City Council Meeting   5/6/2024

Hello, we have a quorum.

I know Natalie will be right in by the time we get started.

I'm going to start with the formalities.

Ms.

Councillor Oschrin, I will mark her present once she arrives.

Is there a motion to approve the agenda or amend it?

So moved.

Mr. Payne, will you second?

Second.

Okay.

Okay, we can cast our vote.

The motion passes.

And the meeting will be divided into three sections.

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

And then there will be a closed meeting.

At this time, we're going to hear reports.

We have two reports today.

Thank you.

Thanks for having me this afternoon.

I appreciate your time and invitation to be here.

I have been here for the past couple of years, so I think the two previous Junes.

So I thought I would do a little bit of a different presentation today and talk about what we do from the visitor side of things.

Alright, so today I'm going to introduce you guys to two fictional people, Karen and Jim.

We're going to talk about their journey to Charlottesville, now Marl County.

So, Karen is the proverbial Karen that we joke about these days, and Jim is very much not like Karen.

And what we know about them is that this clicker's not working.

Thanks, Remy.

Karen and Jim are familiar with the Charlottesville area, but they haven't had any exposure to our organization.

So what does that mean?

That means they've probably heard about Charlottesville and the national news.

I think we made the national news again yesterday.

So this is something that we know that people who don't know anything else about Charlottesville do hear about us.

And so that's all they know.

So knowing what he knows, Jim decides he doesn't want to come.

and knowing what she knows, Karen decides she does.

So she books a trip.

She stays at a big brand hotel and she eats at a fast food chain.

She stays at a corporately owned winery and she spends just a little bit of money.

She leaves a day early because she's uninformed about what we have to do here and what we're all about.

She's not familiar with us and she never comes back.

So that's what happens naturally without the influence of the CACPB.

Now,

The other scenario, they have been exposed to efforts that we have made as the Charlottesville Albemoral Conventions and Visitors Bureau.

So they've seen two of our accolades.

Booking.com's 2023 most welcoming destinations.

Outdoor magazine's 15 happiest places to live.

And they've seen our ads.

And both of them have the same reaction.

We didn't know that this is what Charlottesville was like.

And because of that,

In this case, Karen decides she doesn't want to come.

However, Jim books a trip.

and he navigates his way to our website.

He checks out to see what else we have to do here because he's seen our ads and he's seen our public relations.

And he scrolls down to our black civil landing page.

He wants to see how we tell our story.

What does that mean?

He checks out our videos.

He looks at our blog posts.

He sees what the articles that have been written on this topic are.

And then he looks at our black owned businesses.

and what he ends up doing is making informed choices.

Maybe he's talked to Remy ahead of time, maybe he sees him at the Mobile Visitor Center and he decides to book.

He stays at one of those black-owned businesses and he books a kayaking trip at the Rivanna River Company.

He eats at Pearl Island.

He strolls down the mall.

He makes art at the bridge and he sips wine at Blam.

And so his economic impact, especially to locally owned businesses and nonprofits, is way more significant than Karen's was when she was uninformed.

And even better, Jim makes a return visit for a corporate retreat and he brings his business here with him and a group of folks who then generate additional economic impact.

And that's what we're really trying to do, help people make informed decisions, become familiar with us.

And so, giving you a scenario of two fake people, but I have a scenario from somebody who really came.

This is Ms.

Candace Welch.

She was Ms.

Wheelchair California 2023.

Is it a video?

Okay.

Well, in that case, I will tell you what Candace has to say.

So Candace is in a motorized wheelchair and she has limited use of her

Arms, and she has no use of her likes.

And when she came here, we had special transportation arranged for her.

She got to experience everything that we have to offer.

She went on the downtown mall.

She made art at Picasso Swig, assisted.

She went up to Carter Mountain, she went all over our destination to explore what it was all about and what she came away with was a real sense of empowerment and the fact that she felt seen and that she was very welcome here and that's really what we want people to come away with and I'll definitely follow up with you all to share that YouTube link with you so you can watch it if you are interested in seeing what she had to say directly

Alright, so I've given you some stories and it was really about who we are and what we do, but what we believe is creating a welcoming environment for all of our visitors that also translates into a welcoming environment for all of us.

We believe that tourism should be open to everybody.

Our mission is to generate overnight visitation.

That is what ends up generating the lodging tax.

It also generates other taxes that go into the city's budget and they fund you all.

It also, we believe in being the most inclusive, diverse, welcoming and thriving destination for visitors in the Southeast.

And finally, our values reflect the values that we see in our community.

All right, so everyone has different learning styles.

So for the folks who love their numbers, here are the numbers.

For Charlottesville City, in 2022, these are our most recent economic impact numbers.

We saw nearly $400 million of direct visitor spending.

Should we ask questions now or save them for later?

Whatever floats your boat.

For back one slide?

Yes.

And we know that by their zip code?

Yes.

So it's not credit card data.

This is data taken in by Tours and Economics and they do it through U.S.

Travel Association for the entire country.

So it's it's kind of approximate like this is the trend we're gonna apply it to the money that's been spent here Yes, but it's but it's based on actual so it you're not gonna see that number be larger than right for all right of the amount that was spent here Approximately this much is based on out of Out of range folks.

Yes, according to the model that they've created correct.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Good question

and please feel free to interrupt me anytime.

So for the city of Charlottesville, that equates to $19.7 million in local taxes.

And so that's direct economic impact.

Indirect and induced is $1.3 billion for the city and the county combined again in 2022.

And for

to get a better understanding of what indirect and induced means.

On the left hand side is $1 million of visitor spending in these categories.

So the same categories that I mentioned for direct visitor spending, they end up producing even more impact in all these other various industry sectors.

So how does that happen?

Let's say that your hotel doesn't have laundry services on site.

They're doing towels and sheets and everything every day, right?

They take that offsite to be cleaned.

That's an indirect visitor expenditure.

So that's how that works in our economy.

$19.7 million in local tax collection would fund nearly 400 teachers in Charlottesville schools.

So that gives you also another way of measuring the impact of the local tax collection from our industry.

I want to thank the City Council for your support during COVID.

You provided us with CARES Act funding, you provided us with ARPA funding.

And because of that, we were able to recover much faster than other localities.

You'll see here that there is a wide range of recovery.

Albemarle during that period of time also increased some of their room numbers so they were able to get a little bit higher of an impact than Charlottesville City directly, but we recovered very well overall.

And that is really thanks to the investment that you all made, so I appreciate that.

Speaking about your investment, just as a reminder, our organization comes from a city and county agreement.

Portion of your transient occupancy tax goes to our organization.

It is 30% of the first 5%, which is not an easy thing to remember.

So next year when the transient occupancy tax is at 9%, those 4% at the end, none of that comes to the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau will overall get 14% of the transient occupancy tax collection.

We get 30% of the first 5%, so that's fixed.

So as you increase the transient occupancy tax, there is no additional amount that goes to our organization.

And just as a reminder, it is a government organization and not a nonprofit.

I find that misconception happens a lot because we are combined with the county, but we have the county as our fiscal agent and we are technically county employees.

And finally, when we do a great job of spending that reinvestment, you see the tax revenue grow.

And that is really the goal of our organization and why you invest in us.

So I want to think back to Jim and Karen for a second.

They had an awareness of Charlottesville.

So that meant they had a very basic understanding of what Charlottesville was.

But what we found in our research this winter is that only 23% of people who are aware

are familiar with Charlottesville.

So that's really our job is letting those 70 plus folks know more about who we are so they can make an educated decision and they consider us as a vacation destination and the desired behavior is obviously to book a trip here and hopefully return.

How do we do that?

We have many areas of work.

But these are our four primary focuses.

I sent a document out that was, I'm sorry, 30 pages long.

So if you had any questions about that, happy to chat through that.

And I had a lot of detail in there about how we do these areas of work.

But primarily, we do promotion.

So that's the storytelling about how we talk about our destination.

Group Sales, when Jim was booking his corporate retreat, that is Group Sales.

He's bringing a group of folks here, and that's an easier way of attracting business than trying to reach each and every vacation traveler.

Visitor Services.

When you saw a picture of Rami at the Mobile Visitor Center, we have five locations in the city where we serve people out of our mobile visitor center.

We also prepare bags with brochures for wedding parties and other such services.

And finally, our newest area is in destination development.

So we work with the workforce.

We also work with the

The upcoming workforce.

So we have partnerships with Albemarle County Schools.

We were at the hiring fair for Charlottesville High School.

I think it was two weeks ago.

Trying to educate folks as they are considering areas of work to get into.

about the options that we have here and then we educate not only those individuals but also folks within our industry and build connections among them.

It's really important to us that we are not a siloed place and that we're working collaboratively across industry sectors to really make a robust tourism destination here.

One of the ways that we have capitalized on all of those connections we've had this year is with our tourism master plan

This is our first ever tour semester plan for this region.

It's a 20 year plan.

I've included the timeline here.

It's not complete.

We will have it by the end of June.

It should be approved at our next CACVB board meeting which is at the end of June.

This was built on the visitor research that I showed you earlier.

We have all of that publicly available on our website if people want to dig into it a little bit more.

We did a lot of work with our stakeholders, so early on in the process in November we sat down with a lot of the city leaders who are on staff, Parks and Brack, and other folks within the city government to see what plans you all have that we can work with and make sure that we're not planning

things that are not in accordance with what you all are trying to do for the future of the city.

Then we worked with our stakeholders through a bunch of different ways through additional stakeholder meetings, interviews, and a survey.

I'm sorry, yes, of course.

They are a research firm out of Richmond.

I was going to show you a video.

We do a lot of the way that we communicate things is through video.

Alright, I believe in you.

So in this past year, we won, our region won Wine Region of the Year for the entire world, which was really exciting.

And it is something that our organization submitted for, and we thought it would be really nice if we were a finalist, we had no idea that we would get that kind of level of recognition.

And it turned out that it's not only because our wine is phenomenal, but it's also the way that we've been selling our destination.

selling it as an inclusive place to come.

And I know that wine is primarily in the county, but I also know that the Monticello Wine Company started here in the city and that we do have a lot to offer in the city and people come here and they do both.

They are hopefully coming to eat and not just drink and staying at our hotels and shopping.

So it's really a holistic experience.

It's not allowing me to click the links like in the presentation.

Yeah, the second one in the email is also the same link.

Gotcha.

Hold on.

I feel like I'm talking to the Wizard of Oz.

Yeah, it somehow turns all the presentations into PDFs.

So to do a video link, you have to go outside of it.

So Courtney, as he's getting that together, I just had a couple of comments.

Yeah, absolutely.

So historically, it had been Manichello and the Rotunda.

They share a UNESCO World Heritage designation.

They're still a very popular places to go.

But in addition to that, the wineries are increasingly popular.

The downtown mall has been a hub of visitor activity.

So I would say that the wineries aren't a singular location, right?

But those are the main attractions here.

It really does depend on the audience and who we're looking for.

