Planning Commission Meeting   5/14/2024

Good evening.

I believe we're ready to begin our deliberations for the evening.

Thanks, Chairman Mitchell.

I have a few UVA project updates I would like to report on.

Okay, so the first one is second year housing.

So on April 25th, the University posted an RFP requesting statement of qualifications from development teams for a potential partnership for second year housing.

UVA is committed to helping address the housing challenges our collective community is facing.

And as such, this development proposes 2,000 beds and apartment style units, along with associated food service venues at two potential sites.

The first is at the eastern side of the intersection of Emmett Street and Massey Road, which is near the Kebab House.

People want to kind of orient themselves.

And then it extends down to where the existing Lambeth Housing Community is.

The second one is at the juncture of Emmett Street and Ivy Roads, part of the 14-acre Emmett Ivy Corridor redevelopment site.

And the proposed site sits at the westernmost parcels, closest to Cobley Road.

These potential sites have been reviewed with the Jason Neighborhood Associations from Lewis Mountain, University Circle, and the Venable Community.

The deadline for the interested parties to submit is May 22nd.

A short list of qualified teams will be released on June 12th.

And at that point, I can come back and I'll have more to report as it develops that project.

There is the master plan.

Nothing's been done yet because, again, now it's just sort of looking for development partners.

I think massings will come.

I think the master plan sets out massing heights that are similar to what's at the UVA Virginia guest house, which you see under confetti.

That's already topped out.

So if you want to get a sense of how that sits when you go by that, that's the general idea.

So now the next items I want to highlight are the board of visitors meeting, particularly the buildings and ground committee meeting happens in between this meeting and our next meeting.

So I'll give you a glimpse of what's coming up on the agenda for discussion, having to do with sort of capital projects.

So the first is the Center for the Arts.

So the B&G will consider the proposed site for this project, which is the eastern most parcel of the Emmett-Ivey corridor.

So we were just talking about the housing.

This would kind of book in the eastern side along Emmett.

where the railroad underpasses just to the east of the parking garage opposite Data Science, which just opened up.

This project will include the following public amenities, a performing arts center, musical performance spaces, and a fine art museum.

Design is in the early stages and there will be ongoing funding efforts both with the Commonwealth and with philanthropic donors.

Next one is the Northgrounds parking garage.

This project is going for

is going to the buildings and ground committee for preliminary design review.

So this is a thousand parking space, structured parking deck.

It's going to be located at the northwest corner of Massey Road in Cobley.

So this is sort of near John Paul Jones Arena.

It's opposite Palmer Park, which is the new softball venue.

So it will be sitting, it'll be adjacent to all the competition venues and the John Paul Jones Arena.

This project will include, oh, sorry.

This site was selected after years of planning and analysis.

The idea is that these parking spaces will help allow us to move away from the old surface lots that were associated with University Hall.

And we can transition to more pedestrian and bike friendly environments.

And so a portion of this new athletics promenade is just nearing completion.

And the idea is this time next year, the entire promenade will open up.

And so if you're going to an event at any of the

The idea is you no longer will have to kind of scramble across parking lots.

There will be dedicated pedestrian pathways for all of those destinations.

So the structure for the North Grounds parking garage is purposely set back and in front of it provides community amenities.

There's bike storage, e-bike docking connection to the UTS bus system.

These spaces will also do double duty during football season to help with pregame tailgating and allow mass transit connections to Scott Stadium.

And in order to facilitate this, or to enable this construction, a portion of the 1960s-era Copley Hill, which are these garden-style apartments, will be demolished to make way for this new garage.

And so the housing effort that I mentioned earlier, the second-year housing, is meant in the sort of large-scale planning to accommodate the loss of these beds, but then we'll supplement them with far more beds.

In a style that's what's kind of wanted by our students.

So this project has also been presented to the nearby Lewis Mountain neighborhood.

And then the last one is an update on Fontaine, both the garage and the Manning Institute of Biotechnology.

So construction is underway.

And at this point, we're in a highly disruptive excavation phase.

And this will last.

It's projected to last through July.

What this does is it puts a temporary limit to the amount of available surface parking in this area, so the University has asked visitors to contact their providers for more detailed instructions on how best to arrive for appointments during the next two months.

Once excavation is complete, parking constraints should ease up, and then the garage structure will be completed in the fall of 2025.

That will bring over 1200 spaces online.

And the university has convened town halls with both the Fontaine community and the adjoining neighborhoods to keep affected parties in the loop as this construction process progresses.

And it will have similar commuter amenities to what I just described for Northgrounds Garage.

The only other committee that I went to so far for my new committees was the Tree Commission.

And then I also was at a subcommittee for the Tree Commission today.

And all I'll say is they are amazingly, they are really energetic.

And I learned a lot.

And I have joined the subcommittee on codes

Pretty much that can look at the zoning, the new zoning.

They have a subcommittee audit.

Anyway, it's something to do with codes and looking at state and city potential for where there's legal room in terms of promoting trees.

Very good.

I sat on an interesting student presentation about actually a few recently that are, I believe, relevant to this group.

One was about aging in place and how accessory dwelling units, if they are fronting the street, they can become

It provides space for people to be more involved in their community, as opposed to typically accessory dwelling units are hidden in the back for aesthetic reasons, but that is conflicting with those goals, which struck me.

Another one was a very detailed analysis of our accessory dwelling unit ordinance, the way we're treating it.

They were concerned about, this was an architecture student, concerned about a very detailed issue about

How certain buildings, because they are small, they don't allow an accessory structure nearby of a big enough size to be habitable.

And it's actually a substantial number of parcels in the city because we have so many small homes.

And he was recommending a tweak on that.

I've asked him to give me more details on that.

