Joint Work Session with Albemarle County Planning Commission   10/29/2024

Recording in progress Those of you all who don't know me, I've been in this community since the 90s, but I've only been in this position as director of planning for 10 months.

So excited about this, excited about having this joint meeting with our community.

Apparently we haven't had joint meetings since before the pandemic.

So it's nice to have everyone here.

And I'm really excited that we're having this joint city planning commission talk about this very important topic.

I have a change in courses and existential, existential issue that we face as a community.

And we have something that's broader than just our individual jurisdiction.

So I'm excited to have this opportunity.

Very excited to hear what the planning commission has to say.

For tonight's meeting, we set aside roughly about two, two and a half hours.

And in a second, I'm going to ask Chair Misal to convene the County Planning Commission and Chair Mitchell to convene the city's Planning Commission.

You need to, bathrooms are back towards the main foyer right there.

I think the ladies is in the one and the men's has just passed.

So it's a joint public hearing.

We're here for the time for planning to speak.

We won't necessarily be taking comments from the general public either online or here in the room.

So with that, I will turn it over to Mr. Missell and we can go ahead and

He's awesome.

I will officially convene also order the Albemarle County Planning Commission meeting for October 29.

And I've been told I can simply acknowledge the members of the Planning Commission present.

So we'll start with Mr. Vivins, Mr. Moore, Mr. Fierroch, Mr. Claiborne, Mr. Charizana, and yours truly.

I don't believe we've got eight more houses, but we've got Commissioner Roettger, Commissioner Stolzenberg, Commissioner Donzio, Commissioner Solla-Yates, Commissioner Yoder, and Commissioner Schwarz.

We are in order.

That's my y'all.

Well, thanks.

Michael asked me to prepare a few comments.

I have about 25 minutes of comments to start with.

No, but I'll just kick it off.

First of all, it's great to see you all, to meet many of you for the first time.

You know, we oftentimes get in our little silos where we're working on our own projects and our own spaces, whether it's the university, the county, the city, or others.

This is obviously not one of those subjects that we should be siloing.

This is, I think, the resilient together is truly a perfect conversation, a perfect title.

And I'm really looking forward to having that conversation together today.

I will just say a couple of things just from a matter of structure.

I think we're thinking that this is really just a workshop format, so relatively straightforward and informal.

I think staff would prefer us to wait until after the end of the presentation to ask questions.

But if there are maybe minor clarifications that we have throughout the process, we're fine to do that.

We can ask that.

And then just to ensure that everybody has an opportunity to share their comments.

Once we've heard from staff and really just first a shout out to the city, the county, the university staff who have put this together, I should have said that at the very beginning.

No pressure, but I'm sure this is fantastic.

So thank you for for leading us through this.

What I'll probably do is just start by calling on people or asking if somebody wants to pick us off and then maybe we'll alternate City County just to show how we're joined in this conversation together.

And we'll do that kind of formally up front and then once everybody's had a chance to say a few things, we'll open it up to more of a workshop sort of back and forth banter process.

Does that make sense to everybody?

Okay.

All right.

Well, I'll stop talking and turn it over to you all.

Thank you, Commissioner Missle.

Thank you all for being here this evening.

We appreciate your time and interest in the topic and bringing together a project.

So maybe I'll just introduce myself and Emily first, and then we'll do a round of introductions of our project team, just so you know, who's with us in support of this effort.

I'm Gabe Daley.

I'm the Climate Action Program Manager for Albany Rall County.

And I'm Emily Irvin.

I'm Gabe's counterpart in the city.

Thanks Emily.

So just a kind of agenda for the presentation portion.

nested within the broader agenda that Mr. Missile just laid out for us.

We're going to give brief introductions to other members of our Resilience Together project team who are here from City County, UVA.

We're going to give a bit of context for why we're doing this work, for some of the local impacts of climate change that we're experiencing and how we expect those to have effects in our community.

We'll talk a bit about the Resilience Together project itself, where we've been with that and where we're headed.

We'll speak about the Climate Resilience cohort, which is a kind of centerpiece of the Resilience Together project, the bit of a project within a project that's funded through an EPA Environmental Justice grant that we were able to receive.

We'll speak about next steps in terms of our work this fall, next spring, and then we'll

Get into some conversation.

We'll leave some room for questions generally about what you've seen.

And then we'll get into some conversation about inviting your input on a couple of example strategies.

So we're heading into the next number of months, really doing strategy development.

And we thought it would be hopefully interesting, fun and useful.

Commissions to give us some feedback and have some conversation about a couple such example strategy options for building resilience in our community to toxic climate change.

So that will kind of close us out for the evening and have a little bit more interactive element.

So we introduced ourselves.

Also want to introduce Julia Montieth and Serena Garia, who we asked to sit up at the front with us in case you have questions about UVA and kind of how UVA is playing in this process, things that maybe we can't answer about the project as a whole.

But Julia, the Office of the Architect at UVA, core member of the project team,

and then Serena is our public engagement coordinator for Allmoral County and so I wanted her to be able to be here to speak as well to some of the community engagement aspects of the project and then also would like to just point out our friends and colleagues on the side behind a couple members of the County Planning Commission, Crystal Ritterwald, Director of the Office of Sustainability at the City, Greg Harper, Chief of Environmental Services at Allmoral County and Jamie Powers,

All right.

Hey, everybody.

Thank you again for having us.

We're really excited to be here at this first joint planning commission meeting in quite a while.

So I'm going to set I'm going to talk a little bit about our regional hazards and the impacts we expect to see from climate change.

We think it's important to sort of set the table for this conversation and revisit and have a common understanding of what we're really doing here together this evening.

So

I'm going to talk about how central Virginia is being impacted by climate change and how we expect to be more impacted in the future.

So many folks think of climate change as a future hazard.

I do think as we witness impacts and natural disasters around the globe and around the country and most recently in our own state and our neighboring state,

It is really becoming more present for people because we are being impacted now and we will continue to be more impacted in the future.

So I'm going to walk through the hazards we expect to see here, both the city and county have done climate risk and vulnerability assessments.

And so I'm going to go over our hazards because, remarkably, they said nearly the same thing.

Anyway, so one of our most

I think one of the impacts that we have recently felt is the incidence of extreme heat is increasing in our region.

So in this context, extreme heat is a technical term.

It refers to a day where the temperature gets above 95 degrees Fahrenheit in a given day.

So our historical average was we experienced about five days of extreme heat every summer.

I think we saw more days than that this past summer.

I think we can think back to some really periods of really hot days and think about how that is starting to impact our community.

By mid-century, we expect to see nearly a month of these extremely hot days each summer.

And by 2075, we could see nearly two months of these extremely hot days.

And so this project is contemplating how we will adapt our systems to

So another impact that we expect to see in our region is increased instance of drought periods between rain instances of rain.

We were in a drought period before Hurricane Helene visited our region and we had nine inches of rain in just a few days.

Before that, our area had declared a drought watch.

And that has a relationship with another hazard that we expect to see, which is increased flooding.

So even though we will have longer periods between rain, we will have more intense rain events.

So we expect to see increased precipitation and increase amount of precipitation in any given event.

And when you have dryness from periods of drought, and then you

Experience, a particularly heavy or intense rain event, the ground is not able to absorb that moisture in the way it is when it is more evenly moist.

And so then you get more flooding.

So the way that these hazards interact together exposes our community, our area to this increased risk.

So when all of that is taken together, we see that our seasons are changing.

And so that has an impact, especially on our natural environment.

We are adapted here in central Virginia to experience periods of cold in the winter.

You can see that our

Historical data shows that over the past 30 years, our average has been more than two months of days over the winter period where we get below freezing.

And so that's really important for keeping pests set bay, invasive plant species.

That is our ecosystem is adapted to that.

And so as we experience overall warming and we see

So that has this knock on or secondary impact of increasing the risk of pests and disease in our

in our region.

And so everyone kind of hates when I show this slide because it's a visceral reminder, but we'll have more times of the year where these invasive pests that harm both our natural environment and pose a threat also to humans, longer periods of the year where these are active.

So ticks and mosquitoes are active for a longer period of the year.

are ecosystems that are adapted to periods of cold or not as people to fight off disease invasive species, that thing, that kind of thing.

One fun fact I always like to share when I'm talking about this slide is poison ivy actually really thrives when there's higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere.

So when you have more CO2 in the atmosphere, the toxins that are in poison ivy are actually more concentrated and stronger.

So another knock on

So one hazard that we did not really contemplate when the city and county were doing our risk and vulnerability assessments back in 2022.

is wildfire smoke.

The county's risk and vulnerability assessment does consider wildfire and there's a small increased risk as we move into the future.

But neither of them contemplate smoke and I think everyone in this room can probably remember last summer and fall when we had smoke from Canadian wildfires, smoke from other fires in the region that were really impacting our community and so

Children, older folks, folks with pre-existing conditions, our homeless neighbors, folks who work outside are particularly impacted by this decrease of our regional area.

So a couple of concepts that we wanted to make sure everyone has a shared understanding of.

I'm guessing that these are familiar to many, if not most folks, but we wanted to put it out there.

So a couple of technical terms that we work with in the climate action space.

One of those being mitigation, the other one being adaptation.

Adaptation resilience are often put together so you'll see us use both of those terms.

Sydney and County both have climate action plans.

Those Climate Action Plan and UVA has climate targets, including a strategic plan to reach goals for reducing emissions.

So those plans are all focused for all three entities on what's called mitigation or reducing the severity of climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

And then what this project is focused on for our city, county and UVA is how do we adapt?

Because it didn't take strong enough action as a global community.

20, 30, 40 years ago.

So there are some changes that are baked in.

And as folks know, we're already starting to see the impacts of.

So as we engage in mitigation work, how do we also adapt to and build resilience to those kinds of impacts from a changing climate, from intensifying weather events like those that Emily just described?

There's a lot of overlap between the two.

So this is just a few examples to make the Venn diagram manageable.

We started listing out more and realized it would be actually overwhelming on a slide.

So there's lots that's not stated here, just to give examples.

But there are some actions that we can take that are really focused on the emissions reduction side.

They don't have much to do with adaptation resilience.

And likewise, there are some actions we can take that really focus on the adaptation, the resilience side.

Don't really do anything for us in terms of emissions reduction.

So the next few slides, we wanted to tease out a little bit more the almost like a chain of events or a kind of flow chart

from these increased likelihood of hazards or increased risks that Emily was talking about in terms of extreme weather events and trends.

And how does that actually lead into harmful impacts that people in our community will experience?

So we're going to walk you through a couple of flow charts to illustrate how that might look.

for just kind of two hazards together and we've got some additional ones that we can include in a slide deck we share with you all afterwards, but for the sake of time we'll just use one.

