Human Rights Commission Meeting   4/18/2024

Oh yeah, I'm getting that one.

They did a really good job.

Well done.

Well run.

Okay.

Are you sharing your screen?

I think we're using your charliespeaks.com.

That's the one.

But it's not all showing up.

Like this agenda packet didn't arrive there.

Okay.

I don't know.

Check it.

At least two or three times.

It's good for you.

I did mine.

It's quick.

You get them to have moments.

I did mine.

Thank you for letting us go once.

Then I can email again and it's the wrong date.

Oh, you did it?

Okay.

It's like I could always

James, you want me to drop something to take away from you?

Genwise, like, it's cool for nothing, but it's just, you know, it eventually gets on, in all good sense, right?

Okay, nobody has any other questions, what do you think?

What's that?

Thank you.

How are you?

I'm well, I'm good.

I don't know what counts when we get here.

I'll just come back and leave this in there.

Daniel will not be joining us virtually.

One thing that I have not seen is the output of our work plan.

It's in the back.

It's in the back.

You know I like to be more prepared.

I also took a vegan.

Okay, does someone need a vegan?

I'm not eating.

I'm definitely not eating vegan.

There's sandwiches out there.

Thank you so much.

Anybody vegan?

I fluctuate better.

I don't eat red meat much.

I will eat a vegetarian, sure.

I don't eat at home, but I can eat at home.

I can make so many final comments.

You're craving it.

You don't eat black beans?

I do.

Good evening everyone and thank you for coming out on this nice warm evening.

Yes, it is awesome out compared to last week.

I think we were wearing

jackets or sweaters last week.

So nice to have that on.

It is 634.

We'll go ahead and get started.

We call this meeting to order.

Todd, would you like to do a roll call, please?

Happy to do it.

Ernest?

Here.

Here.

Mary is not here.

Charley?

Here.

Angela is also not here.

Patti is also not here.

Kathryn.

We'll take that as yes.

And Heather.

Here.

Thank you.

Let us go and do our mission statement all together.

One, two, three.

Thank you, everyone.

Just a notice to members of the public participating virtually.

If you have experience, if you experienced technical difficulties, you may call 434-970-3100.

and staff person will assist you.

Again, for members of the public participating virtually, if you experience technical difficulties, you may call 434-970-3115.

Just real quick, do we have any matters of the public?

One person online?

Does that person have, if you are online, your webinar attendee, if you raise your hand, use the raise hand function, or if you are on your phone, the attendee is you, star nine.

A person that is with us, do you,

have any questions for us?

Lorraine say it?

Yes.

All right.

Hi there.

Oh, yes.

Hi.

Well, I was just hoping to talk about sexual

Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

I don't know if you guys were aware of this, but April is actually Sexual Assault Awareness Month, which I think is very important.

I'm glad that we are bringing some of these issues to light.

And I just think it's important as a city that we keep in mind that, you know, there are a lot of people that have been victims of SA that maybe are scared to speak out or are afraid to talk.

You know, I mean, I've noticed that, you know, there are some practices that are going on

I mean, it's also it's also Child Abuse Prevention Month.

And, you know, I think it is very sad that there's some, you know, young children that are not able to defend themselves.

And I speak I work with them, social health services.

And, you know, I've seen a lot of children that have been, you know, sexually assaulted.

And, you know, they don't they're scared to speak up.

And I think it's important that we bring these issues to them, to our attention.

I don't know if you're aware of this practice called Meditza Bepe.

But basically, it's a Jewish circumcision ritual where they, they basically molest the child after they circumcise it, and it gives the child herpes.

And it's a legal practice that I don't believe should be legal.

I mean, I understand that it's protected under their right to freedom of expression of religion.

But I just, I just don't agree that it should be something that's going on in our world.

And but we accept it, and we allow it.

And I would, I would just like to leave the

Thank you for your information.

And thank you.

All right.

Anymore?

Anyone else?

Cool.

I mean, a completely inappropriate thing to bring in what was just said was completely inappropriate.

No, please.

It's human rights.

Those children have rights, too.

What are you talking about?

Can we mute?

Can we talk over it until it's done?

I want to keep talking.

I'll leave it at it's done.

Thumbs up that it's done.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It depends on the rules for your matters from the public with city council because their rules say that you can bring any matter in front of city council and you know there is some leeway as far as if this speech is disruptive however there is more leeway but here and with a commission that has a more limited scope

In the past we have stated some ground rules prior to public comment.

I think it's been a while since we've had members of the public wanting to engage in public comment and I'd say we probably should bring that back

Because there is something in there specifically about hate speech, which we just heard.

And speech that is disruptive too.

That speech has disrupted this meeting.

My colleague is outside the scope of the purpose of this meeting.

So thank you.

As her chair,

Did not appreciate the change of start of your comments and then changing and becoming disruptive.

Disruptive, gross, just

not being very kind and definitely not in the scope of what's on our agenda or just not in a good place.

So for anyone that sees this, this is not something that we condone.

We definitely understand your First Amendment rights to speak, but

Not in that manner.

And I will leave it at that.

Any other comments anything from commissioners?

All right.

We're going to move on.

We're going to disrupt what we need to do today.

Shake it off.

Telling myself.

All right.

Yeah, yes, let's do that.

Let's do that.

Do we need to make a motion to approve?

You don't have to make a motion.

It's a matter of whether or not.

Does anybody have any amendments to the minutes?

from February 15th or March 10th.

Let's do February 15th first.

Okay, Ernest?

Approve.

Approve.

Charley?

Approve.

Kathryn?

Suzanne?

And Heather?

Approved.

Great.

All right.

And

Yes.

Ernest?

Yeah, approved.

OK. OK. Approved.

Charley?

You were there.

I'm sorry.

I was there.

I'm sorry.

There he is.

Suzanne?

Approved.

Approved.

All right.

Chair updates, thank you to the office for getting out information about upcoming meetings and things that are going on.

I see that we are doing something is that on the 25th of April?

It's tomorrow?

No.

That's 25th?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lawyers and housing?

Tomorrow we have a Tom Tom thing.

Tom Tom thing.

Oh, just be fun.

He's on the panel.

Yeah.

So appreciate you guys and your work that you're doing getting out to the community.

I really don't have

Anything else that I have to state that I know of?

I do want to try to do, I know Fridays After Five are coming back to my town.

So I said something to

Lily and Todd about maybe one evening as people are walking in that we have our table out since the office is right here that we would man a table out there to as people walk by say hello and you know and that type of thing not to spend all night out there but at least get people as they're walking in before the bands and we'll have to get started rolling in things so

I was thinking if you could put out maybe a sign of Jesus or something to everyone and kind of get an idea of dates you guys would like to do that maybe once or twice in the month.

That's all I have.

It probably would.

So like I said, it's only if they can and when they can.

It's not something I am mandating that they do.

But something that I ask that we could do is an outreach.