Oh, this is looking good.

So it is wine region of the year for Charlottesville, Virginia.

You see it's, I don't know, more than 10 down.

Keep going.

There you go.

All right.

So I wanted you all to see what we said on the world stage.

Is there no audio?

Yeah, I mean, I think

I serve on the visitors board as a council rep and I learned a lot, as a matter of fact, there are some courses for giving tours and I think it would be cool if the mayor can give tours to different groups and things to visit here.

So learning up on that, so I hope that... Are you leading the training?

Yeah.

Could I ask a?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Yeah.

I don't think it'll let me play the audio.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not.

Well, I won't sit here and make you read what I had to say.

But the point of this was that we were recognized for our efforts in being racially inclusive with marketing our wine region.

and it was unfortunately so unusual that we were able to win the wine region of the year.

And it was really amazing to be able to be on that stage to talk about who we are, to talk about, to confront some of the assumptions that folks might have about us and really to have that moment to be able to shine on the world stage.

The agenda links correctly, so if anyone is following along, they can click on the still, and it does take them to the video.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you for the presentation.

I appreciate it.

I was just sort of scanning the documents when I was preparing for the meeting.

I can't say I read every one, but was there some notion of a

Was there some notion of a convention, a center?

Yeah, so in 2018 there was a conventions of center study that was done.

So that was right before I was hired and the CACVB board decided to investigate that possibility.

Our midweek business is weak because we don't have a major transient occupancy or sorry major business transient.

So usually business transient is when you have big

Corporations coming in and they do trainings and folks come in and stay for the week and go home, right?

And then if you're a beach destination, maybe you have a lot of midweek business because it's the beach.

And so what they decided to do was study, do we have enough meeting space here to attract meetings during the week?

And the answer was no.

And then because the Virginia guest house

Yes.

I mean, it's so hard to know, right?

Like that's, it's years from now.

So the tourism master plan would propose how you could possibly fund something, but it involves a lot of variables and I see.

Understood.

And then in terms of your budget, I'm trying to remember, is it 2.5?

The, it changes, right?

So, you know, in 2020 it was, it took a dip.

But we're two years in the past.

So what we're doing right, what we're going into is FY23, lodging tax collection.

From the city.

How do you feel about how you're funded and what you think you're funded enough to do the things that you've been tasked to do?

I know we often, or not often, a number of times we've spoken in various meetings like what is the sort of rate of, or the return on investment we're getting from.

I know it's hard to quantify because we have a lot of sort of fixed draws here like the university and other things, but it's clear as well that the work that you all do also brings in people that come

Yeah, I think our staff size is great.

I'm really pleased with the number of folks we have and what they're doing.

Especially, I think it matches the needs of the community.

I've changed a lot.

I've been here five years in August.

It's been an evolution.

I'll say that this upcoming year, it will be what I would call the first normal year I've had.

I was here six months before COVID started, and then COVID, and then COVID recovery.

And so our budget is actually decreasing this year because we had some recovery funds, which we were able to invest in advertising in wine enthusiast, which is what helped us build the relationship to get the award.

It's what we use to build our training program called Tours and For All.

A couple questions.

So our recently adopted city budget, 1.5 million was allocated to the CACVB and FY23 that number was about 700,000.

So it hasn't really because we had the one time funding from

the American Rescue Plan Act.

So that's what kind of made up the budget in the meantime.

So the budget that you're referring to, and thank you for looking up the numbers, from last year would have been, this is where, FY 2022, right?

So we were still very much coming out of COVID recovery.

So our overall budget is actually going down because the additional revenue from the American Rescue Plan Act

has dried up.

So it's not all that different at the end of the day.

And then related to that from FY23 to FY24 in your budget, the marketing budget a little more than doubled.

Again, just kind of curiosity, what is a doubling of the market budget looking like practically?

Is that

Yeah, so again, it's not exactly that way because we had, without the ARPA funding, we really did national buys and now we're not going to be anymore.

So in our regular budget, we'll have search engine marketing, so making sure when people Google us, we're coming up and doing some retargeting so that if people come to our website, make sure they come back.

Then we also will do social media advertising.

And one of the things that we've done successfully a handful of times has been to bring a DC TV station here and having them film at various locations.

It's been in major publications.

So in travel and leisure, food and wine, wine enthusiast, so trying to make sure that we're putting up the local palate.

So we tell the story of food

and Wine, which is how we're telling the Charlottesville and the Albemarle story simultaneously in those major media outlets, which is not something we've ever been able to do before.

When I came on, most of our budget was going to our marketing agency, and I wasn't seeing a whole lot of return from that.

And we had a PR agency, and so we haven't had an agency

since the first six months that I've been working here so they could really get control over our budget, be able to spend in a smart way in an impactful way and know that the metrics that we're getting from the advertiser is something that we're looking at and not being massaged by somebody else.

And just the final question, there was great information about how robust our tourism industry is, and I know there's no perfect lockstep way to do it, but are there any kind of metrics looking at with the marketing budget, how effective is that being in terms of bringing in people to the market or someone

Yeah, so in the past, before cookies went out of style on websites, you were able to track cookies from advertising to your website to bookings, which was amazing and super creepy.

There's a reason it's out of style, right?

But we were able to do that at one point in time.

We can't do it that directly and we don't directly sell.

But what I can tell you is that if people are coming here for a football game, they're participating in a football game at UVA and they're not necessarily doing much else while we're here.

So that's why we're at Alumni Hall and our mobile visitor center, telling people where else they can go.

I know that our wine enthusiast recognition has increased one specific tour company for those wine tours by 35% this spring.

So I know that in the impact for local businesses, I don't have direct measurement, but we can see what people are interested in, how they're engaging, and then we can talk to our partners and say,

Are you seeing revenue coming in from visitors?

And lots of them do.

But there are businesses that are in the tourism economy as we define it that don't necessarily think about visitors.

So like restaurants, a lot of the bread and butter for a restaurant are their regulars, right?

But the additional money that comes in from visitors who have to eat when they're here and they don't usually have a kitchen, that's something that our destination development team is working with them on so that we can help

Alright, thanks.

I may have a follow-up to one of Michael's questions.

You said that you used to have an outside agency doing PR and another one doing marketing.

So since you started, you brought those in-house?

Yes.

I was going to say the same thing.

I'm glad that you've done that.

Yes, I very much believe that.

And you all know messaging can change at a moment, right?

And if I have a marketing director right here, I can call him and say, you know, cancel all social right now because it's not a good time to be promoting our message.

That happens very quickly.

So that's an added bonus.

I guess, sorry, that also saves us money.

I mean, that's why we haven't been able to have those large advertising buys before is because, you know, when I got here, we didn't have extra budget to be able to purchase them.

So it is, it's a huge cost saver and something that I think is really important for the stewardship of our, our destination.

That's a great question.

I want to think about that and not just knee-jerk reaction to it, but I think better understanding the communications that you all have and making sure that we're closely in sync when in the event of a crisis and things like that, it's helpful for us to know

What you all are thinking so that we can communicate properly to visitors, you know, with the wildfires a couple, what was that a month ago out in the county, you know, letting folks know, hey, you need to avoid this area.

We're an additional communications channel and you don't want all of the residents to avoid an area and then have a ton of visitors show up, right?

So using us to be able to get that message out so that we can make sure that we're in sync is really helpful.

But I'll keep thinking on it, too.

Thank you.

I just want to add, and I think you are doing a great job.

I know that in our meetings, we talk about the areas that we consider are equals like Asheville.

And I know that there are tours and offices triple, if not larger, outside.

So we do a lot to promote this area.

So thank you and your staff for your work and your efforts.

And if there are any other questions,

I guess I see you in a couple of weeks at the meeting.

And please feel free to reach out anytime, have it answer questions and provide information.

So as Mr. Hicks is preparing himself to begin the presentation, just wanted to offer a couple of comments for Council and for the members of the public.

It seems as though May has become the anniversary of when we talk about where we are with our VDOT portfolio.

I didn't realize that we were establishing that kind of relationship when I first spoke to Council a couple years back.

but in my prior capacity I came before this body and laid out for you some concerns that we had and what we felt like we needed in the way of capacity.

It came back again asking for additional capacity and then along the way I have shared with you that we have discovered a number of things that none of us are satisfied with but recognizing that

There's a number of things that have contributed to it and the goal at this moment is not to spend a great deal of time talking about that as much as it is about laying out how we get away from that.

How do we get past that?

So the presentation that you're about to receive is a joint.

presentation, but it really gives a good sense of us having truly, I believe we have diagnosed all of our problems and we have figured out all of the things that we may need to do.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members.

My name is Stephen Hicks.

I'm the Public Works Director.

And we'll be talking about our locally administered project portfolio.

I don't have the remotes not working, so you'll have to help me next.

So a quick snapshot of our portfolio.

It consists of $157 million.

Of that, we have 29 projects ongoing at various stages.

and some have already get ready to go to construction and some haven't even started.

A project team, we have new faces.

I want to take the time to introduce the project team that's under now facilities and I'll talk more about that.

Michael Goder, I think we all have worked with him.

He's the new Deputy Public Works Director.

Any overseas facility maintenance and facility development and facility development already had a project management team and so in discussion of trying to kind of look at ways where we could provide the expertise in certain areas

Typically, or was, the project management team was under the city engineer, and now those roles are now under Michael.

So now all the project managers, both for vertical and horizontal work, meaning buildings and roads, are under one umbrella to ensure that we have energy there in consistency on how the city manages their infrastructure project.

Then I have the senior transportation project manager position that's vacant.

We're in the process of looking and interviewing.

These musicians are tough to fill because one needs to have a pretty strong experience in civil engineering, transportation, traffic, but more importantly the Virginia Department of Transportation processes and understanding, especially at the senior level.

and then we have Lee Cooper.

He's our new rideaway agent.

He does all the rideaway acquisitions for the projects.

You'll be getting to know him really well here soon with some of the rideaway acquisitions that we'll have to be doing.

And so he's a great addition to our team.

He works closely with our legal department.

and then we have, well, we have Najee Bahama.

He's our new project manager.

He's new to this line of work other than he's had experience doing some transportation projects.

He's bright.

He's a quick learner and we have high expectations of him but no doubt I know he'll deliver.

That's a lot of pressure.

And then we have Colin Porter.

He's not here.

He's at the UVA Transportation Project Management Institute.

It's an eight-day training course where they learn how to manage projects related to the VDOT process and just overall good skills to be able to provide and make sure projects are delivered successfully.

and then Aaron Abel on the computer.

He's our data cruncher.

He does all the data collection and looks at where we are on our performance metrics and making sure that that they he provides the data both financial data and the schedule data to make sure we're we're staying on time and on budget.

And then I do want to introduce Brennan.

I think we all know Brennan.

He's our traffic engineer.

He's essential to the

the team in delivering projects because he provides that perspective from a traffic engineering and the ADA compliance side of the house.

