City Council Meeting   2/3/2025

Sam, you ready to go?

I'll call the Charlottesville City Council on February 3, 2025 meeting to order.

Ms.

Councillor Oschrin.

Here.

And Councillor Payne will not be with us today.

Here.

have been established a physical form City Council will now consider a request from Councilor Snook to participate electronically.

Councilor Snook, are you able to hear us?

Yes, I am.

Are you able to hear me?

Are participants in the audience able to hear Councilor Snook?

Yes.

Councilor Snook, for the record, would you please specify your reason for electronic participation in your remote location?

I am in Ypsilanti, Michigan, visiting family.

Second.

All in favor, please vote.

The motion passes, 3-0.

The meeting will be divided into three sections.

The first is a work session where we will hear and discuss presentations that do not require the council vote followed by a closed session.

And the reports of the first one is

Good afternoon, Mayor, Council.

This afternoon

We will be giving you an update on the progress of the community safety working group and the project safe neighborhoods in hopes that you all feel up to speed, updated and that you can go on to become ambassadors for the good work that this region is doing towards improving community safety.

Alright, as background, the President's Council on UVA Community Partnerships was created in the fall of 2019.

They also have working groups that are dedicated to things like affordable housing and early childhood education.

In November 2022, three UVA football players were shot and killed on campus.

And at that time, additionally, the rate of violent crime in Charlottesville had increased by 30% from 21 to 22.

So in the spring of 2023, UVA President Ryan worked with the city manager's office and Admiral County leadership to create a sixth working group that's focused on community safety and working on that approach to be holistic.

And it included over 20 members from the community, including city staff, nonprofits, community members, community leaders, and folks from the equity center who are in the audience.

Here's one.

So, the first activity is starting in March.

We're really to look at the data, what's really currently happening in Charlottesville and Albemarle and the UVA campus.

We also, in addition to looking at data, we looked at current research around reducing gun violence and increasing community safety.

We talked to experts in the field.

We also engaged presentations from other nonprofit partners.

and over that course of that spring into late summer, the group came up with overarching goals and each goal had several recommendations that fit underneath it.

So goal one is create protective community environments.

Goal two is enhance place based programming and access to care.

Goal three, improve coordination and information flow amongst community members, service providers, school and law enforcement.

And goal four is to connect youth to caring adults and activities.

The full report was published in September 2023.

It's on the Equity Center website and the President's Council website.

So you can see all of the recommendations that the group put together.

And then after that full report was completed, we looked and said, OK, well, there's a slew of recommendations that have been vetted.

But how do we move this working group report into implementation?

And so at that point, there was an implementation group.

So the Community Safety Implementation Group is a smaller group that's from the city, from Alamo County and the University of Virginia.

So the two represent

representatives that Sam had appointed to that implementation group for myself and Chief Cotches.

From Albemarle County, the two appointees there are Kaki Demick and Chief Reeves.

And from the university, it's Chief Longo and some folks from the university.

And we also have Backbone and sort of structure and program management from our partners at the UVA Equity Center.

So this smaller group was charged with analyzing the large documents over 20 pages and prioritizing them and putting them in sort of manageable action items.

We also, in that time, decided on three community metrics because we want to be accountable to our community members and to the work of the group.

And so the three safety metrics that were selected were number of injuries from gun violence in the region, number of deaths from gun violence, and the rate of chronic absenteeism in Charlottesville City and Admiral County Schools.

So from that time, we've slowly been chipping away.

There are current things that are happening ongoing in the community that are sort of progress towards those four overarching goals.

For example, the UVA Equity Center hired a data analyst that supports the community safety working group efforts.

And there's also ongoing support for the CVILALBA.org resource for youth opportunities, that website.

is designed to be sort of an all-encompassing place where community members and parents and caregivers can go to see what are the nonprofits, what can kids do in the community and make sure they're up to speed on what opportunities are available.

As you know, Anchor launched in July of this year.

Hart has been going on for a year and a half, and that's ongoing.

That's increasing the mental health supports.

to folks to increase safety in the community from that avenue.

We've also implemented Youth Lead, which is the pre-arrest youth diversion program for city residents.

We've had a number of roundtables that foster two-way communication with our partners and community residents.

So on January 21st, we had a press conference

that sort of let the community know about one of the initiatives of the community safety implementation group called Project Safe Neighborhood and then on the 28th the group hosted a community dialogue on community safety and so one of the major focuses of the group's work right now is full implementation of Project Safe Neighborhood and Kyle Irvin from the communication department came up with a

We're pleased to have you here for this important time.

This time is a moment that represents over a year of hard-working collaboration between the City of Charlottesville, the County of Albemarle, and the University of Virginia.

Yeah, Project Safe Neighborhood Simply Put is a designation by the U.S.

Attorney's Office that really supports regional collaboration around the issue of community safety.

And one of the things that my organization, as the Equity Center at UVA, as well as the President's Council on Community Partnerships, what we look at is how to coalesce and build a coalition around the partners regionally that are addressing this issue.

With the primary focus on community advocacy groups, community nonprofits,

Local law enforcement as well as regional partners in our local government such as human services that provide services to individuals.

Yes, so I serve in two roles.

I serve on President's Council and I also work for Albemarle County Public Schools.