Yes, sir.

Let's see.

The major piece on the agenda there was the seeds, the comprehensive economic development strategy plan, which

Cayman associates actually drove the bus on that.

And it was enormously detailed.

Sometimes when you get into that, you say, well, there seems to have been a lot of process measuring relatively little product in some ways.

A very detailed analysis of some things that you know.

Yeah.

But the interesting thing about this is that it's moving towards this super regionalism

idea where we're actually joint with District 9, which is due north of us, that encompasses Culpepper and how the corridor between the two of them is really is going to be the next big thing in some respects.

and the major industries that they put out, that they put forth and one of which which sort of parachuted into the process was, you know, one of them, which they discovered was defense and they related and ancillary employment that comes from that and then some very interesting, a lot of interesting work on

The region that isn't that regional, for example, Nelson County has its own set of issues that are not really relevant to most of what this had to do, and the things that it was relevant really didn't touch the rest of us.

So that was the main issue there.

The hack is, God willing, in the quick don't rise, wrapping up its recommendations for the land bank tomorrow.

I hope, or at least we're going to be 90% there.

Yeah, I attended two meetings as planning commissioner this month.

We had our MPOTech meeting, which was actually the shortest ever, probably.

The long-range transportation plan is complete.

It is out for public comment.

There's public hearing coming up.

And so we were just reviewing the draft.

giving the go-ahead.

We also had a Lupec meeting where we learned about the Birdwood Genealogy Research Project, which was quite interesting.

Unfortunately, I had to miss half a bit.

I was on a train in Ohio and internet cut out.

Also, I attended a UVA class to a land use law class in the architecture school to talk about our comprehensive planning and rezoning process.

For April's BAR meeting, it was a pretty short meeting.

We had the First United Methodist Church came back just to modify their solar panel application.

They want to use a metal roof instead of asphalt shingles underneath the solar panel.

So it was a much better solution in the end.

And then we had a preliminary discussion about 218 West Market Street, which is the artful lodger site for a future hotel.

The BAR was overall supportive of what was shown.

It was just some basic massing at this point though.

We didn't get to see any materials or anything like that.

One of the items from the, it's no longer bound by the SUP because it's now just a buy-right project.

They're throwing out the old SUP, but one of the conditions that was put on it was a

Pedestrian Cutway, cut through for the site.

That will not be part of the project.

BAR did not feel like we had the authority to require that, but it is still, it'll be similar to the Omni in that you can walk through the hotel in a kind of a semi-public manner.

So there's still going to be a pedestrian connection.

It just won't be a physical outside connection.

And that was it for the BAR.

Very good.

Let's see.

I think I've only got one thing to talk about, and that's Parks and Rec.

Those guys are busy as always, but there are three things that I think you guys might want to be aware of.

We got a presentation from Cultivate Charlottesville.

One of the taglines in their presentation is that Charlottesville is known as a foodie community, and it is their objective to make

And if you guys will remember, that's my key part of chapter seven in our conference plan

The way that they want to get to food equity in our community is through urban agricultural programs.

And one of the ones that they're, the first one they're looking at is they're hoping will be located in Washington Park.

And I sent you guys a PowerPoint presentation on that that either you should have gotten earlier in a few minutes.

It goes into the detail of that.

I got a presentation regarding the youth and adult programs.

Between last winter and now, we've put on 110 classes, and 753 people have been a part of that.

Once again, lots of detail there, and you guys got a presentation on that recently as well that I sent you.

The master plan process, the Schrets either are over or about to be over.

And now we're beginning to go through just doing the analysis of the feedback that we've gotten from you guys and going through all the data.

The objective is to get this thing approved by council in January of next year.

Ms.

Sure, so we've had a lot going on, maybe not necessarily things that are as public at this point in time, but they will be eventually.

I wanted to let you guys know that since the end of March, we have had 15 pre-application meetings with folks who are interested in

working with our new ordinance and that's just the formal ones.

There's all sorts of informal discussions that are occurring and so we're learning more about the hurdles that still remain in order to move forward with different things and we're also

Learning a lot about what people are putting together for this.

So we're very hopeful.

We've got at least our first two or three development plans in.

We're hopeful that we'll start to see some activity.

Again, because there was a lot of concern that there would be an overrun of activity with this new code, but it's actually very much followed the path that we anticipated that

and so on.

Still working on the many projects that are under the old code and working to get them to fruition.

We've had ground broke on the Belmont condos property this past week ago and that's been exciting.

And we're expecting some other projects to get going out there as well soon.

So lots going on, but again, not as much that's coming forward to you all at this point, but that's okay.

You all deserve a little bit of a break.

We had a very, very busy time for a very long time.

Let's see.

Mr. Schwarz provided a number of items that there was interest from the community in getting some updates on.

And so I've got some summary information for that.

So I'll provide that just in general, because some of these are things that our folks out in listening may be interested in as well.

One has to do with the dockless mobility.

That's the scooters and bikes that are around our community that folks can rent to get from one destination to another.

There's been concern, actually concern since it began because all users have not necessarily been putting vehicles in the proper place when they finish their rides.

and so our transportation folks have been working hand-in-hand with the company as well as riders and there is a provision in the contract for fines for vehicles that are placed in the wrong locations and so this would

that had not been enforced previously because they wanted to make sure there was an opportunity to do as much as we could before it got to that point.

But at this point, it's all on everyone's been on, well, riders and company have been on notice for quite a while.

And as of June 1, they're going to begin charging the fines.

The fines that get charged go back

It works through the company as well as some of the funds that go back into the program itself.

Who gets fined?

The company or the biker?

Yeah, and so what we're hoping is that it will usually the misplacement occurs at some point in the evening, and then the next morning it makes it difficult for people who are traveling in those pedestrian areas.

