City Council Meeting   7/1/2024

Good afternoon.

The July 1st, 2024 Charlotte City Council meeting will come to order.

My name is Brian Pinkston.

I'm the vice mayor and I'm standing in for our mayor who's out of town this week.

Ms.

Councilor Oschrin.

Here.

Is there a second?

Second?

Okay.

Please cast your vote.

The motion passes.

This meeting will be divided into three sections.

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

The second is a closed meeting.

I'm doing well.

It's good to see each of you.

Thanks for having me today.

I appreciate it.

So there is no formal request as you stated.

This is really just an opportunity for me to share a little update with each of you about what United Way has been doing over the past year and hopefully it's somewhat conversational.

So I hope you'll have some questions.

United Way does many things and I've met with most of you and have shared that with you.

But today we really tried to do more of a deep dive into what are we doing with the city?

So what kind of an impact are we using our dollars that we raise either through private philanthropy or through funds from the city or the state to make an impact for our citizens here in the city?

So it's a little smaller than I thought it would be.

So I'm going to get, is there a way to do one slide per?

Or are they going to be too, okay, maybe that's, I'll try to read it out here.

There we go, that's better.

Okay, that works better.

Okay, so the work of the United Way.

We unite, collaborate and convene communities as well as provide direct services which activate individual and family thriving and equity across the region.

And I'll just pause for a sec and ask how many of you are familiar with what we're calling the United Way, the new United Way.

Anybody heard me talk about that before, Lloyd?

Would it be helpful for some of the council members for me to explain a little bit about what that means just for context?

Okay.

I like to think I've talked to everybody plenty, but I always find people who think we still make grants in the community and we pretty much collect workplace campaigns.

So I'll just back up a minute and say I started in the summer of 2018 and I got to the United Way.

That's really what we were known for.

We did about 20 grants a year to organizations that work generally within financial stability, school readiness, and community health.

But what we were finding is that we couldn't necessarily measure the impact of those resources.

So we knew that it made a difference for the nonprofits that we were working with, but we weren't necessarily sure were we truly meeting the needs of our community and we're meeting the priorities of our community.

So we took a step back and evaluated where we thought we could make the biggest impact.

We talked to our other nonprofit partners and we wanted to assess how we not duplicate services, but how can we add dollars and add expertise in the space around financial thriving

and early school readiness and what we now call connected community.

So there was sort of a year of assessment that went on the United Way while we took the time to kind of look broadly at how we can be a real convener and uniter here in our community.

And where we landed was around two really specific goals.

One is to help lift 1,800 families in our community out of poverty and the other is to increase by 10% low income kindergartners who passed developmental benchmarks.

So those are two specific goals that our United Way is working toward.

and we do it in partnership with other nonprofits, the local school systems, to some extent the city and the county, but it's a much more collaborative approach to program delivery, which is very much different than us just giving grants out to other organizations.

Another significant shift is that we no longer collect mini workplace campaigns.

That was sort of a old model of United Way where local businesses like Wegmans and Centera Hospital, for example, they still participate, but employees could give dollars essentially through payroll deductions and contribute.

The way that things have really moved across our country, not just locally, is we now gather money from either private individuals or foundations in our community, some actually foundations outside our community, corporate gifts.

So it's a very different way of raising dollars.

And it really is important that people that are investing in the United Way understand our impact and are able to look at the data and what kind of difference we're making.

It's not necessarily something where we just expect those dollars to come in through workplace campaigns.

That's really the new model, working with other nonprofits to achieve results in the community and then measure that data of the impact.

So I don't know if you have questions around that.

Yeah, thank you for asking a question.

So it's warm and you haven't taken my jacket off.

During the pandemic, well, how it all happened, we might recall it was like Friday, maybe the 13th of March.

And everything was shutting down.

And Brendan from the Community Foundation had reached out to us and asked if we could help them start to disperse funds in the community because they weren't set up to disperse a lot of funds.

And also the current pathways phone number that we use through the city.

wasn't necessarily set up to handle the volling of calls that we were getting from people that needed help.

So United Way set up an operator system, we hired new employees of our staff, took over and serene phones, and we worked with the community foundation.

They raised dollars, we raised some dollars, they raised over six million dollars, and then we approached the city and the county and we worked as a four-way partnership to collaboratively disperse what amounted to over about seven or eight million dollars.

just in that first eight weeks of the pandemic.

But that works so well into the system in place we've kept on and we now disperse all of the pathways funding for the City of Charlottesville and a contractual relationship, which has been, I think, really great all the way around.

We work with Misty and her team and it's allowed for a lot more communication.

So as families are calling in on a way that need help, often we know them in some capacity.

And so we can talk to the city and kind of see what they know about the families and our network of nonprofits to make sure that families actually getting what they need or they getting duplicative services.

or they lost eligibility.

So it's a much more sort of open relationship now that we all have, which has been really great.

I appreciate you asking that question.

So any questions generally about all of the sort of the shift in the Inadaway model?

Oops.

Oh, it's going to be just kind of advance.

I'm sorry.

There we go.

So Reddy Region's Blue Ridge and Mixed Delivery.

I'll talk about this program because it's really important to the United Way.

About two and a half years ago, three years ago, we applied for what's called Reddy Regions, which is a program run by Virginia Early Childhood Foundation.

But it's through the Virginia Department of Education.

And so we now serve 21 counties, which is a significant territory.

We serve all the way from Winchester, Harrisonburg, Staten Coast, and Waynesboro, and the planning district.

And our goal there is to make sure that we're providing early education support to lower income families.

So families earning less than 200% of federal poverty level.

So this past year we placed 514 students and the average amount of money that it requires for somebody to go to a full day quality child care center is about $20,000 a year.

So that represents a little over eight million dollars.

And I don't know if anybody here has young children or maybe they have grandchildren.

But if you've looked at the average cost of care, particularly for infant and toddlers, which can range up to 24,000 a year, it's very unaffordable, especially if you're looking for quality care.

Quality care is really essential because you want to make sure your child is getting everything they need in terms of learning so they can succeed when they get to kindergarten.

They don't want to just be in a daycare setting.

They want to have that quality instruction, which is so important.

So this is a program that United Way has been running now two years.

We've really been involved in working with the VECF for the past eight or nine years, and we were awarded this opportunity because of our longstanding relationship and the task force that we've been running since 2015 in early education.

Just broadly speaking, if Council remembers anything from the presentation today, I hope you can remember how important early education is to workforce development.

that we can't have a thriving ecosystem economically if we can't have childcare in our community, particularly for those people who don't earn the resources to afford it.

And if we want a future workforce that's ready to do well when they get to school, we want to ensure that they have that quality early education.

All of the research shows now that's coming out that even zero to three are the most important years of a child's development.

So the earlier that we can provide that intervention and care, the better we are.

And as a community, my hope is that we really embrace this with the city level, the county level,

working with the University of Virginia Early Education Implementation Team, which we participate in, and our Chamber of Commerce.

They're actually getting ready to move forward with a hire of somebody who's going to focus just an early end at the local chamber.

So, you know, again, when I walk out of the room today, I know you hear a lot of information, but I hope that that resonates, and certainly I can share the slide deck because all of the data is there.

The other thing I want to call your attention to is that we do what we call class observations.

So that's an in-classroom assessment.

Some people might ask, how can you ensure quality?

What does that even mean?

Class assessment was developed by UVA Curry School of Education and it basically is a whole system for how a teacher interacts with a child and how you rate those interactions.

We send people out from our team across the region into classrooms

that are private centers, the Charlottesville City School System, Family Day Homes, and we're assessing those interactions, gathering that data, and we're able to provide that feedback to those centers for them to be qualified to get mixed delivery dollars, which makes a significant difference to their business model.

They have to make sure that those assessments are at a certain standard so we know that those children are getting that kind of quality instruction.

So that sort of broadly speaking has been an impact that's been significant.

We'll talk about our early learner scholarship program in a minute.

But historically, that was the only program we offered.

And that's about 30 placements a year, which is significant.

And the dollars make a huge difference.

This year, we just got granted $214,000 from the city, which is contractual and makes a big difference.

But when you're looking at $22,000 a year per child, you can start to see the scale of it right and how important it is.

So mixed delivery coming in and giving our region over $8 million is really significant.

and important.

I don't know if I'm going to get this to move.

I think he's going to load the larger file.

Let me switch over to the other presentation.

Oh, that's why.

Yeah.

Does he have the PowerPoint?

Yeah.

Okay.

You can go ahead.

Yeah, because actually that was like maybe the third slide.

So I think it wasn't was a little bit out of alignment to I want you to see the slide.

I'm going to talk about it, but it's important to see it.

And I didn't bring my glasses and the Sistineatines.

I'm going to do the best that I can.

One of the other big issues in our community is a shortfall in slots.

So does anybody kind of sense of what that might mean?

It's significant.

So right now we have over 1,800 slots in our community that are on the field.

So there are 1,800 children that need early preschool and there are not slots for them in this community.

In Charlottesville, the shortfall right now for children zero to two is 572.

So again, if there's any take away from this today's presentation, it's that our youngest children are the ones that are most in need of child care, and yet we do not have the actual centers to provide that care, or necessarily the dollars to provide that care.

Is that, that's just, oh okay, I see it's over on child care as well.

So we work for the Virginia Department of Education and they do an assessment of what the available slots are in the community and then we do the Census Bureau.

So we looked at the most recent micro report for 2022 around birth statistics.

So how many children are being born in each of the regions or each of the city and the county and all the counties actually in our region.

to see how many potentially could be in child care and then what slot.

Now, one could say not every child needs child care.

And that's true.

Not every parent wants to put their child in child care.

But I think we can kind of assume that some of those children would want child care if it were available.

That's kind of how we look at it.

It's not the clicky thing.

I think he's going to do it for you.

OK, let's go back if that's OK.

We're going to go to the one that says 2024 example of impact.

So, one before that.

There you go.

There you go.

Now you can see the numbers up there.

So, like I said, 1,800 shortfall slots in our community.

You can see what it looks like for the City of Charlottesville.

We're doing well on three to fours, which is really great, but we really need to work on children zero to two.

Some other things to talk about broadly in our community, Head Start, I'm sure all of you have heard about Head Start and the fact that we had to relinquish our grant and the impact on our lowest income families.

Those are families earning 125% or less of area median income.

We had 205 children without child care, Head Start child care as of April 1.

A lot of those children have since been placed but not all and so United Way was asked to step in as the leader in early education in our community to see what we might be able to do to help the situation

and we've been working with the Board Chair at MACA.

One of the things that we did is provide $45,000 in bonuses to the teachers that were at MACA that decided to stay on with CDI, which is the operator of Head Start for the foreseeable future until the next organization puts in a grant and is awarded that grant.

It's significant because we don't want to lose teachers right now that are trained in early education.

We already have a significant shortfall of teachers

That's another problem you might have heard Sunshine talk about PHA and some of the projects they have coming online and they include childcare centers, but we don't have teachers necessarily to work in those childcare centers that have taken their CDA and they've gotten their basic credentialing.

So this is like a two-part process that we're trying to tackle.

So we provided the stipends of about $3,000 for those teachers to keep them in the profession and hopefully keep them with CDI so that they didn't leave and take other positions because that's one of our biggest problems is that we have a huge attrition in people working in childcare centers because they can find a better paying job than other industries.

So our goal is how do we keep them in staying in that type of work.

The other thing that came out of the Head Start relinquishment is that we put together, we also put together a task force to consider what a community response to Head Start might look like.

Dr. Gurley was in those conversations, Matt Haas from the county, some of our non-profit leaders that ready kids and ship, United Way, some local funders and Macca, the board chair, and essentially they asked ready regions, United Way, to apply for the new Head Start opportunity.

So we are in the process of going down that road and kind of assessing what we need to do, but one of the first steps is a community needs assessment.

So we'll be working in conjunction with Macca, the Equity Center and City of Promise,

and Network to Work to do a community needs assessment and look at what we need to do to actually put out that application for Head Start.

So that would be run if we're awarded that by United Wayne Moving Forward in the future.

Any questions about any of that before I move forward?

Okay.