The Department of Human Services is part of the Project Safe Neighborhood Project by leveraging our community partnerships and using our partners in the community that serve youth, that serve adults in the community who need some supportive services to get on the right track.

So our role is to make sure that we have everyone at the table because this is a collaborative effort because in order for this project to work

We're asking everyone to join hands and join forces to try to provide services to people who need them and also accountability for people who need that.

We think by joining forces together we're going to make a big difference around how this community feels and how people get their needs met.

You know, UVA is a community.

We're a critical piece of the Charlottesville Albemore area.

And what I think most excites me about this project is the opportunity to work closely with my colleagues in the city, in the county, and the United States Attorney's Office to really make a positive and meaningful impact on violent crime.

Violent crime moves no boundaries.

It has no idea where the lines between city and county and universities may intersect.

Well, so first of all, one of the things we're doing now is identifying those prolific offenders that continue to prey on our community.

It's a very small group of folks through a focused deterrence model.

We're using that to identify these individuals and then do college to see what kind of services they may need.

It's not just about enforcement action.

It's about taking opportunities to reach those who are at risk for connection criminal violence.

All right.

So just to recap some of the topics that were covered in the video, their Project Safe Neighborhood is a Department of Justice program that is a nationwide initiative that has been successful in other localities.

It brings together federal, state, and local law enforcement officials, prosecutors, community organizations, and other stakeholders to help identify and address violent crime problems.

There are four pillars to Project Safe Neighborhood.

Community Engagement, Prevention and Intervention, Strategic Enforcement and Accountability, and I'll just kind of give you a little bit more information on each of those pillars and how it's starting to shape up here in Charlottesville.

So community engagement this meeting is another opportunity to engage with the community.

We want to make sure that the community is informed of what Project Safe Neighborhood is, why is it here, its purpose and some of its components.

So we want to make sure that we are

being transparent.

We're sharing information.

We're also inviting feedback like we had on the 28th, the community dialogue.

What is it that people want to see happening in our community to improve community safety?

And we want to make sure that we're utilizing diverse methods of communication.

So whether it's a press release, whether it's meetings like this, town halls, the community walks that the police department does,

So that's community engagement, making sure folks have buy-in, have a way to contribute to the rollout.

Prevention, working with youth-serving organizations so that they can have some increased capacity to build resilience so that they don't even end up on the radar of Project Safe Neighborhood Strategic Enforcement, which we'll talk about later.

I want to make sure that we're checking in with youth and tailor those programming and resources to their current needs.

One of the things that we heard at the community dialogue last week, we heard from a young person who had talked about hearing again and again that teens and young folks want a non-programmed safe space to hang out in, you know, like a mall, and that wanting to have a place where they can connect, where they don't necessarily have to

do a sports team to be engaged where they can have a safe place where they can have a good time and connect and know that they're safe.

Intervention, so one component of this that Chief Cock just mentioned in the videos are call-in meetings.

This is an opportunity to provide individual attention to and encourage those individuals to take a different path.

So it requires basically calling folks in.

There is a list that has data and metrics that are very subjective, excuse me, objective, and they make sure that there is a metric in place that it can identify the folks that are at highest risk for committing violent crime and the most in need.

And so we bring those in.

and we'll have providers, we'll have facilitators that are sort of restorative in nature and we'll be able to sort of talk with the individual about what would it take to encourage them to take a different path.

And there will be a law enforcement presence there to kind of talk about what might happen if they continue down the path that they're currently on.

And then the last component is accountability.

So we're accountable to the residents we serve.

That's why we have community safety metrics that the UVA Equity Center's data analysts will

make sure that we're up to speed on and the community engagement.

That doesn't just drop off.

That's not a check box.

So we're going to be having opportunities for the community to keep us honest about what we say that we're going to do.

And I've been really enjoying the collaboration, the partnerships that we've built over the last year and some, almost two years now.

And just grateful that I've been involved in gaining momentum.

It's very humbling because you're balancing the urgency of people that you meet out in the community that want a resolution.

They want it now.

People are hurting.

with that, that we want to do it right, that we want to make sure that people are informed.

We want to make sure that we're getting the right kind of feedback.

We want to make sure that if someone asks for a service, we have that service to give.

So we want to make sure that we're filling those gaps as well.

So thank you for letting me update you on Project Safe Neighborhood.

It's here.

It's getting ready to launch.

Obviously she's not just if he wants to have some follow up remarks.

I think you covered it well, Ms.

T. This is how it's supposed to work.

I mean, the collaboration, the meeting we had the other night, the dialogue, it was packed.

And these were folks from the community.

It was just an awesome conversation.

Folks who have been traumatized by gun violence.

And so, yeah, this is an all of the above approach.

Yeah, thank you so much.

I know that in times past, you've given us updates in terms of the crime rate and incidents.

I don't remember the last time that you've done that, but it seems sort of my subjective feeling of things is that things are in a better path than they had been.

It does, and we'll be pushing out our annual report here in the next month or so, but just put some numbers out there at the town halls.

So part one, you saw there was a 21 to 22, 30% increase in violent crime.

Last year we had a 10% decrease in part one crime, which are most serious crime.

Homicides were down 76% last year.

And so the numbers are good, right?

But they're not zero.

And so, you know, we just had a young man kill the other night.

That's, you know, so I think there's something to be said about those metrics and that data that I think is important.