Greg Allen, Gregory, he's our VDOT locally minister coordinator.

He's the one who kind of helps us and oversee the work that we do.

He's very resourceful and both VDOT and Gregory specifically and also Patrick Moore who's not here.

They played a significant role in making sure we turn this ship around.

and then of course Ben Chambers.

He plays a critical role from a transportation planning perspective.

He's the one who kind of sets the vision of projects as well as help us with the funding and provides all the scope he needs.

So that's a quick summary of our team.

Next.

So while we have teams, our project team, we do have closely to about 14 other individuals or departments or outside agencies that play a critical role in the collaboration of delivering a project on time.

As you can see, there's a lot, and a lot of it is internal, but then at the same time, we do rely on VDOT.

It's critical that we're all on the same page when we start a project because I'll share with you all there's multiple phases and multiple activities and we all need to make sure that we understand the schedule and the calls and delivering a project.

Next.

So, in January, the city manager, Mr. Sanders, he received a letter from the Virginia Department of Transportation

the Culpeper District engineer, Sean Nelson, pretty much saying that what we knew and what we were anticipating because it was elevated at the central office level that we're deficient.

We were not delivering projects on time, period.

And not only that, but some of the projects were going back to 2011, 2016, 2017, and even the ones that are in the 2016-2017 phase

They're still not delivered.

So as a result of this letter and also some prior deficiencies that the city manager identified as well with some other team members, he collectively started coordinating with the district.

Jr., a quarterly meeting to kind of really figure out what's going on, what do we need to do, where's the resources, what capacity we need, because we were just more interested in just turning this around.

While we identified the problems, that was helpful, but we wanted a solution where we'd never get into

a situation where we get another letter from Virginia Department of Transportation.

So some of the findings were we were lacking a team approach.

We were lacking the fact that we all work together, we all play a critical role.

This isn't just a project manager's responsibility.

It requires so much collaboration.

that it was important.

But the other area that we identified is we didn't have the best relationship with the Virginia Department of Transportation.

And if you don't have a good relationship with the agency, that one is very resourceful.

And by the way, they're the one funding the projects.

You can eventually get into a point where I think we started pointing fingers.

And that was not healthy for delivering projects.

And at the end of the day, the citizens

were the ones who ultimately were hurt by it.

Also, there was no clear strategy or plan or mission.

There was no strategy on how we're going to deliver the projects, what resources are we going to need, how are we going to focus on the priorities of the projects, what projects should VDOT administer, and more importantly, what are the ones we should give back to VDOT, maybe because we didn't have the skill sets or we didn't have the capacity, and that was carefully looked at.

But at the end of the day, we were not delivering projects on time and on budget period.

And as a result, VDOT identified areas of concern.

This was a crisis because if you lose the credibility with an agency as big as VDOT and they're the ones funding our road systems, it definitely can impact us on how we have a vision or plan for land development or also just make improvements for pedestrian usage or other type of

wrote improvements to either improve capacity or look at other modes of transportation.

So we had to fix this.

And so the way we identified was the Department of Transportation pretty much told the city manager that you will go on a projects development improvement plan.

In other words, that's a fancy word for correction plan.

They wanted some income paper that demonstrated

that we're serious of what we're going to do it, and what's the plan, and how are we going to do it, and how is it going to be sustainable?

And so we worked on that for months.

It was finalized in January this year, Center Office, and Mr. Sanders, they signed the letter of a commitment of what we're going to do to turn our program around.

and it was important because I would say that we're losing public trust if we tell the public, hey, we're going to build a road on December 2025 and then February comes around 2026 and the project's not delivered.

And so what that means is you can just randomly arbitrarily start

John dates or committing to dates and as a citizen, I don't know if they believe we were really going to fulfill what we said.

So that was pretty much empty promise.

It was pretty much, you know, I hear you, but I don't believe you until you start showing that you're going to start delivering projects on time during even the public hearing processes or public engagement.

If we were to go out there and tell them, oh, this project's coming and we're going to do it on a certain day, a lot of the community members would just say we've heard that before and why hasn't anything been done.

So part of the correction plan, and I'll be saying that because I think we need to emphasize, really, that's what this really is, is there was no performance measures and so as part of the

The Correction Action Plan, we had to create some performance measures to demonstrate how we're going to meet certain goals, but specifically VDOT's goals because they're the one who are funding the projects and we have to have a draw down and spend the dollars to make sure we're committing those dollars based on the federal government fiscal year cycle and I'll share more on that.

It was signed January of this month.

This year.

Okay.

Yes.

So I'm going to touch base on the locality sustained performance improvement plan.

This was the process that's been provided by VDOT on how they're going to come up with metrics and how they're going to measure a locality success.

And so one of the areas, the corrective action plan, we were the first who received a corrective action plan, the first locality.

And it's going to be a model for other localities who also aren't delivering projects on time and have a deficiency.

for whatever reasons.

So that raises the bar to make sure that now we've got a plan and we've got to execute it.

But the three areas that they're going to be measuring us is on-time performance, responsible progress, reasonable progress, and then physical management.

And I'll go through each one of those.

So, numbers don't lie, but liars will figure.

At the end of the day, we're delivering about three out of ten projects on time.

And that depends how you define what's on time as an establishment of fixed date.

So, VDOT would like to see you at least delivering 70% of your program on time.

And those activities can vary because we have seven phases of an activity on developing a project, but there's mainly just three critical ones that we focus on.

And that's the plumber engineering, the design, the public hearing and ride-away acquisition piece, and then the construction piece.

So you can have a project, let's say, for 12 months, and you're six months behind.

It took four months to do a design, but you're at six months right now.

You're behind for all the other phases.

It has a ripple effect.

So then it turns into the next slide, Reasonable Progress.

Next slide.

So the reasonable progress is a way to identify if you're slow on design phase, how is it going to impact the right-of-way construction to complete a project, and where do you need to catch up to some extent?

So what VDOT is asking us to do, they give you a 90-day grace period to be able to say, all right, you're behind on PE, and we're going to give you 30 days or 60 days until you demonstrate that you're going to be able to get, let's say, to a right-of-way phase part that they have to authorize.

They allow us a grace period to catch up.

That's the only best way I could say it and not get hit as hard because we're not delivering projects on time.

But at the end of the day, they hope when the project is completed or advertised and traffic is on the road and pedestrians are walking on the sidewalk, we met the end completion date.

And right now, we have turned this ship around.

We are making progress.

We're 60% of we have been able to demonstrate that we are slowly making progress on our projects in the past year or two, which demonstrates we are slowly getting packed to delivering projects on time.

But there are the old projects that still under design in 2017, 2018.

There's not anything we can do.

Those projects are late.

Our score is going to be down.

is going to take a good year before we see some of these scores meet the expectations of Virginia Department of Transportation.

And then the next one is, next slide, is how we manage our dollars.

We're doing a good job here.

Earlier in the year we weren't.

Mr. Sanders made a point that he wanted to make sure that we start

Managing our dollars and the area where you see there is the reimbursement process.

The way it works is the city pays the contractor or consultant to do the work.

Let's say it's two dollars.

Then we submit it to VDOT and we receive the two dollars back, right?

So it draws down on the VDOT funds, but how they measure if we're doing right is

The formula is whatever has been allocated $10 minus the expenditure $6 means the balance is $4.

We have $66.9 million of

of the U.S.

The federal government has expectations that you spend the dollars because there's other needs out there and if they don't have the trust that you're going to spend those dollars, they may need to want to use those dollars for other localities.

So it's critical that we manage our dollars.

Can you clarify something on this slide?

Sure.

Sorry to interrupt.

Those are the funds that have been allocated to VDOT as a grant.

So those are potential funds.

So that's in a bucket somewhere set aside city money.

Correct.

And it can only be used for VDOT funds.

We couldn't use that to do anything else with it because it's like a grant.

Right.

Correct.

And not moving projects along.

Right.

And that was a concern the city manager identified.

Next.

So the corrective action plan, our focus series, mission.

It's real simple.

We're going to deliver projects on time and on budget.

We don't need a long mission statement.

We don't need to discuss the why we can't do projects.

We just need to deliver projects on time.

and go from there.

Also build a strong team in place.

We did do the reorganization.

I shared with you all all the project managers.

We're under the city engineer.

They're now under the Deputy Public Works Director, Michael.

We have new faces.

I ask that they be here because what I do know next year, Michael will be doing this presentation.

And then you will be seeing also project managers coming up and bringing forward updates on projects as well as some other subject matter expertise and stuff.

and the other one is Virginia Department of Transportation relationship.

It is solid.

I would have to say that in my experience, this is one of the better relationships I've seen with Virginia Department of Transportation.

It's fortunate our city manager has Sean Nelson, the district engineer on speed dial and they have a great relationship as well as us having a great relationship

with the locally administered coordinators and we have our monthly meeting on a regular basis just to go over projects to make sure the status is fine.

We will be entering into a, it wasn't MOU, but it's, and that's an error on my part, but it's a memorandum of agreement to give the flexibility.

We will be presenting this to you.

The flexibility should VDOT or should the city identify certain projects.

It just makes sense that VDOT administers them, that it allows us to go into agreement where VDOT will administer them.

and they understand some of our design expectations when they do move forward with the project.

And we're hoping through results, it's no hope we will be restoring public trust.

It's so critical that we have credibility with the public.

From my experience when you go out to the public and we're going to be going out to the public and getting them engaged, you have to be able to demonstrate that you deliver projects on time.

There's no question around it.

My experience is when you tell someone you're going to deliver a project, let's say in October 2027, come October 2027, they remember that day.

They may not remember the cost of the project, but they'll remember when you told them that you're going to open the road.

The budget, Chrissy and our project management team, we are now talking more and each project manager, they're not keeping track of their own records.

It's an open book and we are making sure that when we get invoices, we're paying those invoices in a timely fashion and that we are having models that demonstrate when we're going to be drawing down on projects and their schedules.

and then Urban Design.

We see transportation, Lincoln Transportation with land development critical and how it all works together.

This is in Ben's wheelhouse.

He is the individual that has visions of new projects that we're going to be designing or projects that are under design now.

and he will be carrying the ball to our project management team.

We're not planners.

We design it and we build it, but we rely on Ben to kind of help us navigate how to feel, how to look, where should it be, and identifying the scope of projects.

And I think you've already heard from Ben multiple times.

He's great at his job.

and he's really been a great asset to us.

And then project transparency.

We will be going live on our website on when projects are going to be completed and those dates will not be moved.

Hopefully, I mean, there's going to be unforeseen circumstances, obviously, but our goal is in mid summer end of July.

We will have all projects on our website and it's kept up on a daily basis.

So any citizen could go on there and figure out what project is being delivered or what project is being managed, when it's going to be completed.

But more importantly, if they need to talk to a project manager, they can pick up the phone and call and discuss it.

and

If we say we need you as a team, it could be in procurement, it could be in legal, it could be in budgeting, it could be at any other of the internal departments we have, you play our role.