And the hope is to be able to get that in compliance earlier.

so that folks aren't having that conflict when they're commuting in.

So power poles.

This is another thing that's been of concern.

I'm sure that people out in the community have seen a circumstance where there's a power pole, it has one wire on it, and then right next to it, it might have another wire on it.

And so as the utilities

Move to the new poll, because it's usually a new poll situation.

In the end, the old poll is supposed to be removed.

There are a lot of circumstances where that has not been happening.

So we've had a team with Public Works that has met with Dominion to work

through this process and to understand the process that Dominion has for this.

It's also an opportunity to work in collaboration because there have been some updates to the ADA requirements, which will require everyone to make sure that there's proper spacing for people to move through on sidewalks.

And so we

Meaning the public works folks with the city reached out because we want to work in partnership with Dominion to create a better situation for this and so those conversations have begun and There are a lot of folks on our side very passionate about trying to get this resolved So we'll hope to hear good things from them on that and

And one of the other items had to do with street lighting.

So Dominion's also changing street lighting throughout the whole service area.

But there is a process of how that's being done.

I can give details of what I got from.

from our contact.

So the city has somebody who is in the role of energy management coordinator in the office of sustainability.

And so they have been working hand in hand with Dominion to understand how this process works.

They also are doing it on a schedule.

And so they'll be able to provide some information about when they're going to do certain things.

And they were able to provide some information about the type of lighting.

that they're able to provide.

And so that will be something coming to our community soon.

It's been coming kind of haphazard right now as something is broken and needs repair, but this is actually going to be a larger effort that will be occurring.

And that comes into the energy and environmental realms.

as well.

And we had another question in there concerning looking at the standards and design manual for updating.

And our engineering staff is a bit lean right now.

They're in the recruitment process for that department right now.

And so hopefully once we get a few more people on board, that will become a higher priority.

So that's all I have today.

Yeah, a lot of good things going on.

Again, good update.

Mr. Schwarz, thank you for bringing this up.

Right, we are ready for matters to be presented by the public that are not on the formal agenda.

So if the public would like to talk to us about any of the work that we do, with the exception of the block grant and home funding application, this would be your opportunity to do that.

Ms.

Sure, I will do that.

I did not bring the computer up here.

All right, wonderful.

So what we'll do is we'll get started.

When we have matters from the public, we provide an opportunity for those who are in person to provide comment.

And then we alternate to our virtual audience.

And we'll alternate back and forth until everyone's had an opportunity to speak.

Everyone receives three minutes to do so.

And the only items not

To focus on during matters from the public would be the item that we have for public hearing coming up.

And that is on the CDBG and home budget.

So if you want to speak about that this evening, you've got another opportunity coming.

But this is an opportunity for anything else.

So I'll ask our in-person audience, if anyone is interested in speaking to the commission.

Yes, sir.

Come forward.

My name is Tyler Miller.

I live at 1500 Green Street, Charlottesville, obviously.

I'm a member of the Tree Commission, but I'm here speaking on my own behalf.

I just wanted to, I guess, reiterate how important the utility pole issue is and how little clarity we have on it.

There's no sense of a timeline for when the public can expect changes, particularly for ADA folks.

and that is a big part of the problem.

I also think that we're missing a real opportunity here to work with Dominion to promote undergrounding where it makes sense, promote route efficiency where it makes sense.

I have a utility pole on every corner of my lot.

I can't drive a vehicle of any size onto my lot because of the utility lines.

I can't get a load of mulch delivered.

Hosea

Mr. Schwarz may have talked to him.

You know, I don't know how out of date that is, but I do know that in that agreement with Dominion, there was a fee that was supposed to be assessed per utility poll of $1.75.

That dates to 1935.

I don't think the city has been taking up that fee for some time.

In 20, $24, that's 40-some dollars a poll.

So just for Belmont, my neighbor, that sounds like about $20,000.

So maybe you guys can look into that.

And just any way you guys, anything you can do to help the urban canopy in town, I would greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

Great.

All right, we will check in with our virtual audience.

And if you're interested in speaking and you're virtual to the meeting, please raise your hand in the application.

If you're on a telephone line, then hit star nine, and that will raise your hand in the application.

We'll jump back to our in-person audience.

Hey, everybody.

Dan Miller.

I live at 1107 Avon.

Happened to be Tyler Miller's brother, importantly.

I just want to throw my weight behind the undergrounding issue as well.

I just got back from Alexandria.

And man, it is really nice to walk around some of those neighborhoods and see.

I have a couple of mature sycamores in my yard and one of them

It's just, as we see around town, it's slowly getting more and more sent to the side by Dominion and I think in the core of the town here.

Given the pretty generous dividend I receive as a shareholder of Dominion, it's interesting to me that it's always put out there as somehow financially totally impossible for this monopsony corporation to be able to do some undergrounding in town.

yet the company and I got I'm not a finance guy but my my read is that if you're paying a dividend you're you're basically saying we've we've done enough investment in our infrastructure we see it you know the most efficient thing we can do to return shareholder value is to give money back and I just don't think that that is true in this town so

I just want to say that diplomatically.

I want to frame it as, hey, let's work with them.

But I do think that that relationship can maybe be thought of in a little bit of a different way, given the fact that it is monopsony.

And as I understand it, at least they should be operating kind of in our interest.

So I appreciate the attention that you guys are giving to it.

All right.

We'll turn to our virtual audience.

Any hands raised?

All right, we'll head back to our in-person audience.

Yes ma'am.

Hello everyone, my name is Frankie Allen.

I live at 1500 Green in the Belmont neighborhood.