But a program like this also takes into account the trauma

of the folks in the 900 block of Page Street the other night that were housed and cars were shot up 45 times.

So the numbers are important.

They're a metric.

They're a goal.

But I think this is more than just numbers.

So the Project Safe Neighborhoods, what is it, my observation is that you and Chief Longo and Chief Reeves, you all are working hand in glove all the time.

Daily.

Yeah, what does Project Safe Neighborhoods sort of add on top of that?

A framework?

and resources from the focused deterrence piece of it, from the strategic enforcement piece of it.

It gives us resources at the federal level that we don't have at the state level.

I'm hoping we don't have to use any of those resources.

Resources in terms of like money, federal grand juries, money, enforcement type stuff.

I'm hoping we don't have to go use any of them.

They'd be great not to.

And that's where I think these call ins are going to be of value.

I mean these are voluntary call ins.

We hope to be pushing that out here shortly, right?

The call-ins.

That's why we did the press conference to kind of notify folks.

We did a community dialogue.

We identified facilitators and now we

and Project Safe Neighborhood in other places in the country.

It's the same model of identifying a high-risk person and bringing them in.

Put them on the spot and say, you can go this way or you can go that way.

Yeah, that's basically what we're saying.

Yeah, there's models out there.

Danville is a Project Safe Neighborhood Community, a city of Roanoke is.

It's been around a long time through different administrations on whether both Republican and Democrat administrations, it's continued.

And so, but it's you, what I think is interesting for us, it's really unique to our community.

Good.

Yeah.

We also got some support from the UVA Law Clinic students to do some research on best practice and how folks are rolling out Project Safe Neighborhood.

Got it.

Thank you.

Yeah, a couple of questions.

A couple of years ago, when we were seeing this increase in violent crime, and we did a lot of talking about it, we were talking about the causes of violent crime as falling into a few categories, some of which we could do something about, some of which we would do much harder doing something about.

One, domestic violence is not really something we had

a lot of ability to intervene directly on the second was youth violence and it was particularly distressing back then that there seemed to be a lot of young people who every time they had some sort of a beef they wound up going and finding a gun and shooting wildly all over the place and occasionally they actually hit somebody and we put some effort over the last couple of years into identifying programs

for kids to get involved with that we thought might give them something to do with some adult supervision, with some team building, with some community building, and so on.

And then we had violence growing out of drug and other illegal activities.

And then to a certain extent, there were some just sort of side private beefs that the Buck Squad, now I guess Central Virginia, violence interrupters, whatever,

being called now was trying to deal with.

I'm wondering, first of all, is that still essentially a fair breakdown of the kinds of things that are leading to violent crime?

Well, thank you for the question, sir.

So I would say what we mostly are seeing now out of all of those groups is the settling of petty beefs with firearms and just the accessibility of firearms now that we haven't seen in a very long time.

I'm

You know, violent crime is rooted in poverty, right?

That's a big conversation, right, about housing and all those other things.

But from where I stand as the police chief, my concern is these young individuals are accessed to firearms and using them to just settle what would just be a petty beef that now linger online for a very long time.

and that's what we continue to see.

We have not seen many shootings or violent crime associated with the drug distribution.

We haven't seen that over the last two years.

Does it exist?

I remember about 20 years ago, long before your time chief, your time here was put it that way.

There was a major federal prosecution that I was involved with as representing somebody on the defense side.

where there were a series of shootings in one particular case of killing over in the Dice Street area that amounted to an ongoing beef between two different, call them gangs is probably overstating it, but two groups of people who were at least some tangentially involved in the drug trade.

So there's a little bit of a

of a carryover between the beefs and the drug activity.

In that major prosecution, a whole lot of people wound up going to jail and it seemed like that neighborhood calmed down.

Is there any comparable thought that there is a particular neighborhood that requires additional law enforcement presence or some other more targeted law enforcement response or is that what

So to answer your question, we monthly meet, you've been to one of the meetings, one of our CompStat meetings, where we really look at the data, those hotspots, if you will, and what's there.

Those hotspots have been the same hotspots for about 20 years.

And so what we're really starting to do now is look for that hotspot within the hotspot.

What's causing it to continue to be a hotspot?

What we find is typically an address.

in a specific situation that's happening and trying to get to addressing that.

The case that you're talking about, I'm assuming was more of like a RICO case or a racketeering type case in order to put something like that large.

The challenge with what we're seeing now is in order to put a case like that together, you have to show that these groups are profiting somehow for something, whether it be the drug trade or something else.

These are groups, and again, I'm not sure I'd even call them gangs, that are beefing over what somebody called somebody on social media or someone said to someone's girlfriend.

And so it makes it much more complicated to kind of identify the groups and go after them.

But yeah, it's definitely a complex issue.

To answer your question about a neighborhood, there's no specific neighborhood.

I also think that's what makes this new initiative a project safe neighborhood different, is that it's much more individualized to the people who are having the most impact on violent crime.

So it's even more

like individualized, not necessarily to a neighborhood, but to an actual person.

We'll be able to sit with them and say, what do you need?

Yeah, I had one other question.

A year, about a year and a half ago, there was a major problem with some of the violence spilling into the schools.

And I'm wondering how any of this, what the trends are right now with violence spilling into the schools, is that situation abating?

Are we getting any better?