If you commit that you're going to do your part, we would like for you to demonstrate it so we can go ahead and move forward with projects.

Next slide.

I'm not going to go into the details of these.

I think you all are familiar with them.

But the big funding programs, always remember, they're even years.

Unfortunately, we didn't apply for any smart scale projects because VDOT just didn't trust us that if we gave you the dollars now, you're going to be able to spend

And that is not a good thing.

That's actually embarrassing.

But they also realize that we've turned the program around and Ben is already looking at planning to apply for projects in 2026.

But we got to make sure we have the capacity to handle them.

And we got to make sure that when we do apply for those funds.

We have a very clear scope and a very clear plan of how we're going to deliver them.

And then the odd years are more of, I would call, more smaller scale projects.

They're the revenue sharing projects for dollar match, and then the transportation alternatives and stuff.

And then the annual state of good repair.

That is like the Derry Road Bridge replacement.

We get funds for that.

And also some of the paving programs.

Next.

and then the project development process.

There's a reason this is fuzzy.

It's mainly used as just a picture of the expectations on delivering a project and there's multiple activities, if you could just see.

This is a picture's worth a thousand words.

This just kind of highlights the complexity of delivering a project.

And it doesn't matter if it's a small project or a large project, it still has the similar steps and the similar attention you need to deliver a project.

But I will be talking about the seven phases here real quick to kind of highlight a quick overview for you and the citizens to understand.

So the next one.

So here are the seven phases of a project.

The first phase is initiating it.

Once the PE is authorized to start the project, project management team goes to the council to provide you a city VDOT locally administer agreement, which means that VDOT is agreeing to the locality to manage the project and council is authorizing the city manager to execute any and all contracts to make sure the project is delivered on time.

This will always be brought to council for approval to determine if this is a project that you will want to staff to manage That typically takes two to four months then the scoping piece the next phase two phases phase two and three is is partially in Ben's area Ben works and I with the project management team to identify the scoping

of what needs to be done.

Is it a five foot bike multipurpose or eight foot multipurpose lane, four foot sidewalk?

How does it blend in?

Is there landscaping?

He has the vision.

He also understands what the needs are

and then he hands it off to us to start the design work.

But transportation planning is still part of the design team and the design work.

But those take between four to nine months.

Again, it depends on the complexity of the project.

And then the detailed design.

Once we have the design somewhat completed, this is where council comes in.

During the detailed design and public hearing, after public hearings, we will come to council to give an update on what the community members have shared or what their concerns are.

And then we go into finalizing the design and then the right-of-way acquisition.

And I would have to say, phase four and five, you all are part of that key partnership to making a project successful.

Those areas are going to require decisive decision.

They're going to require some more discussion on the needs of the project.

But once you get to phase four and five, any changes to the design are altering it.

Not only will they increase potentially the cost, but more importantly also delay the project.

So phase four and five are critical and depending on the scope again, it can take up to 18 months.

and then after we get through right away it's downhill.

It's advertisement and then the funds part is construction where community members need a part in our dust because it is going to be

like bacon sausage, and sometimes there will be significant traffic delays.

So what does this mean?

A project range typically, if everyone stays focused and keep their eye on the ball, it's three to eight years.

That's a long time.

And really it doesn't matter the size of the project.

Preston Harris, for example, is just a simple traffic signal with some pedestrian ADA improvements.

That's anticipated to take three to four years, and it's been under design already for a while, 60%.

Ben's going to go over them.

So the point of it is it takes time to deliver a project.

and while we build this team, we will need patience.

But there is very clear guidance, that's the best way I could probably share with Mr. Sanders, is we mean business and he wants to turn this around.

And I appreciate it.

That three to eight year time frame, especially for a project like the small one you just described, that is

I would say, to answer your question, yeah, three to eight years, once you have a dollar of VDOT funds or federal funds, you're looking at following their process.

And it's the public hearing and ride away process that could slow things up.

Our dollars, it still requires, we don't deviate so much from the project management process.

It's the public hearing engagement and a right away process of how we can have a little bit more flexibility in VDOT that kind of reduces the time.

Does that make sense?

So it's our dollars.

We're in control of what we want to do.

VDOT still has to review and concur.

It's still our project, but they still want to concur and make sure we're following VDOT and the Federal Highway Administration guidelines.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Okay.

There's less strings attached.

That's a good question.

So before we shift to Ben's section of the presentation, I would just like to

hear any further comments or questions from you all because this first section of this presentation was about systems change.

It was also about us being in the confessional and telling the truth about what's been going on.

And I'll point out that this was not a comfortable presentation to ask for and to put together and to deliver.

He didn't want it.

go there.

He wanted to be positive about everything.

But I thought it was important for all of you as well as for the public just to appreciate that we're admitting that we have a lot of work to do and that it requires some systems changes.

That's really what this is about.

I mean, the things that we have moving, we're shifting around and we're not shifting around untested.

We're trying to figure things out and then more or less making sure that we're going in the right direction.

Brian Pinkston, Juandiego Wade, Lloyd Snook, Michael Payne, Natalie Oschrin

A little bit more deliberate about what we take on and when we take it on.

We've been saying yes to a lot of stuff that we probably as a team should have thrown up our hands and screamed no.

I think you all know me by now, I'm prepared to do that.

And I will continue to do that because they've been trying their best for those, a few of them I'm not even going to look, but a few of them have been trying to express

to council, to past administrations.

We need to do something different and no one was listening to them.

So I've been wanting to thank all of those folks for getting through what they've been through, but to also join in this effort of nobody's blaming.

We got there's so many different ways and places that I could point and all that is just not important at this time.

The key is to make sure that everyone is understanding how far behind we are.

Greg being here and Sean, they've been amazing.

They could have clamped down on us a lot sooner by now.

And they've been willing to continue to let me beg and then respond to my begging and pleading, please don't do this.

Please don't let us try to figure this out.

And it's all been much appreciated.

And I think we're beginning to see the fruit of that.

It's already turning around.

We already have

more of this collegial spirit internal.

We still have some process fixes internal that we need to do.

And as we make those things happen, it'll get a lot easier.

But a project takes the time that it takes.

So I just want to make sure that that much was stated.

I know that we have members of our public who appreciate hearing this because this is clearing things up because they haven't necessarily understood why.

Now we're showing you some of the why and Ben's going to talk to you about what the impacts on some of the projects are going to be.

Both.

How about that?

I would say when I say over promise, I think we were happy about applying for grants knowing that we would receive them because Charlottesville is the largest city in the area.

So we qualified just based on certain criteria.

We did a great job applying for grants.

We didn't have a plan on how we're going to execute the projects.

So I would say, yeah, we bit off more than we could chew.

Probably the scale of the projects and the size with the staffing that we had.

So with that said, if we had the relationship with VDOT,

I can't rewind the tape.

I believe we could have talked with VDOT and said, you know, we still need these dollars because despite who's managing the projects, the people who are on the road and the people who want to walk around their bikes, they're going to be punished if we don't take these dollars on.

So can VDOT help us and manage those projects?

Because they do have the capacity

They do have the expertise and they pretty darn do a good job at what they do.

And so that's where we were from a standpoint of lack of relationships, over promising what we can do and not having a plan to execute it.

Yeah, we just underlined I think this presentation might for some members of the community might have felt kind of just like numbers or something, but for anybody who cares about transportation system infrastructure, sidewalks, bike lanes, I think this is

One of the most important structural challenges the city has faced and I think it's clear that there's a recognition of that and changing the structural problem that led to this point.

So just very important and I would say I am still prepared for in the project timeline those areas where we were held up in terms of Roy away acquisition.

I'm prepared and comfortable with us doing what we need to do to rectify that going forward as well.

I have some questions.

Some of these, I think, might be answered by Ben, so I'll hold on to a couple.

But for the benefit of whoever's out there listening, you mentioned generally there's projects that we fell through on.

Ben will cover that.

Okay.

I mean, as all the projects, you'll look at some of the completion dates and you'll probably say,

Why are they going on for years?

Yes.

So a V dot road is a road that

The Virginia Department

collector roads and stuff, but in general cities are responsible for maintaining their own roads, depending on what they call the road classification.

And there's a series of road classification.

A city road is where we receive VDOT maintenance funds to maintain those roads.

We own them.

And so we have the opportunity to, when we apply for funds for construction,

To some extent, it's our responsibility or could be our responsibility to maintain those roads to provide the flexibility of what we feel we need based on certain design criteria, understanding the community a little bit better.

VDOT falls under the BERT Act, where localities are not responsible for their secondary road systems.

And VDOT maintains all secondary road systems and roads that go through all that stuff.

Great, thank you.

You mentioned that we're having a better relationship with VDOT nowadays, but I've also heard that VDOT's priorities are getting more cars into and through Charlottesville, whereas our priorities are different, but also we just don't have the space to continue storing and adding more cars forever.

Their VDOT does work with what they call a long-range transportation plan and some master planning and they do take into consideration other modes of transportation and their scope design of the work.

but typically the projects that they do work on, the roads are so highly congested and been in the planning phase for so long, there's immediate need to do something now, recognizing that planning for multi-purpose modes, either sidewalks or

multi-purpose pass or dedicated bike lanes while they're important there's only so many dollars available where VDOT can work with to improve the road network system because their goal is to keep vehicles moving but recognize that when there are opportunities to build additional infrastructure for different modes of transportation they will take that consideration

But the closer you get to areas that are at interchanges or already primary routes that are already two or three or four laying roads, VDOT does look at how they can reduce congestion.

Now, the fact that the roads are designed to provide or to increase traffic within the city,

A lot of that is just land use driven and the desire for people to work in this city or live in this city and that's their way of getting here.

That is hard to control no matter where you are.

And so even if we were to have all the dollars in the world in certain areas that are highly congested to provide other boats of transportation, it would make a very small impact

on the consistency of moving vehicles or people out of cars onto the road.

While there's some advantage of it and the city is that's one of their priorities to look at it, it would not provide consistent ways to remove vehicles off the road.

And so we're looking at

at congestion volumes of 10 or 15,000 vehicles a day and peak left turning movements of 350.

Yeah, I understand all of that.

I just sometimes think about VDOT as being

forgetting that transportation is more than just cars and what they're proposing and what they're, you know, they shifted the rules of smart scale to be more car, to favor car projects over bike ped projects.

And that was a policy choice that I find frustrating and shortsighted.

So I just want to keep, you know, the city, the city priorities in mind while we work with VDOT on this and not kind of lose track of the fact that we do have

limited size and scope to add more vehicles.

My last question is that 66.97 million that we talked about earlier in the bucket for projects.

Hang on, hang on, hang on.

Chrissy?

So when we budget for the projects in the CIP budget, you'll notice that there is a project budget for the expenditure.

It's all also offset by a revenue budget, be it federal, state dollars or city match.

So while the project is on our books and is available to be spent, when we talk about cleaning up the CIP, and I think we've talked about this before,

that the budget may or may not, we can't just reassign it to something else because those dollars don't exist if VDOT doesn't reimburse us.