I'm also here because of my, just emphasizing the importance of the power lines in terms of accessibility and the walkability of our city.

As a nurse in the community, I care a lot about making our city one that facilitates and empowers people to walk and to be a part of our neighborhoods and I think the power lines limiting egress but also prohibiting things like shade trees on our major avenues and the places where people want to commute.

All right.

One more with our virtual audience.

Any hands?

All right.

We'll try our in-person audience.

Any other speakers?

You only get one.

All right.

Right.

That wraps up the initial public hearing session.

We are ready to review the consent agenda.

Yes, sir.

I have a motion.

I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented subject to the Scrivener's Errors Corrections provided by Mr. Joy Schwartz and myself.

I have a second.

Any opposition?

Any abstentions?

Ms.

Yeah, everyone say yes.

Perfect.

Right, so we is a six.

We are ready to now begin the public hearing regarding the

What we're being asked to do is to review the Task Force recommendation and then make a recommendation based on their recommendation, whether to just forward their recommendation on the council, make modifications, or send back.

And the good news is the chair of the task force is on our board, Mr. D'Oronzio.

So we'll benefit from your input as well.

Good evening, commissioners.

My name is Anthony Warren.

I'm with the Office of Community Solutions and here to talk to you about the work of the CDB gene home task force, kind of the impact that the two programs make in our community and to present the funding recommendations that the task force has come up with and allow you to consider them and whether we take them back and do a little bit more work.

or whether we go forward to present to City Council.

I have met some of you but not all of you and I don't know how much background knowledge you have on these two different programs so if I may just jump in there a little bit.

The city participates in two programs funded through the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development through their office of community and planning development so you might hear them referred to as CPD programs and the first is the community development block grant program which is an entitlement funding that comes through from HUD to the city to use for a variety of purposes around impacting our community positively

and then the other program is the Home Investments Program and that is mainly to support housing opportunities.

The both programs, because they're community and planning development programs, the benefits, the majority of the benefits are to defer to members of the community who HUD refers to as low and moderate income, which is typically, according to their rules, under 80% of the median family income or the median income in the

Metropolitan Regional Area.

The city has taken it on to commit to bringing those impacts as far down the income scale as we can.

Typically 50% or below of the median income of the area.

Those numbers are set by HUD based on their national analyses.

They're available on HUD's website.

They're presented in a format that is not entirely reader-friendly.

So if anybody wants something, I've done this now for two funding cycles.

I kind of convert them to a different format that I find to be much easier to understand.

So if you'd like me to send those on.

So the Community Development Block Grant program, the city is the entitlement community and we receive those funds for use as the elected officials see fit according to specific HUD guidelines.

The home program is a much larger area in order for us to qualify.

The city doesn't qualify on its own, so approximately 2001, the city entered into a consortium partnership with five surrounding counties, Albemarle, Fulvana, Louisa, Green and Nelson counties.

And so, where's with the CDBG program, those monies come directly to the city and we figure out how to allocate those with the home program

The monies come in, they get passed through to the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission, which manages that program.

The city is still the financial agent for those programs, so we're still the named recipient.

But then there's some programmatic takeouts, and then the bulk of the share is divided equally among the counties.

When you get to the local share, it's just divided up six ways.

They refer to it as your pie share.

And we get to control, however, that we can impact on that in our community.

There's a special set aside in that that is kind of a slightly bigger piece of the pie that is rotated annually among the different counties for community housing development organizations or what they call a chotto.

If you look at the acronym, you're going to see it's not CHODO, but that's what everybody calls it.

And we were the recipients of that last year, and now it will rotate.

I believe Louisa is getting the CHODO funding for this year.

So part of our work with the task force, a little bit about the task force, volunteer, entirely volunteer, like most of the boards and commissions, they come together.

and review all the requests for funding and they try to figure out

where those dollars can make the maximum impact.

Now, we're not talking about huge pots of money, especially on the home side.

Our home share is almost always under $100,000, which when you're trying to build stuff does not go very far.

So typically, that money is used as gap funding for projects that are already

in operations to try to help bring them across the finish line in terms of penciling out the budget or however you will.

On the community development block grant side, there are some major categories of activities that we invest in, that we're allowed to invest in.

We can work with public facilities and infrastructure programs.

We can work with economic development programs.

We can work with what HUD calls public services programs.

And then we can work with housing opportunities through the CDBG fund, often in support of the investment made through the home program as well.

Again, we're not talking about huge amounts of money.

In terms of the applications that are received, like I said, I've only done this for about a year and a half.

But having gone back and taken a look, the majority of the requests for funding come in for these public service programs.

HUD has capped the amount of money that you're allowed to invest in those programs every year at 15% of the overall allocation.

A variety of different opinions about that.

A number of theories about why.

It's just the rule.

It's in the Code of Federal Regulations.

We follow it.

So what that means is a lot of the applications come in and are competing for one of the smaller pieces of pie.

Like I said, I've only done this about a year and a half.

I'm growing to love this work, but when it comes time to make the funding recommendations, I'm not involved in those.

That's not my role.

My role is to facilitate the task force, to provide them information, to take questions that they may have, be the liaison out to the applicants, try to get additional background information, and then they have to make the difficult decisions.

And I've done that twice now.

Two rounds, and it's painful work.

In every case, since I've been doing this, the general consensus is they would love to be able to fund everybody at 100%, but that's not possible.

So often what that leads to are having to make some very difficult choices.

We might be talking about some of those choices later.

In some cases, the programs might not be recommended for funding.

And in almost every case I've seen and everybody I've talked to, it's not an indication that the application wasn't strong, that the desired outcome wasn't worthy.

It's really just trying to figure out how we can maximize the number of people who can benefit from this limited pot of money.