I don't have any of that data in front of me now, sir.

I could probably get some of that.

But I think we're in a better place today than we were this time last year when it comes to schools.

And I'll also add that the Department of Human Services has really invested in their partnership with Charlottesville City Schools.

So we have a couple new initiatives going into the schools to work on pro-social skills, confidence building, self-esteem,

Conflict Resolution, Identity.

These are gender-based groups.

So there's a girls' circle and a boys' council.

And so youth that are in Walker and Buford will be able to engage in that.

Again, more focused on the prevention side of things.

But again, we want to prevent the violence from happening.

Thank you.

So before you go, just a quick follow up to that.

So I saw Eric from the county schools.

Not specifically in the implementation group right now.

How does that work?

So what we did, and it's kind of the framework, is we developed a matrix, and an individual is scored based on this matrix.

And it depends on your criminal history, your activities in the past.

They met with our crime analysts, our intelligence analysts.

that do this stuff every day.

And so they're digging into police reports and warrants and all that stuff, right?

So our analysts, our Morrill County's analysts, UVA, they all got together and put together this list and scored them on objective criteria.

Like I said, criminal history, if you were involved in a gun violence incident or were caught with a firearm, stuff like that.

And then once that score comes up, developed a list,

and say we're going to take the top.

I don't know what the number is.

I think the initial run through was 40.

And then they additionally took out anybody that was under current investigation, currently incarcerated, or had been of good behavior for a certain period of time.

They have limited those from the bit earliest of 40.

So somewhere around 20 individuals.

And then what will happen is we'll decide how many of them we can actually facilitate by calling in and we can call them in either through community partners, which we've been working with, or probation and parole, you know, folks like that, ask them to come on in and sit them down and have this conversation with them and see what do they need.

And basically just say, what is it you need?

What resources?

Here are the resources.

So it's like an invitation to a meeting that you can choose to accept.

Do we know where you're going to happen yet?

The implementation group is working on the scripts and the agenda and the location.

And so we do want to be very thoughtful about the location.

And it may not be a public location.

We also, I think Chief mentioned,

selected two wonderful facilitators that are very versed in restorative practices and working with folks who are shortly in need help and kind of getting through that way from restorative practices.

So we're excited about the quality and caliber of our facilitators because it's going to

Yeah, okay, thank you.

And then you just said in response to Lloyd's question, it's hard to identify the groups to go after them.

So how do we identify the people that we're trying to go after for this more positive?

That's the list.

And when we talk about, are these gangs, if you will, when I think of a gang, I think of a hierarchy, something like that.

We're not necessarily seeing that.

They're not as organized.

Not that that would be a better thing.

And then backing up to one of the goals that you mentioned, enhance place-based programming and access to care.

So one of it is as simple as making for

Michael Payne

Okay, thank you.

So I just had a couple of comments.

The first one is that you listed some bullets and the second one was like a list of different community activities that the youth can do.

How is that updating?

Who updates that?

Currently, the Equity Center is the holder of the website and there are staff that can update it.

And they also have a link that you can click on the website to say.

Hey, my organization isn't here.

Is that website, like, cross-listed on the city and the county websites?

Or do people think, oh, I have to go to the UVA Equity Center website to learn about it?

I don't think it's on mine at Human Services, but we can certainly work to that.

Yeah, a lot of people still don't know that it exists.

I met with another community leader and they were very excited about it and so they were going to put it on.

Yeah, it also I think makes it feel like more of a city-county partnership as well where if it's

I mean, we appreciate that you're hosting the website.

But if we are cross listing and sending people there, then it also feels more like a city and county program.

Cool.

So my next question or comment is like the attorney general or the state and feds input in this, what do you see?

First, you know, has have you heard any discussion that's being

D-funded or curtailed, but even if it's not, if it stays as it is, I'm trying to get an idea of like...

when we have these call-in meetings, like what do you see as the purpose?

Well, yeah, the money, I mean, obviously that's a piece of it.

And again, the resources as well are a big piece.

I was asked this recently about with everything kind of going on, what's the impact going to be with, you know, with the U.S.

Attorney's Office and all that.

I will say the folks who we work with at the U.S.

Attorney's Office, we've been working with for years.

through multiple administrations.

It's the same line level career prosecutors that know this community, who live in this community, who you all know.

And so I don't suspect any of that's going to change and I'll do everything in my power to make sure it doesn't.

So, you know, we're going to do our work the way our community expects us to.

and so we've talked about it.

I talked to our local prosecutors as well and they're still moving forward.

I also want to thank Ben Allen and his folks at UVA.

There's a lot of work that was done, like things that had to be done here and they really, they picked it up and helped us tremendously.

So I just want to add, I'm glad Ben is here when I was one of the original

co-chair of that university community task force.

And when we talked about, you know, having a university more engaged in a concrete way, in a community, kind of having a front door to the community.

And, you know, at the time, you know, it was talk of so many studies and different schools and departments were doing studies for kids in West Haven and Friendship Court, but no one really knew.

And so we needed something like this to kind of like bring all these kind of resources together to kind of

you know make sure it makes sense and it wasn't negative impact in the community so it's really great to see and hear that this is things are actually happening so it's great.