Since it's right there, we can just pull the table out from the office and set it up, and we don't have to travel anywhere.

So this would be these two and one of us?

Like I said, it's not something that... Sparty Center 5 starts at 5, right?

Yeah.

And it's not all night long, just an hour or so of that.

You know, like once the bands get started,

because then the level of people coming through will diminish because everybody's watching and the kids run around and all that stuff.

That's all I have.

We can talk about that.

Yeah, so that is something that we had already had in mind.

So I'm glad to hear that you're interested in doing that.

And we have the permits and permissions to do that.

Anytime that we, it's something that I would prefer to have a commissioner present for.

So I'm happy to do it anytime that anyone is available and I will probably give it to those times.

All right.

Outreach updates?

Sure.

One-on-one meetings.

I'm still around, you can have a one-on-one with me anytime you would like.

This weekend on Sunday, we have, well, I'll start with tomorrow on Friday, we have a panel discussion on conversations during conflict, which is a collection of different groups that do mediation type services, including Todd.

Sets tomorrow at 10 a.m.

And this Sunday at one o'clock in the Central Library, we're doing the culminating panel discussion for the Community Read.

For those of you who've been following along with that, if you'd like to come on Sunday, you don't have to have read the book.

Just come and listen if you'd like.

On April 25th, we have

A Fair Housing Know Your Rights presentation and Q&A session here at 6pm and on Zoom.

You can come to that if you're interested.

And yeah, we have some other things cooking that I'm happy to bring to you when they're more prepared.

Or if you'd like to be involved in the planning, you can let me know.

And I know if you have questions.

Is there anything commissioners can do to support the Know Your Rights event on Thursday?

I assume most of the details have been locked in because it's a week away.

But if there was anything that commissioners can do,

And I think, too, it's always valuable to have commissioners present.

People will ask questions, and it's a chance for you to say how to engage with the commission.

You can invite people to participate in public comment in person and bring ideas and thoughts when we have panels and town halls and things like that.

So that's just a chance for you to share how people can engage with the commission.

We talk about it in our presentation, generally speaking, but it might be great to hear from a commissioner if you're able to attend.

so they can put a face to the commission as well.

And just for new commissioners, cause this is maybe the first regular meeting agenda back that you've been looking at.

We always put a monthly report in the agenda packet.

That's kind of a summary of what staff have been doing over the past month and has all of our data from our individual service as well as our outreach and kind of status of different cases and stuff like that.

Obviously the identified data about cases, but

Just you can find that stuff if you ever have questions about any of that, feel free to reach out.

I'm happy to answer questions.

I won't highlight anything in there right now, but the only thing I would say is that we also have a quarterly obligation to send reports to council for the ordinance.

And a while back, we agreed that we would just send this monthly report quarterly.

So this is the first one we sent.

And you probably saw that in email.

last evening and Mayor Wade responded.

So it's been a great event too.

It reminds me that I forgot to attach the work plan.

Being informal, but I am, that is the new thing because we've not had a work plan like this in the past.

So I thought that would be important to share with council and it dovetails well with what city manager is also doing in terms of work plan.

I know something outreach that we didn't talk about that wasn't brought up was the Haven is having a program the 24th of April at 7 p.m. Housing First, Homelessness and Program Access at 7 o'clock.

So I plan on attending that.

So I will have the time off to do that.

So I'm going to put that on the schedule if you can.

That's everything from the office.

Can we go to the work session?

We're going to go into the work session part of the meeting.

And we have a couple of things that we want to do.

First one is we have a couple of city staff members here on this evening to talk about COYA, FOIA, and BPRA.

Without further ado, I will attempt to share my screen.

So my name is Rob Hubbard.

I'm deputy city attorney for the city of Charlottesville.

I'm here with Brittany Nelson.

She's our FOIA officer.

I'm very happy to be here and spread our love of FOIA and a lot of information that we've learned over, for me, the last couple of years handling FOIA for the city.

So what is FOIA?

First of all, it's the Freedom of Information Act.

And the purpose of FOIA is

Right, the free flow of information.

So to make sure that citizens of Virginia have ready access to public records and free entry to meetings where the business of the people is conducted.

So the general rule is that every meeting should be open to the public and all public records should be available for inspection and copy.

You can see we're going to talk about three different laws in about 20 to 30 minutes and so

We're going to try to move through, but if you have questions, feel free to stop us.

The way I look at FOIA, it applies to two things.

It applies to open records and also open meetings.

So the first aspect we're going to talk about is the records.

What to do if you get a FOIA request for your emails from the last

and three years or what have you on a particular topic.

So the basic mandate for FOIA, all public records shall be open to citizens of the Commonwealth, representatives of newspapers or magazines with circulation in the Commonwealth and representatives of radio and television stations broadcasting into the Commonwealth.

So the first question that we always ask if we get a FOIA request is, is that person a citizen or resident of Virginia?

And if they're not, we can, you know,

We can tell that their FOIA request will not be answered.

Typically you will have maybe someone who has an attorney or has an agent within the Commonwealth of Virginia and they can submit the request and at that point we have to answer it.

But sometimes we get all kinds of requests and sometimes they're from California and they really don't have the right to FOIA.

This is Virginia's law for Virginia residents, Virginia citizens.

What is a public record?

Public Record is any recording or writing that's prepared by a city staff or employee or officer that's created in the transaction of public business.

And so it doesn't matter if it's your personal email or your personal advice, it's no matter is it in writing?

Is it discussing public business?

Are you a person to whom FOIA applies?

If the answers to all three of them are yes, then that document is FOIAable.

A record can still be a public record, even if it's in the possession of an individual city employee, officer, or on a privately owned device.

So the way that that comes up most frequently is text messages.

And, you know, if you have a city phone, then I would say text city business on your city phone, but I don't have a city phone.

And so sometimes, you know, even I may send a text to a coworker saying, hey, did you get that?

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Keep in mind that your text messages are fallible.

If they ask for, you know, all communications,

Between, you know, Mr.

Chambers and Mr. Niemeier, that includes text messages.

The horror story, you know, and imagine everyone always says, you know, before you type something and hit send, imagine being on the front page of the daily progress.

And here's an example of the city manager for Virginia Beach.

and he was in an altercation with someone from the State Transportation, Department of Transportation and he, if you look at the bottom, it says, you know, in his text messages to one of his associates, Deputy City Manager, not doing me any favors, I don't want to meet with R because he's going to have to put a cotton ball up his nose after I punch him.

and someone FOIA'd the text messages and that was in the text messages and so that ends up being in the front page of his local paper.

So I mean, you know, a lot of times you write something that you want to send, you're mad and you want to send something.

My advice would be don't hit send.

Again, if you can avoid it, do not use personal devices to conduct public business and if you receive emails or texts to your personal email or phone, forward them to your city account and then respond from there.

So that's where if you have your city account and your local, you know, your personal account, as long as they're the same emails, you can produce the ones from your city account.