Sometimes there will be a program or an application where if they don't get full funding, they might not be able to bring it to fruition.

And so the task force may back away from that one and put it on the back burner and then see if they can come back to it after they

Hosea

There's nothing to stop a locality from, you know, funding the same programs year after year, but it's not recommended because they're trying to build up strength throughout the community.

Just a little bit by way of background, so the funding recommendations from HUD typically come through in January or February.

They came through just about a week and a half ago.

HUDs

The pool of money to award out to states and localities like ourselves is determined, is set by Congress, and then HUD has to figure out a variety of things.

Nobody knows why it took so long, but it has caused a lot of problems for a lot of people across the country.

We're not the only ones.

It made the work of the task force infinitely harder, and we can kind of go into that.

But just by way of background,

Community Development Block Grant Program is a nominal increase in funding this year by a little over 6%, but the home consortium allocation, the home funds were cut close to 20%.

The allocation of the consortium was cut by 17.09%.

And those are just formula grants, so there's no judgment for any different locality.

It's just across the board.

If you have this number of people, these particular income demographics, you get X amount of money according to a spreadsheet.

They funnel in the numbers and then they export a spreadsheet and that's kind of how much we get.

So the cut in

to the six-member home consortium was $134,175 this round.

Nobody knows why.

Again,

I do know that if people are interested in increasing that money, they contact not HUD.

They contact their congressional representatives, their local state representatives, to put pressure on their congressional representatives, both on the House side and the Senate side.

If anybody wants those contact numbers, I can point you in the right direction.

The cut made the work of the task force harder and getting the numbers later made it harder.

And with that, I can, you guys have in your packet, SAF memo that kind of explains some of the background that we thought was important.

And you have a summary of the actual funding recommendations.

If you guys would like to pass that down.

So a lot of the work of the task force in evaluating the current applications was somewhat theoretical because we didn't have real numbers to work with.

So what we did was we took the numbers from last year and we used those and then we broke up the pie among the applicants.

Then I went and I took those numbers and put them into a different kind of spreadsheet and calculated out what the percentage value was of the

Pi that we were working with from last year, the allocation numbers from last year.

Then the task force members, they voted, they finalized their recommendations.

They were working with last year's numbers.

I converted those to the percentages.

They approved them.

Then I copied that spreadsheet, reformed it a little bit.

And then when the new numbers came in, we could just plug in the new numbers and the new funding recommendations came through based on the percentage value.

Then we took out our pencils and our glass and took it I handed it off to a bunch of different people to get a second set of eyes on them and we came up with the funding recommendations that we have I presented the funding recommendations a little bit differently this year and then we gave the funding recommendation numbers but we also gave the percent of what they requested

hoping that that would spark a little bit of conversation or something.

What you will notice when you look at the funding recommendations, in some cases they're over 100% of what they asked for, particularly on the home side.

So if you take that summary of the recommendation sheet and you go down to the bottom and you look at the home, two interesting things about that.

One, there were three applications for home funding.

The task force kind of worked through and for their reasons and we can get into those a little bit later, decided to fund two and then why those numbers come up to a little bit above 100% because when the final numbers came in and those are the two programs recommended and we took the percentages that you now have before you

The final number was more than what their application was for.

Then there was some discussion about should we take that extra money and put it into the third application, but the third application really requires a big pot of money to kind of pull off.

That one was kind of backed away from doesn't mean that the application wasn't worthy doesn't mean that the applicant group wasn't worthy that applicant applicant group Has received money from these programs relatively recently for another project that they're Going ahead with Another

Thank you very much.

Potts of Money, if you will, that can support these programs.

And so if there were some programs that were only eligible for city funds through community development block grant program, for example, and we knew that they were likely to get or had been approved for money through the Affordable Housing Fund or the Housing Operations and Program Support

Program or the Vibrant Communities Fund or some other source of money, that was a factor in there.

So you might see some that are very worthy programs that we have funded in the past, that we would have loved to have funded at 100% or 150% that weren't funded.

Again, it just a limited pot of money trying to maximize impacts.

I also have another kind of sheet that I did not include in here, but it kind of shows you the gap between the funding requests and the amount of money that we have available.

And if you added up all the money that was requested between the two programs and subtracted out the amount of money that it was eventually available for us, it was a little over a million dollars gap.

The delta is pretty huge.

So if the applications are a reflection of community need, then the amount of money coming in clearly is inadequate to do what we would like.

So why don't we begin with this Joy, any questions?

I'm just impressed how you've managed to work through this, not having final numbers, so thanks for taking us through the process.

I don't have any questions at this time, but I echo those comments.

And I think we got a series of different spreadsheets over the last few days.

So it's been interesting just to kind of figure out, like, oh, we're changing.

And I know it's really hard work.

Impressive work.

There's a new item on here, a CRHA economic program coordinator, which is new to me because I think it's a new position.

Yes, it is a new position.

It is related to some of the larger work that CRHA is trying to do around family self-sufficiency.

I'm sure all of you are familiar with my boss, Alex Cifuna.

Good evening, commissioners.

It's good to see everybody again.

It's been a while.

That's a great question, Commissioner Yates.

I'm sure some of you may have knowledge of what's going on with the CRHA.

There has been a massive redevelopment initiatives.

One of the aspects of that is the need to improve the scale levels of the residents of a CRRJ property so they'll be able to seek jobs that pay living wage.

At this point CRRJ has a robust family self-sufficiency program.

They are seeking funding to develop some of those programs so they will be able to provide economic development, some kind of skills of training for the residents.

And this funding will help them to hire somebody who will be able to help them to fulfill that needs.

And on a related note,

Lytek, most of their projects, if not all, even though the city has a substantial investment in CRHA projects, most of those are Lytek projects.

