I got over my initial frustration and disappointment in seeing these people speeding down the road,

is actually down to bad design, right?

We're seeing a road system here that was set up really in the 60s in a way that, you know, is not how we think about traffic these days.

And really we've had traffic calming via a promise of shifting traffic to these arterial roads.

This has sort of been promised to the residents in Belmont since, really, 1961 for my research.

So I think it's time that we do that.

I think there's ways to do divided pedestrian platforms and to do radar speed limit signs.

And frankly, just to take the speed limit on that part of Avon going out of town, we could do that tomorrow.

We could take that road down to 25 miles an hour.

instead of being at 35.

And that would be great because that's, you know, a neighborhood where I see on a regular basis kids getting dropped off to school and riding.

It was 11.30 last night and I saw two boys, two brothers on a rental scooter, doing figure eight loops in the middle of Avon Street.

I mean, this is a neighborhood, right?

There's a park.

There's people crossing to go to Browns all the time.

And I'm really, really concerned looking out my window every day that someone's going to get killed.

Another person's going to get killed, as we did have somebody get killed on Elliott Street.

from someone's meeting.

So that's about all I've got.

I've got about five seconds left to say I think it's time we do these traffic calming initiatives and I also think it's time we switch CAT to EVs and well past time we switch CAT to having obviously a union contract for the drivers.

Thank you, Mr. Miller.

My name is Robert McAdams and I live at 2211 Williamsburg Road, Charlottesville, 22901.

The second page of the Charlottesville Area Transit System Alternative Fuel Study states the two goals City Council has set, a 45% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050.

To achieve these goals, CAT needs to act quickly on the transition to zero emissions buses.

The fuel study does include a pilot study in 2025 with two battery electric buses, but there is no action planned in response to this study for almost 10 years.

This makes no sense.

Because battery powered electric buses are proven technology, the purpose of a pilot study for Charlottesville can only be to identify local problems that need to be addressed before beginning a broad transition to these buses.

Charlottesville is not the first municipality to make the transition to zero emissions buses.

During 2024, city staff can learn from the experiences in other cities

and prepare extensively for the 2025 pilot study.

Doing so will enable city staff to act in 2026 to make progress toward the 2030 goal.

Last year, 2023 was the warmest year globally on record.

At times, the temperature increase exceeded the 1.5 degrees Celsius level that scientists have warned us about.

Billions of dollars of damages and widespread suffering resulted from the effects of global warming last year.

This is why you have the goal of a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

I do not know why the consultants so disrespected your 2030 goal.

But the decision on how to proceed with CATS transition to zero emissions buses is not the consultants, it is yours.

I urge you to act quickly to conduct a pilot study with two battery electric buses, then start making real progress

toward both your 2030 and your 2050 goals.

Thank you, sir.

Good evening.

My name is Kelly Reed Keeling.

I live in the city on Raymond Avenue at 212 Raymond Avenue.

I'm a third grade teacher working in an Title I elementary school.

in the City of Charlottesville Schools.

The school bus driver shortage definitely impacted our students.

For some families, not having a bus was an inconvenience.

For instance, one of my students who just got a bus this January was able to continue to attend school because one of her parents owns a business and has flexibility

The other parent has a remote work arrangement and the child's grandparents could sometimes help.

On the other hand, I have a student who comes from a single-parent household.

Last year when the child had no bus, cousins could help, but this year the cousins have different work schedules and the parent's job requires travel all around the region.

On one occasion, the parent had to drive from Stanton to pick up the child after school and take her back to work with him in Stanton.

That's an hour and a half round trip for the student, twice that for the parent.

This student also missed school due to lack of afternoon transportation.

Thankfully, this child was considered high priority and got a school bus more than a month into the school year.

I recognize that the City Council has a lot on its plate and has to make tough decisions.

However, parents should not have to risk losing their jobs to keep their children in public schools.

When the City Council refuses to negotiate better contracts with our school bus drivers, our district's families are impacted and our children miss school.