However, I just, as a general rule, I don't do, you know, my personal emails for my personal business and my work emails for work.

And I don't let the two mix because, you know, I don't want people going through my email, honestly, you know.

That's for the weekends.

So anyway, if you receive, as we said, you know, if it's sent to your personal email or your phone, just forward it to your city account and go from there.

So what counts as a request for records?

FOIA requests can be made verbally or in writing.

And sometimes you will have where someone says, hey, you guys were talking about some memo at the commission meeting last night.

I want a copy of that.

That's a FOIA request.

And the clock starts ticking once the request is made.

So when you get that, when that happens and someone makes an oral request, ask them to send it to you in writing.

You know, you can forward that request to the FOIA officer and put that in the FOIA system.

That way, you know, we can keep track of the request.

But again, it can be an oral request for a FOIA document and it counts as a FOIA request.

Responding to the FOIA requests.

So the city has five business days to respond and must give one of the following answers, that either the records are being withheld due to an exemption, which we'll talk about, that the records are being provided in part and withheld in part, the records cannot be found or do not exist, and that's where the Public Records Act comes in, and then it's not possibly or practically possible to locate or produce the records in five days,

and the city can ask for an additional seven business days.

But typically without a court order, we're supposed to respond in 12 business days to a FOIA request, or we could face penalties.

Here's kind of a flow chart that my colleague April made.

Some of my friends in law school, that's how their brain worked.

They worked in kind of flow charts.

So do the records exist?

No, if they don't, then yeah, it's easy.

We don't have to create records that don't exist.

But if they do, you know, can we get them in five days?

You know, and you can kind of read for yourself.

But there's kind of the FOIA game.

I'll give you a few seconds to play that game before.

I kind of like at the end where they do the high five and say congratulations, you probably won't get sued.

Emphasis on probably.

So anyway.

So what did you do if a citizen asked you directly for a city record?

If you got it, and if you have it, and you can produce it quickly, then just produce the document.

Can I ask a question about that?

Sure.

So I am out chatting with a friend, and I mentioned something about the Human Rights Commission.

And they say, hey, can I get a copy of law?

Is that an effect?

Like, that doesn't matter what circumstance I'm in.

That is correct.

Right, or just, you know, if you're talking about, be careful talking about public business, right?

So the answer to that, as a public official, you're not obligated to produce the documents to the requester, but you must notify the city's FOIA officer about it.

And again, the important part of that is that the clock starts ticking on the five business days when the request is made.

Oh, sorry.

Can I just say one thing?

Yeah.

Todd does an excellent job and I'm sure Lily as well to add things to the website.

So if they are requesting something that is already posted on the website, you can in that moment direct them to the website in that conversation.

And that can be considered like we don't have to let you know or anything like that?

That's correct.

Another important point, if the document does not exist, you do not have to create a document.

And someone says, I want a report of all the different, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah in the last two years.

And you have to take data from somewhere else and compile it into a document.

You don't have to do that, right?

But if the record does exist, then it should be produced.

So again, what information can be withheld?

And there are a list of different exemptions, attorney-client privilege being one, records prepared for closed session being another.

So there are some exemptions that can be applied to FOIA.

However, you should assume that the exemptions are to be applied narrowly and the requests are to be replied broadly.

And so in all the cases I've read from the Supreme Court of Virginia involving FOIA, they lean towards

Open transparency of government.

They want the free flow of information.

And so again, don't think that you can rely on one of these exemptions because we may not be able to.

Again, some of the common ones, attorney-client privilege, the personnel information.

So one of them is that, you know, things within the person's personnel and file, you know, could be withheld.

There's been some case law.

Let me see if I can go back.

There's been some case law.

that goes against that a little bit.

Records from closed meetings can be waived.

And then the last one doesn't necessarily apply to you, but maybe it does.

If it's involving a contract where there's competition and bargaining, you know, during the bid process, we're not supposed to release that information.

After the bid process is over, we can release the information.

So a single instance of denial of the rights and privileges conferred by FOIA is enough to show a violation and you can be awarded remedies.

So that's even if you just missed the five and seven day deadlines.

The FOIA records cases are heard on an expedited basis.

And unlike in most cases, the city has the burden of proof.

So we have to prove that the violation didn't occur, which can be difficult at times.

and then the penalties.

And this is the important, this is usually where people sit up straighter because penalties can be assessed against the city but also can be assessed against individual employees and officers in their personal capacities.

An individual employee or officer who willfully and knowingly violates FOIA, the court shall impose a fine of 500 to $2,000 on the first offense and 2,000 to $5,000 on the subsequent offense.

And that's your money, that is not the city's money.

Officers may also be fined $100 for each individual record they alter or destroy to avoid FOIA obligations.

And you go, that's crazy.

I would never do that.

People do that.

So again, you know, don't try to be sneaky.

Don't try to be slick.

Don't try to hide things.

Definitely don't try to destroy anything.

And also,

Again, a quick thing with the American legal system.

Typically, you pay for your own attorney.

Typically, only in certain situations does the loser have to pay the winner's attorney's fees.

But FOIA is one of those situations where if the city loses, the city's obligated to pay plaintiff's attorney's fees as well.

And that can be, you know, a few thousand dollars.

It can be expensive real quick.

All right, moving on.

So that's the recap on the records aspect.

Five business days to respond.

We got to get one of four responses.

Five days includes the legal review time.

So we definitely appreciate that you find those records and send them to Brittany as soon as possible.

Verbal requests do count as FOIA requests.

These exemptions are applied narrowly.

And again, there's potential personal liability for not following FOIA.

The meetings piece,

Question.

Go ahead.

About the foyer.

And you said the clock starts.

The clock starts going back to when Susan was asking about a friend asking for a document.

Um, it starts when you get the requests.

I think they would give us some grace for the next business day.

That would be day one.

You know, if I'm out of dinner and someone asked me for a document.

Okay.

All right.

Well, give me till tomorrow morning.

Um, but I would consider that first that, you know, nine o'clock that next day to be day one.

Um, and the clock is ticking.

And again, it's business days.

Yeah.

So if it happens on a Saturday, the clock would start on Monday at eight o'clock.

So again, part of meetings, you know, for the public to show up, they've got to know about it.

So the public must receive adequate notice of meetings.

Meeting materials must be open to public inspection.

So typically at the same time your agenda is available to the commissioners, it's also got to be available to the public.

And minutes must be taken of every meeting.

What is the public body?

County, cities, and towns, their governing bodies, school boards, and planning commissions, and any committee, subcommittee, or other entity, that's you guys, created to perform delegated functions of the public body or advisor.

So we are considered a public body.

What is a meeting?

A meeting occurs when three or more commissioners are assembled physically or through electronic meetings and public businesses transacted or discussed.