So we talked about this slide so we can move on to the next one.

Another important program that United Way runs is called Coordinated Enrollment.

So about four or five years ago, up until four or five years ago, I should say,

If you wanted to put your child in early education, you would go to a local school and you would fill out a paper application and you would hope to get matched in a way that made sense for your family.

We've since brought on an online system called Coordinated Enrollment or Single Point of Entry.

So now there's a whole database of every single child care slot available in our community and parents can go on and apply online.

It also provides a robust wraparound services opportunity.

So if a parent comes in and they don't have transportation, we can pair them up with a school that's relatively close to their home or on a bus line and try to better serve their needs.

also figure out if they need part-time care, full-time care.

And we also collect a lot of rich data from the system and understanding what our families need and what their kind of family demographics look like.

And so we're in our third year of this program.

We've been doubling numbers.

We had over 2,000 families served in Charlottesville and Albemarle just since FY21.

So it's been a very successful program.

And again, the whole idea is how do we improve the overall system of child care delivery in our region?

And this has been one of the important ways that we've been able to do that.

Next slide.

Early Learner Scholarship, so this has been around for 40 years.

This is the one Council is probably most familiar with.

It's the one that the city and the county fund.

$192,400 is our annual contract.

It just increased to $214,000 this year, FY25, which we're really grateful for that opportunity.

And you can see we have 31 families being served right now, more than 80% of which are single parent households.

This is just an important program.

It's always been an important program for the United Way, and it's one that we hope to continue and also scale.

So we have this year gone off after a lot of private philanthropy dollars to try to be awful more of these slots in the city because we know there's such a need.

One of the other things I should just mention is that there's a lack of slots.

So one of the other ways that we're trying to tackle that is actually get new centers off the ground that have teachers already trained.

So one of those opportunities is Pilgrim Baptist Church, which is over in 10th and Page in a historically black neighborhood.

We just had a $35,000 grant to that organization It's it's a minority owned and will be minority run and it's an incredible opportunity to have a Montessori school opportunity right here in 10th and Page and so that should be opening We hope by the fall or next spring and there's others coming online So one of the things we've grown into is providing business support startup support resource support and getting these new child care centers We're in conversation with City of Promise right now to do a similar opportunity

Abundant Life is Approached to St.

Mark's Preschool.

So there's a huge need for business training, licensing support, seed money and investment and opening new centers around the community as well as creating that pipeline of providers that are not providers but child co-workers who are trained.

I'm just going to pause any questions so far.

Okay, next slide.

Another area I'm just going to switch gears.

So when we think about serving a whole family, it's really about making sure that the family is resourced in a way where they can meet their needs or at a minimum have a survival income in their household.

And so about five years ago, we helped launch what we call the Financial Resiliency Task Force.

You see all the logos there.

Those are the other organizations that we work with.

We've been meeting pretty regularly just about every month actually for four years to come up with a work plan, an MOU that we all signed, and shared priorities to ensure that families who are looking for program services to get ahead financially could access those easily and efficiently.

And so essentially we use Network to Works platform.

anybody looking for a job, looking to increase their pay, looking for childcare, looking for transportation, trying to figure out where they can get some affordable housing opportunities or financial coaching.

This is the network that's been created to help those families.

In fact, when we work with Misty with the city, she, you know, sends us folks and refers people and we work with the county.

but it's a really robust network.

We've been up and running about a year in terms of taking families in.

We're about 80 families that have been enrolled so far, which is really great.

The average median income is about 31,000.

We're working to try to get up to sort of an Alice baseline, so asset-limited income constraints.

So sort of a working poor population is a demographic that we're most trying to impact.

And we've had some really great success stories just early on already.

So it's been a really great program and we continue to look at how to

make it the most impactful it can be.

And right now, the things that we really look at is workforce development, skill training, transportation, childcare, financial literacy, and of course access to affordable housing.

So those are the areas that we spend most of our time focused on.

Habitat's been a core partner of Pima Housing Alliance Network to Work.

Most of the ones you would assume have been a part of this for that amount of time.

So next slide.

Family Investment Program is one of our sort of robust offerings that we can support families with.

Up until this point, most of our families have come from Habitat for Humanity, so they have their own pathways program.

If somebody is not eligible to purchase their home because they have low credit, they don't have enough in their savings, they don't have high enough income.

We work with the family for two years.

United Way invests about $10,000 per family.

We help them with down payment assistance by doing a shared savings account.

So we match money as they put money into their savings account.

Reduced bad debt, a lot of our families come with really high interest rates on car loans, student loans, you name it.

And that's really like the most difficult thing they deal with.

It's really hard to get ahead if they're always paying off high interest loans.

And so we work with them on reducing bad debt, increasing what we call good debt.

and ultimately after two years most of them move into a habitat home which has been a really great and successful program and so now we've started to expand it to Fountain Fund, IRC and international neighbors who have families that may not be trying to purchase a home but they have other financial goals in mind and this is a program that helps the family meet their own needs as they design their own financial plan over a two-year period and United Way disperses funds to them as they meet their own goals.

So it's been a really great robust program.

Next slide.

Driving Lives Forward is a program we launched about three years ago.

Again, we're just trying to tackle this from all different sides.

Transportation is really important.

We work with Carter Myers Automotive.

The idea here is we source affordable vehicles for families and we get them really low interest loans.

We partner with Virginia National Bank right now.

We're looking to also partner with the CIC for low interest loans.

and we've also started offering insurance assistance insurance.

Right now sometimes the payment each month is more than a car payment.

We have very expensive insurance in our community and also helping with down payment assistance.

So the goal is to get somebody in a car that they can pay off within four to five years with a payment that's about two to three hundred a month and basically get them driving.

For families that can't get into a vehicle, we're adding a vehicle repair program this year.

Ridgewood Network to Works spent about seventy five thousand dollars this year on vehicle repair requests.

It's one of the biggest things we get.

and we hear about when people need emergency funding, it's utilities, it's rent and it's vehicle repairs.

So that's our goal.

We're going to try to put together $100,000 in seed money.

Right now it's only cars.

We haven't added bikes.

We put a grant in with Lyft.

So we're hoping to get a significant Lyft grant where we can give people codes.

I think it's a great idea.

I think what we want to do is get vehicle repair off the ground and running.

We want to make sure that we get more families in the pipeline for vehicles themselves, and then we have something called a loaner program.

It's like another tier.

We get donated vehicles and we pick people in loaner vehicles who are actively in Network to Works workforce development program.

So we have sort of that continuum, but the final frontier would be like

of Bicycle.

An Urban Arrow family vehicle, that's about $5,000.

We're open to everything.

I think what we see is a lot of our families have to drive in from far because they cannot afford to live in the city.

And so bike isn't really going to help them all that much in that scenario.

So like if you're a city resident, yes.

But most of our families are commuting in from like Louisa, I mean, Waynesboro, wherever they can afford to live, which typically is unfortunately not Charlottesville.

But that isn't a bad idea to have even my whole thing is provide a continuum of options for people because every family is different, right?

But the goal this year is to get that vehicle repair program up and running.

So that's a little bit about what we're doing.

And again, you can kind of see typical clients, the same client, single mom, hourly wage, working poor, all of the things that we're trying to really support and lift up.

Next slide.

Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'll just finish up one of our very new programs.

I keep saying newer programs.

As you can see, we have many new programs at United Way, but I'll finish up this one.

Small business grant making.

So we've been working with the CIC.

They're one of our partners in our financial resiliency task force.

They do loans.

They did do some grant making during the pandemic, but that's not really what they focus on.

Mostly they focus on sort of micro loans.

And then, of course, their coursework and entrepreneurs.

And where they could use some support in conversation is grants to small businesses that are trying to scale.

And so we started, I think, three or four years ago working with a minority business alliance, which is an affinity group with a local chamber.

and we offer $5,000 grants.

We do $50,000 with the grants.

They're sustaining grants so they're to help people with immediate needs.

Like the first year we help voodoo noodles move from the Jefferson School over to Water Street and we bought all the equipment to get her kitchen open.

As an example, like super specific, highly tangible things.

This past year, Khadija's kitchen, she's from Afghanistan.

She's a single mom of five children.

You may have heard in the news she lost somebody's stole actually her food truck, which is her only means of support.

and so she got a grant of $5,000 and was able to buy another food truck.

Most of the things I'm doing at Unadaway are highly specific, highly tangible, immediate results for families that try to help them do better.

Like that's the goal that we have in mind.

That's been a very successful program.

Then two years ago I approached the city economic development department and the county economic development department and asked if they would be interested in considering an expanded grant program and they were.

So that's been really great.

So we've had one whole cycle of grant making

and now we're on to our second year.

I think we had over 36 applications this last round and I'll just share the last recipients were culinary concepts.

That's Alan there in his family.

Alan's got a short bread, swift transportation and spirit lab distillery.

So they were all funded with a $10,000 grant and we asked Alan, you know, how did it go?

Like you got this $10,000 grant to help with capacity and he said I was actually able to

to take 30 days and get out of the kitchen and think about how to grow my company.

I was able to hire somebody new, and I took that time, and I went out and I got a bunch of new accounts, including Whole Foods, and it just did this for me.

So great, it's only $10,000, but if $10,000 gives you a little breathing space to think about how to expand your company, that's what we're all about, accelerating that.

And we really see it as an alternative means to traditional employment.

A lot of the folks in entrepreneurial roles maybe can't do traditional employment or want to be able to

Billed Wealth, which they can do through being an entrepreneur.

So it's been a really successful program and we're really happy that we're able to work with the Charlottesville Office of Economic Development on it.

Chris has been a big supporter.

So that's really it.

I think that was my last slide.

Just thank you for your support and investment in our work.

We really appreciate it.

And what's really helpful to me is when you will sit down and have coffee with me, which I've done with most of you, but not you, Michael Payne, and I don't think you, Ms.

Oschrin, would love to sit down with you because the more I can hear from you about your perspective about what

City residents are telling you.

It helps me inform how we do program design.

We're big on talking to the clients that we serve.

We have family councils that are part of our program design.

So we really want to hear both from our elected officials and we want to hear from the families that we're helping.

How do we best deliver these programs in a way that meets you where you're at?

That's always our goal.

Any other questions?

Listen, thank you so much.

We really appreciate the work that you do.

Absolutely.

Thank you for having me.

All right.

Is Wilson on the video?

Great.

Do you guys also have our presentation?

There we go.

It's in the packet.

Should we try and do the

What?

Awesome.

Hello everyone.

Thank you so much for having us here today.

We're really excited to talk to you about LEAP.

I am Katie Van Langen.

one of the co-executive directors of LEAP and I am joined by Wilson Ratliff who is my fellow co-director who is joining us virtually today.

So what is LEAP?

We are based in Charlottesville.

We were founded in 2009 and we were born out of

The City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County coming together and realizing that there was a need for an organization and a climate action plan before both organizations had created their climate action plans to create a mutual vision around lowering greenhouse gas emissions.

And it was started as a community project that received some additional funding and

Leap was born.

Our vision as an organization is to create a more energy efficient and resilient community, reducing the carbon footprint while also improving quality of life for all of the residents.

We were really proud to have been city partners from the very beginning and the city has really intertwined in all aspects of our successes in organization.

Over the past 15 years, we've hooked over 13,000 residents across the state in their journeys towards sustainability and energy efficiency.

And the bulk of the work that we do is around energy efficiency, home energy assessments,

Home Energy retrofits and upgrades and renewable energy, so largely solar installations.

So I wanted to touch on a quick timeline, some of our key benchmarks in our evolution and how we've kind of evolved our business model over time.

As I mentioned, we received our initial investment in founding by the city and the county in 2009.

At that point in time, we were primarily founded by the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, SEA.

and the Department of Energy's Better Buildings Neighborhood Program.

We officially started doing work as a 501C3 nonprofit in 2010.

We moved into 608 Ridge Street, which some of you may know as the Eco Remod House, which is actually a city-owned building.

This was a home in a historic neighborhood that was

Not, it was slightly neglected, but through an innovative partnership between UVA, the City of Charlottesville, and LEAP, the house went from a formerly neglected home to an innovative energy demonstration house as well as LEAP's offices.