So it's really not, there's not a pot of $67,000 sitting in a bucket for us to allocate.

That money is a pot of budget that is there, but we spend the money on the project.

We get reimbursed in a very short order from those expenditures.

So it's therefore just a budget.

Thank you for explaining that.

And for those projects, those projects that we've already kind of set aside and allocated that for expecting that reimbursement, what are the limitations on what we're allowed to do?

So it's not money to spend, it's just a budget, and that budget is allocated to these specific projects, and they're offset by the anticipated funding plan for that project.

So if you have $66,000 allocated for transportation projects, and we know that 60,000 of that is coming from VDOT, if you reallocate that 60,000,

We have to figure out how else you're going to pay for it because VDOT's not going to give us that 60,000 now.

and just look at it from the sense of it's a commitment.

When we have submitted the request, that's like a grant proposal.

VDOT has reviewed it.

The project is now grant funded.

We haven't received the grant funds.

We reserve in our budget the capacity for being able to deliver the project to then get the reimbursement later.

Road, sidewalks, traffic signals.

We have a series of all of those different things.

So if you're looking to make sure we strike a balance in what we go after, that's going to be tied to the funding source that's available.

It has its own set priorities and that's really why Ben's position was so important for us to have so that we can start looking forward.

Stephen and team are going to execute what we've committed to.

Yeah, thank you.

So we're getting short on time and as I guess Ben, as you're coming up, if you could kind of

Yeah, I'll try to use it as quickly as possible.

Yeah, I just wanted to add as part of the VDOT that I'm glad that we is very similar to the discussion we had about cats a few months ago.

You've been brutally honest with us and it's good to know.

I have to be.

We have to know.

I did this for 20 years with the county.

I was the county's main rep with VDOT for projects.

Well, thanks for having me again, Council.

I was here a few weeks ago talking about transportation projects, and I said I'd be back to talk about the ones that are funded by VDOT, so here we go.

I'm going to try to get through these as quickly as possible to get you guys to dinner.

As you can see we have basically four large buckets of the kinds of projects that we have.

We have streetscapes, trails, intersections and bridges.

There are a couple other funding types that I'll talk about later, but those are the big ones.

with those projects.

Most of them look like they're in design or right-of-way phase.

We have a few that are under construction or about to be under construction, and then a couple that have funding awarded to them already but have not yet gotten started yet.

They don't have the funding available quite yet.

We're going to start with Streetscapes.

This is the largest bucket that we have.

Councillor Oschrin, if you were asking what are the projects that we've been sort of stumbling on, these would be the ones.

We started these projects back in the mid 2010s.

These are larger scale efforts looking at corridors, our major corridors in the city, and looking at turning them into a place.

making bike pet improvements, upgrading traffic patterns, basically beautifying these corridors and making them welcoming to everyone.

Most of these are funded through SmartScale.

They were funded in early rounds of SmartScale when there weren't as many restrictions on application types and numbers of applications you could go after.

So we went after a lot of them, and we were awarded a lot of them.

One of them that we were awarded was several phases of the West Main Street streetscape project.

There were four different phases of that project.

It was a huge project.

It was ultimately defunded in 2021.

But we still have a lot of other large projects that are on the books for these streetscape projects.

Most of the work is not visible.

That means we're in the design phase or we're in the right-of-way phase.

And you're not seeing people out on the ground doing surveying.

You're not seeing construction happening.

And so it seems like nothing's happening with these projects.

Assuredly, there are things happening with these projects.

A lot of them are in right-of-way phase, so you're going to hear that quite a bit as I go through these.

First one I'll start with is East High Street.

This is kind of a continuation of the Belmont Bridge project.

It goes from Market Street down to Locust.

This will give us new multimodal improvements along that corridor, make it safer for bikes and pedestrians.

We're looking at a winter completion in 2026 for this project.

Currently it's in the right-of-way phase.

Fontaine Avenue, we're waiting to go into the right-of-way phase.

We have a 60% design that we're waiting for approval from VDOT.

This is another streetscape project that we'll add in bike lanes, sidewalks on both sides of the road, formalize where the parking spaces are, and this goes between JPA and the city boundary.

We'll also talk about another VDOT project that's just beyond the city boundary a little bit later if I can get to that quickly enough, but we're looking at this being completed in summer of 2026.

Emmett Street is actually two different projects.

We have two phases for that.

The first goes from Ivy to Arlington, and then the second one goes from Arlington to Barracks.

The first phase is looking at being completed in spring of 2026.

It's currently in the right-of-way phase.

The second phase, the funds come online this year, so we'll begin design work on that.

Overall, we're looking at a corridor between Barracks and Ivy that will have improved bus stops, a shared use path, landscaping, pedestrian improvements at crossings, and a tunnel that goes underneath the railroad tracks there between Ivy and Barracks Road.

at the end of

Ridge Street is a new project this year.

It has funded, awarded funded already through SmartScale.

We were originally given funding in 2020 for a project that was at the intersection of Fifth Ridge, Cherry and Elliott.

And then in 2022, we're awarded more funding for a neighboring project that goes from Cherry and Elliott up to just south of West Main Street on Ridge Street.

In 2023 we combined those two projects into one project.

The funding for both projects or the single unified project becomes available this year and we'll start design work on that.

No.

So none of these will show up on the sidewalk priorities list.

That's looking at what we're going to invest in next.

So these are things that we've already committed to and we've already got funds set to.

The sidewalk priorities list is stuff I'm going to be asking for funding for.

Alright, so I'm going to hit a few trails projects here.

This is the Meadow Creek Valley Trail.

This is going up Meadow Creek Valley sort of behind Whole Foods area up into Greenbrier.

Our design plans are completed for this.

Our permits are in place.

We're currently looking at deeds right now.

We're looking at completing this in summer 2025 and having a nice recreational bike-ped facility through this neighborhood.

Rugby Ave, Cheredews Path.

This is building a Cheredews path that will go under 250 from Rugby Ave at Westwood into McIntyre Park.

Construction is about to go out to bid.

We're looking at this being completed in the fall of 2024.

Previously, this was a two-way road with traffic on either side of this median that you can see that is currently blocked by the construction.

That traffic will return to both sides of the median.

It won't have as large of a lane in both directions in order for us to fit in the shared use path, but it will have that traffic in both directions.

This project originally had a four-way stop at Westwood, which was taken out for

financial considerations at some point during the project.

We're going to be adding that back in as a quick build solution once this project is completed.

So when I say quick build, I mean paint, plastic, signage.

And then we'll look for funding to complete it in concrete once we have everything in place.

Washington Park Madison Avenue connector.

So right now there is a staircase that connects the bottom of Washington Park to Madison Avenue.

You can see the

It's tennis courts or basketball courts at the bottom of Washington Park there, and then up in the right corner is Madison Avenue.

Those two neighborhoods are connected by just a staircase right now.

It would be a useful connection for our ADA users, our bike users, if there was a ramp there, so we're building one.

I don't know that they're directly linked, but yeah, Parks is working on them together.

Now we're going to look at some intersections.

First one is Rose Hill Drive at Ruby Avenue.

We're coordinating the final powering of that traffic signal that's there, and then we'll go in and do the final repaving of the intersection.

It will have improved crossings for pedestrians and that's pretty important because this is a major corridor for our safe rest of school program And we're gonna have upgraded signal infrastructure here We're expecting this to be completed this summer so well before the beginning of next school year

We also have a project at 10th and Grady Avenue Previously we did have a smart scale project here that was a much larger reconstruction of this whole intersection area It changed traffic flows.

It was kind of a little controversial and all the things that was trying to get done This is a much simpler version where we're just trying to make sure that there are pedestrian crossings that are available that there are ADA ramps that are available and

and Michael

We're upgrading this intersection so that it meets current ADA standards It's currently in the right-of-way phase has 60% completed 60% plans completed and is anticipated for completion in late summer next year Manocho and Second Street.

This is actually one that you'll be seeing some movement on soon We have construction plans complete to realign this intersection I think you can see from this overhead view that those are some very very long crosswalks

takes about 30 seconds to get across the road here.

So we're trying to shorten those up, square out the crosswalks, make it a much shorter crossing, much safer for folks, and you won't be stranded out in the middle of the street for quite as long.

Hoping to have that completed by the end of the fall this year.

We have a few bridges that we're doing some upgrades on.

Dairy Road Bridge.

This would be a replacement of the existing two-lane bridge, which is currently substandard.

It is funded with state of good repair funding.

We are coming up with a conceptual design for what this would look like, but it's basically going to be a two-lane bridge like it is today.

During construction of this, you'll still have access across using the bike-ped bridge that's there.

will be coming out with more maintenance of traffic and designs and things for this as the project progresses.

We're looking at having this completed in summer of 2027.

Belmont Bridge is almost done.

This is replacing a structurally deficient bridge with a new larger bridge that has a multimodal design with bike lanes and larger sidewalks.

Functionally, this is going to be completed in about a month.

And I say functionally because there's still one more step after that, which is coming through with the protective coating, applying that, and then putting down the absolute final layer of blacktop and new striping on it.

That has to happen when it's warm enough overnight so that the protective layer will settle onto the concrete.

But that should be happening in June.

It'll be warm in June.

And then we'll be done.

So before you move on for that, will that protective coating, is that prevent the tagging that's going on?

It's a graffiti and weather protective coating.

There are a few other buckets of money that we have.

You may have seen that list that I've had up first and said, wait, didn't Hicks just say we have 29 projects?

And then this list looks like we don't have 29 projects.

Where's the rest of the projects?

Well, we also have what's called revenue sharing.

Every two years, we're able to go out and ask for revenue sharing funds.

It's a one-for-one match.

We have five of these projects and they're all sort of

Not set up the way we actually want to go after revenue sharing funds in the future.

Typically, you go after funds saying, I'm going to build this specific project.

In the past, we've gone after revenue sharing funds saying, we'd like to be able to use this funding to pay for anything that's in our bike pedmaster plan.

Back in 2013, VDOT was amenable to that sort of thing.

These days, VDOT is not amenable to that sort of thing.

You can see the restrictions on these buckets at the different years.

We have one in 2013.

We also have one in 2021.

The one in 2021 says, excuse me, we'll only build these specific projects with this funding.

Whereas the one in 2013 says, we'll use it to build whatever we want, basically.

We have used this to build sidewalks in the city in past years.

We've also used this to adjust scopes on some larger projects.

There are streetscapes or bridge projects, for instance.

Belmont Bridge, the bike lanes originally for the designs just sort of stopped as soon as you got across to Levy.

Now those bike lanes are going to be extended up the hill a little bit.

Some of these projects, in quotes, still have a little bit of funding.

We're looking into whether they're committed to anything.

I mean, we're looking at some of these from 2013.

We have to do some archaeology to find out what happened with those funds and figure out why they didn't get spent.