So that means you're at a cocktail party,

If you're at a funeral or you're at a baseball game and you're talking about, you know, Billy and Susie and how, you know, who's going to prom together and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you're not discussing public business, does not count.

But just try to keep that in mind and if there's three of you together, eh, you know, one of you might want to consider saying hello and then taking on.

When is it not a meeting?

A gathering of employees or members of the public body is not a meeting when no part of the purpose of such gathering or attendance is the discussion or transaction of any public business and such gathering or attendance was not called or prearranged

with any public or any purpose of discussing or transacting any business of the public body.

So again, a purely social event wouldn't count, but do not, you know, just don't discuss business, right?

You're at the football game.

So let me ask you, so say that on the 24th, more than three of us show up at the Haven.

Will we have to make public notice of that or

What's the purpose of the meeting at The Haven?

So potentially, but one way to get around that is to only have two commissioners show up.

And a lot of times with council, we'll do two, two ones and I'll sit down with two counselors

and then I sit down with two more counselors and then I sit down with the mayor.

And I didn't, we didn't violate FOIA because you didn't have three people together.

So I know it seems a little bit tricky, but again, you don't want to have the double secret where the counselors get together at the baseball game and they talk business and no one knew about that they were deciding something at the baseball game.

Right.

Just concerned that, you know, plus to, you know, for some of our initiatives that we were trying to

to get information on.

And sometimes those things happen either online or in person.

We're not conducting business.

What if somebody at the Haven while we're at this event then asks a question about the work of the Human Rights Commission and one of us answers it?

Now what is it?

That gets really tricky.

That gets really tricky.

Should I then keep that in mind from an outreach perspective?

Should there be no more than two commissioners present at any outreach event that I hold or tabling?

I just want to make sure.

And what's public notice?

Right.

Right, but if there's a public calendar of events that is up for the month.

That's correct.

And during the month, there's an outreach event and

Three of us are at the table.

You have to take minutes.

Right.

I'm going for two.

Two just seems like a good idea to think of.

We could just have a rule of two.

But Fridays After Five is not, the purpose of Fridays After Five is not the gathering or attendance or discussion of public business.

And so the gathering or attendance was not called or prearranged with any purpose of discussing the transaction.

So I think that's part of it and that's a little bit of your loophole as far as you're at a social event and people start talking business.

Except the Fridays After Five event is a table specifically for the Human Rights Commission, right?

I would still err on the side of having two commissioners.

You know, for now.

And I can follow up and do more research.

I know with one of the airport commissions.

Well, I guess that's just their quorum, though.

But again, I can look into it further and push back.

Rob, one other thing.

Maybe it's also talking about transacting business rather than talking about what

The other thing I'm thinking about is, you know, in the past there's been an annual meeting of

Virginia Commissioners from the different localities with Human Rights Commissions down in Virginia Beach and it may occur again this year and many of them have three or more commissioners there in attendance but it's more of that they're not making decisions they're talking about what they do and sharing anything

The things that they're sharing are things that would be publicly available anyway in their minutes and their ordinances and they're just sharing.

This is what we do.

They're not making any decisions about their locality.

So just thinking about that, we'd love to have more commissioners be able to participate in that, but we just have to be careful that we don't discuss it.

Right.

Or we publicly notice it, but no minutes are taken at that meeting.

So that's the challenge.

Yeah.

As far as

Other than to say, these are the things we're working on this year, which would already be in minutes because you've already been working on them or you're talking about things that are already in your ordinance, how your ordinance operates, that sort of thing.

decisions about things that you're going to do.

You're just talking about things you've done or things that exist in writing.

Yeah.

Right, exactly.

All right, so here we go.

What counts as public business?

Those matters over which the public governmental body has supervision, control, jurisdiction, or advisory power.

Business that is on a public body's agenda or is likely to come before the public body in the foreseeable future.

So the topic may not appear on the formal agenda, but it's also not sufficient that the topic conceptually could at some point, it's gotta be a little bit better than like maybe sometime in the future we might discuss this.

But it also doesn't have to be, we're discussing this next week either.

It's kind of somewhere in the middle on that continuum.

Open meetings procedures.

So as Brittany said, at least three days notice must be given except in an emergency.

Agenda materials must be provided to the public at the same time they're made available to members of the public body and written minutes must be taken and must include a record of members attendance and any votes that are taken.

Closed meetings.

So public bodies may hold closed meetings only for certain narrow purposes, such as to protect the privacy of individuals regarding personal matters not related to public business or to discuss certain subjects such as limited personnel or legal matters.

When you go into closed session, you have to do certain things before the closed session.

You gotta do something during this closed session and then after the closed session.

So before the closed session, the commission must take an affirmative vote

in an open meeting and the vote must identify the subject and purpose of the closed session and cite the applicable FOIA exemption.

There's some language down there as far as kind of some template language to use.

The authorized exemptions for open meeting requirements.

So right, so just kind of saying, oh, we're going to do it pursuant to FOIA, you have to say we are,

having a closed meeting to discuss an attorney-client privilege matter, upcoming litigation, and name the lawsuit, and then go into closed session.

And then during the closed session, the public body must limit its discussion to only those matters specifically exempted.

The public matter, so you can't say, yeah, we're going to closed session, talk about one thing, and then you go into closed session, you talk about something else.

You have to talk about what was that specified topic.

And you may not take any formal action such as a vote while in closed session.

Then after the closed session, you have to certify that no other topics were discussed other than the exempted matter identified in the motion.

And again, the city can be fined $1,000 if this certification was not in accordance with FOIA.

Subject matter is in a closed meeting.

For instance, prospective candidates for employment or appointment, performance, discipline of certain public officers, issues related to actual or potential litigation with legal counsel, the award of a public contract, and then the purchase of real property.

So these are some things that can be discussed in closed meetings.

And then our recap.

Generally, meetings must be open to the public, must give notice of daytime location, provide agenda materials and take minutes, remember the rule of three,

Closed session should be rare and focused, and again, potential personal liability.

That's kind of a quick, very quick overview of BOYA.

Are there any other questions?

Okay.

You want to go next?

Okay.

We are going to switch to, is it working?

Hi everyone, my name is Brittany Nelson and I'm the FOIA and Records Officer for the City of Charlottesville.

I was hired in December and my role is to help as a liaison to those who do create records throughout the city in order to help complete FOIA requests as quickly and as efficiently and as transparent as possible.

I'm not an attorney and I do not practice law.

But I do work closely with the city attorney's office in order to make sure that we are in compliance.

So I'm going to review the Virginia Public Records Act, which is a part of the, which is referenced in the Code of Virginia in 42.1, 76 through 91.

And we're going to go over just a brief introduction, some definitions of video, the section reviews and Q&A.

So this is the Chapter 7 of the Code of Virginia.

I just took the very top part of it and then referenced with a link where it is.

As I stated before, I'm not an attorney.

I don't practice law.

But I do try to abide by the Virginia Public Records Act to a T so that we are abiding by all of the policies needed.