To tee that up we wanted to show this chart which comes from Noah and I think gives a helpful visual for overall what we're trying to do with the resilience work.

So the chart on the left shows you know an example of you

So you can have a community that's kind of chugging along, business as usual, gets hit by some kind of acute hazard, maybe a hurricane, intense flooding, maybe a heat wave or a wildfire, and there's going to be some kind of shock to the system, some harm in the short term that comes from that.

And sometimes that community might bounce back, but it's also possible that the initial shock is so intense that

Even after a period of recovery, there's a permanent loss.

The QG doesn't quite make it back to where they were before.

On the right is what we're looking to do with this climate resilience work.

So if we can make investments to build resilience now,

Before the next big hazard or shock to the system, there will still be short-term adverse impacts.

But hopefully, because the investments up front, we can bounce back and be better off, be stronger as a community.

So to make that a little bit more concrete with a couple of examples, I'll walk you through this one briefly.

Emily talked a few minutes ago about the interplay between drought and intense rainfall and how those can lead to increasingly likely load of flooding.

But it's not just the hazard or the extreme weather event, right?

There's also ways in which some community members might be more exposed to that.

So we know there are some buildings in the area that are in the floodplain, right?

So that's something that might increase a household or person's exposure to flooding.

We also know that having a lack of stream buffer, right, increases likelihood of that flooding, I mean inland and the intensity of the flooding.

There might also be vulnerability that's more specifically at the household level, so not so much exposure to the hazard, but a more vulnerable situation for the family who's living nearby, so maybe an older building less stable to hold up against intense rainstorms.

And then when you combine those three, the hazard itself, potential and additional exposure

Household Vulnerability, you get impacts, right?

So you might get displaced families, cost of repairs that could be particularly financially challenging for some folks, maybe help impacts from exposure to moisture and more things like that.

So Broadview, what can we do to build some of those, build resilience in advance, make those investments from the chart on the previous slide?

Well, we might do something to address vulnerability at the household level.

So I think about the work that Elbrough Housing Improvement Program does in the community.

Lyle

So putting all that together

leads to something that I think Emily has alluded to previously with the fact that we share similar risks and vulnerabilities for us, for our region, why work together.

The impetus for this project came out of a conversation between myself and Emily's predecessor at the city who reached out to me and said, hey, you know, we're doing these climate vulnerability risk assessments.

We're starting to see more of these impacts.

and the University of Virginia on a resilience planning process for the community because, you know, the extreme rain and flooding event or the heat wave doesn't particularly care where the jurisdictional boundary is.

So that was kind of the impetus for this project.

And Emily's fond of saying that, you know, knowing your neighbors is the best first step.

for building resilience for emergency preparedness.

So we've been working on this partnership for quite a while now and it's been fruitful in terms of the kinds of feedback that we've gotten from our colleagues, from subject matter experts in each of the institutions and also from the broader community that surrounds us.

I think I'm turning it back over to you.

Next slide.

Thank you.

So I will share, Crystal and I were at a conference, USDN, our Urban Sustainability Directors Network, in Minneapolis last week, and we were there, some of our colleagues from Asheville were also there.

And they were telling stories about coming together with their neighbors after Haleen, and I

Well, first of all, very humbled that we're having this conversation as our community.

But also, it was sort of reassuring to me that we're coming at this work with that spirit of getting to know your neighbors as a foundational step.

We're trying to live that and model that in working together on this project.

And if we can just help to strengthen relationships within the community and strengthen the webs and networks that are already holding our community in place through this project, we will really be actually building and modeling resilience.

So I just wanted to add that.

That's what we're doing here.

But so after we

Gabe said, why do this work together?

And so we did come together to start saying like, how can this project unfold?

How can we do this work together?

So UVA came into this conversation early.

Gabe and Serena did some very important foundational work.

And what we're trying to do here is really use this project to convene a community conversation about building the resilience to the impacts of climate change that we're going to be experiencing.

and strengthen our community really in a holistic way.

So our vision for this project is a strong and safe and healthy community for everyone who calls Charlottesville and Albemarle home now and into the future.

And so there are some specific deliverables that will come out of the Resilient Together project.

Those are climate resilience plans that will be adopted by each jurisdiction.

We're going to develop them in parallel and then for ease of local government processes, we will have two separate plans that are adopted.

We'll talk a little bit later in the presentation about how that interacts with existing projects and documents.

comprehensive plans and things.

But what we also really want to build through this project is an implementation framework.

We don't want this to just be another plan that is really difficult to implement.

But by through the project, and I hope with just systems that we help to build through doing this engagement and intense work together, we are really building a framework for investing in our community and making it more resilient.

So this is our project outline.

We put this star here.

We are here.

We are going to talk through where we've been and look forward.

But the discover phase, which we kicked on a little over a year ago, we wanted to share some of the information that we have shared with you all this evening about our hazards and risks with the community and also hear from the community how they are being impacted.

We've had a series of staff

Workshops, we've done a lot of community engagement.

I'll talk a little in a little bit more detail about that in a moment.

The defined phase is really making sure we're solid in what we heard from the community before we move on to the real exciting meat of the project, which is designing the strategies that we'll employ in our community.

And then the decide phase will be really creating those plans, going through the bureaucratic process of having them adopted

And then do is where we really implement the work and that's kind of the ongoing into the future.

And I'll talk later about how we have been learning from peer communities and how some other communities are moving from planning into implementation.

So like I said, we kicked off the discover phase, the first public-facing phase of this project back in October of 2023.

We had a number of workshops, a few of them right here in this room.

We gathered staff from across the city, the county and UVA and also some of our regional sort of quasi-governmental partners, the Planning District Commission, the RIVANA authorities.

The Soil and Water Conservation District staff from those organizations also joined us as subject matter experts.

We had some workshops with community organizations.

We were at a number of community events trying to just get the word out about how we were thinking about this and how our community will be impacted.

So we also got some feedback that there are many members of the community who have been asked repeatedly what they want and what they need, and there's a little bit of engagement fatigue.

So we also tried to learn from other planning, recent planning processes like AC44 and Seville Plants together to integrate some of that community input into what we have put forward.

in the Defined Phase.

So the Defined Phase, we started over the summer.

We are just getting to the end of it, although we're going to talk about, gave mention to our Climate Resilience cohort, which is a very important project within the project.

And we are trying to, since that piece of the project is funded by a federal grant, it took us a little bit of time to get through the grant machinations to be able to get a cohort off.

So we've

We want to share our draft principles and goals with the cohort and with staff before we call it final.

So we're just wrapping up define and transitioning into the design.

So also during that time, we have been researching and refining a list of potential resilient strategies that could work in our community.

Of course, we are not the only community doing this.

We are trying to learn from larger communities, areas that have done this before.

The federal government, through their climate resilience toolkit, gives us a great

database of strategy options from plans from all over the country.

And we have been really like combing through those lists to create a draft list of strategies that are suitable for our area, based on our hazards or geography, the size of our community, the fact that we're Dylan rules, state all types of, you know, the local context, what we can do in our community.

So

It's been wonderful to collate what we have heard from the community into some concrete outputs.

And I hope that you all had an opportunity to look at the report that we put published as part of the packet for this evening.

But so we distilled what we heard into these nine themes.

I know a lot of you all have been doing engagement around major planning processes recently, so I hope this doesn't surprise anyone in this room, but this is what we heard from the community that they really care about.

And I do want to clarify, when I'm talking about reliable systems, that includes infrastructure or food systems, sort of those community systems and hardened infrastructure systems that really support the day-to-day life and work of our community.

And so from there, we took the themes and we drafted these six guiding principles.

And these again are in our report, I don't want to necessarily read them verbatim, but we felt like these six

items really rose to the top as things that we need to keep as our North Star as we move through this project.

And then also, these seven goals seem like really good broad outcomes that if we can work towards these goals throughout this process and project, and as we move into implementation, we will really be building resilience in our community.

And so what I wanted to say also is

Mr. Barnes said at the outset of this meeting that climate change is an existential issue, and it is, and it is a threat multiplier, but it's also a symptom of a deeper problem that

because many of our systems are built on extraction and exploiting people in the environment.

And if we reexamine some of those ways that we interact with other people and with our environment are the place we live in here, we will really be helping to address some of those underlying causes that cause us to be less resilient.

So we really do believe that if we can kind of embody the principles and work towards those goals, we will be working together to really build a community that is truly resilient.

So strategy development, this is the exciting, we're standing on the precipice of this part of the project.

It feels exciting.

So we have been working to define this locally relevant list.

We also don't want to reinvent the wheel here.

And we know there's a lot of excellent plans that exist through the region, all three entities.

So we are also beginning the work of comparing our draft list with what is already

planned for or happening in the community because if we take existing plans and structures and either strengthen the connections on them or use them as a foundation to build upon, that is we'll be taking advantage of our existing systems and not reinventing them.

So as we move into this design phase engagement that will be part of this next phase,

We want to ask ourselves these three kind of foundational questions.

So like, what are the midterm outcomes?

What are the impacts we're looking to see?

And then when we think about the answer to those questions, what is locally relevant?

Because this is so place-based.

It's really important that the strategies that we develop work for this community, because what works in other places may not be what works here in Charlottesville.

So I alluded to this.

We've been doing a lot of learning from other peer communities.

The staff involved in this project, we're all members of these networks of folks doing this type of work at the local government level.

We have great connections with, we actually included a link to Fairfax's Resilient Fairfax Plan in the packet.

We hold this up as such a great example.

We have a great relationship with some of the staff in Fairfax who are the lead on developing this for their community.

They've been very generous with their experience and expertise, and that's been a great resource to learn from folks who are further ahead of this process.

I said we mentioned we've been relying on this federal tool that is helping communities be able to do this resilience planning work.

The EPA has regional plans for resilience for each of the EPA regions and they support communities building out from there.

So we've been doing a lot of learning from those who have come before us in this work.

Cool, thank you.

One point that I would love to call out on that last slide.

If you remember from a little while ago, Emily had said that we're really aiming for our resilience plans to be structured and written to help guide implementation when they're hot off the press.

And that's one of the reasons why we've found resilient fairfax to be a helpful plan to look at, see how I structure it, see how their prioritized strategies have these implementations

Can I say one more thing?

They have also really successfully transferred from the planning process into a program for resilience building.

So the climate resilience cohort, something we're really excited about is

So we're excited about that.

We had an afternoon with them, got to onboard them onto the project.

I think given the topic that we're discussing tonight, folks will appreciate that we had to reschedule that workshop from a month ago.

We were supposed to do it on September 30th.