We did apply some revenue sharing funds to two new projects in the past year.

These two projects were just

given local funding, I believe last council session and that will be Monticello Avenue between Corey Road and Druitt Avenue and Corey Road between Monticello Avenue and the existing sidewalk.

So basically completing an L that is missing at the entrance to our city on Monticello Avenue there.

There's also three buckets of money for paving.

We get state of good repair funding from the state for routes that are considered state routes.

So that would be Emmett Street, which would be Route 29, Monticello Ave, Belmont Bridge and High Street, which would be US 20.

So these funds are used by public service to make sure that our paving schedule can be funded and along with any funding that we program from the CIP.

along with all the things that we're working on with VDOT money.

VDOT is also working on a lot of projects in our area.

Some of them are in the city, some of them across the city county boundaries, some of them are just outside of the county.

So I wanted to highlight a few of those right here at the end.

VDOT is doing planning in our district.

They are doing planning under the program of pipeline projects.

So these are projects where

VDOT has recognized in the state transportation plan that there is a need.

And so they come to the localities and say, how can we help you fix that need?

How can we get you set up to do a smart scale application to address that need?

This year, they're looking at Barracks Road at the 250 interchange, sort of between Emmett Street and Georgetown Road.

And Ivy Road between Copley Road and I believe Bore's Head, or maybe a little bit further west past there.

They're also

taking a smart-scale application for a Pantops Park and Ride project that was part of a previous pipeline project last year.

I believe it's, I think, great.

Next set of projects I want to mention was Hydraulic Road.

We have two projects there that VDOT, well, three technically that VDOT is managing.

Two that are under construction or about to start construction right now.

That's the roundabout at Hillsdale Drive and the pedestrian overpass that would go over 29.

And then one that's about to go into design that we should be having a citizen information meeting on soon.

And that's at District Avenue and Cedar Hill Road on Hydraulic right there at the entrance of Stonefield.

There will be more information on that coming in July.

It's also moving forward with an application for SmartScale, supporting an application for SmartScale for the MPO for an interchange improvement at I-64 at Fifth Street.

They're looking at a design for a diverging diamond interchange that would also incorporate a shared use path.

So diverging diamond interchange, if you're familiar with the interchange over on Pantops, it would look like that, except we're hoping for much more bike-ped infrastructure involved with diversion at Fifth Street.

While they're managing that application, they're also managing a trail project at Fifth Street, sort of back behind the Markets of Tiger Fuel.

There is a trail project.

It's sort of a hub for trails that are going to be leading to that location.

starting from the hub first and then building the spokes out of that trail system.

They have just started that project this past year and have come up with designs for some bridges back there and some connections that will go up to the Wegmans area of the Fifth Street Station Shopping Center.

VDOT is also working on an application, well, they're working on a smart scale project that is at the 29 interchange at Fontaine Avenue that had previously been awarded as a smart scale project.

There were some changes to that design that were recently approved and they'll be moving forward with refining those designs for the intersection improvements there at that interchange.

There's another project on Avon Street that is funded that has not quite yet started.

This would be with multimodal improvements right there at the City County boundary.

some bike pet improvements that will bring people up that hill into the city.

And then in Albemarle, we have several different intersection projects that VDOT's working on and they're all roundabout designs.

So we're going to get to see a lot of innovative intersections in Albemarle County right at our entrance corridors.

We have one at Routes 240, 250 and 680 interchange west of town.

One at Rio Road and John Warner Parkway intersection.

one at Old Lynchburg and Fifth Street Southwest, south of the I-64 interchange and then one at US-20 and 53 south of the I-64 interchange at US-20.

Yeah, they should be posted now.

Is it, okay, sorry.

I don't think it was on Sunday, but anyway.

Thank you all so much.

I look forward to... Mike is giving a presentation next year.

You set the bar high.

We'll be ready.

Thank you.

Yes, so there's two certifications that I'm reading for closed session.

So the first pursuant to Section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code are hereby moved that City Council close this open meeting and convene in a closed session as authorized by Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A1 for one discussion in consideration of prospective candidates to be interviewed for upcoming and existing

Vacancies on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board, and two, discussion and consideration of prospective candidates to be interviewed for upcoming and existing vacancies on the police civilian oversight board, and three, discussion and consideration of applications of prospective candidates seeking appointment to the Board of Zoning Appeals.

and then concurrent with that, we have another closed session or we'll be done at the same time.

I have this motion pursuant to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code.

I hereby move that City Council close this open meeting and convene in a closed meeting as authorized by Virginia Code section 2.2-3711A3 and A6 for one discussion and consideration of the acquisition of real property for a public

Purpose whose discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body and to discussion and consideration of the investment of public funds where Competition or bargaining is involved where if made public initially the financial interest of the city would be adversely affected

Do you need two separate seconds?

Seconds.

So we have both motions or motions have been second.

Can we cast a vote?

The motion passes and we're now in closed session.

We'll return at 6.30.

For those who are joining by Zoom, there'll be a separate link at 4 to 6.30 meeting.

Thank you.

Okay, we are back in session.

Yes, sir.

So the first one I'm reading back in has to do with the Board's commission.

So I move that this council certified by a recorded vote that to the best of each council member's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act.

and identified in the motion convening the closed session were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed session.

Thank you.

Okay, can we vote?

We actually will be actually going back into closed session after the regular meeting.

So we're not going to have a moment of silence.

Mr. Mayor, I would like to say a word about Tom Tom.

I don't know if you can do this now or... Now would be good.

I just wanted to thank the Tom Tom Foundation and all the people that worked, including Mr. Paul Beyer, to put these events on in our community.

I think we're really blessed and fortunate to have that.

I wanted to just a couple of

If you look on their recap page, 170 events and performances, 70 plus artists and performers, 240 plus speakers and presenters, almost 26,000 festival attendees, 120 partnering organizations.

So I just wanted to take a moment to thank

Tom Tom and Paul and all the good work that they did.

Thank you.

Yes, it was a wonderful bend.

It was gathered a lot of people in the community together.

I mean, the music was great.

The weather was great.

In a way, I'm looking forward to already to next year's.

Yes, I've got one.

We've got a note from Mr. Alexander that the ninth annual My Help List contest winners have been selected.

The contest is a thinking, reading, writing activity for students in Charlottesville and the surrounding counties.

They share their thoughts and the importance of helping others and list five things they have or can do to help someone.

This year's winners will be celebrated at a gathering at York Place on Thursday at 6.30 at the Seville Media Center where they will get a cash prize and they are

Great.

Thank you so much.

Brian Pinkston.

whereas May is recognized as an older American month, a time for us to recognize and honor older Americans in the city of Charlottesville and their immense influence on every facet of the community and where Charlottesville recognizes how through their wealth of life experiences and wisdom older Americans

Odo adults guide our younger generations and carry forward abundant culture and historical knowledge.

And whereas the theme of Odo American Month is powered by connection recognizing the profound impact

and meaningful relationships and social connections have on our health and well-being and the vital role that connectedness plays in supporting independence and aging in place by combating isolation, loneliness and other issues and now therefore the city of Charlottesville

hereby proclaim May 2024 to be Old American Month.

We urge every residents to celebrate their older citizens and to recognize the profound impact of meaningful interactions and social connections on well-being of health and wealth of older Americans in our community.

Just want to thank City Council and all the staff of Charlottesville.

I think this theme is really exemplified by Charlottesville's commitment to their seniors by their support for Java, but also the support for affordable housing for seniors for tax relief so people can age in the community and the support of the Charlottesville Area Alliance that works with 30 different agencies to create an age-friendly community.

Thank you so much for your work.

And I just note that I serve on Jabba Board with Martin, a whole host of other community volunteers.

Yes, and likewise anyone here to accept it, feel free to come up.

But whereas the Salvation Army Week is an opportunity to recognize the Salvation Army and its many volunteers and staff both internationally and locally for their continued dedication of offering others a helping hand and whereas the Salvation Army is a non-government provider of direct social services,

meeting physical and spiritual needs of millions of people worldwide and whereas the Salvation Army assists thousands of individuals and families in the Greater Charlottesville community without discrimination by providing food, clothing, emergency shelter, financial assistance, hope and guidance as well as many additional programs and services and whereas the Salvation Army is grateful for and relies upon the support of the Greater Charlottesville citizens in its mission of doing the most good including but not limited to the following contributions to the community in 2023.

4,677 people assisted, 49,265 meals provided, 18,278 nights lodging, 1,700 clothing items, 482 furnitures given, 577 energy assisted, 913 hygiene items, 6,829 volunteer hours, and 1,515 volunteers.

The Salvation Army has been serving in Charlottesville since 1912.

It was in 1954 that President Dwight D. Eisenhower first proclaimed this coming week as National Salvation Army Week.

The stats that you read are annual stats from last year.

typically giving out 50,000 meals annually to individuals in our community.

About three weeks ago, my team came to me and said that they had served over 1,000 meals that week, and then they came back and said that they had served almost 1,200 meals the week after that.

And so, need continues to increase in our community, and we appreciate the support of Charlottesville and its Citizens 3 for our service here in the community.

God bless you.

Thank you.

Our church looks forward to our time and we can come there and prepare meals.

So thank you for your service that you serve in the community.

Yes, I have this proclamation, National Police Week May 12th through 20th, 2024, National Peace Officers Memorial Day May 15th, 2024.

Whereas the Congress and President of the United States

have designated the week in which May 15th occurs as National Police Week in May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day and whereas the City of Charlottesville Police Department plays an essential role in safeguarding the constitutional rights and freedoms of all members of the community and whereas it is important that all citizens know and understand the hazards, duties, and responsibilities of their police department and that members of our department recognize their duty to serve the people by safeguarding life and property

protecting them against violence or disorder and protecting the innocent against deception and the weak against oppression and whereas the names of dedicated police officers who have died in the line of duty are engraved on the walls of the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington DC and whereas the men and women of the city of Charlottesville Police Department unceasingly provide this vital public service in a manner that builds trust

Now, therefore, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville, Virginia declares the week of May 12th, May 20, 2024 to be National Police Week in the City of Charlottesville in May 15 to be Peace Officers Memorial Day.

We call upon all community members to join in commemorating law enforcement officers past and present who by their faithful and loyal devotion to the responsibilities have rendered a dedicated service to the community and have established an enduring reputation for preserving the rights and security of all community members.

be it therefore proclaimed that we observe May 15 as Peace Officers Memorial Day in honor of law enforcement officers who through their courageous deeds have made the ultimate sacrifice in service to their community or have become disabled in the performance of duty and let us recognize and pay respect to the survivors of our fallen heroes.

Sign and seal the sixth day of May 2024 by our Mayor Juan Diego

Mayor, counselors, I thank you for this proclamation.

You know, every day our police officers across this country, they put under uniforms and they face the unknown.

They confront danger head on, often risking their own lives to protect others.

I saw this about a week ago when a person who was in crisis ran at one of our officers with a knife and was ultimately able to be taken into custody without the use of deadly force.