My last comment or question is the meetings that you have and so you know I've been in this community enough to know that we have to be careful but when we have these meetings that sometimes only those who have done opportunity or privilege enough to come out

And that's what I was mentioning about the diversity and how we get the word out about Project Safe Neighborhood is not just the community meetings, but having our partners that are already established in neighborhoods and community leaders that already have meetings going on, we go there rather than inventing a new thing for someone to have to find resources to attend.

So yeah, some people already have

their regular neighborhood meetings, you know, I'm thinking afar, they have really well attended meetings and neighborhood association, black professional networks, they already have to get some time in whatever in the meeting.

So great.

Any other questions or comments you guys are rocking and rolling on this?

Well, it's not like there's not like a specific grant.

There's multiple grants you can get.

Okay.

It's a designation and the police departments, UVA and out on the city were designated in August of this past year.

Right.

So once you get your designation, it could potentially open up funding streams

Okay, so like I said back in, I think it was September when we talked about this, is that right?

September?

I would come back and kind of give an update as to the rollout of the Flock ALPR program and kind of where we are.

and as we as we move forward after this meeting with you all we will be taking this on the road as we promise the community as well to the different community groups that we went to when we initially rolled this out.

Since September, when I stood before you and talked about this, there's a lot been said about ALPRs on the state level.

There's legislation, draft legislation now, sponsored by Delegate Herring, and a lot of things kind of going on.

And so, I am happy to say, and I'll get into our policies here in a minute, our policy here in a minute, but that we're being looked at as almost a model.

They've looked at stuff from our policies when drafting guardrails on the state level and the draft legislation that is out there, our current policy meets all of those guardrails that are in that draft legislation and then some.

And so we're in a pretty good place.

Just a reminder, these are the locations where our flock cameras are up.

There are 10 of them and these are the different locations.

A few policy highlights, and I'll get into how we got here to our policy.

Right now we have a seven-day retention period.

It is the shortest within the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Our system access is restricted to Virginia law enforcement only.

In our policy and when there is an alert, this statement is put up there as an ALPR alert, including an alert by the ECC, does not create reasonable suspicion to justify a traffic stop or a detention or an individual.

The officer must develop independent reasonable suspicion for that stop.

And that was that verbiage was taken out of ACLU's model policy recommendation.

And then our ALPR system audit shall be conducted on a monthly basis.

This is our transparency

This is the second half of it because it's a lot.

It shows hot list alerts, vehicles detected in the last 30 days.

This is as of last week.

I want to say I pulled this off on Thursday.

Hot list hits and then searches in the last 30 days.

It also has a link to our policy that anybody can see along with the contract that anyone can see.

Again, this is open to the public.

Just a little background implementation process after we stood before you and talked about this program.

We began our contract negotiations with Flock.

That contract was reviewed by us, the city attorney, and the city manager.

After that was finalized, the policy was developed.

That was reviewed by us, the PCOB executive director, the city attorney, and the city manager.

After that happened, then we trained all of staff, all of our sworn staff has been trained along with the executive director of the PCOB.

And then the PCOB executive director has been granted access to all police systems required to audit that.

And that means our records management system, our acts on body camera system.

They've received sieges training, which is criminal justice information systems training, which is required.

Um, quick question.

That's Sieges.

Sieges.

Is that done like, um,

It's training that the Virginia State Police puts on.

It's a it's a wet wet-based thing now But put like anybody who has access even to our like record section in the police department has to attend sieges The sieges training just talks about the privacy records It's a it's a requirement by Like how we have to go through for your training exactly.

Yeah

So a few of examples since the program has been into effect.

You know, the big one obviously is multiple stolen vehicles were covered and here's why I feel like that's important when I talk to folks in the community who have their vehicles stolen.

Every day their cars not recovered, they can't go to work.

It's a big deal to get your car stolen.

And so that's been one of the biggest things.

There was a shooting on Hardy Drive on a playground where someone was shot in the leg.

We had a description of the vehicle.

We were able to punch it into the system.

We were able to identify a tag to that vehicle, ultimately identifying the person and suspect who involved in that shooting and make an arrest.

Another shooting on Hardy Drive or two stolen vehicles were identified related to this incident.

The vehicles were recovered and in that, based on flock hits, those evidence was found within those vehicles when they were recovered.

It led to three arrests in the shootings.

This other one was a missing child who never showed up to Summit Elementary School.

The vehicle information of possible whereabouts of the child, like all the family members, like what kind of vehicles his family members have.

Let's see, maybe they got into a vehicle with a family member.

Obviously you can imagine family was frantic and we were able to ultimately identify the vehicle, locate the vehicle and ultimately locate the missing child who was not in harm.

And then another hit, a vehicle related to a homicide and another jurisdiction was alerted in the city.

Ultimately it was identified, stopped and information was passed on to that jurisdiction for their case.

It's been, as you can see, it's been very helpful.

Those are just a few situations that I can talk about.

It's also been really useful to see the system, how it tracks where our stolen vehicles are going to and from.

They're traveling to areas such as Lynchburg, Harrisburg, Waynesboro.

And it gives us a good idea and intelligence of what persons could be responsible for many of these thefts.

And so that's been helpful in investigating these cases.

Hitton Runs, Domestics.

We've had domestics where the suspect may have fled in a vehicle.

We get the tag number.

We're able to punch it into the system and locate that vehicle real time when it alerts in our cameras.