The night before, one of our colleagues said,

You should probably postpone our workshop because folks might have unanticipated childcare issues and also a barometer of maybe there are some roads out there that are not safe to cross.

So we ended up postponing the workshop and do the scheduling with 10 organizations that ended up being a month later.

But we found it telling and perhaps a bit ironic that we had to reschedule the kickoff session of a climate resilience cohort due to a climate change exacerbated storm.

So we're really excited to finally get together with folks yesterday and kick off this key piece of the project.

So it's a partnership with 10 community-based organizations that serve disadvantaged or vulnerable community members to help really ensure that the voices and voices of folks are really brought into the project.

This came from a highly competitive EPA Environmental Justice grant that we applied for as a team of Albano County with the lead applicant for that.

So we're kind of the administrator of the grant, but it's a key piece of this collaborative project.

And we're providing subgrants to 10, like I said, community-based organizations.

One of the things

Houses of Operation and we can sometimes have a hard time, you know, getting a broad swath of community perspective.

So the intention with this grant is to help leverage the relationships that we have with local community-based organizations and then the relationships that they in turn have with the folks that they serve directly.

I'm going to start saying CBOs.

I know we have lots of acronyms in local government, but just to

So this was, we got the grant through funding from the Inflation Reduction Act.

I've covered a couple of these elements.

And actually kind of an example of adapting and being playful with how we're implementing the project.

Originally we said, let's give an equal $40,000 to each organization.

And then we thought about that a little bit further.

And we wondered if that was the best approach and we ultimately decided to pivot where each organization is getting a certain chunk of the money to be part of the planning part of this process, helping us develop and vet the strategies that we've been talking about that will go with our resilience plans.

And then there will be an additional pot of money that folks will be able to be granted through a second round to do implementation projects.

And the change that we made rather than giving each organization connection Maybe it's the clicker

We're giving folks the option to pool funds.

We know that some of these organizations, which we'll show you in the next slide, are in collaborations with each other already or have collaborated on various projects.

And so we said, well, you know, why don't we give them the option?

partner in that.

And so we'll see what kind of projects come out of that will be facilitating a kind of participatory design process with them a little later in this first year of the grant to come to arrive at the projects they'll be doing.

So we're really excited about the 10 that we've got.

There are some of these organizations that we as the local governments have worked with in the past.

We know the kind of the kind of community service they do.

And there's also some folks that we've never worked with where we're cultivating and so we're very excited to be able to kind of have that mixture.

and also got a sense from yesterday of some of the relationships among these organizations that already exist as well as some of the new ones that we already saw being fostered.

So I've alluded to what the timeline and elements of this grant will look like.

But just to put it on the page for you and talk through this briefly, basically there's two parts of the grant.

The first part, part one, or planning, is overlapping with the remaining phases of the resilience-together planning portion.

So part one here will end when we have adopted resilience plans for our entities.

And then part two will kick off.

And that will be where that second pot of money will come into play, and these organizations will be able to implement pilot projects.

hit the ground running with implementing the resilience plan.

So we're excited about this.

And that kind of feeds back into just a few words that I'll say about next steps.

Wanting to come back, Emily showed the kind of side-by-side tiles of the Resilient Together project phases, the discover, define, design, decide, and do or implement.

And so just to revisit a little bit, kind of more of a fun image of that for you here,

But just to give you that sense again, so we're in between two and three kind of right on the cusp right there and One of the the pieces I'll just call attention to again Emily foreshadowed this and think now that we've gone through the climate resilience cohort I'll say so that's this piece those those themes guiding principles long-term goals are what we've penciled in based on what we heard through the project but that we want to make sure that you know this

Back, this group of 10 organizations also have the opportunity to weigh in on that before we put it into an ink in terms of the project.

So looking ahead towards number three and number four here in the design and design phases of the project, in the design phase, we will be taking that information that we've distilled thus far, right?

The goals, the guiding principles, themes we heard, and then this research that we've been doing on strategy options and putting that together to help

bring strategies into the fold that will help us meet the goals that we have.

And then the decide phase, that's where we'll actually be doing the work of putting everything we have on paper, figuratively speaking, but literally in Word documents, where we're kind of structuring the information into a plan that we can then request our elected bodies to adopt and that we could be implementing.

There will be a number of elements of engagement, community engagement in the design phase.

So also to kind of briefly call back something that Emily said earlier, where we got this feedback about some of the engagement fatigue in the community.

And that feedback that we received was that while there's, while there may be engagement fatigue on kind of general information questions of like, what's working well for you?

What's, you know, challenging in your neighborhood?

What needs do you have?

that there's quite a bit of appetite for really creative design thinking, getting together to craft ideas.

And so this phase will have quite a bit of engagement both through those 10 organizations in the climate resilience cohort, and as well as broader community engagement that we're going to be doing kind of in strategic geographic locations across the city and county to try to get as broad

We'll also continue to meet with staff and subject minor experts from City County UVA and also some of those additional government agencies that have offices or branches in the area.

And lastly, we wanted to make sure to speak to just how these fit in with our guiding planning documents for City and County that, you know, the planning commissions are heavily involved in.

So, C-ville plans together, AC44.

Well, one thing I kind of wanted to back up and say, so the city of Charlottesville is part of the global covenant of mayors for climate and energy.

So we have a commitment to develop a climate action plan and a climate resilience plan.

And when we, so we have already adopted our climate action plan and you all likely remember that we went through the extra step of having that be adopted as one of the functional pieces, a functional plan underneath the umbrella of our updated comprehensive plan.

So it is our hope and intention to be able to do that again.

for the Climate Resilience Plan.

So we really would like for this plan to become one of those functional plans that is part of the broader umbrella of the comprehensive plan.

And speaking of that comprehensive plan, we also know that a lot of our final strategies will cut across more chapters than just the Chapter 7 related to environment, climate, and food.

So I think we hit a lot of chapters.

And on the county side, we've actually had the sort of fruitful opportunity to be doing our resilience planning in concurrence with the AC44 comprehensive plan update.

So we've been able to have a lot of cross pollination with our colleagues in planning on what they're working on as that's in development.

We've been able to actually on that theme of drawing from engagement that other

We also had the opportunity to go to some of the engagement events that they've done through AC44, where we heard a lot of themes that are relevant to the kind of work that we're doing.

So that's been quite fruitful for us.

There's elements of both climate change mitigation and adaptation resilience that intersect.

And we know that the resilient community chapter will also explicitly integrate some of the smart goals that we've been developing on the county side with respect to our climate action plan or mitigation plan and then involved goals related to this resilience project.

So we see those as as threading together right next to me.

So let me maybe pause at this point and just check in with Commissioner Missel.

You had mentioned wanting to have a little space for some kind of general questions.

We have, so the next two slides are our kind of potential strategies that we put in the agenda that we put in the memo to you all to take a look at in advance.

And so I just want to check and we could go straight into those and invite discussion, but I didn't want to buy

I pass if you would also like to have an opportunity for general Q&A.

Yeah.

Thank you.

That's a great question.

I think it'd be great to have maybe, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes if we need it for Q&A right now.

Just because if everyone else is like me, I've got a bunch of questions that I'd love to throw out there.

But why don't we start?

I'll just start on this side.

that you developed that was sold in 22.

How that fits into this, and because there were certainly a lot of potential deliverables there.

I'm going to have to do it now, but perhaps the complaining commission.

I was struck in your introduction when you laid out and you just sort of completed the certain amount on your 10 partners.

And while I can appreciate your 10 partners and you sort of describe them

Your subgrants tend to community-based organizations that serve disadvantaged community members.

And while no one in Lysie is going to stop.

I would of course like to have a bit more shape down on what does that mean because if I look at some of those individuals from where I stand in other hats that I've worn, I don't know how effective they are doing what you want them to do.

So I will just place that there.

The other thing I think is sort of is it was a question of if you're just looking at how do you bring together a group of people who will help you think through the design of what this might look like.

There's no one from the for-profit part of this community who will be the individuals who will have to adopt this.

And so I don't see anyone here that says, why don't we bring in sooner or later?

And I'm sure there are people saying, you know, they have a mistrust for the for-profit people, but they're the people we're going to do it.

The county and the city have no, have no levers.

to make those entities do anything, except that they want, perhaps, a different kind of shading on there.

I mean, shading as in trees, but a bit more density or something, not a piece of property.

That's where perhaps the leverage comes, or the conversation comes.

But if you're thinking, this is a positive for our jurisdiction.

But I feel as if there's a significant gap in not being able to include some people who are in this form, who are actually going to be the ones who are going to have to build this into their process.

The other piece that I would also suggest, and being inclusive, is that I thought there would be, this is an opportunity, we hear this at Tom, certainly at our CACs, those of us, I can't speak for the city, but for the county, as a community advisory group, so I've always messed those up, and someone has to always help me through that.

There are opportunities for people, for our young people in school, who are absolutely dreaming, accidentally, about how do we do this?

And so I think there would also be an opportunity for you to reach out to the various schools here.

And so perhaps bring a couple of them on here.

The students.

Any questions specifically?

Why don't we go over to Michael Joy?

Well, I had a comment.

Well, there's two that I want to throw out.

And the first would be, I know that we're working towards a roadmap to complete this study.

It's sort of just kind of a third way in the process, but it'd be interesting

Information comes online.

So that was just one comment.

And then the other one, you know, trying to just look at the climate action plan and it may be redundant with that.

But, you know, what conversations are being had with some of the, you know, you have to be sure if it's the same with some of the for-profit or some of the large utility providers or some aspect.

Can I, is that a comment?

Can I speak to you?

So we do recognize we need to connect with some of our state level agencies and our utilities and we are working to build some of those connections.

And we actually have gotten some advice from our friends and Fairfax about how to go about engaging the utilities, engaging our state agencies that may have, you know,

Something to add to this, or we need to know about how they operate to really, you know, work around them in our communities, right?

I know in the county, especially HEDOT has a lot of heat impact.

And so we are working to make those connections.

And we are also working to try to work through our

Colleagues to connect with, so we've had conversations with our economic development folks, how can we really connect with the business community because they do have important input on this project.

So we hope that to do some business specific workshops during the design phase to try to get interest from across

So we're ideating how to best be able

It can be hard to get engagement from folks.

And so we are trying to be really intentional about the asks and so that we can be prepared to have the feedback that we're able to get from different parts of the community, have it be the most impactful for us and the best use of their time.

I said one last one.

One thing that would be helpful is that

Imagine that report sort of being sort of shared with a larger regional area where they could then adopt components of it that's sort of making it almost like a series of plugins that could, you know, different areas which may not have the municipal oversight or the deep resources could sit there and sort of take it and sort of adopt sections in a way that at least have some guiding principles that can help guide their decision.