These officers worked tirelessly around the clock to uphold the laws and keep our society functioning.

Our officers are guided by a sense of duty and a belief in justice that transcends politics and personal opinions.

But being a police officer in the midst of political turmoil is not easy.

They are often caught in the crossfire of conflicting ideologies and criticized from all sides.

And yet they continue to serve with integrity and honor.

They are the embodiment of resilience, facing each day with courage and determination.

But their job is not just about enforcing the law.

It's also about compassion and empathy.

Police officers are often the first to respond in times of crisis.

providing comfort and support to those in need.

Like this past Christmas, when two of our officers had to provide CPR to a three-year-old under a Christmas tree on Christmas morning, they are the pillars of strength in our communities and continue to be the call of choice when our members of our community are in crisis.

We must also remember the families of those brave men and women.

They too make sacrifices.

supporting their loved ones and their noble calling, often enduring long periods of separation and worry.

As we honor the memory of those officers who have made the ultimate sacrifice, let us please also show our appreciation for those who continue to serve.

Let us thank them for their dedication, their bravery and their unwavering commitment to the law and the safety of our community.

To all the police officers that are here today and to members of our community action team that are here today,

I say thank you.

Thank you for your service, your sacrifice, and your commitment to keeping our community safe.

for our favorite clerk.

Whereas the professional municipal clerk, a time honored and vital part of local government exists throughout the world, it is the oldest profession among public servants.

Whereas the office of the municipal clerk provides a professional link between the citizens, the local governing body, city departments, and agencies of government at other levels,

serving as an information center on functions of local government and community and whereas professional municipal clerks have pledged to be ever mindful of their neutrality and impartiality rendering equal service to all recording that which is true and subscribing to a professional and personal code of ethics and whereas professional municipal clerks continually strive to improve the administration of the affairs of the office the municipal clerk

The participation in professional certification programs, education seminars, workshops, and the annual meetings of their state, regional, and international professional organizations.

And whereas a few of the responsibilities of the local municipal clerk include being the official keeper of the city seal,

recording and certifying official actions of the governing body, managing the city council meeting agenda process and attending city council meetings, managing the boards and commissions, appointment process, and serving as liaison for the sister city's commission.

And whereas Kena Thomas, master municipal clerk, serves as chief of staff, clerk of council, and Maxillia Robinson serves as deputy clerk of council,

Now, therefore, the Charlottesville City Council recognizes the week of May 5th through May 11th as Professional Municipal Clerks Week and further extends appreciation to our professional municipal clerk and her staff for their exemplary dedication to the services they provide to the public, to the city organization, and to the governing body.

Thank you.

This is one time I will step away from my chair.

But the municipal clerk role is not something that a little child dreams of being one day because most people don't even know that it exists.

So throughout years of training in the administrative field and other jobs, it just so happened that the position came open in my former locality and I kind of fell in love with the work.

So I continue to be dedicated to earning certifications and moving forward and just seeing what I could make of the role.

So it has been very enjoyable.

And tonight is really not about me.

I want to acknowledge my deputy.

This year has been a heavy lift as far as her role with boards and commissions and the sister cities commission in particular.

We have had three delegation visits from our sister cities and our friendship city.

The first one was

Winneba.

We had a delegation from Winneba Ghana come last summer.

We have a friendship city that we're working on, Huehue, Tanango, Guatemala.

So we had a delegation come from there, and we toured with them, took them all over to different locations locally.

And then the most recent is Bess & Son France.

So those delegation visits would not have run it smoothly had it not been for Maxillia Robinson.

She has been very diligent in working with the sister cities commission and being available to answer questions, being steadfast in understanding protocol rules and helping them to also understand.

Well, I would like to thank you all as well.

We couldn't function without you all.

It's probably today.

I'll probably email and call you at least a dozen times before the meeting.

So we depend on you all.

So thank you all so much.

We have a lot of work to do, a lot of organizations to be part of, and a lot of things to do.

And we just could not do it without you all.

So thank you so much.

So thank you.

As I announced last meeting, this is bike month, but now we're making it official with a proclamation.

Whereas bicycling is a healthy, clean, efficient and affordable mode of transportation and recreation used by thousands of citizens and residents of all ages throughout our great Commonwealth and city.

and whereas traveling by bicycle has been proven to alleviate traffic congestion and reduced pollution associated with vehicular travel and offer significant mental and physical health benefits to bicyclists themselves and whereas the City of Charlottesville has undertaken ambitious goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and is committed to providing more multimodal transportation options for all residents

and whereas Charlottesville, Albemarle County and the University of Virginia alongside a large cohort of businesses, agencies and community groups are hosting many bicycle events that promote awareness, safety, new travel options as well as building community and whereas these groups and many others are also promoting the use of bicycle as a means of both of transportation and recreation year round to improve community health, economic vitality, environmental stewardship and the simple joy of being active outdoors.

Do we have someone here?

So thank you so much.

And I hesitated to come up because this proclamation actually belongs to the residence of Charlottesville.

So I'm going to pass it on to James when I'm done, and he'll make sure it goes into the right place.

You mentioned a large cohort of organizations who put this

years bike month together, starting first and foremost with the City of Charlottesville and its many residents.

But also we were joined this year with astonishingly many events at both the University of Virginia and in Albemarle County.

They both have been very active, as well as many organizations, groups, and individuals.

I wanted to call attention to a couple of events that people can participate in this month.

This coming Wednesday is Bike to School Day.

It is a longer name than that.

It's like bike, roll, and walk to school day on Wednesday.

So all the elementary schools will have an event, albeit Clark.

Super excited about that.

Next week is Bike to Work Week.

There'll be an event at UVA Hospital on Monday of next week.

on the Friday of next week.

There'll be a celebration, encouragement, and snack station on West Bain Street.

There are e-bike and safety demonstrations throughout the month.

In fact, the county just had one tonight.

They got postponed due to lightning, so hopefully that'll get rescheduled.

There's a bike month business challenge where all the businesses in the region can compete for bragging rights.

And all of this is listed out on the website, bikemonthseville.org.

Thank you.

There are two preregistered speakers leaving 14 slots for additional speakers on Community Minors.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes to speak.

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

The first speaker is Lisa Kustolo.

I was coming down to talk about David Yancey.

He was a Charlottesville resident and a World War II veteran.

He is interned at the Oakwood Cemetery, but his grave marker is down at Hartmans on East Market Street.

He passed in 1974.

So in July it will be 50 years, and we haven't been able to find a next of Ken, but his marker is down there.

The city of Charlottesville did go through the oak wood and take a picture of it, you know, of his

where he's buried, but we haven't been able to find any of his next of kin.

I called Hartman Memorials about getting the stone moved back.

They said the government paid for his stone because he was a World War II veteran, but they didn't pay for it to be installed.

And so basically his grave marker has been at Hartman Memorials on East Market Street for the last 50 years.

I mean, come July.

So anyway, I guess I was interested.

I don't know if anybody, I don't know if the city or anybody was an earshot can have any say so or I was thinking of taking up a donation.

They said we could have the grave marker back, but they will have to install it.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

And Mr. Well, for his service.

What was his name?

Yancy.

Yancy.

Hello Counselors, my name is M Gunter and I live off Jefferson Park Avenue here in Charlottesville.

I'm also an anthropology student at the University of Virginia where on Saturday I watched riot police from the University, Charlottesville Albemarle County and Virginia State Police descend on my university where my peers and I have been peacefully protesting Israel's ongoing genocide of Palestine since last Tuesday afternoon.

Why did University President Jim Ryan feel the need to authorize the Virginia State Police to beat my classmates and professors, you may ask?

Tense.

It is because of less than a dozen tents that the University of Virginia decided to allow a multi-agency riot squad to assault my classmates.

Where was this multi-agency riot squad when neo-Nazis marched the lawn in 2017?

Why was riot police deemed the appropriate response to a policy violation that could have been resolved through other means?

Since Saturday, there has been near universal outcry from the UVA community and others across the globe.

In his letter of resignation from UVA's Religion, Diversity, and Belonging Task Force, Professor Oganake borrows on the words of Dr. King's letter from Birmingham Jail.

Our greatest stumbling block is the moderate administrator who is more devoted to order than justice, who prefers a negative piece which is the absence of tension to a positive piece which is the presence of justice.

After the first wave of students were beaten and arrested, I walked between the line of riot police and students documenting the conduct of the officers who were beating my friends.

While walking up and down the line of riot police holding chemical weapons, canisters, and long guns, I asked officers to disclose their names and badge numbers as their riot gear obfuscated such information.

All officers refused to answer this question.

I call on the city council to immediately open an investigation into the conduct of the Charlottesville City police officers who refuse to disclose their names or badge numbers.

On Saturday night, the university's decision to allow riot cops to beat its student was on the front page of nearly every national news source, just like numerous other college campuses these last three weeks.

In these past three weeks, the media has been focusing on ruckus on college campuses, calling us anti-war protesters or propel city protesters, ignoring the fact that we are anti-genocide protesters.

I have barely been able to move due to severe pain resulting from Saturday's assault on grounds, but it is not about me.

It is about the people of Gaza.

A week ago, a mass grave with over 390 people was discovered at a hospital, including patients that still had catheters in them, doctors and children who had been buried alive, and doctors and patients beaten to death.

The media is ignoring this while the United States continues to fund Israel's genocide of Palestine unabetted.

As I speak here, Israel has begun invading Rafa where over 1.5 million people are at risk of indiscriminate massacre.

I conclude, demanding that the city council explain why Charlottesville Police Department officers made the majority of Saturday's arrests

Despite the fact that the University of Virginia grounds falls within the county's jurisdiction.

Why was Charlottesville Police Department so hands-on in the use of mace and rubber bullets as part of the violent assault on UVA students, faculty, and staff?

Thank you.

We have opportunity for 14 other speakers.

Good evening, Council.

I'm James Groves, City Resident.

You know me from past speaking activities.

I'm here on a little bit different issue and certainly nothing quite as significant as what we just heard about.

But it's an issue that you heard about earlier at your work session.

And I want to talk for a couple minutes about, I think, a closely related issue.

My concern that I just kind of on the spur of the moment decided to come down and talk to you about tonight is in regards to engineering activities in the operations of the city of Charlottesville As I found out from Sean Tubbs yesterday in a news drop and as you heard I guess in your work session earlier VDOT has found the city deficient

at building projects in this community.

I haven't had a chance to listen to that work session.

I'll go back and do that, so hopefully none of my comments are already out of date.

And I'm certainly concerned about those projects.

There are a number of those ongoing in my community that seem to drag on forever, the light at the corner of Rugby Avenue, Rose Hill being an example.

But I'm also concerned about the engineering workforce

specifically engineering workforce in the city government.

And I'm wondering why so many of the engineers or engineering related staff members have left within the last year.

The ones that I'm aware of are Andrea Henry, professional engineer, Water Resources Protection Administrator, I believe left the city last June.