Therefore taking a violent or dangerous domestic abuser off the street quickly so they can't come back to the home.

And then for our shooting investigations, again, due to the yongo and nature of a lot of them, I can't talk about specifics, but I will tell you that this system is used in every one of our shootings.

It's been used in our recent homicide.

We are using it, and it's been fruitful in a way that allows us to make progress in these cases much faster, especially when we're talking about dangerous individuals out on the streets.

Some guardrails.

So like I said, Charlottesville A.O.P.R., we currently meet or exceed all draft legislation guardrails.

The draft legislation actually allows for 30 days of retention and we haven't asked for that.

We don't need that right now.

The seven days is working for us.

and so I'm proud to say that our policies will withstand the legislation and is actually much more restrictive than that draft legislation which is bipartisan that is working its way through the General Assembly as we speak.

It's going to cross over tomorrow from the House to the Senate.

So they can't yet and here's why.

Their roads are maintained by the state and so for them to have

Flock or ALPRs on roads that are maintained by the state.

It's actually in that draft legislation that will allow them to get a permit through the state if they want to use them.

So right now they don't.

There are some private businesses in the county that have these.

Thank you.

No, I'll just say I've been

curious and concerned from the civil libertarian perspective about the whole flock system, but I think that the guardrails, I voted to do this in large part because of the guardrails and I'm glad to hear that the guardrails are apparently satisfactory for your purposes

It seems to me that they are reasonably calculated to avoid some of the worst case scenarios that people have been throwing out about the way in which flock systems might be used or misused.

At the beginning you said ALPR system audits should be conducted on a monthly basis.

So it tells a few things, but the big one is, so if an officer goes into the system and queries a license plate or a tag that they're looking for, they have to put a case number associated with it.

And so when you do an audit, so an officer would just randomly pull up.

I'm not sure what that does.

So you would pull up the case number, first of all, make sure that case number that the officer is associating with that search is legit.

So the idea is that it has to be used for a legitimate law enforcement purpose, and so that confirms that.

That's just one example of the audit of the system and doing them randomly.

And that's why the PCOB Executive Director needed access to our records management system.

and the body warmth and our axon system so they could pull up that report, they could pull up the stop, they could watch the stop, they could see all of it.

Okay.

This presentation, is that going to get sent to us?

It wasn't in the packet, was it?

It might have been, but that would be helpful.

So, Chief Cotches, have there been any hiccups that, you know, anticipated or anticipated that, you know, that just happened?

No.

So you gave a couple of examples, one of a missing child, one of a shooting that you were able to.

Well, it's hard to give a hypothetical.

Yeah, I know, I know.

So the shooting, I mean the locations of where these are, so the shooting up on Hardy Drive on the playground, we had a description of a vehicle, and I don't remember the exact description, let's just say it was a green two door, I say green because you're sure, green two door car, right?

That's all we have, we don't have a tag number, okay?

But we have a flock camera at 10th and Main Street.

If it happens late at night, not a lot of cars are on the road.

And so we can look and see what green two-door went through there around this time frame and get a tag number.

And then look that up and see, okay, let's find out if this person was there.

And that's what happened.

And so if we didn't have that, we may not have solved it as quickly.

You know, a stolen vehicle.

So when your car stole and the officers are on scene taking that report, what's your tag number?

They can go in and say, okay, at this time, your car went through this camera like one in the morning.

So we know it was stolen around this time.

So now we can also go ahead and look for video cameras in the area that people may have around and narrow it down to that time frame.

and be able to maybe even identify a picture of a suspect who may have stolen that person's car.

So it does a lot and it provides evidence to, you know, a trial in the courts.

So yeah, it's invaluable.

And look, I know the conversation around the civil liberties and privacy expectations.

I'm sensitive to that.

And so it's on the top of my mind.

And I could tell you, even as I'm involved in this conversation in Richmond and at the state level,

And I don't always make my peers happy when I say seven days is good for us.

But you know, that's what our community expects.

And that's one thing I keep hammering home is that when you put something like this into place, how you do it in the process to get their matters.

And I think we got that right.

I would like to make kind of a parallel statement based on your presentation before where you said, where you acknowledged that, you know, poverty is the driving force behind all of these things.

In a similar way, like you mentioned, stolen cars mean people can't get to work.

Well, that's because we have a car dependent system.

if people didn't need to rely on their cars to get around because we have a more robust transit network, bike lanes, sidewalks, all of those things.

A broader view, those could help people not be so car dependent, also reduce vehicle theft and vehicles and that sort of thing.

I would love to get to a point that we don't need it.

Yeah, I was reading in the paper, maybe a couple of weeks ago where that guy who had stolen all those bikes, he had like, I don't know, $60,000 or $70,000 worth of bikes.

I don't know if you remember that, but yeah, people will find a way to take a lot of things that don't belong.

Yeah, absolutely.

Great.

Any other questions or comments?

Thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

September or October?

I would say that we, I have to have that conversation with the chief before the budget closes, but that's part of the question.

Yeah.

Lloyd?

Did you want to state your position now?

Not at the moment.

Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

So Sam, is that it?

pursuant to Section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code.

Second.

Second.

Can we vote please?

Okay, we're in closed session.

I'll second that.

Okay, so we have Lloyd here as well.

Can you do we have to read it in him in again?