Thanks.

A little bit.

I have some questions about the potential strategies, but we'll save that for afterward.

In the meantime, the first comment is I appreciate the long-term goals.

It's a really nice list.

I put a check mark by all.

And I do also appreciate that this is meant to be more about adaptation.

This project's focused rather than, say, mitigation, which is why I was kind of

Had a hump moment when I saw that the primary resilience strategy is greenhouse gas reduction, which is mitigation.

And I mean, we could be carbon neutral tomorrow in Charlottesville and Alamo County, and it's still going to be 30 days a year that are over 95 in 2050.

I mean, I don't want to say like we shouldn't do some things, we should, but I feel like if we let that take up the air in the room of the primary strategy,

Then we're going to miss out on the social things and the actual adaptation things that are much more necessary.

Yeah, maybe just briefly.

And recognizing that we're just entering into the strategy development.

The reason we made that the first guiding principle of how we think through this is certainly not to have that kind of take up all the air in the room of the actual strategies that go into the plans, but recognizing that with each kind of increasing year of emissions, we're making that problem worse and making the added

Yeah, to build on that, I'm looking at the goals.

I mean, maybe it's a matter of just prioritizing like,

It sounds like the communication and collaboration is probably the most important to get, but you keep talking about needing more information and creating this, you know, getting everyone involved.

So maybe it's just a matter of like visually ordering them so that that's like, hey, we're doing this.

And then, and then working admissions is one of the many, you know, things that we're working on.

It seems

really well thought out, awesome that you all are working together.

I think I was interested in the grant and because it's allowing this other, you know, kind of bringing more people together and maybe finding more opportunities.

Maybe it's with schools like finding money on this, like finding opportunities like you already did, you know, tying them to some of these goals.

So that when we get to implementation, it's not just like, you know, it's that each, each strategy might have like, here's 10 things we could apply for, assuming that that's all going to be coming out hopefully, you know, in the next few years, hopefully more funding for that.

So just encouraging that to be like in the lists, like amount of money should be there.

So that I think it also helps

We've been talking to communities having the money up there so that people can help figure out like, oh, okay, if we do this, maybe we can't do this.

You know, just sort of like, sometimes we leave that out and then people are disappointed because we choose something else and they don't understand why.

Yeah, but so thank you.

Thanks, Karen.

I guess I'm a little curious how, to what extent data gathering or analysis of existing data then factors into this.

And we have these vulnerability assessments that sort of get into that.

But I think about the dam study that the county is doing and how there's all these private dams and stormwater systems throughout the county that

Nobody knows anything about how many culverts are there that are vulnerable, being washed out like that one and I made a couple of years ago, and getting an inventory of those as a method of prioritizing the different strategies that we come up with.

Sure.

I'm even the one that was talking about the DM study in drainage infrastructure management program.

So the risk factor is a company, first read is what they're called, they produce data that we did purchase recently.

So the data includes like flood data,

and risks in 30 years based on different climate scenarios.

So heat, smoke, other risks like that.

So we are looking to receive and consume and digest and disseminate data to some extent.

We're relying on the vulnerability assessments that we're done, as you mentioned.

And through different programs that are being administered,

So I think that's my thoughts about how we're using data.

One thing that's helpful about the risk factor data, by the way, the package that we got from them has city and county.

Sometimes you get data sets and there's like, you know, the county's vulnerability assessment has a donut hole in the center.

So for this project, we were able to get both.

And a lot of the data in that data set is much more spatially refined than some of the maps that you might see in the county's vulnerability assessment, for example.

And Rory, I can also share.

So the city has a blood resilience plan that has been adopted by or approved by DCR.

So that has a list of projects in it that we can

apply for funding through the CFPF fund to, you know, actually do these get funds to do some projects that have been identified through that.

And so we imagine this, that plan will relate to this one, that would be part of the implementation roadmap, right?

Like take our plan that's been approved, apply for funding to do the process.

Thanks.

Thank you, Lyle.

Yes, absolutely.

Yes, it strikes me that there's this overlap between addressing climate change and one of the world's other great crises this occurring, which is

Solla-Yates, Michael Joy

They're addressing a climate change horribly wrong.

You look at Chesterfield, for example, a massive solar project that actually is going to wipe out several endangered species in Virginia.

So that's how you get addressing climate change.

So what are we doing in our county, you know, working with maybe

Great question.

A couple brief thoughts, and I know we want to make sure there's time for everybody.

One of the things that we've talked about in our strategy development is that some of them will need to prioritize those strategies.

One of the ways that we want to do that is by bringing in other factors about, you know, what multiple benefits at once is a strategy able to give us.

So there was that slide that Emily showed that talked about kind of climate change as

You know, an incredible challenge and also a symptom of sort of deeper challenges, including, you know, extraction and exploitation of environment that I think touches on biodiversity and species extinction.

And so one of the things that we talked about is having that kind of root causes mindset as we evaluate strategies that can be beneficial, that we want to prioritize for this work.

is to actually, you know, kind of maybe score or maybe check off, notate somehow, like what strategies are things that, you know, are really going to be helpful cutting across those multiple challenges that we're facing.

And then what are strategies that maybe, you know, because it's a climate resilience plan to Mr. Moore's point earlier, you know,

Hosea Mitchell

And a second element is I think I've had the opportunity to work on recent projects with colleagues in community development on some of the county's current policy making that really try to thread that in ways that maybe other communities haven't been able to quite as well.

So thinking about how we can make sure to prioritize biodiversity protection and even increase as we also promote clean energy in the county.

Question.

Philip?

Yeah, so a couple of things.

One, very briefly, I will let you know that that slide that showed the progress in Charlottesville and said forthcoming zoning ordinance causes six people at the side of this room.

We've got some very small contacts.

Yeah, so just people with that forthcoming and this comment is here, it is working.

Did I not know something?

So that's that.

To speak to a slightly larger answer about it, slightly larger from a greater height, my interest may be less in the specifics of what we do.

But the strategy of how we implement it is at the beginning we talk about we don't want this just to be another plan.

But my concern is in my thought is that we need to be mindful of developing an implementation strategy even before we've got the plan fully formed or else

We're going to find our, we're not mindful of the process of implementation and how this is going to roll out and what it's going to look like.

I think we could end up in sort of a frozen, constipated space where some of this just doesn't get done.

So I'm a little concerned about that.

And I think that that sort of probably deserves some serious thought on how we can look at that.

And then to follow up on Mr. Moore's comments on greenhouse gases.

Yeah, I mean, it is easy.

It is a measurable.

It's easy to measure, right?

But again, it's obligatory.

It doesn't actually change anything about the climate or the environment in the city of Charlottesville or out in Rock County, because we're not even a drop in the bucket.

Yeah.

And so, I mean, it's obligatory because we want everybody else to do it, but yeah.

Oh, well.

That's pretty much all I had, but my main concern is that we actually are able to implement this and we spend some time and resources on coming up with a strategy for the capital S strategy.

And we have to pull somebody in to hire somebody to talk about strategy.

Maybe we do that.

Maybe I don't know what our internal resources are for that.

Good point.

Emily, Gabe, I just want to give you a chance to respond a little bit to that, because I had a similar question.

And if I could just kind of riff on that for one second, in addition to how we do it, how do we measure it?

So once we're doing it, how do you actually then say, yeah, we're doing the right thing, or we need to kind of change direction in a couple of places here?

Yes.

I mean, I feel like that is certainly something that we have

We are aware of as the project team, and as we work on strategy development, that's a critical spin, right?

And this is also something that we run into a lot in the mitigation side of our work, right?

Like, you know, I can say pre-art, you know, we just, on the implementation, or on the mitigation side, we just gave our first kind of report out on how we're doing on implementing our climate action plan.

It is hard to measure each item on our work plan that we have been moving forward discreetly with like how many, you know, how many tons of carbon did we reduce, you know, by any given action.

So that is a difficult part of this work for sure.

And so we, it's something we think about a lot and we'll be thinking about as part of our strategy development.

So we do give some service to, you know, measurement and verification and building that into the do phase, right?

As we build out those implementation roadmaps, I mean, one of our

One of our guiding principles is these must be actionable strategies that we developed, right?

So at this phase in the project, we felt like that was a critically important thing to put forward.

This is a guiding principle.

We are not going to develop like if it is not an actionable thing that has real tangible real world impacts, it won't end up in the final plan.

A second piece that we are planning

The conversation began recently with it, so I don't have a document to show for it, but although you actually showed a bit of it on one of our slides, is actually putting out logical frameworks for all the strategies in the plan.

And when you talk about metrics, when you talk about metrics doing action in the real world, there's always going to be that element where you have projects, you do the outputs, you have short-term outcomes, medium-term outcomes.

And then unless you're really lucky, there becomes a dotted line to long-term impacts.

And so you can conjecture about long-term impacts, but often being able to measure

definitively the through line from one all the way to the very end is something that becomes sort of cost prohibitive or data possession prohibitive.

But that piece of building out the logical framework or logic model

So this strategy, and how is it going to have the impact that we hope it will, is something that we plan to build out for the strategies in our resilience plans.

I would just add that we're not there yet.

I mean, remember, we're just going into design.

Great.

Thank you.

First, I just want to say thank you, and I hope that this collaboration becomes more of an annual norm than one 75 years.

So I was saying that before I forget.

My first question is not intended for you to answer right now.

What's something to think about as a process matures?

And there's signals of that.

I did a control at F on page 170 of the county plan where I wouldn't read 170 pages, right?

So I found it there.

But that needs to be pulled up to the top.

And maybe it's not always financially.

It could be even life expectancy.

Like we do nothing.

Life expectancy in this region changes from 72 to 69, whatever it might be.

But I do think that economics and the health are

to really important points that measures the vitality of a community.

So that was my first comment.

And then just to piggyback a little bit briefly on what are we going to measure and understanding where we are in the process, understanding it's premature.

But I do want to push back a little bit on the building performance piece because I, for my age, I work for the American Institute of Architects and there's over 1,500 firms across the country

I think it would be negligent for us not to

And I'll have the fact that Gates said a theory of change, right?

So maybe that's a graphical image that says, if we test this, we expect these outcomes as it starts to look graphically so we can share it externally and internally.

Because I think you will need a theory of change.

It's such a big problem, right?

That there is no one solution.

And so you have to have bite-sized chunks.

Test this.

It didn't work.

So if we calibrate, we'll do that, right?

Those are my two comments for now, and I'll hold on the rest until we get to the other part of the discussion.

Wow.

Very grateful to be here.

This is exciting.

This is important work.

I'm excited to see it.

This ends my positive things that I say.