Jack Dawson, city engineer who left in January, February I believe of this year.

Tony Edwards, floodplain administrator who I believe now works for the county and most recently Hugh Blake, a long-term professional engineer who has worked for the city for many years.

Now I may not have my facts straight and I absolutely would welcome correction on any of these if I have a misunderstanding about their departure.

But my sense is that you had this presentation earlier this evening about projects.

and

These individuals that I named in great depth, but I do know a couple of them and I've reviewed their work in great detail.

And I know them to be highly professional.

Andrea Henry is one who's worked, I've looked at extensively.

And I should mention, as you may remember, I'm a licensed professional engineer involved in engineering at the university and also in the community.

She does excellent work, things that I've reviewed.

I've reviewed the work of Hugh Blake extensively as well.

Excellent engineering work.

And so, for instance, Councillor Oschrin is interested in bike infrastructure as I am, and a number of those in the room.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Good evening, Don Gathers, City Resident.

I, too, am very much concerned and disturbed about the goings on from this past Saturday.

It was 54 years to the day, 54 years when the massacre at Kent State happened.

Thank God we didn't have it to, we didn't have anything to occur to that particular level here, but it certainly made the possibility of it happening.

and it only could happen with the blessings of either President Jim Ryan or the Board of Visitors or Governor Junkin.

And it's bothersome and painful to think that the opportunity for free speech ceases to exist and live on Mr. Jefferson's hallowed halls of hell.

We need to do better and I urge and encourage each and every one of you to

use whatever influence that you may have to act that those charges be dropped against those students and those professors and those community people who are your citizens that were arrested so unnecessarily on Saturday evening.

It looked exactly like some of the issues from the summer of hell of 2017.

and what the community went through.

It's never a good idea to militarize the state police and bring them in.

It just brings further trauma to already traumatized community.

So I encourage you and I urge you, whoever you need to talk to, rather it's a comrade's attorney, Jim Hingeley, whoever you can approach and ask that those charges be dropped, please use whatever influence that you may have.

We don't need to continue to go through these things.

I said several weeks ago that war, regardless of the perpetrators and those involved, is wrong.

So whatever the peaceful actions were that the students were portraying over there, they should have been left alone.

There was an edict that came down from President Brian saying that they were within their rights to do so.

And two hours later, that was changed.

and 30 minutes after that, the assault began.

So I ask you please stand with those students, those professors, those community members who were so unnecessarily handled on that day.

26 arrests, 25 of them were released, 26 was released on this morning.

So please, rather it's our Commonwealth's Attorney, Joe Plotania, rather it's any of you all please, whatever influence or who's ever here that you may have.

Please speak to them about this.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm also speaking regarding the protest.

Now my understanding is that the only actions that the Charlottesville City Police took on that day were to create the encirclement.

I'm sorry, can you give your name?

Oh yes, my name is Mo Vandesampel.

I live at Cabell Avenue.

Now my understanding is that Charlottesville City Police only created the encirclement around the camp and that everything

What I would call thuggish behavior of the people in riot gear was entirely the state police Although I would appreciate being told whether or not that is the case because it sounds like it was very unclear who was actually doing what

The main reason that I'm here today is because I expect that the city will be more transparent than the university will in being forthcoming with information.

And the specific information that I'm here to request, and I think that you were specifically there, so I guess I'll point it at you, is who made the decision that state police was necessary?

Did the university determine that?

Was that Jim Ryan?

Was that Timothy Longo?

I think that a lot of people would really appreciate clarification on this matter.

I don't know if Charlottesville police made that decision.

To me it seems absurd that this level of violence was required for what was effectively a 20-person protest.

We don't answer.

This is not like the Congress.

I have a report.

OK.

Anyone else?

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

I would just generally appreciate a public statement from a city official on this matter.

The other thing that I'd like to point out is that I thought that there was the one thing that I found very uncommendable from the Charlottesville City Police

At the time that I was there, I found that they did not do a very good job of separating the protesters from the counter protesters, a problem which we also had in 2017.

I thought that there were a lot of people being aggravating towards the protesters and that could have resulted in violence, although thankfully I did not see any.

But that's everything.

Thank you.

Anyone else like to speak?

It would be another opportunity at the end of the meeting.

Thank you.

We'll now have the consent agenda, Ms.

Consent Agenda, number three minutes, February 5th, regular meeting, March 28th, budget development, April 4th, budget development, four resolution for revenue sharing program appropriation of $394,256 and a transfer of $394,256 for multimodal improvements, FY21, second reading.

5.

Resolution appropriating funding for the hydraulic road shared use path $40,000 second reading 6.

Resolution appropriating Dogwood Memorial Foundation State Grant pass-through funding $600,000 second reading 7.

Resolution ratifying the meals and lodging tax rates for FY 2025

May I get a second?

Well, I'm sorry.

Okay.

Any further questions on this?

If not, can we vote?

Good evening, counselors and members of the public.

Just a few quick things to run through.

Just wanted to share that I was pleased to have the opportunity and the honor to speak as the keynote speaker to FAR's intern graduation on April 17th.

It was a nice event, being able to talk to folks who are looking to engage further in their community.

We also, a group of us, greeted representatives with the mayor from the National League of Cities who were here in the city on the 18th of April.

They were beginning their 100 city tour in honor of the National League of Cities' 100th anniversary.

So they picked Charlottesville as one of those cities to swing by and present a framed piece of art to us and then to invite us to join them for their conference later this year.

We had our quarterly neighborhood leaders meeting.

That's a meeting that I facilitate with the heads of the leader neighborhood associations That was held on the 18th of April for anyone Interested in some of the things that we discussed the Q&A section of the report that we use we provide an opportunity for these leaders to propose questions to the city staff We put those answers in writing that packet is attached to the city manager's report so that is available for anyone to review and

to see the kinds of things that we're sharing information about.

Also happy to report that we are bringing back inside Charlottesville, our local community affairs program air on Channel 10.

I taped my first segment, which is called On the Spot.

I was playing when I came up with that name and now they stuck me with it.

My intention is that I won't not only just say things to the larger community, but I might actually invite people to be on the spot with me.

That's pretty much how I'm supposed to work.

and in addition to that, furthering our community engagement work.

We are bringing back the city's community-wide newsletter.

The communications team right now is collecting feedback.

We're looking to hear from the public what would you like to see, hear about, and or read.

And if you were interested in sharing your thoughts, you can send an email to communications at charlesville.gov.

We'll be accepting that feedback through the 17th of May and then the team will begin to work on what that newsletter will become and then we'll produce a schedule and get that out to the larger public.

The last item is in regards to Saturday's events.

Our city, of course, had an experience that is one of those things that we regret whenever there's moments that puts any level of peace and jeopardy.

But I just wanted to share a couple of things to clarify.

As I monitored the situation myself, I was taken by a number of comments that were made that

Misdirect what role the Charlottesville Police Department played in the events on Saturday, so I wanted to clear that up.

CPD responded to a request for mutual aid.

That is a standing agreement between law enforcement agencies in this region.

We respond to requests for support as we expect the full cooperation of those same entities if we were to ask them to come in our time of need.

The role for the CPD on Saturday was to establish and maintain a perimeter.

That is it.

That is all that our officers did throughout the event.

The assignments of personnel was within the purview of incident command at the university.

So our officers did not play any role other than crowd control.

That was their purpose on grounds and that is what they did for the entire duration of the event.

So I wanted to make that clear as there were other things that have been attributed to what role they played.

That is my report.

Yeah, I will just say briefly

You know, I'm still concerned about what happens Saturday.

I appreciate the clarity that Charlottesville Police Department's role was strictly to establish a perimeter and it sounds like it was not involved in arrests.

But I would still say I'm concerned, the reporting and the daily progress that the protest was peaceful, that it was peaceful when state riot police were initiated, that UVA

again in daily progress reporting changed their policy that morning to facilitate arrest in a way that appears was potentially not content neutral and finally again from the report just direct quote police indiscriminately sprayed pepper spray into the crowd at one point hitting a daily progress reporter and other members of the media covering the conflict and I know several members with NBC 29 News were also pepper sprayed during that

So I know I'm appreciative of the clarity of CPD's role, but I'm still left wanting to know who called state police to that event.

Was that coming from the state?

Jim Ryan, the Board of Visitors.

And I think it is appropriate to join with delegate Katrina Coulson, State Senator Craig Deeds, as well as the University Democrats in wanting to have some more answers and clarity on what happened.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments?

Will anyone else like to speak?

Thank you.

My name is Peter Krebs.

I'm from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I'm living in the past a little bit.

I thought consent agenda items were still before the consent agenda is read.

I'm glad that you all passed it.

Excellent.

I just wanted to call the community's attention to a couple of things that were inside the consent agenda, which are important.

So one of the items is about VDOT's revenue sharing, which is a 50-50 split where the city and the state combine to pay for sidewalks and roads and stuff.

And the projects in that package include a sidewalk on Monticello Avenue down by Druid.

And I think it's worth pointing out that there's actually a monument to a pedestrian who is struck and killed on that segment.

So thank you for getting a sidewalk in there.

Right next door is another sidewalk project, which will link that segment to the park, Aquari Park.

and then the last item in that package is extending the bike lanes, which you can see coming into place on the Belmont Bridge further up Avon Street.

So those are all three excellent projects.

And then there was another

piece on the consent agenda, which is funding for the hydraulic avenue shared use path or something like that.

That's part of the four mile loop trail the CHS kids were asking about during the budget session.

I made a little map and in order to save paper I'll pass it on to Ms.

Thomas and you guys can pass it down the dais but that's a little segment like it's short like it's way less than a quarter mile maybe it's like a hundred yards or something but it's really important because it connects the

shared his path along the bypass to Mickey Drive and all the people that live up on Mickey Drive connects to the Hillsdale network and obviously the jobs and stores on 29 North.

Thank you.

Thank you so much, Peter.

Does anyone else in the public like to speak?

Okay, so we have to go back in a closed session.

You ready for that?

Yes, yes, I'm sorry.

Okay, I get to read these words again.

There's a lot of them.

The first one pursuant to Section 2.2-3711-3712 of the Virginia Code are hereby moved the City Council to close this open meeting and convene in a closed session.

is authorized by Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A3 and A6.

For one, discussion and consideration of the acquisition of real property for public purchase whose discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body.

And two, discussion and consideration of the investment of public funds where competition or bargaining is involved, where if made public initially the financial interest of the city would be adversely affected.

At the same time, motion as follows pursuant to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code.

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

For one, discussion and consideration of prospective candidates to be interviewed for upcoming and existing vacancies on the road.

Okay, is there a second?

Second?

Okay, can we vote?

Okay, we're in closed session.

We'll come back just to close out the meeting.

Yes.

Okay.

So we had two closed sessions that we handled concurrently and it's the same certification for both.

So I move that this council is certified by a recorded vote that to the best of each council member's knowledge, only public business matters