I think we could all agree, given the barriers, the many barriers that students have to learning, that getting children in the building should be our number one priority.

Thank you so much.

The next speaker is Michael Salateria.

I thought I saw him earlier, but he missed.

Good evening, my name is Shannon Gilliken, known to you guys as the other Gilliken.

I am a city schools teacher and parent as well as president of the Charlottesville Education Association.

On behalf of CEA, I am here tonight to urge you to come to a fair contract with our bus drivers.

Both the CAT and the school bus drivers are responsible for getting so many people in our city to school and to work, and they deserve a contract that honors their work.

Let me tell you about the impact the bus driver shortage has had on our students and their families.

It has been the case that parents without bus spots have had to use their lunch breaks late in the day to leave work, come get their kids, and then go back to work.

This year, one of my students has that situation.

She still does not have a bus spot.

And her parent leaves every single day, and she has to leave school an hour early each day.

If you had to leave work an hour early every day, would that impact your performance?

It's impacting the student's education.

Did you know the official end of elementary school is 2.30 p.m., but we actually ended 2.10?

Why?

Bus driver shortages.

The buses have to come early in order to make the next run to get to the middle school and then to the high school because we don't have enough drivers.

Transportation is dictating our instructional day rather than the other way around.

This extra 20 minutes a day of instruction would surely improve our students' educational outcomes.

and having a strong contract means more drivers and more time in the classroom for our students.

At CEA, we like to say that our working conditions are our students' learning conditions and that definitely applies here.

The working conditions for our bus drivers are our students' learning conditions.

Charlottesville has made some great strides in the last year for workers' rights, but we aren't done.

The power sits with you to ensure our drivers get a fair contract and that our students get to school.

Thank you very much.

Good evening, City Council.

My name is Greg Weaver, Christ Spring.

I'm here tonight representing the Charlottesville Democratic Socialists of America.

I'm going to read a statement from Seville DSA that was approved unanimously by our steering committee, which is a democratically elected body representing nearly 300 community members.

Charlottesville Democratic Socialists of America stand in solidarity with the unionized workers of Charlottesville Area Transit, ATU Local 1220, in their struggle for a fair collective bargaining process, dignified working conditions, and livable wages.

For years, the workers of CAT have made it clear that the way to fix our broken transit system starts with their working conditions.

Those with decades of service are earning stagnant wages.

Many have to work a second job over time or both to support themselves and their families.

Few, if any, are able to afford to live in the city that they work tirelessly to keep running.

In response, the city of Charlottesville passed a collective bargaining ordinance.

However, they have so far failed to agree to a fair contract.

Cat workers in their union representation have made public statements attesting that the outside attorney that the city hired has been acting adversarily and cynically during the bargaining process.

Her reported attitude of disdain was unacceptable last year when she was hired to help formulate the collective bargaining ordinance, and it's worse now upon her questionable rehire to negotiate CATS contract.

A fair first contract could be a win-win for Charlottesville residents and transit workers.

If negotiated in a way that puts workers first, it would help address long-standing deficiencies

that have led to a driver shortage, decline in service, and hemorrhaging ridership.

That means listening to cat workers when they say that such demands is improving wages and reducing the time it takes for drivers to reach top pay, or keys to retaining and attracting the drivers that are necessary to reach the city's transicles.

Seville DSA, together with countless other organizations and community members, has made it abundantly clear for years.

We stand behind our neighbors and friends of cat.

We demand changes that see CAT employees thrive personally and professionally.

We are keenly aware of how CAT employees' well-being is interlaced with the vision for robust, reliable transit service that is shared between riders, would-be riders, and CAT alike.

We call on City Council and City Manager to use their power to stop the obstruction.

They need to be firm and tell the attorney that what the city and its people want is a contract for CAT workers that sets the standard for collective bargaining in our state.

that shows that Charlottesville is behind his transit workers and those that depend on them 100%.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name's Lisa Glasgow and I live on Lake Forest Drive in Charlottesville.

And I'm here to talk about buses and money, which might grab your attention.

First, I would like to be a cheerleader for President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act.