Thank you, Michael.

Next.

I'm very excited to see equity as a piece here.

That was a crucial part of the Charlottesville plans together, an approach we followed by equity of lands.

I'd like to hear more about how that will be a part of this.

We lean pretty hard on the Virginia Equity Center as a resource on that.

I don't know if you're doing that, but if you aren't, please do it.

They are incredible.

Housing was another essential piece of the Charlottesville plans-to-get-it process.

I didn't hear it, although I noticed some things about organizations that we listened to.

I had questions about emergency housing and how you're thinking about that.

Reginald Transit and Transit Granted Development

So yes, all of those elements that you mentioned are strategies that are in that draft strategy list, thinking about density, thinking about transportation, thinking about housing.

Those are all things that came up.

We tried to include some of those words in our report to help signal that those were very important things that came up during all of our engagement that we did during the Discover phase.

Of course, housing always rises to the top for many folks in this community.

I will share also we are

tried to be active at the state level legislatively through our professional networks.

And Priscilla and I and Gabe and Jamie and Greg are members of the Virginia group of local government sustainability folks doing this work.

And we are learning together how to think about advocating up

for things that will help us in our jurisdiction.

And there's several key actions in the climate action plan that are related to state and even federal level advocacy.

Thank you for being here.

This is great.

And actually, I mean, a lot of great questions already, some of them were very similar that I had.

But you mentioned something, Emily, early on.

You said you were recently in North Carolina.

And so I was just wondering, were there something that you, and you did mention a couple of things, particularly how neighbors were helping neighbors, right?

I was just wondering, more holistically, were there something that you gleaned there or that you have been talking?

I'm sure there's conversations going on, right?

I mean, this is very fresh, but it's not new, right?

We have experience here in Nelson County, Skyler.

So we have very relevant local experience with very similar type of disasters.

Just wondering if there's something that maybe caused you to pause and say, well, did we think about that?

Did something change?

Or maybe reinforced some of your thinking.

Just to correct the record.

But with colleagues from North Carolina who are sharing their experience.

Oh, my gosh, it was so interesting.

I mean, it's very fresh for them.

And one of the things that they shared was it was so shocking to be completely cut off from the internet and communication systems.

And folks had to rely on the radio.

And not everybody has a radio anymore.

especially one that you can run when you don't have electricity.

And so that kind of stuck with me as we engage with the community about emergency preparedness.

I don't think we, you know, there's a huge overlap with this about emergency preparedness.

So we've been talking a lot with our emergency preparedness colleagues.

They're a really central part of this project.

And

But as we communicate with the community through this lens, you know, having lessons or gathering lessons learned from communities who have been so greatly impacted recently.

That was something that really stuck with me, just how hard it was.

So as we develop strategies in our community, it makes me think like, okay, so I come from the engineering world.

That's my background before I came to work for the city.

So sometimes redundancy,

is considered inefficient, right?

But redundancy is a really important word when we're talking about resilience.

So how can we help to ensure that some of our systems, including our communications systems, are redundant?

So we don't end up in the dark, not being able to communicate with each other.

That was something that really startled me.

And also, yeah, just getting to know your neighbors.

I mean, people said they really had to come together

Because we can't plan for everything, right?

I mean, what happened in Asheville is not something that any level of planning could have really mitigated, right?

And so the stronger those systems are in place and connections between folks like you showed that graph at the beginning, I think that's really what we're talking about.

Well, thank you.

And I certainly, I mean, this, as I've said, it's very fresh, right?

So there's going to be more and more coming out.

I think there's lessons learned there that we should draw from.

I'm not sure that we learned the lesson from Nelson and Scholar necessarily.

We were having a conversation the other day about building in flood plains.

And so did we learn the lesson?

So here's an opportunity that we have to learn the entire region, right?

And it kind of answers Cory's question about what's the cost of doing nothing, right?

Awesome.

Danny, you guys outnumber us too.

So I am tickled that we were getting to do this.

I think Julia and I attempted to do this just before COVID fell apart.

So again, glad we're doing it and hopefully we'll do it again.

Let me meander through a thought that may lead to a question.

I'll be quick.

The everything that I've read and everything that I've heard today speaks to excessive water and excessive

And as I read through the Arlington Report, they acknowledged that not enough work, not enough thought has been done on their part as relates to the droughts.

And as I read through our reports, we, I think we mentioned it three times.

The word drought is mentioned three times in our report.

You guys in your presentation, the first, the second, third slide, you spoke to the worry about droughts and you spoke to wildfires could.

Because over the last week, I'm just talking about what they're thinking about as late as Tuesday.

And one of the guys suggested that 99% of all the properties in album harm are at least at moderate risk for wildfires.

And so I just want to make sure that we get a little more thought to a positive word.

So to that end,

We're bringing the water and sewerage to the table to talk about this because we need to understand what their reservoir strategies are going to be in light of a good job and what their pipelines are going to be and that sort of thing.

Just briefly, that was a comment and advice for us if it's okay just to say briefly that Emily talked about how we've been doing this research of strategies from other places around the country and kind of calling out ones that are locally relevant and then comparing those with

And cross-referencing those.

And one of the ones that jumps out with your comment is the, I'm not gonna, I don't have the name of it memorized, but the drought response plan that the Water and Sewer Authority has, we've looked through a number of those strategies and it's interesting how their plan in particular, some of their strategies are almost written like procedures.

If this happens, if water level gets to here, that triggers something that we're gonna do

And so I think that was really helpful for me to see in looking through what they have in that plan and being able to think about, okay, what is, you know, what do we have here that's already been adopted that's in place that we can make sure to build on and elevate?

And of course that, you know, doesn't necessarily address folks on well water in the rural area.

And I just wanted to mention that for those who are not aware of this, RWSA is in a process right now that we're very involved with the UVA, which is that they're going to be there.

They're maxing out the reservoir.

They're recirculating the way that water systems are going to work for our entire community.

And they're, they're building out their own water lines.

So instead of 18-inch raw water lines, they're going to have 36-inch raw water lines.

So the whole system is going to work differently.

Yeah, I was glad that the right hand of water and sewer authority also hired their first sustainability coordinator ever.

And that we're going to be meeting with that person next week.

And I think they'll create a direct link

Chair, what we're talking about, really what we're talking about, what helps us to respond in case of the emergency.

And so that's more than just water.

That's the fire department.

That's the, you know, that's the, I don't know what we have now, whether or not it's a unified ambulance service here, or even at the most on, you know, also what we're talking about is have those

Yeah, I would imagine that thinking my mind is simplifying this into like a checklist of these are the things like it's power, it's water, it's sewer, it's all these other, you know, pieces and how then will you respond in a situation for each one of those?

I just had a couple of really quick questions.

One is, you know, we talked about measurable and I totally get that that's a ways off because we don't know yet what we're deciding, designing and doing.

I would just encourage us to think about measuring even while we're thinking about designing and doing because sometimes, I mean, you want to be at the end, you want to have things you can measure.

So thinking about that from, you know, backwards to forwards may help you with the designing and the deciding and doing.

The other is just thinking about the funding.

So we've talked about incentives.

We will be talking about incentives probably in a minute.

This all is going to cost money.

So, you know, we've been thinking about affordable housing for years.

And, you know, it took a while to really get to a point where the housing album are, for example, had some incentive in it.

Maybe not enough, but had some incentive in it.

So as we think through this,

Let's also be thinking about, and I'm going to ask this as a question, are you thinking about how to fund these things as well?

I mean, that's always a question.

Yeah.

I mean, I would say up to this point, I mean, we've been mostly thinking about it on the mitigation side thus far.

But as we move deeper into this process, of course, you know, that is starting to bubble up and thinking about

How can we use this project?

I mean, this is a unique thing that we're doing here together, two jurisdictions and our university that spans our jurisdictions.

We're working together.

So when you think about grant applications, that's a unique

structure, a unique way of working together.

So we've been thinking about it in that context, like how can we sort of use this partnership to leverage outside resources?

We have not in terms of like, how much will it cost to build resilience hubs in our community?

That's good to know.

I think it just goes with Commissioner Clayburn's comment about what's the cost of doing nothing.

And I think when you bring the whole thing, it changes the mindset.

This is an added cost.

I just wanted to think about something to say.

So actually, something that Emily mentioned in terms of you want to define actionable steps, whatever your actionable steps that you can take.

Along with that, you have to think about what makes them actionable and probably funding is part of it.

All right, that's everyone.

All right.

Thank you.

Yes, what I'd like to talk about a little bit is beyond what people typically think of as community engagement, we're doing a lot of work with subject matter experts in our community.

So those are subject matter experts that our staff with the city and the county and with UVA.

And we're learning a lot from them because they're experts at what they do.

And that's also really important when we're talking about the systems and those people are running the systems in our community.

I really like the idea, Julianne, of going to the schools.

And I'm thinking about how to do that.

When I was working for ZGF in Portland,

They had a program citywide where firms sent professionals to schools to teach kids what architecture is and what architecture and planning does.

And I was thinking we could do something like that along those lines, make it like a classroom environment, make it

Engaging, because I think we have a lot to learn from young people.

We've also talked about reaching out to the monokin nation, which I think could be a really fascinating thing to do, but also very useful and obviously important in our community.

When we think about the five minute walk circle, the 10 minute walk circle, I'm thinking about that tonight in terms of the communities that we've already touched and then those that we need to keep building out the network to touch.

Yeah, actually, I have a meeting with tomorrow with the county schools to talk about how to actually bring these types of workshops into the county schools.

And I think we could probably use that model with the city schools as well.

So great suggestions and they're happening.

And I think in terms of the community engagement, we are being really intentional about creating accessible tools that we can deploy across the region using the cohort as kind of a vetting option so that we can work with them and do true human-centered design so that we're not just creating things in our offices and then putting them out into the community.

We're actually working with the community

to think through how we share information, what information we share in order to enable people to come to the conversation as their best selves.

And I think those tools, while we're specifically designing them with the cohort for their community,

Those tools will be as accessible to the chamber, to classrooms across the community so that we'll have the best availability of information and design strategies that really reflect the needs of the entire community.

And that's really at the heart of it, right?

We want it all to be, of course, accessible to you and to the elected officials.

But at the end of the day, we're going to need our community to take action and feel vested in this work.

So

So gonna close out our portion and just to frame what's next We've distilled two potential strategies that are kind of a combination distillation of things that we've researched that we wanted to ask you all we felt like you know

What a golden opportunity to have the two planning commissions together with the kinds of expertise that are in the room to hopefully ask for your help thinking through some challenges.

So I'm hoping to kind of shift things here and we're really asking you all questions and interested in your conversation together and the sort of feedback insight wisdom that you have for us.