So on this slide, I wanted to point out some definitions that are really important for the

BPRA, and that is records custodian, a person or department designated as a steward of records management in all stages of creating, sharing, using, storing, retrieving, and destroying or archiving records in electronic or paper form.

That might indicate to you that you guys are a part of that definition and you are.

And then the records retention schedule,

which tells us when we need to destroy our archive records in order to make sure that we are in compliance and so that we do what we need to do according to the Library of Virginia and then VEGARA which is a organization for those who are in the records management profession throughout the state of Virginia and then on the bottom side of the page I do have the records life cycle so just so that you have a visual

for what the process of records management looks like in this fun little graph.

Just a couple things about the Virginia Public Records Act while he's pulling that up.

You'll need to go down to the bottom right hand corner where it says share screen.

Click the little arrow that's next to share screen and you'll need to click share audio.

That way it should come through.

Where was it again?

Share audio?

I think we got it.

Software databases or on microfilm.

Each agency must designate at least one records officer to serve as a liaison to the Library of Virginia.

The records officer is responsible for implementing and overseeing a records management program and coordinating records disposition, including destruction of non-permanent records and the transfer of permanent records to the archives.

A records officer is designated by mailing a records officer designation and responsibilities form to the library.

Well, that video is public record, so you can go onto the Library of Virginia website and view that for yourself.

It is just a two-minute video, so if you would like to see that, you can.

We got the pinwheel of death over here, so DVD.

So I'm just going to review the rest of the presentation and then I think the slides will be provided for you guys to review but the Commonwealth of Virginia should preserve and maintain records using a uniform records retention schedule and that records retention schedule is created by the Library of Virginia.

It is the official, the official trustees of the records retention schedule and the

The entity that appoints records officers is the Library of Virginia, as you saw with that beautiful form.

The Library of Virginia maintains both state and locality records management regulations.

Virginia Public Records Act outlines the requirements for each agency to appoint a records officer.

So I am the records officer for the City of Charlottesville, but we also have appointed records officers for some of our, all of our individual departments.

And so they help assist and

providing records for FOIA.

So we are working towards making sure that each of our departments have one.

Lily is your representative for the human rights department.

So thank you to Lily.

And then long-term digital preservation of records is an important part of the VPRA.

And the most important part of that is a disaster and emergency management plan, which must be in place

So myself and the emergency management team work together to build a coop to make sure that that is in place.

And then all electronic records must be maintained in a way that the records can be retrievable.

That's a really important part for maintaining that lifecycle of the records.

And then this VPRA requires the use of both the RM3 and RM25 form.

The RM3 form is the certificate of destruction of public records.

The RM-25 form is the form that we saw that appoints or assigns the records officer.

And then historic records are marked as anything that is significant or was created prior to 1912.

Regardless of format, preservation and retrieval is required for anything that is a public record.

And so you can preserve any and all records digitally in order to maintain them for long-term digital preservation.

Records custodians are required to report records back to the Library of Virginia before leaving a position.

And that is to avoid, you know, losing something or not maintaining them to their retention.

All records custodians can do that in the form of giving them to the records officer.

And then if an unauthorized person has possession of records, then a court order can be provided to obtain records.

And that is the Virginia Public Records Act.

Does anyone have any questions for me?

Yes.

So presently, we have.

It's done automatically.

So you don't have to worry about that.

If we have the things in our personal email?

Personal email, you would need to still maintain the same records retention

even if it is in your personal email, which is why it might be advisable to make a more strategic decision to just use one inbox.

But to clarify for us, our situation, all of our email is going through- Duplicative, yeah.

Human Rights Commission at Charlottesville.gov.

You may have been copied on your personal email, but all those things originate from that.

And when you reply all, it's still on that thread.

And so you don't necessarily, unless you get something and then reply from your personal email to another commissioner's personal email at that point, that could be a problem.

Then you'd have to repeat it.

So don't do that.

You can receive it that way, see it that way.

You could even reply from your personal email back to the full group, and then it's still maintained in the thread.

Or if you see it on your personal email, maybe better, just go back into your city email account and reply from there, and then you know it's not going to be an issue.

Does that make sense?

So, duplicative emails are not records.

As long as you maintain a single source

of This Is My Record, which in this case, I think Todd's indicating that would be your government email address.

Your personal email is not of concern.

It does come into concern if you were to message somebody through your personal email or if you were to conduct any sort of Teams meeting outside of your government email.

Sorry about the slides.

If Todd and I as staff people are conducting a Teams meeting through our Teams accounts through the city, even if we are meeting a commissioner through their personal email, that's still fine.

And it's not recorded anyway.

Any other questions on that?

So the Conflict of Interest Act, I know there's a lot of acronyms.

It's called COIA.

And essentially, it is like FOIA designed to kind of guarantee transparency in government.

The idea again being that we want citizens to have trust in government and trust in their public officials and so that's where this Conflict of Interest Act comes in.

It's a guide to define and prohibit inappropriate conflicts and requires disclosure of economic interests and again I think forwarding you guys the slides will be helpful for you to review and then you can certainly contact our office or contact Todd if you have any further questions.

The city's Human Rights Commission is an example of a governmental agency.

It's a component part of legislative, the legislative branch of local government, including offices, departments, authorities, post commissions.

And so you're exercising a regulatory or sovereign power or duty, yada yada, right?

So we know that we're a governmental agency, and each of you is an officer of this governmental agency.

You've been appointed to any governmental agency,

and whether or not you receive compensation, you're considered an officer.

Lastly, COYA also often implicates the financial interests of immediate family members as well.

And we'll talk about that a little bit.

An immediate family for the purposes of COYA means a spouse or any other person who resides in the same household as the officer, including dependents.

Prohibited conduct,

Some of this is going to be pretty obvious.

An officer should not solicit or accept money or any other thing of value for services performed within the scope of his official duties, except for the compensation or expenses or other remuneration, that should be remuneration, paid by the agency of which he's an officer.

So again, you can't accept money for services performed within the scope of your duties, can't accept money or any other thing of value

or in consideration of obtaining employment, appointment or promotion of any person.

So, you know, help my friend get a job kind of thing.

You can't offer or accept any money or any other thing of value for the use of your public position to try to influence your decision-making.

And you can also, or you cannot use confidential information that you've acquired as part of your role as an officer for your own economic benefit.

That's another one as well, so insider trading kind of prohibition.

More prohibited conduct, accepting any money, loan, gift, favor, service or business or profession.

And here is the key word that reasonably tends to influence him in the performance of his official duties.

So, you know, you get $20, someone lends you $20 for lunch, that's one thing.

Someone that loans you a down payment for a house, right?

I mean, some of that, the perception of what would be reasonably tend to influence your decision making.

Accepting any business or professional opportunity, which he knows there's a reasonable likelihood that the opportunity is being afforded to him because of his official duties.

Also accepting an honor, I'll skip that one.