This act is providing grants for cities to go electric with their bus systems.

The money is there to buy both electric buses and set up charging stations.

I know that's a very important part of making the change and that Charlottesville has good grant writers who have accessed some of that money and can access more.

This is the time to go electric and write for those grants because they might go away under a different administration.

I also want to comment on the Kimley-Horn slide show that we saw earlier today.

If we are going to have zero emissions by 2050, we should absolutely not buy dozens of vehicles that run on fossil fuels.

We should focus on proven technology that is being improved as we sit here, electric vehicles.

If hydrogen works out in the future, great, but we don't know that.

And to address Mr. Snook's point about rare earths being needed and the danger that people take to get them, many companies are working on making safer, cheaper, easier batteries at the time.

That doesn't have to slow down the transition.

A pilot program

which we plan to start, should focus on EVs and include maybe 10 buses and should only last long enough to iron out the creases of training people and driving and fixing them.

Then we should start buying more electric buses per year until we have enough.

Two electric buses for some unknown time period while we buy many more diesel buses is crazy.

It is unacceptable.

We must move quickly to an environmentally sustainable transportation system.

The bottom line is that people everywhere have to stop burning fossil fuels, or we will be the ones burning.

Thank you very much.

Hello, my name is Caetano de Campos Lopez.

I'm with the Community Climate Collaborative.

So a few comments on the topic of cat and the alternative buses.

First, zero emission buses.

Several times today, just like in July, the principle of being good stewards of public money was raised.

I believe that nobody in this room or community should be reminded that we need to be very careful with this mentality.

Putting money first has not historically promoted the best interests of people or nature.

and Michael Payne.

and the United States

A 2023 article from Standard & Poor's says that a sense that the value of North American renewable natural gas today is at least 11.5 times more expensive than regular natural gas costs.

The consultants that presented today have failed to mention anywhere in their analysis the risk of shortage of supply for that technology or the enormous few costs that it implies.

is still on the topic of good stewardship of money.

It saddens me to note how similar today's presentation is to the one presented six months ago.

I wanted to remind you that according to CUT study, Transition Dr. Doranty fields only start in 2030.

The selected technologies will only be piloted until 2030.

That means that no bus capacity will be replaced with new technologies until 2030.

Even the fast pace in which zero emission buses have recently improved, it would be a huge mistake to be stuck with present-day picture when making such a long-term fuel decision with no real reliability impact over the next six years.

It's a pilot.

Lastly, on the topic of ZBs, zero emission buses, please remember that what Mr. Williams said, cut only pays 4% of the buses it acquires.

That means that at $1.1 million that it was mentioned several times today, the cost of a battery-electric buses actually is sufficient, $1.2 million to buy 25 buses or two-thirds of cut's current fleet.

so Zebes.

Lastly, cat drivers deserve to be paid comparable to what Richmond's GRTC system pays its operators.

C3 and many in the environmental community want to extend our support to the ATU and the workers of cat and other city council to please

give the union a fair contract.

Thank you, Mr. Lopez.

We now have opportunity for eight slots to speak on this public comment period.

So is there anyone in the audience they would like to address?

Good evening.

My name is James Groves.

I'm a city resident, professional engineer and co-chair of the Seville 100 Climate Alliance.

Last Friday, I walked to work in the snow.

As I reached the corner of rugby in Grady, a UVA bus turned the corner, loudly started up the hill, and left behind diesel exhaust fumes that I could see and smell.

As I crossed the street, I thought, huh, our city's consultants recommend that we quadruple the number of these things on our streets in the next 10 to 20 years.

They're loud, generate irritatingly perceptible air pollution, and drives us rapidly away from our city's stated goal of a 45% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.

Is this how my city demonstrates climate leadership to its residents?

Go Big Green, Go Diesel.

Without any analysis, we're told, trust us, increased ridership will offset increased bus emissions.

How could Kim Lee Horne arrive at such a clearly flawed recommendation?

I've looked for answers in their materials and found a big one.