So for quite some time we were able to have individuals from the community stop by, see the offices, understand energy efficiency and how that was done within our space and see how they could make their homes more energy efficient.

So for the first five years of LEAP's operation, we were primarily funded from stimulus funding.

And so during that time, we were largely focused on home energy assessments and doing work mostly for market rate populations.

And as that stimulus funding started to run down,

that also meant we had to take a closer look at how we were operating and our business and our priorities started to evolve quite a bit.

So up until about 2014 we were primarily focused on

working in

and the idea around it is to help individual homeowners overcome the barriers to going solar.

So we adopted that model and created really customized local content in partnership with the City of Charlottesville and our goals around that are to

help connect homeowners with discounted pricing, vetted installers, and do it during a limited time window.

So doing it in that way, we kind of help spur action around people who might be interested in going solar.

So we launched this program in 2014.

Since in the past decade, we've had over 930 city residents sign up for Solarize.

Now, not every one of them went through with the solar installation, but every single one of them got a solar roof assessment to see their solar potential for solar

for getting a rooftop installation.

Many of them attended webinars, they learned about the process, they got a proposal from an installer and they really started to think about solar as an option and we've continued conversations with all of these individuals over the years and

to date we've had 195 Charlottesville homeowners install solar through our program.

And I am one of them.

And that's a total of 1.2 megawatts of solar in the city through Solar Eyes.

We, like I said,

Going solar is not something that we expect people to do with the drop of a hat.

It's a big investment.

But through our program, we realize it's an opportunity to help educate and cultivate people through the process, hold their hand, be a trusted partner.

And we do that in partnership with the city as well.

So one of our other kind of big turning points in our history was when we started working with Dominion's income qualified programs in 2015.

Up until that point, we have been primarily focused on market rate audiences through our Solar Eyes program and through the prior funding opportunities that we had.

Working with Dominion as a utility, they really allowed us through this new funding stream to shift our focus through to income qualified households and really change the impact that we were able to have on the Solar Eyes community.

on the Charlottesville community, specifically low-income and age-qualifying households.

This was truly our shift to being able to scale in reaching those more vulnerable households in Charlottesville.

Similarly, in 2019, we launched an initiative with Charlottesville Gas to bring more weatherization improvements to a lot of the Charlottesville Gas customers as well.

Thank you, Katie.

And councillors, I'm sorry I can't be there in person, but it's good to see you all.

It's good to be here.

I'm going to talk a little bit about our process for weatherizing a home.

Since, like Katie said, it's become sort of the core focus of a lot of our operations now.

It begins with a home energy assessment, which has

been the foundation for the entry point to all of our programs since the very beginning, even when we were primarily market rate focused.

It's still the case now, so that usually consists of about a 90 minute to a two hour evaluation by one of our building analysts.

To get to that level of being a building analyst for us, there's about two or three weeks of cumulative training as well as a couple of certifications that go along with that along with a state license.

So anybody we're deploying into the field, we like to think as an expert in the field and uniquely qualified to make these sort of determinations that they are doing.

So we'll spend a couple hours in the house.

Within that, we'll also be doing a blower door test, which measures the air leakage of the house.

It lets us quantify how leaky the house is, along with infrared scans to help locate insulation problems.

And we'll work through

a checklist essentially.

The goal of all of these audits is really just to create a comprehensive list of the energy savings opportunities within the house.

And we try to do that independent of funding sources.

And so even if our actual opportunity to deliver some of the improvements is kind of limited, we still have a comprehensive list of all the things that can be done in the house and that can help inform

Future funding requests or handoffs to other partners that I'll talk about in a little bit.

Once we create that preliminary list, we'll verify eligibility of the homeowner, and that sort of puts them in individual buckets of programs in funding, and then we create a scope of work off of that.

Cater to the individual house, of course.

Scheduling from there is pretty straightforward.

We can usually serve people once we clear all those initial hurdles.

We can usually get them on the calendar within a couple weeks is our goal.

It's rarely longer than a month, so a quick service is kind of part of our goal here.

The improvements that we end up doing in most homes will consist of insulation improvements, largely attic and crawl spaces.

Sometimes we can do well insulation depending on access.

ceiling air leaks, replacing light bulbs with LEDs, water saving shower heads and faucet aerators are an easy lift for us upgrading existing heating and cooling systems to more efficient options is also something I would try to do when funding allows it.

Aside from all these energy efficiency issues that we can address, we also encounter a lot of deferred maintenance and health and safety issues, especially in our income qualified clients homes.

We can see plumbing issues, electrical issues, and air quality fangs like mold.

Roof leaks aren't uncommon.

All of those we try to address with existing funding sources by braiding them.

Again, we have other

nonprofit partners that we can also coordinate with to try to get some of this stuff done too.

Following the retrofits, we also screen our income and age qualifying individuals for eligibility for Dominion's low income solar program.

And that will provide a free up to five kilowatt solar array.

So it's relatively small system for income and age qualifying households.

and our role there is to help facilitate the connection between the homeowner and the contractor to get the work done and schedule that as well as submitting all of that to Dominion for reimbursement.

In all the results of these strategies, our goal is always to reduce the energy load of these residents, make their house more comfortable and affordable.

Any questions on any of that?

Our efforts are focused on three key pillars, and I think I've basically touched on all these in the previous slide, and that is efficiency, electrification, and renewable energy, specifically solar in our market.

Combining the efficiency work along with electrification and solar increases in energy resilience, reducing vulnerability to power outages

and fuel price volatility while also reducing our carbon footprint.

It also helps low-income individuals reduce energy costs and improve living conditions.

I wanted to touch on some of the statistics and numbers around the stats, or what Wilson was just talking about around our key.

Pillars of Energy in our focus areas because we see the impact, but we also have been tracking and we know that there's a lot of research around this data as well.

So we know that our work not only makes homes healthier and more comfortable for residents, but the EPA has reported that homeowners can save an average of 200

to $400 annually on their energy bills by implementing the recommendations from a home energy assessment.

And for most low-income households, we are doing this work for them so they are not even paying for the work and they're seeing significant returns from their home energy assessment as well.

We've seen an additional $500 to $600 in annual savings that we have brought through our income qualified solar program.

So huge savings on efficiency as well as utility bills.

The electrification of heating, cooking, and transportation can save households an average of $600 annually by reducing fuel costs.

There's obviously a lot of incentives around that coming through now.

and a rooftop solar installation can reduce a typical household's carbon footprint by three to four tons of CO2 annually, which is the equivalent of planting 100 trees.

So all of these things, they really do add up.

And at the end of the day, we care about reducing the carbon footprint of all of these households, but for the individual homeowners,

making their homes more comfortable, reducing their electric bills and other utility bills.

Since our founding in 2009,

We've helped thousands of city households.

I went through all of our records that I could find and it gets murky in the early days, but between direct audits, retrofits and solar installations were above 2,000 households served and then countless sort of general inquiries that we get on any given day just with

area homeowners and tenants asking about just broad energy efficiency questions about what they can do.

Our active city sponsored programs are listed here for you, and I'll just go down the list if you guys don't mind me reading this as a bulleted list.

The first one, the climate protection team in our office is sustainability.

We've had a program service agreement

with them since 2013.

It's been a collaboration with LEAP staff and city staff there since then in helping LEAP support the city's climate protection goals.

Largely, that is in the way of marketing and education support for the work that we're doing in the community.

and ensuring that Charlottesville residents obviously have full access to the benefits of our programs and other local incentives.

The second one, CGBE is our abbreviation for the Charlottesville Gas Energy Efficiency Program.

That was, again, like Katie said, launched in 2019.

That was designed to pick up where dominions programs sort of fall off when it comes to our income-qualified homeowners.

Dominion has pretty robust opportunities for anybody that's electrically heated, but they're understandably a little stingier when it comes to gas heat.

And so, CG for example, can supplement paddock insulation, air sealing, as well as health and safety needs that just aren't included as kind of the fundamental part of Dominion's programs.

Our most common usage of this is when it comes to stuff like attic insulation with Dominion's program.

Their support for attic insulation drops, stops at an R38, which is about 12 inches of insulation.

But CG allows us to insulate all the way to R49, which is about 16 inches.

So that's almost 20% improvement on the insulation over what the homeowner would get otherwise.

Bullet 3, the CDBG, the Community Development Block Grant.

The way we're using this funding is to make homes solar ready.

And that's kind of to clear the biggest barrier that we're seeing with adoption and the Domain's Low Income Solar Program is roof condition.

Dominion requires within their program that our roof must be

with a newer than 10 years to be eligible for the program and obviously in disadvantaged communities the cost of roof replacement is significant.

We're seeing probably at least 50% deferral rates when it comes to

Solar because of the roof condition.

And so with the SEG funds, we're able to do both repairs and full replacements on some of these routes to clear the way for for Dominion's low income program.

We also have home funding and we have had it.

I think we're on our third or fourth year now.

We're using this current round of funding just for larger retrofits that our existing utility programs don't cover.

The biggest thing that we've run into is, like I said, deferred maintenance so that can cover windows and doors.

We're using it on one house, comes to mind that have significant foundation water issues, standing water in their basement, as well as mold associated with that.

So that home funding allows us to solve the water problem as well as remediate the mold.

So that then we can use our existing programs to properly aerosol and insulate the house.

Over 2,000 households have received energy assessments since 2009.

From that, by our latest count, about 800 have received the weatherization and efficiency retrofit work completed by either LEAP or in the earlier days by one of our subcontractors.

that also includes 235 total solar installations.

41 of those would be the Dominion Low Income Solar Program.

So, Wilson just chatted about a lot of the work that we do and over the past 15 years we know that we have really had a significant impact on our local community.

We hear feedback like IDA who we are really making their home more comfortable, it's cooler, it's hotter, it's you know, that's our goal is I think

for them to truly feel the impact that we make on their homes when we're done with the home energy retrofits.

So we see the impact.

There's anecdotal results around that.

We've tracked a lot of numbers around that.

But one of the things that we have recognized over the past couple years is that we can do better.

There is a lot around the

tracking tools and energy modeling that is frankly a little bit new and just counting a home energy assessment as a success is a success.

But we want to know what came out of that.

What were the energy savings?

How did that impact their bills?

How does it affect the city's climate action plan?

And so we have truly invested internally on our databases, our tracking tools, our energy modeling.

A lot of those things are in place right now and really hoping and eager to see

and more numbers coming through and will be in our reporting moving forward.

We've already shared a lot of them with our team that we work with at the city and I think they'll be incorporated into future reports.

So we recognize that there's also a big opportunity there too because as Wilson mentioned, we've already served quite

A lot of city residents in getting home energy assessments and upgrades, but there's a lot more opportunity there.

So not only looking at the impact that we've had on the residents that we have served, but how do we reach the other remaining city residents that could also use our help?

We have an annual budget of a little over $4.6 million right now, 85% of which is program related, and as we've talked about, we leverage multiple funding streams, ideally all at once on any given job, and that includes utility rebates and referral fees to some of our subcontractors to support the program administration.

For every dollar invested in LEAP, we can leverage usually three to five times that amount in additional funding through other sources, deploying it on the actual work that we're doing.

Primary source of funding is our fee-for-service programming, and that includes dominion's weatherization and low-income solar programs.

But in addition to that, these sources of revenue included the City of Charlottesville, Memorial County, Charlottesville Gas, and the solarized programs that we put on every year.

Last year, we received a little over $100,000 in support from the PSA with the City Climate Protection Program.

And then, again, on top of that was the CDBG and home funding.

We pride ourselves on being a nimble organization who can respond to an ever-changing landscape in this space as new funding sources come on and old funding sources kind of sunset.

One way we're able to do that is with all of the community resources and connections that we have.

Some of them that we work with often are listed here in front of you.

AHIP, the Elmer Housing Improvement Program, is a huge one.

Then combined with the Good Building Goodness Foundation, we have a pretty streamlined client sharing process between all three of us, where between all of our various resources, we know if

If we can't address somebody's problems that they hit, for example, probably cancel, hand them over to them.