Some of these you kind of get the gist.

And also accepting gifts from a person who has interest that may be substantially affected by the performance of the officer's duties.

So, you know, again, you kind of get that idea.

And a lot of it is perception.

The next one, number nine, accepting gifts from sources on a basis so frequent as to raise an appearance of the use of his public office for private game, right?

So someone hooks you up with tickets to a UVA basketball game once.

That's one thing.

But they give you tickets to every game, you know, people would reasonably think, oh, man, like, you know, he's going to try to hook that guy up because he's getting all these favors, right?

And so again, a lot of it is kind of the appearance of propriety and that you should not accept gifts that would lead people to believe that you're being influenced by that gift.

Gifts define, and again, I will forward you the PowerPoint because it's a lot of definitions, but a gift includes any gratuity, favor, discount, entertainment, hospitality, loan, forbearance, or other item having monetary value.

It includes services as well as gifts of transportation, local travel, lodgings and meals, whether provided in-kind by purchase of a ticket, payment in advance or reimbursement after the expense has been incurred.

So, you know, your friend gives you a gift of flight on his private jet to go hunting with him, for instance, right?

Under Virginia's Coia law, that would be considered an improper gift.

And a gift does not include an offer of a ticket, a coupon or admission to a game or

An event if you don't use, you know, you give it back, you never use it, it's not an improper gift.

Last, it gets a little bit more complicated and sometimes you will have where a commissioner is worried about their conflict of interest and we have to break down, do you have a personal interest in the transaction?

A personal interest basically

Do you have an interest worth more than $5,000 in that transaction?

That's the very, like, you know, bare bones definition.

So personal interest means a financial benefit or a liability accruing to an officer or the member of the immediate family if that person owns a business and has at least 3% of equity in the business, has annual income from that business that's more than $5,000, has a salary, you know, or benefits that exceed $5,000 annually.

You have ownership of real property that exceeds $5,000 in value and excluding ownership in a business income or salary, other compensation, right?

So even just without the other benefits, but you own the property that's at least $5,000 in value, which means you own anything in town.

Personal liability incurred or assumed on behalf of the business if the liability exceeds 3% of the asset value of the business or if you have an option for ownership of a business or real personal property.

So again, you know, I can forward to the definitions, but, you know, if you are considering some work and maybe let's say you're on city council one day,

and you know you're you have a business and you owe more than three percent of the business or you have income more than five thousand dollars that's going to be considered a personal interest and you need to either disclose that personal interest or you need to abstain from acting on so that is yes what do you do if you if there's a personal interest in a transaction again

You declare it.

You disclose it.

You disqualify yourself if required.

You make sure the commission's minutes reflect your compliance.

So then in the minutes, you would say, you know, Commissioner Lynn, you know, decided not to vote because of this personal conflict, that kind of thing.

So that's it really in a nutshell.

And, you know, I'm happy to forge you this.

I'm happy to answer any further questions that you have.

But, you know,

Back to my teaching days, it's like I can tell when their eyes start to glaze over, they've heard enough.

Sorry, thank you guys.

You guys have heard enough, but we appreciate it.

Do we sign conflict of interest statements or is it just like when we become a member?

Because we're also not sworn in or anything, right?

Like, okay.

I think it would come about where this would happen is if you had a public hearing and say the respondent or complainant had some financial relation to you or a family member that's where it comes in and it really is financial like it's not relational per se until it's financial as I understand it.

Is that fair?

I think it's a fair assessment.

You could know the person, say the respondent is somebody you know.

You may still want to disclose it just to be clear and transparent about it, but I don't think you'd abstain from participating in the public hearing and voting on a matter as to we would recommend this action as a result of this finding of reasonable cause or something like that.

I think this ticks the box of COYA, like you don't have to sign anything, you just have to receive the training and that's the purpose of... That's why I asked you guys here.

Yeah, thank you both for doing this.

I know it takes some preparation to get all this stuff together to condense this complex information into

And grab food if you did not.

Yeah, thank you.

Great job going out for PowerPoints.

And also, feel free to reach out like we said before.

Thank you.

All right.

Planning for any other questions, anything commissioners have on that?

Yeah, I agree, Heather.

I will not send, I will not use my personal email.

I'll use this email.

That's no problem.

Planning for homelessness expert panel that we're supposed to be doing.

I don't know if we've seen anything yet.

Right, so who do we want to, I think we talked a little bit of who we thought we should bring as far as organization-wise.

A little bit.

I don't think we did.

Yep.

I think maybe just a kind of a bigger thought on this, like it's a pretty big topic because I think we said in the work plan, like housing, homelessness and wraparound services, like that's a big topic.

And so my question might be for you to think about, is there any one particular aspect of any of that?

It might help them now.

Well, questions to ask as well as who did we hear from the last time?

Also.

Because I think we had, the last time we had Pacham, The Haven,

The Piedmont Housing, what is that?

I don't think we've asked them to, but again that's what I'm saying.

There was one.

Then there was also, I think I sent you an email.

I was trying to remember who, who had actually said the thing about the housing market in Charlottesville being the most expensive if you adjust for salaries or, you know, for pay.

And I think it, I can't, I think it was James Freas or something like that from neighborhood development.

I thought, oh, is that somebody like, I don't know much about him, but.

He's deputy city manager.

That's right.

He just got appointed.

No, this is what we talked about on March the 29th.

No, no, no.

The last work session.

As you were talking about April 4th.

So I have come across at least, I'm giving here eight people in my community that are homeless.

That's what we talk about too, is trying to find individuals that wouldn't mind telling their story.

I could find.

And again, I think maybe also consider what information are you trying to gather and for what purpose?

If you know that you have deliverables to counsel in maybe two categories, one

What city or budget-related things do you want to advocate for or recommend to them?

And then two, what state-level legislative recommendations do you want to provide?

So if you have those two things in mind, I think it might guide both who you ask and what you ask of them when they come, if that makes sense.

Because

Then you can narrow it down a bit because otherwise it could be so broad.

I think you could just have a huge conversation about all the things.

One of the things that we identified in our work plan was specifically the systemic barriers and accessing housing outside of just sheer cost, things that would relate to potential criminal records, cost, hidden fees, application fees, those kinds of things.

And so we could ask maybe some questions about that.

Have you guys ever worked with the NAACP's housing committee?

There's somebody named George Dillard who, oh wait, he might, well, I'm not sure.

That is their chair that I'm just looking at and in Charlottesville, so in Albemarle, Charlottesville.

Cause I know they've been, they have work on housing and visiting, you know, visiting people and seeing, you know,

You know, are there landlords fixing things and are they being, you know, do they have heat and things like that?

They're doing a lot right now.

Right.

I haven't been able to attend their meetings in a couple of months.

My husband is the treasurer, so.

Great.

We have lots of connections.

Yeah.

Or focus areas.

I like the barriers, hearing what the barriers are.