And Lytek, you've got to pay the money back, the investors, we have to be paid, which means that

The tenants or the residents, if you will, regardless of whether your income is at below 0% or 0 to 30% or 0 to 50%, you've got to pay your due rent so that the CRHA will be able to meet its financial obligation in terms of paying its debtors.

So this funding is very critical in terms of CRHA being able

to fulfill that purchasing power necessity for its residents.

Just a question.

Yeah, I think that's part of the process as well.

I think something that they haven't done real well in the past, it's that Section 3 aspect.

So right now they're really garing up.

You know, in terms of improving the purchasing power for the tenants of CRHA neighborhoods Do we know how many residents are employed in Section 3 programs?

Just to touch in on the section three, nationally one of the challenges of different organizations fulfilling that requirement is the availability of certified and trained and licensed people to fill those positions.

And so outside of all of this, within our office, that's one of the things that we're trying to explore, whether we can fund or find ways to create subsidized apprenticeship programs.

We may be coming back before you at some point to talk about.

You know, so the city gives money to different organizations that do critical repairs on homes or energy efficiency work on homes, mainly focused on the interior.

So one of the ideas we're talking about is can we do something like what Hampton Roads does or other cities where they fund exterior work to kind of help build pride of place?

Well, if we were going to

We wanted to explore something like that.

We would want there to be a Section 3 style apprenticeship program.

In prior years we funded a program through the local energy alliance project LEAP, where they specifically did that and they hired people in

to apprentice on the job and while they were doing some of their energy efficiency related home repairs and specifically trying to gear those people to either work for a group like LEAP or energy provider like Dominion eventually.

So that apprenticeship program, there's been some interest in from some of the groups that are currently operating here but we would love any ideas people have about how to really support that apprenticeship program.

As inside, one of the things I'd love to see is people be able to get experience and then help with that licensing fee at the end because you have to purchase the materials and you also have to pay the licensing fee and provide it anyway.

That's an aside.

But back to the plan before us.

So I'm not, most of the questions I have are asked and answered, but I would offer up that I'm perfectly happy to get into some of the wise and wherefores of how we ended up with where we were.

That was sort of the bulk of my work, whereas Anthony was trying to

Well, that was happening and I would like you to speak since it's pretty glaring and it's going to come up.

The Beacon-Shared Use Kitchen, I'll let Anthony give you the next level of detail on this, but essentially

These applications were made towards the end of the year and in December, facing some nasty grams from HUD on funding from prior years that were still around, Mr. Warren went to council with the Beacon Shared Use Kitchen and got a very substantial piece of funding at the very end of the year.

So the opinion of the

of the task force was that although there was a council priority to spend a minimum of 90 grand in this category, they had effectively done so.

If they want to go back and plug that back in, that's their lookout.

But from our point of view, it freed up.

A considerable chunk of funds that we could use elsewhere, and most of those funds ended up going to CRHA for their roofs.

They wanted $150,000 to replace some roofs at Dogwood.

They're getting $154,000.

I'm sure everyone here has no doubt that they will end up spending $154,000 on these roofs instead of $150,000.

That's the reason that we overfunded Dogwood.

We did not overfund it in the initial round, it was at exactly 100%.

We did that because the percentages, because Mr. Warren

assigned the percentages of the original, then carried those over with the new numbers.

And it went up, so it went up a little bit.

And frankly, because it's replacing roofs, they're going to spend that for a grant.

Similarly, for 6th Street, with the soft costs for Habitat for Development, I am metaphysically certain that the $2,000 that we quote overfunded is going to go into soft costs with no problem.

Thanks, yeah, I kind of touched on some of the questions I had.

For other programs that were fractionally funded, for example, the Zero J Economic Opportunity Program Coordinator, we're funding that at 80%.

Do they just list that job with a lower salary?

They make it up.

They made that clear in there.

Give us what you can.

And have we talked to the other applicants?

Yes.

The short answer to that is yes.

There's a question on there.

What do you do?

If we give you a less, then they give you the answer of

Well, we're going to have to proportionately cut back, or we'll scramble around and find the money, and we're reaching out in a lot of directions.

The IRC thing is an ongoing fundraising for their ongoing project there.

Okay.

Oh, just going to touch on that.

One of the things that I did when I revisited the application, I tried to

We worked a little bit to aim for concision, but also to clarify kind of what the hoped for outcomes were.

And one of the questions that we always ask, and that always I've only done this twice, is what would you do if you get less than 100% of your ask?

One of the things you learn very quickly is nobody says, oh, you know, if you can't give us 100%, don't give it.

So you then have to read kind of between the tea leaves kind of see whether they can do it.

One of the things that my job was as a task force was kind of deliberating these.

was to give them background information of how these different organizations have been funded in the past through these programs but also from other sources and in several of the cases they're getting money from other sources to fill kind of similar purposes.

I'm pretty confident that at the end of it, the task force members believed that even if you weren't funded 100%, it was enough to kind of push the ball forward for each of these programs.

And then two questions on specific programs.

One, the haven's entry into homelessness system of care program is funded at zero, AHIP's critical rehab program funded at zero.

Do you want me to go first?

Sure.

So the Haven has funded a couple of salary positions from Hop's money.

This is very similar to a program that was funded in Hop's.

They also have a HIMS coordinator, which is adjacent.

to this system.

And there was a general feeling, as Mr. Warren pointed out earlier about, you know, you don't want to make this a permanent funding source.

So even though we were sort of pushed that way, we seed money for a salary and go find the rest of the money, it's better.

The Haven got quite a bit of funding on the hops round.

Same thing for AHIP.

AHIP got a hundred and

$31,000 or $117,000 on this program from the cap.