And Ditto, if they have a job that doesn't need perhaps the larger retrofit that they are typically doing, we'll send it over to us to just take the energy efficiency work.

Get that out of the way.

Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville has been a significant partner over the years as well, as well as community housing partners, which is the federal weatherization provider in this area, and C3, the Community Climate Collaborative.

Board and staff.

So, from the leadership of an incredible board of directors,

two of which are strong associations with the city there.

Crystal Riddleville, the city's director of sustainability is on our board and as a city councilor, Michael Payne.

Staff-wise, we're currently up to a staff of 20, which is up from just four in 2015.

As we continue to grow, our ability to deliver services is relying, continues to be reliant on our

are our incredible field staff.

That's made up of five building analysts right now and seven retrofit technicians that are actually doing the work in the houses.

They do most of the collaboration between the two of them in terms of creating the scope of work to find things that

Our specific teach houses needs and all that, the core of which are, like we've mentioned, the weatherization, air sealing, and insulation work.

Only at this point HVAC is really the only thing we're solving out in addition to sometimes plumbing and electrical work.

And then the solar as well.

So this past year we've served approximately 750 households statewide and we really expect that number to continue to grow.

I think we're projected much higher that in 2024 already.

We've already hired three new home manager analysts and we plan to hire about two more before the end of the year.

and Michael Payne

Headquartered here, much of our work is here.

We do serve more households throughout the state, but we try and prioritize as much as we can within the city first.

So the home energy analysts that Wilson talked about and that I just mentioned, that growth is really what drives our reaches and organizations.

So that the home energy audits

must be done before any of the other work is done.

So before we do electrification, before we do solar, the base is that everybody gets a home energy assessment.

And so increasing the number of home energy analysts that can do that is the key to unlocking us expanding as an organization.

And so we're really excited to be able to do more of that.

The state of Virginia's IRA benefits are going to start opening up early in 2025.

This is a truly game-changing amount of resources and benefits that are going to be coming to households throughout Virginia.

We recognize the huge opportunity here, our partners at the city also recognize it and we are going to be working collaboratively to create an energy resource hub that will help residents throughout the city to take advantage of all of these benefits and to navigate

What's available to them on a local, state and national level.

So Leap and C3 are working together alongside the city to build this new tool.

We will be building it throughout the fall.

We actually kick off our planning process today.

And the planning process will go through the fall and we plan to spend the first half of next year

January through June and actually deploying the resource hub as the new benefits start to roll out.

So we're really excited about that.

LEAP is also really primed to be involved in the implementation side of the IRA benefits as well.

So we're really, I think there's a huge opportunity as they start to come through to figure out how we can really

Make sure every resident has access not only to the services that we're already providing, but continuing to braid in more resources as they come up.

So, I think that's pretty much our big picture summary of all of the work that we do.

As I mentioned earlier, our mission really is to use energy efficiency solutions to make homes healthier,

more affordable, safer for residents while reducing the impact on our environment.

And so we are so grateful as an organization to be in a place where our goals so closely align with those of the city.

We are proud to support the Climate Action Plan.

We feel like we've been a really integral part in

reaching some of the goals that have already been set through that.

And we're working closely with the city to make sure that every new PSA that we work together on is specifically addressing those goals moving forward.

And we're looking forward to launching the Resource Hub and really making sure that our investments and our growth and the expansion really also help the city as we continue to grow together.

So thank you all so much.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Just briefly, you've mentioned all these great programs that go towards existing homeowners to do retrofitting or improve the state of their house.

What, if any, efforts do you have for new construction?

Do you partner with developers or

you know, individuals trying to add an ADU or anything like that.

Yeah, it's a great question.

We do and I'll let Wilson talk a little bit more to that.

It's something we're actually thinking about doing even more of in the next year.

I think it's included in our PSA to talk more about, to provide more training for builders and contractors as they make, build new homes.

But I'll let Wilson

Sure.

Yeah, the new building codes that have gone into effect over the last couple of years require additional diagnostics, namely a duct leakage test and a blower test in those cases.

And so on a basic level, we're offering that to

area builders.

We're also trying to expand our outreach, like Katie said, in that way because many builders aren't used to this higher building science informed approach to building.

They're used to doing the thing that they've always done for the last 20 years.

has these newer code requirements come online.

I think there's much less room for error when tightening up a house and building a house from scratch.

If you're not approaching energy efficiency from the very beginning, it gets much harder to meet some of these code requirements.

So we're trying to do a lot of outreach in that way.

We get probably

Thanks.

Half a dozen a month inquiries from homeowners who are in the process of planning or actively building additions or ADUs or homes for themselves that will work with them either on an actual consulting basis where we charge a fee or if it's a basic question that we can answer or email we'll just help them out that way.

but we try to stay engaged in all aspect of it in terms of actual incentives to be able to be deployed like we are on the income qualified side.

It's pretty light.

Dominion, I think, is in the process of launching a new construction program but I'm not quite sure what the status of that is right now.

Okay, listen, thank you so much.

We really appreciate all the work that you all do.

All right, next up, Mr. Chambers is going to talk to us about the

Long awaited and we're all very happy.

Thank you and good afternoon council So this is an update to an update that came before you earlier this spring to give you an update on transportation issues in general This is a very quick specific update to that update looking at our sidewalk priorities Before I dive in I do want to mention that at the beginning of this calendar year Mr. Sanders said

We're going to get to the end of this fiscal year and we're going to have a new sidewalk list.

And so as the first day of the new fiscal year, this is the sidewalk list we're here.

So how are we planning to build new sidewalks?

So first I'm going to give you a quick overview of the planning work that we've done to date, give you some anticipated costs that you can be looking forward to as part of your CIP development process, and give you a little bit of the workflow of the next steps that we're going to take this in.

So this project started out back in 2022.

We had identified a need to come up with a prioritization list because we had several different lists at the time.

We had our bike ped master plan.

We had the streets that work plan.

We had several small area plans.

They all said put sidewalks in very different places.

So we brought in a consultant and we were supported by the state's office of intermodal planning and investment.

That's what that would be.

acronym right there is foreign second bullet and they looked at some quantitative metrics for us and I'll go through that in the next slide what those metrics were but they came up with here is a list of your needs based on quantitative analysis.

In 2023 we took that quantitative analysis and the list that they had produced through their their data work and sort of started looking at qualitative issues with these sidewalks.

We were doing that through last summer.

We took a bit of a pause to, you know, see if the ADA transition plan could line up with this plan and then we decided, let's go ahead and just finish this one.

So you've seen this chart before.

This was included in your previous transportation update this year and the one last year as well because we were talking about this last year.

On the left side of it is that quantitative analysis.

It looks at the suitability of

different sidewalk locations, demand at those locations, connectivity at those locations and safety issues that have come up around those locations.

The top 50 scoring project or top 50% of scoring projects from that, we brought into a qualitative assessment that looked at how these projects were distributed in terms of equity.

We looked at if they could match up with our paving schedule.

Unfortunately in a lot of cases they didn't because the paving schedule was on streets that already had sidewalks.

We looked at physical feasibility.

There were some sidewalks and our old plans that just frankly

are too difficult to construct because of the way that they are laid out on the street and would take a lot of work, and sometimes the juices aren't quite worth the squeeze.

We also looked at what can we get done in the next three years, five years, ten years, what does the timeline look like in terms of feasibility.

We also got some feedback internally and from stakeholders.

with all of that assessment we decided to split those priorities into different tiers and I'll go through what those tiers mean in just a second.

So all of the projects that we came out with are considered the city's priorities.

There's not one that we're saying is more of a priority than the other but we did tear these into different tiers because we understood that there were kind of different timelines that these projects would fall into just based on

How Difficult They Were To Construct

There aren't necessarily trees growing in places where we might eventually want a sidewalk.

So a lot fewer conflicts with Tier 1.

Tier 2 is a larger group.

These are projects where we looked at them and said, ooh, we don't feel totally comfortable saying that this is easy.

We know that there's going to be some hard work here.

But this is something that we can probably take on, at least in terms of design, preliminary engineering, and figuring out how hard this is going to be constructed.

Tier 3 are the hard challenges, the big stuff.

We have 13 projects currently listed under Tier 3.

These are mostly large projects.

They have lots of conflicts that are very easy to point out.

They often require coordination with an outside partner, either because that partner owns the property or because we know that we're going to need to come to an outside partner to get some funding, whether that's BDOT or a federal partner or a private partner.

Some of these are properties that are on the boundary of UVA.

Some of these are properties that, you know, in front of the county office building, there's a piece of missing sidewalk that is one of our tier three projects.

That's going to require some coordination and not something that we as city staff can sort of work through on our own.

So we put out the draft priorities earlier this spring to collect comments on them for about a month.

We received 213 unique comments.

We had a few duplicates, but 213 of those were unique.

The majority of them were received through our website, which had an online map.

You could click on any of the projects and give feedback on that, or you could submit it through a web form underneath that to provide any other comments.

I also received some through email.

I also had a citizen look at every single one of these projects and submit an Excel spreadsheet with a comment for every single one, which is

Most of the feedback that we received on these were considerations for the projects themselves.

When you're designing these, keep an eye out for X, Y, or Z. We also got a lot of, we prefer this to be a priority over this.

That will be up to City Council to decide as we go through capital planning later in the fall.

We are sticking with these are all of our priorities.

So that is really there.

There's not one that's a priority or up with the other.

We're just trying to make sure that they are distributed both geographically and temporarily in a fair way.

So what has changed based on those comments that we received?

Two of the projects we removed, most of the comments on those two projects said, I don't really get what you're doing here.

Nobody really walks here and no one's really going to walk here anytime soon.

Or there's very low vehicle volume so people in this neighborhood don't feel that.

and Michael Payne.

for some reason or the other, maybe they had been considered for construction years ago and fell off of some list, but they weren't in our original analysis.

And we got several comments on each of those five saying, hey, this is a kind of important connection for you to make.

So we've added those in.

So what are we talking about cost wise?

So including this current fiscal year where we already have some funds designated for sidewalks and are starting to move forward, we're talking about about 4.76 million through 2030, through fiscal year 2030.

And that only includes

Design and construction for Tier 1 projects and design for Tier 2 projects.

And just to clarify why that is, we don't actually know what the construction costs are going to be for Tier 2 projects.

That's partly why they're considered Tier 2 projects, is we need to sit down and do some design work to figure out exactly what are the construction costs, what are the issues that we're going to have to build around.

We also don't have costs for design or construction for tier three projects.

Those are projects that are going to need a lot more planning.

And most of the costs in sort of the early days are basically going to be staff time.

It's going to be me sitting in meetings talking to people about how we move these things forward.

So you see the $4.76 million price tag.

That's where we're starting.

But once we do more design, once we do more planning on tier

to when tier three projects, that price tag will increase as will our requests to federal and state sources.

So it's not all on the backs of the local budget.

But in terms of what does need to go on to the local budget, we currently get about $100,000 a year for sidewalks in the CIP.

Beyond that, this is what we would need.

We currently have FY25 accounted for, so you're only seeing the next five years, FY26 through 2030.

And we'll be looking for an additional $3.5 million on top of the $100,000 a year that's currently in there.

When those dollars go into what years is totally negotiable?

And I'll get to how we're going to update this sidewalk list in a couple slides.

Could I ask one question here?

Sure.

We do have a balance that is accumulated.

What's not included here is projects that we've already committed to.

And a lot of the funding that's currently in there is committed to those projects.

So some projects that you haven't seen on this list, but they're already in the hopper for being spent.

So what do we do with these priorities next?

So moving the priorities is kind of a team effort between neighborhood development services and public works.

Neighborhood development services is going to take the lead on sort of the first phase of things, which looks at planning, project selection, sort of early conceptual design.

so that you can put in grant applications and we would work through that grant application phase.

Once we have funding identified and have a conceptual design for our engineers to move forward, we'd hand it off to our public works team.

They would handle the engineering right-of-way acquisition and construction phases to get the sidewalk on the ground.

We're also going to be reviewing and updating schedules and budgets of sidewalk priorities on an annual basis.

Our current estimates are based on sidewalks we've constructed recently.