So, I don't know, Todd, what you think about this, but I know our, you know, our big, our top goal was housing.

And then our second kind of sub sub goal in there was, was partially housing related to reentry.

and Todd and I were both at an event earlier today where talking about barriers to re-entry, et cetera.

And so I don't, there are so many people doing work there as well.

So that could be interesting to have somebody join us and talk a little bit about the barriers to re-entry from a housing perspective that integrates with some of the work.

Or our in-house experts home to Hope.

Right.

Right in our theme office too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A combination of the two.

Are there any localities in Virginia that we think are doing much more to help people than Charlottesville is able to do?

Like a community that is sort of living in the same Dylan rule context, but has figured out innovative solutions to

to help people who are suffering from housing inequity and lack of housing.

I know the question too.

Right, right.

Or maybe another Diller Rule thing.

I could try to.

I mean, I can try and think about it, not just ask the question.

You know, because this is much.

I love hearing, I want to hear what the barriers are.

It gets me thinking about the other side of it, someone who made it through and got, you know, was able to get housing.

And I would love to have that story told too, you know, to give some hope to people that are struggling

but also know that there's someone that went through those steps or had those issues and was able to make it to the other side.

I think we need to try to find those voices or elevate that voice some as well to give some hope to people because it is daunting and tough and really a huge situation to think about the housing situation in Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

To the locality question,

Another thing that you could consider, and maybe it's a separate panel or a separate meeting, you could ask the chairs or other representatives of the other human rights commissions in Virginia to attend a meeting and say, what are you guys as commissions advocating for with regard to housing in your locality?

Or what are you advocating for at the general assembly level or going to propose to your city or county board of supervisors

to advocate for general assembly.

Because then a couple of things, if more than one commission is advocating for the same legislative action, then it might carry more weight.

So we'll get out.

I'll put in a letter.

Other questions you would think of asking potential guests?

I think the systemic barriers gets to a lot of things.

What else other than barriers?

You could even directly ask them if are there any city policies that are limiting

or could be change that would make the work more successful.

Just a thought.

Do we know if anybody's tracking if a landlord or management company is asking for fees from hundreds and hundreds of applicants, but there's really only one apartment?

Is there anybody who's trying to...

I think there is someone who's trying to at least establish a database of rental stock and how much rental stock is actually going for.

There is an effort for that, but I don't know if there's an effort to track

I know somebody who's currently working on a rental registry project.

Yeah.

John, that's hi.

Thanks.

We did a big software project with code a while back to inventory properties and landlords in Charlottesville, primarily to try to assist housing navigators and guiding people.

But it is a very difficult project because it requires constant attention and update.

And I don't know where it stands now.

I think Pocham's the key to it at the moment.

But in any case, yeah, adding more data to it.

The documentation for like real estate sites like Zillow is pretty ironclad so you can't scrape it as easily as you could have maybe seven years ago.

There are some commercial APIs that you can use to be able to buy their data, and that is what this person did to build a data.

So we have historical data, but in order to keep updating it, you have to keep hitting that API.

But we still, from what I understand, it's a pretty impressive

Information about we could be able to answer maybe like some historical trends like did landlords have landlords systemically raise the prices to keep ahead of HUD's like established rent outright?

Did that happen in the past up until the present moment?

And how can we make recommendations based on that?

So there's still some interesting questions that we have been asking for years here that we might be able to use that data to leverage.

What was the other question?

So you had two things that you were interested in with HUD that could be considered discriminatory.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but one was things being too expensive to qualify for vouchers.

And the other one was that they weren't keeping the units up to code well enough to pass HUD.

Does that ever get tracked?

We don't know.

I think that's something that

You know, we have Shiel kind of doing some preliminary research on this.

And those are kind of the questions to see, does a voucher administrator have that information on hand?

Even anecdotally, what do you know about that?

But I think it's not typically collected, but yeah.

Do you have a personal email to my books for my HSC email?

Yes, exactly.

Do a pretty big list.

Maybe what we want to do is we can consolidate.

It'll be in the minutes, obviously.

We'll make sure it's in there.

And then

We could send it out with a list.

We will draft some questions and then maybe send those to you too.

And just to verify that that's what you want to do.

Can we try to nail it down as much as we can now, since we're here?

We can.

As far as agencies we want to bring.

Yeah.

Do you want me to read things that we've said in the past and then you can respond to them?

Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, Salvation Army, Legal Aid Justice Center,

CRHA, The Haven, Livable Seaville.

Public Housing Association of Residents, Piedmont Housing Alliance.

Any staff that may be working in housing and equity at UVA?

Housing Opportunities Made Equal, Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, James Freas, the NAACP Housing Committee, the DSA Housing Committee, any organizations or staff from those organizations working in the re-entry space, including Home to Hope, the Fountain Fund, representatives from other localities in places with the Dillon Rule,

And the Diller rule on localities, that's something that we need to do some research on.

Yeah, that seems like separate.

Yeah.

Someone from region 10, since we didn't have them before.

No.

OK, which one?

Since one is in our office, Home to Hope is in our office, which one has, I know both are more important.

I guess my question is which one can we get more?

We're going to get extensive information for us.

Will it be both?

Is it just one?

I feel like our focus is hyperlocality.

Home to Hope would have a better understanding of systemic barriers in Charlottesville for Charlottesville's homeless population.

OK.

So that would be where I would lead, although Fountain Fund, if we could get something from the Fountain Fund.

Whoa.

No?

You don't think we could?

We could.

They're both local, though.

They're both local?

They're totally local, yeah.

Maybe the difference is that, you know, just maybe in focus, right?

So Home to Hope is a group of three navigators, peer navigators that are receiving people who are coming back into the community to help them do whatever it is they need to do to resettle, which housing is one of the number one priorities for them.

The Fountain Fund is primarily a small loan program.

However, I mean, Martez gets involved in a lot of things.

And so I think there's a lot of

mentoring and some housing navigation, but not, it's not a specific focus.

Neither is housing navigation a specific focus for Home to Hope.

So they do a lot more barrier stuff.

Yes.

And helping people navigate through that where founding does that, but, you know, it's a little different as far as they have the money to make the change with the other one is,

That sounds like a home to hope.

We've already piloted NAACP, Region 10, and home to hope.

And DSA.

No, we don't.

I would say we need to do at least seven.

It's the case people won't be able to show.

So we have four now.

We have more than four.

So the four are just the ones that you've brought back up since I read out the long list.

The long list, we still have that, but just that you've doubled down on.

Yes.

I would suggest, you know, if you had to choose somebody from the homelessness continuum of care, BRAC, Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless, would probably be the most logical choice in that they're sort of the overseeing entity for the continuum of care that touches the Haven Pacham a little bit, not so much with Salvation Army, though they're kind of in touch, but they're kind of external.

But we haven't heard from Shayla before.

I think the other thing, too, Ernest, depending on when these are going to these invites are going to go out and remind sorry.