So we didn't want to double dip on that.

Also, I believe that AHIP is, and you can speak to this, they've got quite a positive balance with the city right now in terms of money allocated that they have not spent yet.

And we don't want to back that up too much.

Because, again, that has.

Yeah, specifically in terms of that program, their projects often work with older homes and even though they're not kind of like under the historical preservation goals, they still require a more extensive environmental review and a lot of background and their projects are almost always funded between a very complex

Network of City Money, these federal funds, philanthropy, other grant-funded programs and a variety of different things, each of which comes with their own strings.

I don't envy them, the job that they have just trying to make these projects work.

And so that was one of the programs that

Consideration of how many other funding sources there were for them, plus they do have a balance in a couple of programs that they're trying to work through largely because, you know, there's still a tail end of projects that, for whatever reasons, weren't able to get off the ground during the pandemic.

But they're making great strides in getting those at the door.

Two more questions.

One, can you speak to, I guess, the makeup of the task force?

It seems like there's seven citizen slots of which two, only two are filled, plus a planning commission rep and a school board rep.

No, yeah, well, so yes.

The biggest challenge for the town is

I will start off by saying that the work that the Task Force does to inform these funding recommendations benefits from a large number of diverse voices.

We have had people with a variety of different backgrounds in the past and everybody's contribution is valuable.

Historically, for whatever reason, this task force has never had a complete slot.

There are 10 seats.

We can expand it wider.

One of the challenges has been, or I have heard, is that slots are broken down according to priority neighborhoods in some cases.

And so there are people within those neighborhoods who might like to serve.

But if that slot is filled, they might not realize that there are open seats.

One of the next pieces of work is for us to update our citizen participation plan.

They, in part, governs the work of the task force and the membership and the composition.

And so we're going to try to maybe explore having other public agencies, other groups involved.

and then more, you know, open seats across the city.

You know, I know with like AHIP they have a problem sometimes because the funding was tied to a priority neighborhood and they've had a hard time coming up with enough shovel ready projects in that neighborhood and they had one that was two blocks outside of the neighborhood.

They perfectly fit.

very, you know, below 50% AMI, the whole thing and so they went through a lot of work on their own before they contacted me and then they were like, hey, this is not exactly what we asked for but it fits all of the program, you know, metrics and the homeowners or people who would benefit from this and are, you know, eminently worthy of it so can we go ahead with it and, you know, I was like, yeah.

So, again, representation matters.

We'd love to have more people.

We went into this work this year with a couple members.

Two of them had to withdraw for work-related opportunities, and out-of-state opportunity came up for one.

And another valuable member is defending her dissertation shortly.

We wish her well on that.

I believe there's also a relatively new baby and a planned move coming up.

So she finally said, you know, we're like, hey, dissertation.

So I just throw that out there as an invitation.

You know, we've had rounds go out from the city council, the clerk council advertising the vacancies and

Just not enough people.

But I'm out in the community all the time.

I talk to people, and I mention that I work at the CDBJ program, and they say, what?

Even though it's been around for a long time, or the home program.

The task force has had a conversation about changing some of those slots, period, because a lot of that reflects priorities.

2004 priorities, not necessarily 2024 priorities, and the way we're looking at neighborhoods is a little different in the way, you know, that, anyway.

So it probably needs a relook and a re-presentation council.

of, hey, we're going to have roughly 10 people.

Yeah, last question.

Can you speak to our role in this process?

Does HUD mandate that the Planning Commission make a recommendation?

Is that a council requirement?

Why are we here tonight?

Well, you're here tonight as

Interesting and knowledgeable members of the community.

HUD's main goal in this is to foster community involvement.

So I believe that was the initial impetus for involving Planning Commission.

That one more opportunity to put things before the public and get feedback and input before it went to City Council.

Commissioner Rory, I'm glad to ask this question because I've been

I've been battling with the fact that the Planning Commission has to review CDBG and home applications or make recommendations to the city council.

Now, there are three review processes for $410,000 CDBG every year.

You know, I'm sure commissioners will agree that this is, it's not practical, you know.

And I think the primary function of the planning commission is land use and transportation.

And in between, maybe environmental and what I view, you know, but the planning commission review of CDBG recommendations and related activities, you know, I think it's

30 years.

So we are looking at proposing a streamlining, you know, that process so that the CDBG task force, when they make recommendation, instead of coming to the planning commission, it goes to the city council.

or the CAF committee.

The CAF committee might make sense.

So that's the way I look at it.

You know, your point is worth taking and we are looking at it.

And frankly, sometimes it prolongs the review process.

You know, sometimes staff, there might be a need to do some kind of amendment.

And the staff is wondering, you know, how can we take this straight to the city council because this is an urgent situation.

Because it's already in the code, you have to route through the planning commission for recommendation today.

to the city council.

Alex, maybe you can piggyback on this.

That's an interesting idea.

As this body is also the entrance corridor review board, would it make sense?

And is it possible and will HUD let us?

And I know those may be three different answers to that question.

Can we call the CAF committee the CDBG task force?

Is there anything stopping us from just, because at this point, they're doing, I mean, that might also create a second efficiency.

I mean, one of the reasons I always sit on the CDBG in the first place, I mean, not just the former chairman, Lyle Yates said go sit on the CDBG was that

You know, I sit on the calf, too.

And it's, you know, I'm an anti-silo force there that I can sort of say, wait a minute, we discussed this.

So is there a reason

And I'm not suggesting that we do it, I'm spitballing.

Actually, the amount that you indicated, I never thought about it, but as we initiate the revisions to the citizen participation plan, that is something that staff needs to chew on.

And then if that becomes the case, you know, after this question with the city manager and deputy city manager, Mr. Fritz, then we take it to the city council as part of the amendment.