As we start to construct more sidewalks we're going to get better data on those construction costs and obviously they'll change over time.

We'll want to keep the costs that we're looking at for the future up to date with those changes.

We are also looking to do this as an annual update so that you're aware going into CIP

What are the projects that have fallen off of this list?

What are the projects that are being added onto this list because we've done some of the work with Tier 2 or Tier 3 and identified more funding that we'll need?

This is not going to be a static list.

It is going to evolve and be updated over time, but this is day one of that list.

The next steps for city staff, well, you may notice if you go to our sidewalk priorities page today, it still says draft, so that's on my to-do list this week, is get that updated to final.

We are also already starting to work on some of these.

Before we finished the draft sidewalk list, we looked at these and saw there were some tier one projects that we could probably get moving soon.

We also had a couple of projects that were on our safe routes to school list, which was a separate list that we thought we could get those moving at the same time.

But the ones that are on the sidewalk list that we started moving forward were 8th Street, Northeast, that's right over here off of Market Street, Hazel Street off of East High and Prospect Avenue.

We're also going to be looking at scoping the first batch of Tier 2 projects for design work in the fall.

And it's going to be kind of an ongoing effort to identify opportunities to complete planning work for Tier 3 projects with regional, state, and institutional partners.

We've already started having some of these conversations on some of those projects.

We obviously have a lot of work in public works to do so that we can free up some staff time to get some of these projects completed.

We have a fairly large backlog of committed projects, especially with our VDOT portfolio.

Luckily, we got one of those done pretty recently.

And as we get some of those crossed off, then we can start doing more and more sidewalk work.

In the meantime, we're also looking for opportunities to patch some places that are easy.

You may have seen a couple of places where public works has gone out and put down some black top.

That is going to be a very temporary solution.

Yeah, so there was an email that came through earlier that was from a resident in the Greenbrier neighborhood, and they pointed out that one of our tier three projects is on Yorktown Drive.

Currently, it says on there it's going to go from Grove to Bunker Hill.

There's already a sidewalk in that section of Yorktown Drive.

It doesn't say do the section north of that, which doesn't have a sidewalk between Bunker Hill and Brandywine, and so this resident was very

and

Do we put it on the side of the road opposite of where there's already a sidewalk or up the road further on the left side or on the right side?

We're really comparing all three of those segments, right?

So the data analysis that we did came back and said that the segment that was across the street from the existing segment was very important.

It scored very well.

It had higher vehicular volumes, more demand from pedestrians in that area.

It seemed like a pretty prime spot, but it's also pretty difficult.

It's a Tier 3 project.

We understand that that's going to be a tricky one to get done.

And as a Tier 3 project, we've said, hey, we're open to discussion.

This is a project that needs to get planned.

So if this is something the local residents feel like, hey, the next segment actually makes more sense.

That's something that we can change with this list.

Yeah, I think it's a great example of the positive improvements that happen when we listen to our constituents as you're doing.

Thank you.

I guess just two questions.

So if you look on the city's transportation projects website, there's a list that hasn't been updated since February that's a little outdated, but that should give you the scale of all the projects we're currently working on.

It's on the Transportation Projects website on the city's website.

I believe it's under the Public Works website.

I think we still need to talk about how we're going to do that.

I think for right now we're just keeping the sidewalk priorities on its own separate page.

Just as people get more comfortable with it, we might be able to change that to make it more of a direct flow into

What Public Works' website looks like.

And then I guess obviously the real question is funding.

So the committed projects are already funded.

That's right.

Yeah, I think it's 3.5 over the existing 500,000 is what I said.

Okay.

And do you think that that aligns with what the project management capacity is in terms of, you know, if we were to invest that money, is there a theoretical level of additional sidewalks above that could be that could be done?

So that's somewhat what we were trying to show with how that

that graph is built out.

We tried to not make sure there were any spikes in it by keeping everything pretty spread thinly over that five years so that we would have the staff capacity in order to tackle those projects.

It's a little lighter towards the front end because we want to take care of some of that existing committed project workload.

And then the last year, it's actually a little bit lighter than usual.

But that's because we're starting to run out of projects on our lists, and we're starting to bring things off of the list.

Yeah, it's baking in assumptions about workload as well as equitable distribution of those projects around the city so that we're not, you know, building everything in one place all at one time.

both not giving that benefit to residents across the city and also concentrating that impact of construction in one place at one time is kind of not great.

Another question about funding.

Sure.

So one federal source that we're looking at right now is the Safe Streets and Roads for All program.

It is a $5 billion program that's part of the IRA.

Our region is currently doing a regional safety assessment.

Using some of that Safe Streets funding, we were awarded a grant for it.

We were collecting survey comments on that.

We're hoping that some of that federal funding gets invested into our Tier 3 and Tier 2 projects.

That's just one place that we would look.

We're also going to look at state funding sources, like some of our typical old state funding sources like revenue sharing, TAP grants, and smart scale.

But the federal sources, it kind of depends on what's going to be available.

Yeah, okay, great.

Yeah, and that may be a bit of a mirage because we do know that as we start learning more and more about these projects, you're going to get the funding requests for tier two projects and maybe funding requests for

Planning, Design, Work for two or three projects mixed in there.

Right.

Yeah, that's what I'm anticipating is we'll have more projects that we even add to the list as we go.

Okay, great.

Any other questions?

Thank you.

Excellent work.

I really appreciate it.

All right, I think we have, I don't think I know, we have a closed meeting tonight.

That would be lovely.

I move that Council inter-close session as permitted by the Virginia Freedom Information Act as follows under Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A1 to discuss appointments to the City Retire Commission and 2 under Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A7 to consult with legal counsel and receive briefings by staff members or consultants pertaining to probable litigation regarding the Water Street Park and Garage where such consultation or briefing

Sir.

Okay, we have a motion in a second.

Please cast your votes.

Okay, we are in closed session and we will be back at 6.30.

630, we're going to come out of our closed meeting.

Second.

Okay, please cast your votes.

All right, we are back into open meeting.

My name is Brian Pinkston.

I'm Vice Mayor and I'm standing in for our Mayor Juan Diego Wade.

We'll begin the business meeting with a moment of silence.

Are there any announcements?

No?

All good?

Okay.

We have two proclamations tonight.

Sure.

And actually, one brief small announcement.

Okay, go for it.

For anyone celebrating

Independence Day this week with fireworks.

Please be safe.

Yes Okay, our first proclamation Park and Recreation Month 2024

whereas parks and recreation are integral parts of communities throughout the country promoting health and wellness, improving the physical and mental health of people who live near parks, promoting time spent in nature, which positively impacts mental health by increasing cognitive performance and well-being, and alleviating illnesses such as depression, attention deficit disorders,

and Alzheimer's, and whereas parks and recreation encourage physical activities by providing space for popular sports, hiking trails, swimming pools, and many other activities designed to promote active lifestyles, and whereas parks and recreation programming and education activities such as out-of-school time programming, youth sports, and environmental education are critical to childhood development,

And whereas Parks and Recreation are fundamental to the environmental well-being of our community,

Our parks and natural recreation areas encourage the ecological beauty of our community and provide a place for children and adults to connect with nature and recreate outdoors.

And whereas parks and recreation are essential and adaptable infrastructure that make our communities resilient in the face of natural disasters and climate change.

And whereas the City of Charlottesville recognizes the benefits derived from parks and recreation resources, offering over 200 programs such as swim lessons, dance, gymnastics, day camps, nature programs and athletic leagues,

with over 2,000 registered participants for this summer of 2024.

And whereas special events in July include sounds of summer on July 13th at Tonsler Park featuring the Terra Mills Band, bluegrass and a free meal off the grill from 6 to 8 p.m.

and the Sunday sundown events on July 21st from 12 to 2 p.m.

at Washington Park featuring free meals and free access to the pools.

Now, therefore, be proclaimed by the Charlottesville City Council that July is recognized as Park and Recreation Month in the City of Charlottesville.

I think perhaps you're going to come up and receive this from us?

Yeah.

Miss Oschrin?

Yeah.

Anything you'd like to say?

First I'd like to thank the staff of Parks and Rec.

They are the individuals that actually take care of our community.

and just a few reminders since I have council here and I'm on camera.

Again, we are still in the midst of our master plan and just upcoming events for public input.

We have Monday, July 15th at 6.30 for public input for court square and market square.

Thursday, July 18th at six o'clock, Benjamin Tonslow Park Public Input Session Tuesday, July 23rd at six, Booker T Washington and that will be held at Carver Recreation Center and the last one will be Tuesday, August 20th.

That's when we will be talking to the community about the needs assessment.

Great.

Thank you so much.

Pleasure.

Sure.

This is a proclamation for Charlottesville PEG TV's 30th anniversary, whereas the current Charlottesville PEG TV operation was launched in the fall of 1993, and whereas Channel 10 is designated for local government programming, Channel 13 for public programming, and Channel 14 for educational programming,

and whereas the Charlottesville PEG TV operation partnered with KTEC from 2000 to 2015 and offered vocational training and multimedia production to area students and whereas the Charlottesville City of Charlottesville Office of Communications assumed management of the PEG TV operation 2004

and whereas the Charlottesville Community Media Center was launched in 2019 and provides training and production resources to the community serving as the home of the PEG TV operation and whereas over 5,000 hours of local programming have been produced by community members and over 3,000 hours of civic meetings have been broadcast by dedicated city staff members

and whereas the Charlottesville PEG-TV operation continues to serve the citizens of Charlottesville and surrounding counties by encouraging the production of original thought-provoking programming.

Now therefore, the Charlottesville City Council recognizes September 2023 to August 2024 as the 30th anniversary of Charlottesville PEG-TV.

We call upon the community to join in celebrating 30 years of continuous service to the Charlottesville community and invite local residents and non-profit organizations to become members and produce their own original programming.

Siding sealed this first day of July 2024.

Hi, I'm David Dillahunt, the Deputy Director of Communications and Public Engagement for the City.

And thank you so much for this.

This represents the hard work of countless residents and organizations in our community, as well as the tireless efforts of a dedicated small group of city employees.

And we are here for the community.

This is television, local television with a purpose, as we like to say, for the community, by the community.

We are here to help every member of the Charlottesville area share their message with residents in the area and beyond.

And you can find out more at CVILMedia.org.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

There are five pre-registered speakers leaving 11 slots for additional speakers on Community Matters.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes to speak.

We'll now open the floor to pre-registered speakers.

Is our first speaker available?

The first person I have is Alex Janssen.

Alex Janssen, 144 Bennington Road, Charlottesville.

It's just outside of the city limits, but I do use the city gas.

Fantastic.

And that's what prompted me to give you all this information.

This is food for thought in considering your decarbonization plans or program.

As far as I've found out, CO2 does not cause warming or climate change.

solar output variation and changes in the planetary positions relative to the sun caused climate change.

And there's research on this website to back that up.

Therefore, I see no reason to shut down the natural gas service or stop burning fossil fuels.

The greenhouse effect is a basis for human caused global warming climate change

referred to as a myth.

Professor R.W.

Wood performed a relevant experiment in 1909 and found the temperature in a greenhouse did not exceed the maximum solar heating.

Per the radiative greenhouse effect promoted by the UNIPCC, radiation trapped inside the atmosphere should induce a temperature

on the surface greater than the maximum solar heating.

It did not do that.

Joe Posma, a physicist, performed an experiment himself on that and found that the surface temperature was only equal to the maximum solar heating temperature.

So, and all this is on the website.

Ian Plimer pointed out that during the time of life on Earth, the atmosphere has changed from at least 5% and being a geologist, he knows that stuff.

CO2 to the present atmosphere, 0.04% yet life evolved.

and there was no irreversible catastrophic warming in the geologic past despite Earth's CO2-rich atmosphere.

If a high atmospheric CO2 in the past did not drive global warming, then a far lower atmospheric CO2 in the modern atmosphere cannot drive global warming.

Now, I'm not going to have time to read anything else, but at the bottom of this section F, you can read that for yourself.

This was a plan started by a group of people back in 1968 to reduce the population of the earth because they were saying the earth cannot produce enough food or energy to support seven and a half billion people.