Remind me what date are we talking about June?

What is the date?

Okay.

I was going to say if the invites went out fairly quickly.

We'd have a sense pretty quickly of who is going to RSVPs or not, and then do we need to put any more invites out?

Yeah.

And I want to do that too, because I know that this is going to be a cover.

It is also graduation night.

All right.

We're in Carver, right?

They're doing a budget thing here.

And parking for, you know, attendees.

Technologically we're challenging, but we can pull it off.

Oh, yeah.

That'd be fun.

He's done that before.

Should we also invite Pachab and Haven?

What about Region 10?

We put them on the list.

OK.

Yes.

OK.

No, it's a good list.

Do you want to try another?

I thought we heard from, is Flick on there?

Sort of, because Emily Dreyfus from Legal Aid Justice Center came.

and she is directly involved with CLIC.

Yeah.

They have a committee.

Yes, they do have a committee.

There's a series of them under the Great and Good Housing Committee.

Yeah, we can find out.

I mean, are we, is Liverpool Seaville,

They're mainly focused on housing.

They've got funding.

They've got power.

They've got affordable housing development.

Do you know how big that committee is?

It's fairly large.

I appreciate it.

Maybe you should attend these.

Thinking about what information you want and who has it is kind of the key, right?

They're not working with people, and they also have no power.

We could ask them, do you have plans to build more housing?

And what does that look like?

I mean, that's to me what we would get.

That's what we would learn from them.

They make those plans.

They have no power.

If I were to just maybe, you have five, you talked about seven.

I mean,

Let's do legal aid.

Okay.

The two of them and then see.

And then to stop it there.

And then see who we get.

And we want to know more than four.

If anybody from that group wants to attend, just give them the date.

They can attend.

Yeah.

Date and time.

And they can sit in the audience and hear.

I don't know how much these groups kind of coordinate and come together or what have you.

I don't think, maybe often, but you never know.

I think that what we did in August was invited people to attend.

And if they couldn't attend to speak directly to you, they could send you a letter including their recommendations.

So maybe that instead of saying, like, first four to respond to this email can participate, maybe we could say,

We can look at our wording last year.

I mean, the other thing too is if somebody that we really want to hear from isn't able to come on that date,

We have a whole avenue for engagement.

We do have space on the work plan for June.

We called it the expert panel, this one, Housing, Homelessness, and Wraparound Services.

July, we said expert panel with a focus on the legislative priorities.

However, you could just have two panels and ask the legislative policy and systemic barrier questions in both of the two different groups of people from this list as well.

So you could think about that just based on who responds to this one and who comes, what you learn, and if you want us to reach out to those who didn't make it or something like that or additional people on the list that you kind of want

hear from, we can get for July.

So you have two back to back panels month to month and then by August when you have to draft legislative recommendations, you probably have some pretty good information.

Yeah, that really sounds good, Susan.

Well in terms of information we're seeking I just I'm realizing I keep bringing up things like fees and you know things like that but I'm not sure if we have talked about asking specifically about evictions and my understanding is that there's been like quite a surge and you know in attempts to evict people and that's something that the DSA people are really working on is like trying to inform people of every right that they possibly you know take

So maybe we should ask specific, oh sorry, go ahead.

No, that's what we had in here before was specifically to get their eviction.

The eviction lab.

The eviction lab.

Maybe something to think about.

Maybe when you ask that systemic barriers to accessing housing, if you ask that at DSA, they may talk about evictions.

And I think one of the things that the commission has explored in the past was advocating for a right to counsel policy within the city.

And I know other places are pushing that forward and getting like locality level right to counsel policies or ordinances.

So that could be another thing to think about as you hear from them.

But so that's a good point.

It's another aspect we haven't explored much, but it's another barrier in some way.

It's a barrier to keeping housing.

Since we have a lot of HRC outreach across Virginia to do.

Any other thing we need to touch on?

So we know the five or six that we want to reach out to.

We kind of know what the questions we want asked.

So we'll work on getting those letters out in those days together.

What else we need to do?

That's it on that, as far as finding the plan of the homeless expert pet.

I think we've covered all that.

Yeah.

OK. Word plan check-in.

We're in lockstep of where we need to be.

We did FOIA, COIA, and VPRAA today.

Talk about panel discussion.

Our next actions are to have the panel discussion.

and preparing the draft ordinance for review.

It looks like the main task there is to review proposed ordinance amendments.

What do we have that needs amending on the current ordinance?

So yeah, that's a good question.

So one of the things I was talking with Rob a little bit about before we started today was that we met with Eric Steinecker.

And I could have put this in my staff report.

But anyway, I'll talk about it now.

We met with Eric Steinecker from HUD, who's the director of the fair housing programs for the US.

and we reviewed the changes we made to the ordinance so far.

We've made, the main ones to review with him were the housing section because when we passed the last round of amendments in November of 21, we thought, okay, we're ready for application to the FAP and we took it for another review to Eric and he's like, close, but not quite.

And so we got some more feedback.

And so those are, those are one set of amendments.

We also just made some other structural changes to try to make some of the commission related stuff a little more clear and easier to follow.

So we'll propose those to you as well as some changes to how the commission hearing process would work.

So those are the things that we need to get tightened up.

They're pretty close.

I need to go over those with Rob one more time so that he's aware of that.

The challenge right now, I think we might be able to do it before the mini work session.

But city attorney's office is a little bit low on staff right now.

So I'm kind of giving him some space before I bring that up.

But there's a potential that we'll be ready to go over with you guys.

Oh, sure.

I was going to say, the regular meeting is currently open.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

So we'll just re-bump the ordinance of amendments to the regular meeting.

Maybe we do that.

Cool.

I'll make that change on the work plan.

But yeah, just to give everybody a little bit of time.

And probably have some definite funding

So no meeting on May 2nd.

So on May the 16th, we're going to talk about the audience and elements and getting ready for the expert panel on June the 6th.

All right.

Anything else we need to cover on the work plan?

Awesome.

All right.

So we're confirming that next week, next work session on May the 2nd, we are canceling that because we don't need it.

We have any new business?

All right, matters of the public.

Do we have anybody in the public that's on?

Is it the same person?

I know.

This is a name I recognize.

If you are an attendee, webinar attendees, use the raise hand function if you'd like to speak, if you're on your phone.

Please use star 9.

We are at the public comment section of our meeting.

Thank you for attending our meeting online.

Since we have no public comments, I think we don't have any responses to the members of the public.

Do we have any Commissioner updates?

All right.

Our next steps, I think we know that we're researching, getting people to these for our June 6th meeting and doing our own research.

I'll wave and stay away.

I'm not going to get too stressed out about that because my thing is I want all of us to have, you know, if we can attend to stuff, attend things, to hear and get information, do that, you know, I'll just, you know,

I'm sorry if I don't speak.

I apologize in advance.

So, all right.