The way that we thought we could do that is by picking a couple of potential strategies that are in the mix of consideration that affect likely both the mitigation side and the adaptation and resilience.

And to just kind of put those out for you, I'm going to share a couple of talking points just framing why we chose these.

I'm

obviously in the context of this work of elevating that so protecting areas that provide ecosystem services, land management and ownership strategies such as conservation easements, private open spaces.

So this is a distillation of strategies that other localities are pursuing in their resilience plans across the country.

And the framing that we wanted to kind of put out there for you all to help us think through is that many communities wrestle with

We're curious how we can take the increasingly extreme weather events that we're facing and try to think about a strategy like this sort of reframing it from these things that are intention and how do we balance that to are there ways that we can actually regenerate and expand ecological health

So, I think one great example is what Mr. Murray brought up earlier of biodiversity.

So, one great example, Malibu County, you know, Charlottesville has the Dogwood Festival, whatever it knows.

But we were actually in the furthest southeastern occurrence of a very rare dogwood called Cornish Cannondensis.

There's a little dogwood that only gets like, yay, and normally lives in boreal forests up in Canada.

But there's a little pocket that survived since last Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, that's still in Malibu County.

So this is going to be one of the first casualties from climate change.

At the same time, despite its sensitivity to the climate, it's also a fire-dependent species.

And so it lives in the Shenandoah National Forest.

Right now, it's being choked out because they can't view controlled burns.

So you think about this.

We have houses

So this is a great example.

Thanks for that, Mr. Murray.

I think another one that comes to mind for me is pollinator friendly plants, pollinator species broadly and the impact on our agricultural systems, the crucial contribution.

So this is one, and if it's okay, I'm going to put them both out there for comment on both.

They have perhaps some intersection.

The second one that we wanted to ask you all to help us think through is

A strategy such as use more compact development and other techniques to increase walkability and accessibility, increasing transportation options during climate hazards, decreasing transportation costs, and supporting baseline public health through more active transportation.

Our sense is that pursuing this strategy appears deceptively simple.

It's something that is prioritized in both of our localities comprehensive plans.

You know, in the city's zoning update, likely play a major role in the county zoning modernization process to reflect that kind of priority.

It's also something that seems like many people agree.

is a good thing

And so, you know, how can how can we overcome some of those challenges associated with that where maybe folks support it in theory and then don't want it when it's when it's nearby because of the kinds of beneficial outcomes that I don't need to tell you all about.

I get how this I'm for the county.

I get how this would work for for the airplane.

I get how this would work in Crozet.

I get at my work in Scottsville.

Which is interesting.

So let me come alongside you.

At one point we were talking about community hubs.

And my sense of some of the communities, not the sort of development, but the areas outside that there was significant pushback on community hubs.

And so I was just trying to figure out, how do we even deal with the fact that if there's an emergency, how do we get those people who can't stay in place to a place of safety?

You know, sometimes we'll say, well, we go to Yancy School.

Well, you got to get to Yancy School.

If we have, and I won't even talk about what happened just recently, remember, folks, we had to raise you here.

If you have any recollection of what the roads look like outside

Yes, it was an absolute horror show when that derecho came from here.

Where do you get people to?

Where do you get them to?

And so we, in our, in our conversations, it was just like, why not?

Because you put one of those community centers out there, that means there's going to be a sandwich shop.

There's going to be a sandwich shop.

That means there's going to be this kind of shop.

And so the whole idea, I think, the question is, how do you sort of

I think it may be helpful if you say, you scare people.

And I don't like scaring people.

I do think that in some sense it's like, what will you do if the next time you're stuck, we can also remember, we have 22 inches of snow on the ground here.

Not that long ago.

That basically shut us down.

It shut us completely down.

One of the reasons we're a VDOT place.

VDOT only has so many plows that it can deploy.

And we are accounting like 467,000 acres.

I'd like to back up to you.

I don't like scaring people.

I don't either.

But, and we decided that we had an alarming amount of experience in this in 2022-23.

Change is scary.

And I think none of this is going to work unless we've got a significant portion of people enthusiastically on board for all of this to happen.

The community at large needs to have some sort of consensus that this is an important thing to do because change is scary and we're going to change things.

And it's going to cost money.

And it's really, really difficult, I think, to frame the appropriate fear in people's lizard brains for things that are going to happen 20 years from now if we do nothing.

We just don't seem to be good at that.

You know, getting pissed off because we're building a tent story, building next door, yeah, that's easy.

But it's right there.

But to have this sort of nebulous, and then we've got this insidious group of mouth breathers who are in a position to say, oh, none of this is actually happening.

And that's actually getting credence, right, where it's a complete crackpot and shouldn't get any at all.

But there are actually people running around you think,

Thank God for the billionaires in oil company executives who are uncovering this dastardly plot, otherwise the scientists would have gotten away with it.

And I think that those are larger communication strategies that we have to have, and I don't have a solution.

But either one of these, we've got to say 20 years from now, this is going to happen if we do nothing, as you said.

Well, maybe we need to define that pretty clearly and show how things were 20 years ago, and here's the change you can see.

Yeah, but I think that in implementation, if we don't get people aboard, this is real and serious, and it's going to cost money.

I'm not going to move your dip though, though.

Just one thing, if I could just add to that conversation, and it is all we know most of the scaring part's okay, but thinking through the opposite side of sort of scaring is education, in a sense, right?

Ways the answer, I think both of these strategies, one way, and I know you're doing this, but is actually getting out there and saying, these are the benefits of open space.

These are the benefits of stormwater management.

This is the benefit of walkability.

This is, et cetera, et cetera.

So I mean, I think that's just, once you instill that value in the residents, then oftentimes it is less scary for change because they see the benefit of it from the start.

The other thing that just sort of strikes me in general about these two strategies is, you know, we've talked a lot recently as we're looking at AC44, that 95% of the county is in the rural areas.

And, you know, these are two questions, two strategies very skillfully chosen, I'm sure, in that one of them talks about open space, the other one talks about density.

So, you know, our development area,

We've collectively decided not to expand it.

So we're looking at density.

How do we create density within development areas?

So I'll just call that out as an observation and think through this.

Yeah, so bring it back there to some of the strategies.

I think even thinking of it early,

So those are real

And I think that would do a whole lot to really change the conversation about some of these things.

We also have authority.

to require LID in some of these areas.

I'm surprised that we're not using that.

So I think that that's, and then these areas are areas that are often used for pedestrian infrastructure.

They're used for walking and cycling and running and stuff.

So why do you do that?

The somewhat conservation district, a lot of the easements there hold are repairing these points.

And so that's another strategy that we could be doing and thinking about protecting these areas long term.

Yeah, just one example.

We just finished a rezoning, which many of you know about North Fork.

And up there, we profited 200 acres of open space.

Got 3.7 million square feet of entitled development.

But we also, out of 565 acres, carved out 200 as permanent open space.

And to be quite honest with you, that's mostly floodplain and critical space.

So where developers can be looking at that and thinking about it, it's not just though, okay, this is convenient, sure, we'll put that proffer out there because it makes us look good, but then how do you actually program that space?

And including that in the conversation is perfect.

So I guess with regard to starting to, you know, I think it's easy to look at that and say, you know, we should, you should allow more density.

And I think there's, there's that middle part there that I think is maybe easy to overlook there.

But, but it's sort of a critical component of it.

Is that you've almost in some sense is

done a good job of sometimes of having your new greenfield developments be relatively dense and even have good connectivity and walkability within the development.

But because they're greenfield developments and they're happening as by and large in that kind of second ring of suburbs around your first ring suburbs that were developed, you know, 40 years ago and are not walking

not being walkable to things or accessible to the urban center.

And so you end up with this density without accessibility, which is not necessarily bad.

At least it's not sprawled without accessibility, but it's not quite as good as density with accessibility

and thinking about how to remake those connections often through those older suburbs into the urban core and into other activity centers.

To zoom out a little bit, the two potential strategies

So I read through them, I got through the packet and the guiding principles and like, okay, these are mostly very good.

The long term goals and like, yeah, right.

And I got to the two strategies.

I was like, these are not the strategies that helps us get the

in rural areas.

The others keep building some dense units in the road areas.

Those are already happening and I don't really see how those solve our problem.

I don't think we're going to land use our way to real resilience.

I think we have to look at what are people's needs

And those needs are going to be food, water, electricity, safe quality homes, communications and connections.

And neither of these touch any of those directly, which is where I think we ought to be putting our energy.

If we talk about the first potential strategy, more conservation easements and private open spaces, I mean, I think there we can look at the rural areas and say, what do we grow?

Who makes a living in agriculture?

How do we do business, you know, whether profit sharing and co-op models together?

to get people into those fields so that there's food nearby when we need it when there's crisis, right?

As things change.

In the sort of urban development area, yeah, keep building more dense housing.

And also, I think we have to say, how do we very explicitly build more housing, including social housing and other models of housing, so that people who work for a living can afford to live there?

And that's part of resiliency as our community.

There's missing things here that I didn't even see.

Like for me, if I were thinking like, all right, what's going to help us be more resilient?

It's going to be more robust electric and water backup systems.

It's going to be a radio in every home.

It's going to be more robust communication systems.

It's going to be third places to build those social networks that we're talking about earlier.

So you do get to know your neighbors and people, you know, then let's read.

Just 10 seconds on that.

Charles Bell is got the densest zoning ordinance it can have.

We just spent the last couple of years blogging it to get more dense.

I'm aware.

And getting pushed back by some members of the community for the same reasons I alluded to earlier, look at the longer term picture.

So to us, strategy number two is a non-starter for the city of Charlottesville, because we've already done it.

And it's going to be years before we're going to revisit that to try to make it still dead serve.

So strategy two is easy enough.

It's like, OK, well,

And I would offer, I mean, we talk about the density, but we don't have a public transportation

And one of the reasons I say that is the way our two communities are built, I don't know how I can move public transit across those communities in a way to make the dollars work.

So if we took it, and I always get this nice stuff, Brookfield, Brookfield, Brookfield, Brookfield.

Yeah, I want to call it something that's, someone who says put the right name where there's good, that whole quarter.

So if I come from John Warren Parkway,

up 29, come over to Berk Mar extended, come back to Rye Road.

I don't have a way to get people there.

I got a lot of new houses up there.

I got a lot of new families going up there.

And then when what comes in and North Fork and North Point, I don't have any options right now for those, except for micro-cap, I guess, to some degree.

I don't have options for people to not get out of their cars.

And so you've got to help me with not you, but we've got to help me.

I just thought at the start and I didn't know if these were just things to like start a conversation and they do seem pretty like we already agree on all that with them.