So they're playing, and you can read it all there and take it for which way you want it.

But this was just food for thought.

All right.

Thank you, sir.

All right.

Take care.

Yes, sir.

Our next speaker is Nar Maya Garung.

Yes, we can.

Yes.

Great.

Good evening, everybody.

I'm Nor Guru.

I'm from Bhutan.

Now I live in Charlottesville.

What is the Namiki Drive?

I'd like to talk something, I'd like to say something about the garden program here.

The other thing I am very happy about is that in America we have diverse people, diverse cultures and in the garden, various different people grow their own food and then we are able to share and we are able to grow varieties of different food.

We do a lot of work in the garden, in an exercise group.

We do a lot of work in the garden, with our mothers.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

We do a lot of work together.

So working in the garden and growing your own food gives peace to the soul and it's also a way to stay healthy, physically and mentally.

It's said that people that work with the earth, they're always healthier, they're hardly sick.

I was taken to this garden.

I am very happy to be part of this party.

I am happy to be part of this party.

I am very grateful to be part of this party.

I'd like to thank the city of Charlottesville for providing the space for us.

We enjoy and we try working in the garden.

I think I'd say that I enjoy working in the garden more than attending parties or birthday parties.

We are still in that garden.

We are very happy to be able to stay in that garden.

We are happy to be able to stay in that garden for the next few days.

We wish to be able to stay in that garden for the next few days.

So hopefully we are able to grow more in the garden and I hope we are able to progress more and we are hopefully looking forward to working in the garden in years to come.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate it.

Good evening, Council.

My name is Cecilia Lapp Stoltzfuss, and I'm the manager of the Food and Agriculture Programs at International Rescue Committee, located at 375 Greenbrier Drive.

And it's my absolute pleasure to follow NAR in her remarks.

This evening I'm here representing IRC's Food and Agriculture Program known as New Roots regarding item 8 on the agenda.

As our New Roots mission states, New Roots is a multicultural community growing food together to support health, connections, and power.

Each year, New Roots engages more than 100 refugee and immigrant gardeners, as well as countless community volunteers in stewardship of six community garden and farm sites across Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

Our largest and most popular garden is known as New Roots Farm, which is located at 410 Old Lynchburg Road, adjacent to Azalea Park.

Neuritz Farm has now been host to ten seasons of the IRC's Neuritz Farming programs and here we carry on the agricultural legacy of a site that offers prime soil of statewide agricultural significance and a great location accessible to many neighborhoods.

Over the past decade, gardeners and their families have stewarded the health of our watershed through sustainable agricultural practices

grown hundreds of thousands of pounds of culturally appropriate produce to infuse into our local food system and transform the site into a vibrant community space.

For some, urban farming means filling the freezer with corn, leafy greens, and African egg plant for year-round enjoyment.

For others, it may be about growing Nepali hot chilies or Afghan leeks or other crops that are very hard to find and hard to afford in our local stores.

And for most, it means building an active outdoor lifestyle in community with friends new and old.

Alone, New Roots Farm, more than doubles the garden capacity available to residents in Charlottesville's public garden plots operated by City Parks, so it's filling a very critical need.

Since the city's purchase of New Roots Farm last August, partnerships between Parks and Rec, the Ravana Trail Foundation and IRC New Roots have led to the installation of a new pedestrian bridge, improvements to the gravel access road for the site, and just two days ago, safety improvements to the stream crossing connecting Azalea Park to New Roots Farm.

Meanwhile, over the past year, Newridge's Garden members and staff have contributed their perspectives to the current Parks and Recreation Strategic Master Planning process to craft the future of the site and the parks network.

So now, with the security offered by a multi-year lease, IRC New Roots would be better poised to engage garden members and community partners in implementing further improvements at the site, from farm systems to environmental conservation to continuing opportunities for multicultural exchange.

Thank you very much.

How are you doing?

My name is Kerry Rock.

Good evening.

I live in 941 Henry Avenue in Charlottesville City.

I come before you this evening to speak about a long-standing issue of drug dealing and drug use in the Rose Hill neighborhood, specifically at Washington Park, Tenth Ave, and Charlottesville Avenue.

As residents, we have seen an increase in dealing along Charlottesville Ave, specifically in front of 901 and 907 Charlottesville Avenue.

Neighbors have identified active drugs, drug dealers, drug cars, schedules, and tip-off operations to the police.

To their credit, I know we've got Chief here tonight, to their credit we have seen increased patrols and we're thankful for that.

But Charlton Ave can still be considered an open-air drug market at certain times of the day.

While the metrics may state that crime is down in Charlottesville, it does not look or feel that way in Rose Hill.

Some of these metrics are based on 9-1-1 calls and frankly, not many people in our area call 9-1-1 as it has not shown a fruitful effect.

On this point, even I did not call 9-1-1 during the last week's shooting in front of Washington Park.

I would like to shift focus quickly to Washten Park as it relates to the drug trafficking happening on Charlton Ave.

Washten Park has been identified as a common drug use area under the sheltered area.

I'm speaking about Washten Park on Preston, not the lower park.

Multiple times my family has tried to take our children to the playground at Washten Park only to have to shield our children from someone intoxicated or under the influence of substances.

There has even been a recent instance where my wife and I witnessed and can provide pictures and video of users and an alleged dealer going in and out of the community bathrooms in the middle of the afternoon while children were present on the playground and one user having an OD where medical personnel and police were dispatched.

I believe in the case of Washington Park, a camera system like the one in Tonsler Park could be a perfect way to provide a safe park environment for those trying to enjoy it legally.

If funding for the camera system is needed, Dugud Siva would be happy to assist in the fundraising efforts.

As for Charlton Avenue, I do not have a solution in mind.

Just a request from a citizen that doesn't feel safe to walk down Charlton Avenue.

Please also note that all these actions mentioned tonight are happening within 120 meters of Jackson Burley Middle School.

Thank you for your time this evening.

Thank you.

We appreciate that information.

So we appreciate that information.

Thank you.

Hello, my name is Tony Casey.

I live at 903 Charlton Avenue.

Speaking of similar topics, same topic as Mr. Rock about the ongoing kind of crime activity and drug use, drug dealing there on the Charlton Avenue.

I live there in the 900 block of Charlton Avenue where most of that activity seems to be focused.

I can speak only of my first hand.

Brian Pinkston

You seemingly can walk out on the street at any time of day and catch a drug deal in progress.

The associated crimes with the drug dealing seem to be non-stop as well.

Carrie mentioned it's not a crime, but overdoses in the Washington Park area, particularly concerning.

There's been theft throughout the neighborhood, lots of package theft and things like that.

We've witnessed from our video cameras late at night acts of prostitution and in the morning my wife and daughter walked out one morning watching a man naked from the waist down cleaning himself after engaged in prostitution activity in the vehicle parked in front of our house there's been an uptick and gun violence as well we've reported shots fired ourselves three times in just the two years that we've lived there again

as if those crimes weren't bad enough on their own merit, they're happening within just the stone's throw of Burleigh Middle School.

I've witnessed drug dealers harassing children that are waiting there for their parents to be picked up after school, and I've witnessed them harassing children on their way to extracurricular activities in the evenings at the school as well.

as a matter of fact, Virginia Code agrees with me that it's particularly egregious visit list a separate and distinct felony to distribute narcotics within a thousand feet of a school.

I've made calls to 911.

I've filed police reports online.

I've emailed photos and videos of crimes being committed with police officers.

I have spoken with Chief Caucus in our neighborhood association meetings.

And so far, the only action that we've seen is an uptick in patrols, but those are momentary in any effect.

within minutes of the police cars leaving activities resume.

We have been told that it is the position of current stakeholders in the city government that it is not a high priority to prosecute these street level crimes.

So I just wanted to iterate that if it is not a high priority, it should be as it is very concerning to myself and

My name is there in the Rossell neighborhood.

Yeah, thank you for coming to chair.

Okay, so that's the end of our list of pre-registered speakers.

We have space for 11 more.

If you would like to speak, please raise your hand.

Hi, good evening.

My name is Tricia Szezynski and I live at 916 Henry Avenue.

I just wanted to, after hearing the other two gentlemen talk about their experiences, I just want to kind of share my observations and how I feel.

I have lived at 916 Henry Avenue since 2002 and while I love my immediate neighbors, I do not feel safe at all.

I walk my dog frequently to the park.

I'm witness to drug dealings, people being passed out, people looking unwell,

of violence, odd individuals hanging out that look precarious.

It's just it's it needs attention.

And as a social worker, I work for Albemarle County and I realized that we're talking about

to major problems, which is probably homelessness and substance use.

So I just posed the question, how might we create a safe space that everyone can enjoy?

And if there's any ideas of things that we could do in our neighborhood that are innovative, I would love to be part of that.

Maybe it's doing more outreach within the Charlton area so that I also see people funneling from that area.

We obviously need more, I think, police presence.

The video cameras would certainly help.

So that's all I have to say.

Thank you.

Take care.

Who else would like to speak?

Good evening.

I'm Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I'm here tonight to speak about the IRC Garden as

part of Azalea South, as I think it's now known.

I think of it as the case and property because my organization has been working with the city for a decade or more to get this acquisition to happen.

And it has happened.

And thank you so much.

This is such a great, great move by the city.

I'm also speaking on behalf of the Board of the Ravenna Trails Foundation this evening.

and there's just a lot going on that's wonderful and I want to praise it all.

My organization is working with the County of the City and VDOT to create a shared use path.

It's been in the planning stages forever between Fifth Street, Total Lynchburg Road, and beyond.

That would be accessible to people of all abilities.

Thanks to the city and also to the IRC, as was previously mentioned, we've made a little down payment on that by creating a wide new pedestrian bridge that eliminates, frankly, the most harrowing crossing of the Rivaña Trail.

Thank you for this as well.

I would simply like to state that the tenants that you're taking on the IRC, the New Roots Garden specifically, is the highest best use for this property.

There are so many good things about it and we've heard some of it

of the

Delightful to work with on the trail.

Also, as mentioned today, just over the weekend, another rock hop safe crossing to Azalea Park was created by the labor of the farmers themselves, which was great.

Also, PC was very instrumental in acquiring the property across Old Lynchburg Road, which I think is called Azalea West now.

I think of it as the forms property, the previous owner.

And we're very committed to working with the city and with the IRC to thank even more holistically about the

about this park.

And I don't know if this is really a specific part of the park's master plan, but this is exactly the type of thing that should be included in that work.

Just to close really quickly, thank you for this.

We hope you indeed approve this lease.

Thank you, Peter.

All right.

Who else would like to speak?

Any other hands?

Come on up.

I could tell you were on, just on the verge.

Yeah.

When I arrived here I received a garden for farming.

and we're grateful for these people from IRC.

They work with us and it makes us really happy to work together.

And I'm just so happy to have a garden.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Okay, that's our final speaker for Community Matters.

It would be another opportunity for public

comment later in the meeting.

Ms.

Thomas, could you please read the consent agenda?

To me, to a point.

We do.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks.

Thank you, Michael.

Coming out of closed session, we had one piece of information we needed to share with the group.

And that is that we are reappointing Mr. Phil Garber to the retirement commission.

I think that's all we need to say.

We need to vote on that.

I would so move.

Second.

Second.

Thank you.

If you'd not stepped in, we would have had to deal with this yet another week.

Okay.

All right.

Much shorter than last meeting.

Number four, Minutes, March 18th Regular Meeting and the June 25th Joint Council CRAJ Meeting.

Is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda?

So moved.

Is there a second?

Okay, please cast your vote.

Yes, sir.

As the chief is coming forward, I have invited him to come in and give a presentation of some latest information in regards to crime activity in the city of Charlottesville.

It feels rather fitting based on a couple of the comments this evening and we're not surprised by those from things that we've been hearing.

But what I would like to say before he starts and I'm sure he will reiterate the same is that

We recognize the frustration.

We all are working to address this and I implore every citizen in this community, if you witness a crime, please call, period.

Regardless of what has happened in the past, what you may believe may or may not happen, let's stop that behavior and simply call, period.

The records matter.