No.

Okay.

No.

Second.

Okay, and

Yes, I have two announcements.

Two and a half.

First, I want to thank all of these city staff who put together the e-bike demonstration day last Wednesday.

We had great turnout and there was also support from three of the local bike shops.

and we had like 50 to 70 people show up including our city manager's office and the mayor and it was a beautiful day and it was really great to get out there and get a lot of people on bikes so that was awesome and hopefully we'll get to do another one of those soon.

Also this Sunday

is the next iteration of our city neighborhood walks.

We'll be exploring Fifeville, so we're going to meet at Buford at 1pm on Sunday the 9th to take a couple mile walk around the neighborhood, meet some neighbors,

and get some steps in and kind of explore.

Of course, everyone is welcome.

If you live in the neighborhood, you get to explore your own neighborhood.

Yeah, please come out to that.

And then the e-bike subsidy lottery, our first iteration of that has been tallied up.

We're going to hear a memo about that later.

But I just want to let everyone know the drawing will be February 5th.

So later this week, we'll find the first 25 people to get the vouchers for an e-bike in Charlottesville.

I'm excited about that.

That's one of those programs that our sister city in Bethesda, South France has, that it's a big program that they have there and it's widely used.

I'm glad that

We're the first city in Virginia to do so.

I didn't know that.

That's another bragging point that I'll bring when I'm given introductions and welcome.

So thank you.

Brian, did you have anything?

No.

Lloyd, did you have anything?

No.

history and whereas the City of Charlottesville acknowledges the significant contributions and sacrifices made by African Americans in our community.

and throughout the nations, often in the face of great adversity.

And whereas the city of Charlottesville recognizes that Vinegar Hill, once he thriving black community in Charlottesville, was a culture and economic hub for African Americans, home to black home businesses, churches, homes and

and that fostered a strong and resilient community.

And whereas in 1965, Vinegar Hill neighborhood was demolished as part of an urban renewal project displaced in many black families and businesses and business owners, leading to a lasting economic and social repercussions.

And whereas the city of Charlottesville acknowledges the impact of past practices

honors the legacy of Vinegar Hill and commits to policies and initiatives that promote equity, justice, and inclusion.

And whereas Black History Month serves as an opportunity for residents of Charlottesville to reflect on the struggles of triumph and triumphs of African-Americans to educate ourselves about Black history and to work

towards a more and just equitable future.

Now, therefore, the City of Charlottesville City Council here by proclaims February 2025 is Black History Month in the City of Charlottesville, and we encourage all residents to participate in educational programs, cultural events, initiatives, and honor the

and Anna in Celebrate Black History and Contributions, signed by the Mayor on February the 3rd, 2025.

We are now in Community Matters.

There's only one

pre-registered speaker leaving slots for 15 additional speakers for the community speakers at the beginning of the meeting and as Marta making her way down, we have them three minutes to speak.

Good evening.

Good evening.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak.

I really want to keep my part short.

I know you don't normally share the time slot, but I'm here to really introduce you to the new CEO at Java, Judith Selzer.

She comes to us with about 20 years of nonprofit experience and then several years as an executive coach.

She brings enthusiasm and passion and we're really excited to have her continue the wonderful work that

Jabba does.

Thank you so much, Marta, and thank you.

I appreciate being here tonight, the opportunity to say hello and introduce myself.

As Marta shared, my name is Judah Selzer, and I am the new Java CEO.

I have an amazing mentor here by my side.

And of course, Mayor, I'm so thrilled you're also on our board.

But just wanted to say hello.

Thank you all for your years of investment in the aging community here in Charlottesville.

You have been investing in this community for quite a while, and I look forward to continuing to partner with you.

This year, some of you may know, we'll be celebrating our 50th anniversary, and so we'll have some kickoffs for that in March, so we'll be sending you invitations.

It's open, of course, to the whole community.

And I also wanted to share that on February 26th at 3 p.m., we have an exciting program to invite you to as well.

which is at Timberlake Place, which is on East Market.

We're going to be dedicating the community room in honor of the late Mary Williams, who many of you know.

Her granddaughter will be there as well, so it's a very special day for us, so we'll send out invitations to that.

But again, just so thankful to be here representing Java and look forward to continuing to partner with you on great work for those in the Asian community here in Charlottesville and beyond.

Thank you so much.

I look forward to working with you.

You rose to the top of a very competitive feel, and of course you have some great shoes to feel, but I'm glad Mate is around.

Thank you so much for your service to the community, Mate.

Yes, she's earned it.

Thank you so much.

That was only pre-registered speaker.

I do want to make mention.

Oh, I'm Robin Hoffman.

I live in Charlottesville, the city.

I am a recipient of Java.

I'm Medicare.

And so what they do basically is you go there as a person who first signs on.

Every year Medicare changes rules of who can get what benefits.

So every year, just like your taxes, you should take advantage of the AARP or any services

that people volunteer for who are really trained and very specific to, you know, your understanding of what it is.

And also, I volunteered when I wasn't retired and I'm a registered nurse and they trained me to do the forms and stuff like that.

Also, I became a workshop for, they certified me through a grant

as a certified art fusion specialist.

And I worked with Injaba, in the facility on Hillstale, with Alzheimer's Montsourc.

But I need to do my time for now.

So I started a new TV show, came out of retirement, scared.