They presented to you a model, not actual data, of electric bus performance for Arlington that assumes no range or energy capacity improvement

in the years ahead.

They also assume electric buses will stay expensive.

These assumptions are detached from reality.

Please turn to page two of the handout provided, where you'll see how battery capacity has grown.

From 2008 to 2020, energy storage capacity has increased eight times, eight fold.

The International Energy Agency reports a 31% energy capacity improvement between 2019 and 2022.

On page three,

You'll see two graphs that summarize how battery capacity has and likely will develop.

Between 1993 and 2017, for a quarter century, battery capacity consistently grew 7% per year.

Since 2017, the growth rate has increased to 18% per year.

Thus, a bus today with a relatively modest 350 kilowatt-hour battery should be able to store 700 kilowatt hours by 2030.

On page 4, you will see how lithium-ion battery prices have dropped 80% since 2013.

Forecasts predict an additional 40% price drop by 2030.

Remember, batteries constitute 30 to 40% of the price of battery electric buses.

Kimley Horn has irresponsibly assumed no battery improvement.

Their report is a flat-out disservice to our community's climate goals.

Recently, council has heard from high school and college students, from young, middle-aged, and older voters.

You have received a petition with hundreds of signatures urging rapid adoption of electric buses.

Listen to the people.

Intuitively, you know that we all want clean, quiet, frequent, environmentally responsible transit, not a puff of black soot when we walk to work.

Go electric, go green.

Thank you, Mr. Groves, young lady here.

My name is Joyce Martin Diaz.

I am currently a transit driver operator, and I have worked for the city of Charlottesville for 19 years.

I am an activist in our union and have been present for all the negotiations with the city.

I'm here this afternoon to paint a realistic view of the transit and school bus system department.

to make you aware that a lot of our workforce will age out and retirement soon.

We will lose drivers in the next three to four years.

It is very important that our wages and benefits can be there to make sure that we can replace those drivers who we're getting ready to lose.

I know the drivers very well.

And also,

We need mechanics.

The mechanics to take care of the fleet that we have and to make the adjustment for the new buses and electronic systems that you're asking for.

It's going to take time to train them and retain them with good wages.

The employees at CAT right now, the morale is very, really, really tough.

Honestly, CAT is in a critical position.

It feels like we are barely able to make our services now.

I think that getting a fair contract will help us to retain some of the situation that we're going through with buses not being on time.

Our fleet is old, our buses are breaking down.

Making enough wage so that the drivers do not have to work two jobs

They do not have to worry about their rent and their mortgages.

They will be able to pay their bills on time and go toward making drivers feel more value to the city.

My co-workers and I, we struggle to use the vacation and sick leave that we accrue because of the lack of operators.

Having enough people would be a great improvement to the city and to the workforce of transit.

We want a transit system that can keep enough buses on the streets, ask the city to respectfully give us a good and fair contract that we can all be fully proud of.

and staff will stay and recruit the loss of our system.

Hi, I'm Dr. Emily Yen.

I live on 506 Ridge Street in Charlottesville.

I'm here this evening to express my strong support for ATU and the workers at CAT.

I urge City Council to bargain a fair contract that allows bus operators to reach top pay in five years or less.

A wage freeze in 2024 would be absurd.

We cannot have reliable service in Charlottesville unless the city pays wages that are high enough to both attract and retain drivers.

They also need to provide dignified working conditions.

As you heard earlier this evening, the shortage impacts kids trying to get to school.

as well as elderly and disabled residents trying to go to doctor's appointments.

Many residents like to think of Charlottesville as a world class small city.

Thank you.

I'm going to go over here.

Hello My name is Claire Denton Spalding and I live in Price Springs.

Before I get to my topic, affordable housing and the land trust, I wanted to thank you all for passing the new zoning code.

I know it was many years in the making and very difficult and that was a long session and I am excited about the possibility for increasing housing density in our city.

So I signed up to speak today to encourage the council to invest in community land trust housing.

I am so excited that there is a working group formed by Mr. Sanders.

and I'm looking forward to seeing the result of that survey.