It's important for us to have those records on file.

That then can change some of the choices that we make and how we proceed.

So I just want to state that.

Clearly, and turn it over to the Chief for his comments.

So to some of the comments that were said before, I think it's important to kind of put some of the numbers I'm about to talk to in perspective.

The shots fire call that Mr. Rock talks about, he doesn't live far from my house, it woke me up as well.

And I'm guilty, I didn't call.

And so I say that because to talk about the numbers and the progress we're making in this area,

You know, it still isn't comfort to a lot of folks, folks who whose home was shot 41 times or some of the stories I hear when our community walks.

So it does matter.

And so I don't want, what I'm about to show with these numbers, excuse me, to overshadow that because it is how people feel matters.

And so, and we're going to do our part.

So with that.

So first we'll talk about part one crime.

Part one crime is our most serious crime, robbery, homicide, aggravated assault, larcenies do also kind of enter into that as well.

And that's part one crime is how the FBI kind of records data that we report on a regular basis.

So the city, right now, how we look at the city at the police department from a data standpoint, separated into three different districts, North, Central, and South.

Each district has a commander assigned to it.

And during our monthly meeting, our community staff meeting, they stand up in front of us.

They look at the data, look at their district, talk about what they're doing to address the specific issues, hotspots, all of that kind of stuff.

Currently, year to day, compared to 2023, apartment crime is down 5%.

Then we talk about gun violence incidents.

Now the FBI doesn't necessarily consider shots, fired calls or gun violence incidents as a reporting standard, but we feel that it tells a story.

So we track that data.

So total shots fired this year compared to 2023.

So January, May 2023 compared to this year, January, May 2024, it's down 28%.

Gun violence cases is any incident involving a firearm that we track through our data through whether it's CAD, police reports, officer's spawn, all of that kind of stuff.

And that is down 50% compared to the same time period as last year.

And so it's interesting, as I was kind of looking at this stuff, it's like, you know, where were we this time last year?

And I think this tells a story.

So this time last year we had five homicides.

So far we had one.

You know, one's too many.

I mean, we can't forget that.

That's a real life.

It's a real family.

It's a real people.

Aggressivated assault is down 28%.

Robbery is down 25%.

And so how did we get there?

I'm going to talk about some of the things we're doing, some of the things we've done over the last year.

And I'm going to use two examples, two areas that we've historically, over the years, if you just look at our crime and data mapping,

You see these communities that continue to be disproportionately affected by violent crimes the same one.

So we did a three-year average and kind of where we were and what we're doing.

and really, you know, I bring this up as we're talking about kind of a focused deployment of resources.

So for Prospect Avenue from 2021 to 2023, it accounted for about 9% of all gun violence incidents in the city of Charlottesville.

There were 67 gun violence incidents on Prospect Ave during that timeframe, making it the most popular location for gun violence.

During January through May of 2024, we started really looking at that day to pay attention to it, having our commanders accountable for what we're doing, what the Austrians are actually doing when they're out on the street.

And so, Austrians conducted 429 extra patrols between January and May.

That means when I say extra patrols that's showing up, getting out on foot, talking to folks, meeting people, getting to know who lives in the community.

and as a result, you can see since January CPD has only responded to four gun violence incidents on Prospect Avenue.

This represents less than 4% of all gun violence in the city of Charlottesville in 2024 and it's a 54% decrease in gun violence on Prospect Avenue versus the three year average.

So if you look at Hardy Drive, we've done a similar focused deployment of resources.

So again, from 2021 to 2023, Hardy Drive accounted for about 7% of all gun violence incidents in the city of Charlottesville.

There were 48 gun violence incidents on Hardy Drive during this time, making it the second most popular location for gun violence.

During January through May of 2024, CPD officers have conducted and logged 1,107 extra patrols and foot patrols on Hardy Drive.

It's a 146% increase from 2023 during the same period.

Since January, we have only responded to two gun violence incidents on Hardy Drive, both occurred in January.

This represents less than 2% of gun violence in the city of Charlottesville in 2024 and a 75% decrease in gun violence on Hardy Drive versus three-year average through January and May.

And again, that's that focused deployment of resources, but not only just deployment of resources, but what are they doing there?

I was up there not too long ago talking to Ms.

Johnson from far who works up there.

She was just telling me how happy she was to see and get to know the officer.

She's like, hey, Officer O'Brien.

He's up there.

He's up here all the time.

He walks around.

He tells me he's out here getting his exercise, walking through the neighborhood, talking to people, getting to know folks.

And that's what we want to see our officers do, get out there, get to know folks in the community, and be that presence.

So when something does happen, they'll tell us and they'll feel comfortable calling us.

And so what has really worked between these two areas, specifically up on Hardy Drive?

It's kind of one of them things that we looked back year after year.

It continued to show these as a hotspot.

And so we've really focused on directed covert and over deployment of resources.

And what is that?

Covert is, you know, different operations.

If we have a specific person we are looking for, specific address, that is a problem that we look into it and investigate it.

And then obviously the over is that high visibility officers out there in the community doing the work.

We focused on procedurally just policing and interactions.

Again, it's that person-to-person interaction that we need and that we've really been focusing on.

We've continued the relationship building with residents and stakeholders within the community.

I believe our relationship with CRHA has gotten much better.

Mr. Sales has been great to work with.

I've spoken with him a lot recently, especially with some of the recent incidents that we've had in the areas, so I'm really optimistic there.

And then the future identification of hotspots within the hotspot.

So everybody is seeing what those hotspot maps look like.

So now what I'm asking in our community stat meeting to our commander in that sector is what's the hotspot within the hotspot, meaning what's causing that to continue to be a hotspot.

Is it a specific address?

is a specific thing.

A police response that's going to address it.

It could be an overgrown sidewalk that you might not be able to walk down or stuff like that.

So we're really excited about expanding this model and moving forward.

And so all of this is kind of within the framework of Project Safe Neighborhoods.

We signed on to that probably about a year ago now.

And Project Safe Neighborhoods is really broken down into three sections.

One is community engagement, prevention, intervention to reduce future violence.

Two is focused on strategic enforcement, many call focused deterrence.

and then three is collecting and using data to really guide our decision making on enforcement and prevention efforts and that's what I was just talking about that we talked about in our community staff meeting.

So we break it down the first one community engagement prevention and intervention.

I've spoken about the different community events we do.

We're out there in the community.

We're talking to folks, whether it be community walks, whether it be just building relationships and being present through different events like a community police academy, stuff of that nature.

and then, again, events that's just really designed to force conversations, force us to be present and force relationships that can be built.

But one of the things that is unique about Project Safe Neighborhoods and the model that we're using is identifying prolific offenders and offer focused services.

And so what does that mean?

Most of what we see in the area of gun violence are the same folks.

It's a small group of people, but it continues to be the same folks.

So it's being able to identify those individuals and then outreach to them.

We bring them in and we offer them services.

We say, to the right of me is human services.

Social Services.

Here are all these services that offer to you.

What do we need to help you go down this different path?

Because if you choose not to go on this path, to the left of me is the full way to the federal and state government that's going to investigate and do everything we can to keep our community safe.

And right now we've identified you as an individual that is at risk to go down that road and we want to prevent that from happening.

And so we had our first meeting with service providers probably about three weeks ago.

We're working with the Equity Center at UVA right now and everyone from

Juvenile and Adult Probation to nonprofits, to human services that were there, because one thing we have to make sure is that when we offer those services, that they have the capacity to do it.

We don't want to bring someone in and say, hey, what do you need?

They tell us what they need, and we're like, well, we can't do that.

So we had that meeting first.

I think we have a pretty good idea of where we are, and we're getting ready to actually start doing that outreach.

And then strategic and focused enforcement.

This is in many different ways, whether it be the operation that we've been doing since the recent shootings that we had about two weeks ago where we've been identifying those individuals involved in those shootings, putting cases on them and identifying them and arresting them and then making sure that they're prosecuted.

to whether we need to use a federal grand jury investigation or local state, through the Commonwealth Attorneys Office.

The Commonwealth Attorney is also working with us through Project Safe Neighborhoods, actually has a cross designated assistant Commonwealth attorney who is cross designated through the federal courts.

So if we have a case, they can make a determination if it's best suited for state court or federal court.

So it really is a team effort between law enforcement,

and the courts were an error in the prosecution.

And then collecting data, like I spoke about, it really is about looking at where things are happening, when they're happening, the timing, and how we're going to deploy our resources.

I need my officers to be where they're needed the most.

And then, as we know, and I've said this many times, look, we're not going to do this on our own.

This has to be a whole community approach.

I'm asked often, like, how do we get the numbers where they are?

First thing I'll say is it's not time to spike the football.

Because you can listen to the folks that just got up here and say, those are real issues.

Those are real concerns that people have.

And so we can't ignore that.

But I can tell you, and I think I'd be ignorant to say it didn't have some play, some role in it.

But our local nonprofits, our community stakeholders, probably for the last year, I remember we had five homicides the first six months last year.

And I gotta tell you, the community was, I mean, they wanted to do something about it.

And they really stepped up in a big way.

And so I appreciate it.

And we're going to continue to work as a good partner.

So I'm often asked, where are these firearms coming from?

And I will tell you, over the last two weeks of those five arrests that have been made, we recovered 10 firearms.

These firearms, we're talking AR-15 style weapons, AK-47 style weapons, pistols with switches on them that make them fully automatic, extended magazines.

And so where are they getting them from?

And I gotta tell you, we've had 12 stolen firearms in the city of Charlottesville out of vehicles.

I'm sorry, half of these were stolen, six of them were out of vehicles.

One car alone, three weapons were stolen out of a car, unlocked.

One was there was an AR-15, a .22 long rifle, and a .45 caliber pistol, stolen out of a vehicle, parked overnight, unlocked.

And so, you know, one of the things we really need to kind of get out there is, if you're going to be a gun owner, be a responsible gun owner.

Don't leave them in your cars.

Don't leave them unlocked.

Because what you're doing is you're arming our community and you're getting guns in the hands of people that shouldn't have them.

and so these are some of the seized firearms this year alone.

We've seized 31 firearms since January and these ones that you're looking at right here were within the last two weeks.

Chief, one thing that struck after listening to the folks talking about Charlton and that neighborhood, we know that there, historically, has been, well, termed the squeeze the balloon problem.

You tighten up in one area, it blossoms in another area.

And just in the last 20 years or so that I've been dealing with crimes of this nature in my legal practice, there was a time when 10th and Page was the spot.

There was a time when Dice Street was the spot.

So we, the last

So we, obviously there was a shots fire call the other night that Mr. Ron was telling me about that I was talking about.

Actually, nobody called.

I think we're all guilty of not calling you, calling it in.

We did locate some cartridge casings the next day over on the street.

But if you remember back, I think it was like November or December, there were some shootings.

There was a beef between a neighbor and then folks who were living in another house there.

So we haven't had a ton of shootings there, but I will tell you, I do share the concern about the open air drug dealing on Charlton, so we are seeing that.

We've done some things over there.

Recently, City Council approved our budget request to join the 3A task force, which is a state police task force that focuses on mid to upper level narcotics.

Drugs trafficking organizations and gang activity and so we're in the process of working with them through that.

But, you know, Charlton is one of our hotspots right now that we're focusing on and that we're trying to call up with some solutions.

You know, we have to, there's a balance.

between those who are low-level drug dealers and maybe dealing to support their own habit.

Services, I will tell you, I was on a call the other day.

I was shocked that the closest inpatient clinic is like 60 miles away.

I had no idea.

For a drive?

Yeah.

And so it seems like we continue to have these conversations about these essential services to address some of the root causes of what we're seeing in our community.

And by the time it comes to a head, like on Charlton or stuff, then where the one's getting the call and have to address it.

And so we do try to use a balanced approach.

You know, we do focus on mid to upper level drug dealing as opposed to the street level stuff.

But look, when you allow that to occur out in the open all the time unchecked, things can escalate.

And I think we see that.

So I know that's kind of a long answer.

The folks that these residents have

I see.