But what I'm noticing, because we're both in the room with the city and the county, I think just the creating the larger strategies and the county saying, like, we can work on this stuff, the city saying we can work on this stuff, connecting them, hopefully, as best we can.

So maybe that's where

Like in this whole list of things, it could be like, how does the county sort of fund, you know, to do this?

How does the city do this?

Instead of saying like, you know, we have, the city has their pros and cons.

You know, there's, there are things to work out in the county as their things and they're not the same.

So how do those two like support each other?

So that these two, instead of being like two strategies, say like, how do these support each other?

Who's doing what where?

There's a reasonable argument to be made that inside the city of Charlottesville, we should, we should just be like, done.

We're not doing that anymore.

We're not going to move away from that.

And the idea being that we could get more density out of that, and in return for that, more people living here and more green space outside of the dense area.

Now, I'm not saying that's a bad idea or a good idea, but what I'm saying is that we would need some coordination in policy and in rulemaking

that compliment each other.

So that if we did that, there would be something else going on in the county to sort of compliment that.

The steep slopes were established because they were trying to provide some protection for Earth.

Right.

So if we take them out and we allow people to build them, that means we've got to have an integration to the stormwater management people.

Right.

That means we've also got to figure out a way

Not that all developers are all good people and good-hearted people, but sometimes buildings move.

I'm just saying how we do that.

I mean, because I think we're moving towards a going to gross density.

We're no longer going to do metric density, which in fact then says to the

You're all smart people.

You'll have really good people on your staff.

Figure out how to put it there, but here are the things that you can't mess with.

I think what Phil's trying to get at is, like, sort of the critical slopes thing aside.

Like, what we should be focusing on to enact that second point is building as much as close to, you know, UVA in downtown, the employment centers as we can.

And part of that is building a lot more in the city, which I think we've made a good first step to get towards and there's probably more work to be done.

That will have to take a couple years.

But you guys right now are on your comprehensive plan.

Throw out there that I think in your method of land use planning, of having individual area plans or whatever you're calling them now for each different place, you end up losing a bit of coherence there, where, for example, you have a ton of pending growth in Holly Mead because when

I assume there was lots of greenfield space it was you know way of 29 and that was in the designated growth area so of course you put a lot of growth up there and you end up with developments like North Fork and Brook Hill that are reasonably dense internally but no connection and almost impossible to make to retrofit

He meant North Point.

North Point, sorry.

The Wetzel property, the Granger property that would have been that are right there already basically connected and would have been honestly better suited for that sort of much more intense growth.

So I think the conversation is when you're talking about how do we have community conversations with folks to say that if you want to be remembered, we all came here from someplace else unless you have a piece of land that was here from the 1700s and some people do, but a lot of people don't.

You know, they don't.

They don't.

And so how do you have that conversation in this eclectic group?

And I will tell you, I live in a place right now where the the census has changed from old Strongs, old Albemarle, to new Albemarle, and they don't want to know their names.

They could give a flip about their name, but yet they expect the services to be like it was in Buchanan, Connecticut.

is like, that ain't happening, brother.

You live in the wrong world if you think they're going to come and deal with that.

So you've got this, we've got this interesting change that's happened here, where instead of becoming more community focused, like my colleague to the right one, I'm sensing that there's this, there's this, there's this sort of pulling apart.

And how do we do it in a way that allows us to be a place that's safe, that's resilient, and that can think into the future of what, of what the things that are going to happen to us?

For those of you who are waiting for me to systematically go around, I'm not doing that.

So Commissioner Claiborne asked very kindly, are we going to go around to each person?

So if you have something to say, just feel free to jump in.

The second thing I'll just mention while I'm talking is it kind of bounce off these things as we think about it, tie it maybe back to some of your potential strategies is two things.

One is I think your question was about

How can our community overcome the challenges associated with achieving these aims in practice so that we can realize the beneficial outcomes?

So that's one thing for us to be thinking about.

How can our community overcome that?

The second thing is we've talked a lot about density and bringing density to certain areas.

We haven't talked a lot about how do we think about infrastructure.

So, we have mentioned infrastructure, but if you've got this density and we all want, because people are common, right?

People are showing up.

How do we handle that in a way that's thoughtful and forward thinking in terms of resilience?

I think we have to measure where we are with our infrastructure.

How stable is it?

Where do we want it to get to?

And how do we implement that as part of our development process and increasing density?

I just want to make a quick point.

I haven't made any points yet, so.

Just for the, you know, so I have a benefit of actually being on your side of the table, because I was on the planning commission, I didn't even chair it in Charlottesville.

So I did eight years there, and I'm doing eight years here, and then I'm done.

Honestly, too much.

If you're really bored and you have nothing to do on a Tuesday night, you want to listen to us, you'll hear this commission talks a lot about wanting more density.

And this commission also talks about the fact that

We're not necessarily supporting expanding the growth theory because we think that that'll just like it's like going on a diet by loosening your belt, you know So we want to push the density into what we do have Now having said that, like Julian said, you know, we get like the stormtroopers coming out and saying how dare you ruin our community with this whatever the density is.

Density is a dirty word to a lot of people

You know, when I lived in Belmont and we got the Belmont Loss and one of the things we did was show people pictures of beautiful density

to get people to say, oh, that wouldn't be so bad if that lot was developed more densely than a couple of single-family houses, which is what the original idea was.

So I'm just saying that we're all on that side.

And in fact, you know, we've been saying, like, could you please go a couple stories higher?

Like, we were coming in, we were like, please go higher.

And, you know, we get things like, why do I want to put an elevator in, or I want to make it stick built, and then I can't.

It's like, you know, whatever.

So, you know, we're on that side, but I think it's bringing it back to the resiliency part.

You know, one of the things we talked about in our very last plan commission was, you know, how can we, if we want, we're not getting the density that we're putting in our coupling.

You know, we're, people are coming in at less than that.

Some of the complaints we hear is, well, your process is so hard and it takes time and it costs you a lot of money, and I want to bother with it.

So just come in with buy-right stuff.

So, you know, we are talking about what can we do to incentivize that?

So putting that resiliency lens on it, you know, is there something green that they do that they then get that sort of automatic bump up?

You know, we've done this for affordable housing, but you know, like if you put a green rooftop for your development, if you add extra water quality treatment for your stormwater, if you make that trail connection, like making those kind of automated things that

Yeah, you can slide on through the development process if you're doing the green things that we want.

We don't really have incentives right now.

We really don't.

I think that you and infrastructure, which is you've got to come up with a way to induce, seduce, or otherwise encourage

You know, that building in those areas that you've designated for higher density.

Yeah, I'm sure you've got that a little easier than you because we've got 10, 4 square miles and that's it.

You've got to do what you've got to do.

Yeah, but, but things like infusion, you know, is it worth it to build in closer in these road there?

And I think that's going to require some investment now.

We're the commissioners.

We're not the board.

We're not the council.

We haven't got no money.

And we're not the legislature.

Right.

So the thing is that, you know, we're going, you know, we sometimes, we talk like we're on the board of supervisors all the time.

The point is that, you know, we are going to, as a county city, have to put money and more money in the game.

We're going to have to actually build, you know, we can just say, please give us a sidewalk.

Please give us a track.

We're going to have to actually start coughing up some of that money, subsidizing some of these things to make this community, the green community that we want, that's going to be more infiltrative, withstand extreme weather, be more drought tolerant, be more water conservation based.

That's just going to cost money.

I'm willing to pony up, but that's just me.

And I will suggest you should.

Everybody should be aware that our center of business is actually not where you think it is.

That's where he is.

Yeah.

There are more jobs off the UVA.

Bring it all back to conservation easements and open spaces.

Commissioner Murray made a really good point earlier that you get these proffered open spaces in developments, and then they often are the perfect place to use to for connectivity, but it's infeasible because they are private open spaces, right?

You guys are going through this now with the Greenway Trail biscuit running connector.

Greenway, where these are private HOA easements and you didn't get the connectivity part of the proffer before.

And that's, I think, what really kills me about this strategy is when they are conservation easements in open spaces that doesn't even necessarily mean they're providing the ecosystem services you're asking for.

At some point, there's a lot of localities that require green spaces dedicated that at least an easement is granted to the locality for that.

And I would love to see us move in that direction.

I think that also provides security for a lot of people because you have developments that, you know, you have this area that's been green for a long time, and then the developer comes back a few years later and says, actually, we're going to put houses there.

And they said, well, we were all promised that that was green space.

So,

The big way is what they do is they donate their easement to get a tax break.

But ordinary people who don't have a lot of money, they depend upon a different kind of easement where the rights are courteous.

And Emerald did have a program like that called ACE, and then that was limited.

Yeah, exactly.

So the easement program that we do have is unfortunately not the kind that benefits smaller landowners and people with less

So, and then, you know, as you score things like easements, we can choose.

We've done, in my opinion, a poor job in the past of doing things like looking at, are we really getting the maximum value for these easements?

Is this just a big area that's just cut for hay?

I don't want to pay for that.

I know I saw a couple of hands and I want to hear from folks who haven't spoken, but I also wanted to just call out that Commissioner Firehawk talked about a number of items that Serena put on the back whiteboard as potential follow-up questions for some of what you all have already shared with us.

So you've started to, you know, you pointed out, okay, these are a little broad and you started to give us some almost more like precise

Pat Weiss to pursue.

Yeah, so in the design phase, we're going to serve up some of these great strategies that have been considered by other localities, much like the two that you're looking at today.

And in the conversation, I've just been capturing some of the questions that you all are asking about

How effective would these strategies be?

So when we start to consider, I think in the design phase, you're not only thinking about the possible ideas, but how they'll work.

And if we have enabling authority, what are the funding possibilities?

How are we going to measure it?

That's a design consideration, right?

And what are the benefits?

And then somebody said, how are we going to communicate or get the community behind it?

So these are all considerations that I would want to put forward as we

Solla-Yates

at the table.

And I would just add that if it's not clear,

The difference between strategy one and two is alluding to the fact that the solutions in the county are going to be different from the solutions in the city.

So we have to figure out how to make those harmonious also, right?

But it's not as if you're going to have one plan

That's going to apply to the very different conditions in the city versus the county that's going to solve everything.

Julie, I can't follow up to that.

So, you know, as you transition design phase, you know, I think finding challenge and friction about change or what people sort of

So you actually identify

So,

And so I think we're moving in that direction, but I just wanted to make that point.

Yeah, maybe there's an institutional lens or something or a corporate campus lens or something that's one of these guiding things.

And I think then people can sit there and start to assess

Michael, I would argue the parts of Charlottesville that actually look more suburban.

They look more rural.

Right, that's part of it.