It just, you know, I mean... Of course, the CAF Committee is also struggling getting applicants for its designated slots, though, right?

Yeah.

In a direct answer to your question, HUD's guidance on citizen participation is at times very specific and generally very broad.

They've outlined a very essential goal of facilitating the greatest degree of community involvement as possible, especially from the populations that are most likely

to benefit from these programs.

Those often are the least represented groups for a variety of different reasons.

We would love to do what we can to encourage that participation.

There are a lot of ideas out there.

We're kind of open to considering anything that can help us achieve our goal.

There's nothing specific in the HUD guidance or in the Code of Federal Regulations that specifies the exact nature of the formal approval and review process.

You have to have a volunteer task force, you have to follow certain rules, you have to make funding recommendations to an elected body who then has the final approval on how to

appropriate the funds.

You have to have a period of public comment on those recommendations, which I'll add is currently open now for the month.

The draft plan is available on the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission website.

We have a link to it from our city website for the office community solutions.

But we have a lot of leeway in terms of how to craft the most efficient, effective local structure to kind of get through this work.

Thanks.

Are we allowed to pay people for their time?

We're not allowed to pay people.

You're not allowed to have... Well, there's a question.

I think the answer is yes, if you use local funds.

You're not allowed to use the federal funds to provide salaries.

There are certain cases where you can provide stipends, but I believe they're very narrow.

I've printed out that section.

I haven't really

taking a deep dive into it yet.

I don't think there's any prohibition against using local funds, just as long as they're not reimbursed from the federal money.

And that's another thing about these programs, too, if we're throwing them open the gates.

When I first came into the program and started learning about it, it was described to me as a reimbursement program.

It's actually a double reimbursement program, which means that we get kind of a line of credit from HUD to the city.

We then give sub-recipients the ability to spend money for eligible activities.

We approve a scope of work, and they go off and do those things, and they have to pay for those out of pocket.

Then they are reimbursed from city funds

on the CDBG side and from funds that the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission controls in their financial management system on the home side.

And then our two entities have to go to HUD to get made whole again through reimbursements.

The technical details are not important.

The big thing is that for some of these organizations going out of pocket is a challenge.

You know, that plays a lot of emphasis on me being able to get them, like, when they're able to invoice for an approved activity, getting them the money as quickly as possible.

But for some groups, when you look at the org chart for some organizations, it's pretty lengthy, and you can see, oh, wow, you know, they have a lot of experience.

And other, it says, chief executive, chief financial officer, chief operating officer, grants writer, and it's the same name throughout.

As we think about equity, that might be something we want to think about as well too.

How do we support the smaller organizations who find it very hard to go out of pocket on some of these expenses?

Our office, as inside,

has a program in place that once we kind of get a full handle on all the grants throughout the city, we're going to be in a position to provide more technical assistance to these smaller organizations.

I'm available to any of the applicants for technical assistance.

Every applicant had to go through a pre-application workshop with me where we went over program goals, a HUD,

Objectives and eligible activities and how do they craft an application?

I think we've got the general just mr.

to open this up to the public.

Sure.

So we're going to open to our in-person audience first, and we'll provide a three-minute opportunity to speak.

Interested in speaking, sir?

That's okay.

No worries.

No worries.

And Patrick will check our virtual audience to see if we have any interested speakers.

Again, if you're interested in speaking and your virtual, please raise your hand in the application.

All right.

All right.

With that, I will close the public hearing and begin deliberations.

Any others?

Again, I don't think there's anything additional.

I appreciate the extra clarification, and particularly around the ones that were not funded.

I think it's helpful to understand the decision-making process behind that.

So nothing.

See, I don't feel strongly that the Planning Commission needs to be involved in this process, necessarily.

I don't feel strongly against it or for it, but, you know, at the moment we are in that role.

And I don't feel, as a Planning Commissioner, like I had enough information here to make, to

Exercise that oversight role.

It seems like we were kind of given the final output of the recommendations of the task force and we're meant to kind of rubber stamp it.

I think in the past we've received the minutes of the task force, the applications.

We did get the applications today at 4 p.m.

But I wasn't able to review it in time.

And while I appreciate the work of the task force and of staff, I don't

I feel that I have any information I need to make an informed decision and it would just be saying, okay, that sounds great.

Good job.

And so I'll be abstaining tonight.

I've had the opportunity to chair the block grant test force three times, I think.

And there's a lot of work that goes into what they do, a lot of debate, and there's a lot of heartbreak, a lot of heartbreak, because the decisions they have to make about who's going to get what and how much they're going to get and who's not going to get stuff is very difficult.

To compliment what Mr. Stolzenberg said, knowing the

Hart and Soll, but they put in just making the right decisions.

I'm not about the second guess, the work that the task force does.

Ms.

Sure.

Mr. Ocher.

Aye.

And Mr. Mitchell?

Right.

We will be moving this one to council with a recommendation to approve the recommendations.

Congratulations, Phil, for giving me the chip on this.

Mr. Warren, thank you.

Ms.

Before that, I've got a question.

Whatever you would like.

Okay.

Are we changing venue to Rapture or something?

We have nothing.

We don't have a schedule topic, but we're planning to meet, or is that just always?

All right.

So I am, yes, Mr. Chair, I was a little perturbed to note that nowhere in neighborhood development services did I see any celebratory evidence

to celebrate the quenquaginary of the National America Underground America Day, which is about the built environment and turning gopher and developments on underground living.

Again, we're sort of out of staff right now, so I mean, you could redeem yourself as it's also a national dance, like a chicken day, but I'm not going to put Missy on the spot for that.

We are adjourned.

See you guys in a couple of weeks.