And we have been in the process of identifying owners, but some folks own those owners there, which makes it a little bit more difficult, because if somebody owns a home and is renting it and they're out, we could actually speak to that homeowner and say, hey, your home is becoming what's considered a common nuisance in a neighborhood, but that's a little bit more challenging when the folks involved actually own the home.

So, yeah.

I see.

But typically it's the folks visiting.

The two neighborhoods you highlighted were Prospect and Hardy Drive

It does, but that's what the data is showing.

But I think there's other things that clearly impact it.

I think the community just become being sick of it.

They're stepping up, they're calling us more.

They're engaging with us more.

They're talking to us.

So, you know, it's not just us all along.

Well, so that kind of leads to my question, which is how is the community responded?

I know there's a complicated relationship with

feeling overpoliced versus, you know, having it be effective.

And so, how has that neighborhood responded to the increased presence?

And with that in mind, I noticed you used the term forcing relationships with people.

No, it's like, it's being present.

It's a conscious decision of we are going to be present in this space and present in a way that isn't like we're taking over a community.

So one of the things, one of the answers to your question about what are we hearing from the community, I was asked why the downtown mall has an officer in West Haven doesn't.

They want a designated officer in West Haven.

That's what I'm told.

from folks who live in West Hague.

And so I have not heard from any neighborhood who is disproportionately affected by violent crime.

I've never heard they want less police.

I've heard they want good policing.

They want procedurally just policing.

There's a difference.

We all know what over-policing looks like.

And so we have to be very careful not to do that.

That's why if you notice when we talk about focused deterrence, it really is a focused approach on what we're doing when we're in those neighborhoods.

You know, we're being present, we're building relationships, but we're also trying to identify why does that spot, what makes that spot the hotspot, right?

Like where is the problem resident there?

And then we can work with CRHA.

Is it a problem residents that have been given warnings that have been told, hey, you can't do this or that through CRHA, and it's come to a point where it's like, you know what, you're making it where other folks don't want to live here, don't feel safe here anymore.

Yeah, so it's encouraging.

The numbers and statistics that you've shown, it does feel like from a year or two ago that things are in a better place, but there's clearly a lot more work to be done.

I'll just say that I'm grateful for the improvement and I thank you and your staff and the work they've done and do and then all the other folks that the city manager has, I think it has been a holistic

Approach to this.

So just a few more comments.

Again, just wanting to make sure that the public at large hears, because there have been questions of what are y'all doing?

Why does it seem like no one's doing anything?

Just want to assure you that that's not how I roll.

Just being honest, that is not how it's happening.

The chief has

had many conversations with me on a regular basis as I'm asking questions and looking at the approaches and the things that we're doing.

Just want to again remind everyone, please call, just call.

It's hard to push through that, but just please call.

I also want to just share that I did meet with a few community leaders in the past week or so asking for ideas and approaches that can be taken for some of the issues that we're facing.

Gun violence is a challenging issue.

It is a community issue.

There is no one silver bullet matter that you could identify, bad pun, in being able to address the situation.

It's going to take all of us to continually focus on what are the things that we can do and we're looking for those things and we're looking for people who can step in and play a role in that.

In addition, we're pushing hard right now to get our co-responder model up and running.

That's going to be a chance for us to intervene in a different way when a person is in crisis, when a police officer is called.

That won't be the case anymore.

We'll have a different type of response and hopefully be able to address the issue that the person may be facing.

And the goal would be to ensure that we can get them the help that they need.

So there's some additional work that needs to be done in that space.

and while I'm on it, I might as well shift right into the other easy topic that I have to deal with on a daily basis and that is the unhoused population in our community.

That's a challenge that every community across this country is dealing with.

It's hard for anyone to figure out exactly what to do.

There is no single answer.

There is no one right way to deal with the matter because these are individuals that themselves are in crisis.

They're out there for a reason, and many people tend to look past what the reasons are.

And the goal for us is to not do that.

I've heard from a lot of people who have implored us to not lose sight of the fact that people are going through things, and we need to figure that out.

But I also want to reassure individuals that have expressed more recently outrage at what they're seeing and what they're experiencing.

I too find some things unacceptable.

There are a number of things that we're going to work with people to do better at.

So we're looking at strategies for being able to do that.

And the Supreme Court decision that people believe solved something last week solved absolutely nothing.

It just gives us the ability to do something that I know a lot of people in this community don't want us to do.

So there's a balance that we have to strike in regards to that.

So it's my desire to continue to work at this with a scalpel, not a hatchet, and to do our best to ensure that we don't lose ourselves in how we address this.

But I've been working on homelessness since October because that was a rough moment for me personally.

And we are closer to an overnight shelter.

permanent overnight shelter closer than we have ever been before in the city from my understanding.

So I do hope that there will be some quick resolution to what we've been working on and be able to bring that forward.

And that will be a way for us to intervene in a big way.

It won't be the solution all by itself.

I assure you of that.

So we know that there are many more steps that are involved in being able to do that.

So again, I just wanted to express that.

I know that our community has been in an uproar at various times, struggling with some of the things that happen.

I've talked about boring government.

This isn't the boring part of it because this is what keeps me up at night.

These are the things that I'm trying to work through and figure out how to deploy this team, the whole team at a really

responding to some of these issues.

So please know that we're not sitting on our hands and not doing something.

We're trying to figure things out and we would love to be a model for other communities to come here and figure out how they can do what we've been able to pull off here.

That's my report.

Any other questions for the city manager?

All right.

Item number six on the agenda is public hearing and resolution for issuing bonds.

Good evening, Council.

We're here tonight to talk about issuing some bonds for both projects that were approved in the 24 CIP, but also in previous CIPs.

If you look at the table on the, I believe it's page 51 of your packet, you'll see that we are looking to issue

about $63.5 million of bonds for projects, for public facilities, public schools, and then also for the utilities.

If you had a chance to read the resolution, you'll see that we're asking you to authorize up to $65 million and an additional $25 million for refunding debt.

The difference in those two numbers is that as the market changes, interest rates rise and fall, it gives us more flexibility to structure the bond deal so that we can get the amount of cash that we need.

and so changing par values changed the total dollar amount of the bond issue.

We are looking to refund.

Depending we are tracking the market, we continue to review the possibility of refunding either all or a portion of the 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2015 bonds.

Ms.

Hammock, when you say refund, in other words,

It's like it's equivalent to refinancing essentially.

I see.

Okay.

You helped.

So we have scheduled rating calls with the bond rating agencies.

We did have them visit the city last year.

This year we'll just be doing a call.

We are not anticipating any issues or stress on the bond rating.

As you may recall, there are only four cities in the state of Virginia that have a AAA bond rating.

We are one of those.

The other three are Alexandria, Fairfax, and Virginia Beach.

If you include counties, there are only 12 cities or counties in Virginia that are rated AAA in the state, so that's quite an accomplishment.

As I mentioned or if I didn't the sale is scheduled for early August with closing anticipated by the end of August Interest rates are higher than they've been in the past.

We've been looking at historically low interest rates in the one one and a half range We're probably looking to something closer to three and a half probably good news is we've been counting on this in our projections So it doesn't drastically change what that looks like

And so this basically sort of makes good on our commitments in the CIP that we're going to do various projects.

And I think this is probably the largest bond issue in my tenure here that we have.

couple.

Thanks.

It does not.

I will remind you that our low dead burden is one of the factors that we are consistently

checking off in the good column.

However, we've been talking to the rating agencies in anticipation of this bond issue.

We also have done some things knowing it was forthcoming.

Several years ago we raised our minimum fund balance policy and so no.

We've planned for it.

We have a plan to pay for it and so they're

Okay, great.

And this still, I'm going to get this maybe wrong from budget season.

I'm trying to remember.

So we have a 17% as our fund balance policy.

So we maintain at least 17% of the budget as our fund balance.

We have a debt policy which says that we will issue no more debt than 10% of our general fund with a target of 9.

This bond issue or at the end of 24 it puts us at about 6% and with this bond issue it's just a little over 6% so we're still well within that.

Still within our parameters.

I would note, though, as we've talked about, it's not really our capacity, but I did some quick math just to give you.

And that's current.

Correct.

So 65 million will be, depending on our interest rates, will be somewhere between four to five million dollar debt payment on this bond issue.

Again, with our projections and with the fund balance we've been drawing down.

We are trying to level out that general fund transfer to debt service, but we will be talking about it.

And as we have been talking about, we're looking at probably a million dollar increase a year over the next few years to pay for this increased debt.

And then it would hold depending on how you plan out your CIP.

Okay.

I have a question that if it seems to be coming too far out of left field, tell me.

But I was actually, maybe one of the few times I've read through some of these documents, and there's a term that I'm puzzled by.

It talks about the true or Canadian interest cost.

I don't know.

But I can tell you what the true interest cost is.

Typically what we talk about with the true interest cost is there are other things that are innate with the bond issue, the cost of issuance, our underwriter fees, all those things.

And so all of that gets factored in.

It's not just the coupon rate.

or the rate we are repaying.

Which in a consumer context would be like the APR on a car loan as opposed to just the straight 8% away.

But I will find out about the Canadian and I will let you know.

Okay, there's no further clarifying questions.

I will now open the public hearing.

Is there anyone who would like to speak on this item?

Okay, with no further speakers, the public hearing is now closed.

I would simply note that I think that I think I am correct in saying that the Buford Rebuilding Project is the largest, is the most expensive capital project Charlottesville has ever undertaken.

Okay.

We've been talking about that.

Okay.

All right.

Please cast your vote.

The motion passes.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right.

Item 7 is an ordinance authorizing a grant of public funding having to do with South First Street Phase 2.

Good evening, Councilors.

What is before you tonight is essentially approval of agreements for the funding that the City Council already authorized to support redevelopment activities for the Phase 2.

of South First Street by CROHA.

There is a $6 million, $3 million initially approved by the City Council before and then another $3 million to help support the development.

There is a total of 113 units for this phase two.

I believe the existing unit will be demolished to make way for the construction of this 113 unit.

It's 52 units for which CROHA is seeking demolition permit from the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development.

The project is scheduled to start in December of 2024 with 18 to 24 months completion time line in fall of 2026.

The CRHA Executive Director, John Sales, is with us via Zoom and if there is any questions that staff is unable to answer, John will be able to clarify or provide answers to those questions.

So essentially again, Council has been asked tonight to approve the agreement

which has stipulations on how the funding is supposed to be spent.

And again, the $6 million has already been approved by the City Council in the past.

Just the agreement tonight.

December.

December of 2024.

Yeah, usually it takes 18 months to 24 months to complete.

So this is, we've already approved this money as part of the CIP and it fits within our affordable housing plan.

That's correct.

This is essentially the agreement.

The brass tax.

This is getting down to everything that's involved and actually working with CRAJ to get this money dispersed and spent and tracked accordingly and so forth.

That's correct.

I've got a quick question.

Actually, that was the language that the city attorney in the past said it's up to six million dollars.

So the funding is six million dollars.

Just a clarification before late last week, the CRHA and their development team, they made some changes and those changes basically has to do with the timelines.

Okay, is that?

That's the additional item that you received.

Just adding further detail.

Yeah, I don't have any problem with the content.

Is there anything relative, Ms.

If you all are okay with that.

Correct, and I'll just read this for public's benefit of the public.

Update on timeframe, financial closing and construction start September 2024.

Construction must begin by September 30, 2024.

Potential one time 90 day extension request by September 1, 2024.

Again, these are updates on time frames that are within the document in the packet.

Construction and development cost disbursement periods September 2024 to September 2026.

Construction completed September 2026.

Retention of funds until project completion, retainage of $300,000 until 100% construction completion and issuance of a certificate of occupancy.

Okay.

Thank you, sir.

All right.

This is a resolution to approve an agreement of lease with the International Rescue Committee for property at 410 Old Lynchburg Road.

If Mr. Anthony and Ms.

Thank you, everybody.

Council, this is a lease that we've been working with IRC for a very long time.

The city purchased, aka Morris Creek, roughly about six months ago.

And we've been working diligently with IRC in order to make this lease happen.

And today, we present a council with the lease.

Just want to thank Chris Gensic and Brenda Cully for assisting us and working diligently through this lease.