So I would say as much as we've heard, well, here from the community, every time we're going to build something, but I don't think that that's actually what's limiting us at least in the county.

In a lot of the developments that have come forward, we're actually, and so it's the development community.

County.

So how do we enable that higher density?

How do we enable, you know, adaptive reuse and infill projects in the county?

I think the city has had more success with that, but we haven't.

And they're just not building to the density for all the reasons that we hear, right?

Different building materials, fire, you know, fire code, if you have high rides and more elevators, everything else is more money, right?

What it comes down to.

And I think that the generative nature of what does it take or what does a resilient community look like, that opens up the conversation to developers to say, oh, I think I could contribute in this way to this vision of what it means to be resilient.

So in addition to the density and like how we get there, there's I'm sure it's like

Yeah, I think truly, like to your point, you know, a picture does paint a thousand words, and you can show an example of something that's really helpful.

The other thing on the flip side is, I wonder if there'd be a developer or developers that might think about partnering, and maybe it's residential developers, seems like it's more likely to be that, that could come together and create a pilot project.

And, you know, maybe there's some incentive there.

Maybe there's a marketing incentive to them for marketing their homes or whatever it is that we are a pilot project.

We are concerned about resilience.

We're teaming together and this is how we're doing it.

And that becomes case study and also allows developers to work creatively to find ways to make things happen more efficiently.

The other thing I'd say with the development community, and we talked about incentives, it's easy to think, and you all know this, a preacher of the choir, but we think about incentives as, oh, we have to find the money for this.

It's not always that in the development community.

A lot of times it's time.

And so if there are ways that we can think about and ask to develop a community, what is it that would make things more feasible for you in terms of bringing density, in terms of achieving these resilient goals and objectives?

How did we get there?

Other than paying you, you know, I know they're going to say, well, tap fees, gosh, RWSA takes us there.

So expensive.

Thank you for that.

How long do we want to go?

Because Robin can talk for about seven hours.

Are we thinking maybe wrapping things up around 8, 8.15?

Is that all right?

Are you thinking yes?

Okay.

Well, do we want to guess?

I just had a comment that I want to throw out before we end.

So I know Rory kind of touched on connectivity and we have these different parts of the county and city being developed, but you can't get between them without driving.

And something that hasn't come up yet is VDOT and kind of our regional transportation

Planning an implementation process that is a more or less, you know, oil machine.

It kind of goes on.

The MPO puts together projects from the jurisdictions, federal money comes in, and these projects get built eventually, or something like this.

It's a machine at least.

Yeah, it's a machine.

I don't know how well it is.

Things are being built.

And the scale of what VDOT is doing in the region is much larger than anything the city and county are doing.

I was looking at the last city capital improvement budget as 27 million over five years for all transportation investments and I think

Solla-Yates,

Do not move us closer to being a walkable, likeable community.

You should speak to that, because that's actually

Yeah, I mean, VDOT is implementing projects that are proposed by the county and the city, well, not the city, but the city-influenced-own projects, or more accurately, doesn't implement them.

It's cancelled $35 million worth of projects, but we...

But, you know, the county sets its own transportation priorities beyond VDOT, or beyond smart scale, sort of directing VDOT what to do.

So I think we do sort of have the right people in the room, except to the extent that, you know, nothing any of the planning commissions do matter.

Many of these projects are smart-scale funded, so there's a formula that decides, and that formula is very political.

But I guess what I'm saying is, I just think that there are, you mentioned state-level agencies, but I think the kind of regional transportation project implementation process, I really hope that we can find a way to direct it towards making the region more resilient and making it more possible for us to live.

One of them is that we don't listen to data.

And so every time this project come out in the county, people are saying, oh, the traffic count is this.

And they always just mean the traffic count cars.

And so we have traffic counts for pedestrians, cyclists, runners, but we don't use them.

Hosea Mitchell

I know it's getting late, so let's offer a couple of points that I don't want to be duplicative of some kind of story to them now.

For strategy one, I think the first thing that came to my mind is

How do we, and that lens of climate resilience and so forth, larger scale renewable energy and

The adherent tension that will occur with like land use needs and that needs to be reconciled.

And so, yeah, who was that?

But I think that is a key to getting us where we need to be those and something we're going to have to tussle with.

And then on the second strategy around compact development, I want to make sure that, you know, as we're having these conversations that

For buildings, we need to incentivize resiliency, sustainability, carbon reduction, or existing buildings.

A lot of what we've been talking about here is in Greenfield, but the data says almost half of architecture-firm buildings right now in the U.S.

existing buildings.

And so it's inevitable that that's going to be a new set of constraints that we're going to have to contend with as we're starting to flesh out our strategies and start thinking about how that might be implemented.

around natural disasters, hazards, and risks.

I tried to know four points.

Preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.

And so how we started looking at those avenues, what does that start to mean for infrastructure or site design?

also don't lose sight of that piece as we get further down the road.

And then lastly, I tried down business continuity for both public and private sectors.

So, you know, we had some rain from Helene.

School was closed for three days.

That's crippling for a lot of families, right?

So in terms of business continuity, how do we stay up and running as we think about site design, building design, planning, zoning, and what does that start to mean, right?

When we talk about

So I'll end there because I know people are probably hungry and they want to go home.

So I'll stop there.

I just have a suggestion if it's helpful.

One is I was going to say any concluding remarks from anyone, but that could be another hour.

You guys ever watch Wait or listen to Wait Wait, don't tell me at the end, they're like, you know, this, they go around and everything.

So I'm going to model this and see if we can, if we can do this, just think of your top three items and not like a narrative, just top three items.

So cross jurisdictional infrastructure considerations.

That's one for me.

Two is education, pilot projects and case studies.

Everybody does this as well as you just did.

It's going to be faster than we can write it down.

So I'm going to ask you all to write them down and also send them to us.

We'll have minutes.

Speed round.

A unified transportation.

And a narrative that is about the possibility of tomorrow.

I just think about, you know, if we got 15 inches of rain in two days, what happens, right?

And so where do people get food and water?

Where do people get electricity?

Where do we have communication and connections to do that?

I'll try.

One thing we didn't even talk about is regional pathways, regional greenways for connectivity so that people could, because we can still reconnect all this disconnected stuff we have.

It is possible, just like we've done with Urvana Trail.

I just want to plus one that idea that, Michael, you said this about thinking more about not just like the county and the city, but like suburban, urban and rural, and it's okay that we have different strategies for those different situations.

Sorry, Murray.

I was doing that all week.

Hazard Overlay, I think we need a fire hazard overlay.

I think we also need a significant incentive for structured parking.

I'll be redundant.

I'll just give you one and be one of the strategies that we could have talked to about today, but I would put it in your mind about talking about it more in the future.

We have talked about it and that is neighbor

So how do we do that?

How do we encourage that?

All right, is that an option for us?

I can't consolidate my thoughts on this.

Okay, one thought, stupid thought.

There was some discussion that these strategies only slightly overlap.

To me, these both strategies are the same.

I don't see the difference between the two.

Right.

All right, I'll keep it short.

Direct the real transportation knowledge towards multi-lodal regional connectivity, focus development, or hazard risk in lowest, and give people access to the rural green space.

Well, I didn't write that down.

It's so fast.

Land Value Tax, or we could call it a sprawl tax.

We did it for centuries here in Virginia.

It's a way of making leapfrog development financially unfeasible.

You just can't do those unpacking spaces in fact to connect financially.

It's not legal, but it could be legal.

It's a neat current.

It's a recommendation to Charlottesville's legislative packet legalizer in our region.

I think it would solve our transportation problems as well.

The idea of missing small, we talk a lot about missing the middle.

It was an arc to paint it out for

The positive vision for rural areas, and then permit that by right, what do we want so the rural area, not what we don't want, but what would be good for people with poor resiliency and a legalized land?

Neighborhood commercial, that's one of the few things that fell out between our companies and our museum.

We didn't realize that the commercial was too much put it back.

Sandwiching is exciting.

in the city, perfect candidate again, where they look for places that were historically allowed for commercial uses and then legalized commercial in those places actually had a preservation.

Right, yeah, I love the end of that.

Any land use based on current and future infrastructure, that's something that Charlotte still did in our comprehensive plan, where is the infrastructure already?

Okay, maybe that's where the infrastructure is going.

The limiting dwelling unit per acre measure.

We were getting a lot of great projects killed because they didn't meet the DUA requirements.

We got rid of it.

It's great, right?

Bicycle parking mandate, no vehicular parking mandate.

That was politically relatively easy for being first to do.

Transformative, L2 miles in terms of climate, L7.

Put the compliments plan in the capital improvement plan.

That's something we did in Charleston over the years.

Staff hated me for it, but it used transformers, including the dollars.

Christopher D'Oronzio, what can I ask you?

Sure.

The media of the Borough of the Great Steel, I endorse Michael's basic premise of starting from the King Slate.

The second thing is looking, is dealing with community bringing along and grasping.

You really need to pay attention to what's going to happen in 20 years if you do that.

And third, going back to my original comment, we need to make sure that as we build this plane, we know how to plug it.

Yeah, I'll just say, resilience hubs need microgrids, mass phone charging infrastructure, and satellite internet.

Awesome.

I also like the kind of not shaming people I think we have because, you know, when we're like, oh yeah, they already know this, like, just start from like,

How do you live now?

What's great about it?

And kind of building up the partnership of everyone kind of taking their pieces of the puzzle and not the city doing everything, the county doing it.

Everyone's got like different strategies.

And then I think also just sort of using some of the most vulnerable people as a judge of what we need.

If you're homeless and something happens, this is what happens if you don't have air conditioning or if you just kind of starting with the most immediate problems and then working up just to protect citizens that we need to protect.

Reminder quick, I just wanted to urge clarity, simplicity and positivity in this process, just so I think

I think you can sometimes lose sight of high level ones, just to, this is a scary death for everyone.

I mean, it's an existential thing.

I think a lot of people can just kind of hold up and go like, well, it's too late.

You can't do anything.

So I think making it incremental and really simple and achievable.

And I would imagine getting 80% of our region to do like 10% or 20% is better than getting 10% to 80%.

Well, just a couple of quick ending things.

First of all, thank you.

Secondly, be thinking about how we can continue to be helpful.

So hopefully this isn't the end of the discussion conversation.

You know, if you have other strategies that you want to bounce off, I don't know how we physically do that or email or whatever it is, but

This is great.

I mean, I think this is really, really fun to see.

And then the last thing I'll mention, at the risk of having somebody in the staff or something, I mean, hopefully we can do this again on other subjects and moving forward.

So thank you.

We didn't finish.

We got two teams.

Next time, somebody has to buy dinner.