What is it?

Naomi Klein says shock and awe after this week.

and so I said well my grandnieces and nephews and my newly relatives who just had babies need to have a voice and I wanted to support free speech here in Charlottesville and because I help elect

some of the officials by campaigning and filling out petitions and all that kind of stuff.

I feel that we do have especially our Katrina Coulson and of course Natalie and Michael and everybody here, Sam, Ashley and the police and everybody working together to keep us safe.

My point of making this new TV show was to help people

get on that show and to bring people, especially artists and creatives and people who are nonprofits, to get on CPATV, which is Charlottesville Community Media Center, which is the home of CPATV, which is on the downtown wall, supposed to be open nine to five or call for an appointment

Everybody can be on it.

And if you're a senior, it's only $40.

So I'm a senior.

So I got it for $40 a year.

I'm on four times a week, guys.

That's because I've been doing it for 14 years.

And then David Dill Hunt is amazing, and he helps you with everything.

And then you get on YouTube or a podcast or whatever you like, or even just keep it for yourself.

Thank you so much, Robin.

I've learned something else about you.

Many, many talents.

Thank you so much.

So we have opportunity for 14 more speakers at this time.

Anyone else want to speak?

At this time?

Mauro, did you want to speak now?

Good evening, Mr. Sanders, manager, Mr. Wade de Mer, and good evening everybody.

My name is Mario Moreto.

I live in Coruscant Hall, the people on the fourth and fifth below me today.

Smoked heavily, crystal matte fentyling, and they closed their window days.

Smoked in their room, it come true to went to.

My room, it make me sick.

And I vomit blood.

I was hospitalized seven times and reported to manager.

property manager, and Mr. Seltz, district manager, and chief of police, Michael Picasso, Lieutenant Best.

And they know, they threaten my life even.

And so nobody is helping me.

I sleep in my car.

Even last two weeks was very cold, and he threatened the gentleman on the fifth floor.

He threatened my life.

He's going to kill me.

I went to my room to take shower.

When I came back, I saw him.

He was going toward my car.

He slashed my tire with a butcher knife.

And I saw him.

And the manager said, they saw him camera.

Nobody is slashing your tire.

And still, they smoked heavily.

I study about all the drugs.

I am a doctor.

I came here to work in UVA.

I have to take three exams.

It's called USMLE.

But I never study.

And the gentleman said the police and the manager are done.

Nobody can touch me.

And he said, if you go to court, even I fool the judge, you are going to lose her.

So I don't know who can help me.

Chief of police, I sent all the report to him.

He never responded to me.

I was here.

I spoke with Mr. Sander, with everybody, but nobody.

So thank you, Mario.

We do care and I have your number and I'm going to share it with the chief of, with Sam to share with the police chief of police and we'll someone get in touch with you.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much, sir.

You take care of yourself.

All right.

Have a good night.

Thank you.

Thank you everybody.

So we have opportunity for three more speakers, thirteen more speakers.

Anyone else like to speak?

Do you want to speak as a representative of some of your class?

Anyone from the class would like to come and speak?

This is democracy.

Okay.

So, we'll move on.

You sure no one wants to speak?

Consent agenda, number three, minutes, January 21st, regular meeting.

Number four, resolution to appropriate

Thank you.

Is there a motion to adopt a consent agenda?

Can we vote?

And put me down as a yes.

Lloyd is a yes.

All right.

So good evening, Council and members of the public.

This is my quarterly work plan update because y'all are learning.

I thought I would explain a little bit more.

This is how I am held accountable by them because I work for them and I have to tell them what I'm going to do over the course of a year.

And this is my way to tell them every so often how I'm doing and then they can decide if they like it or not.

That's how it works.

So this is the second quarter update which I actually bled into the third quarter because we're off because we had that ugly snowstorm that came and messed up 2025 for me and I'm a little bit late in being able to present.

So I, instead of giving you the full work plan in this presentation, because it's laid out different, I gave you a paper copy.

I'll make sure that Counselor Snook and Payne get theirs in their boxes.

But just wanted to highlight some things instead of going line by line through the larger document, but that will be posted tomorrow morning on in the transparency portal as usual.

so that the public can take a look at that as well.

So identifying some specific accomplishments for this quarter, we came up with the sidewalk priorities list.

That's been a huge issue for me in that I think I do remember that the first town hall meeting that I had upon getting this job over a year and a half ago, sidewalks is what people wanted to talk about and the questions that they submitted to me.

and I assured them that we would get to work and figure some things out and Ben Chambers and team was able to do that and come up with a sidewalk priorities list which gives us a way to focus on getting work done in a more structured organized fashion.

We also restructured the VDOT portfolio that was settled with council approving the changes that we made back in November.

And we're in the final stages of getting that set with the Commonwealth Transportation Board, which has acted on some of the things that we requested.

Now we're working those things out locally.

You heard in the last meeting, the safer street strategy, which was the urgent infrastructure conversation that I had with you all.

about trying to prioritize getting funds to projects that we have allowed to go unaddressed, trying to make sure that we make some infrastructure improvements that would be quick as well as impactful.

And then Deputy Marshall has been working feverishly on language access services.

We've been able to get that set up.

We're going to be training staff on how to provide language access services directly to individuals who need to engage and communicate with this government.

as a part of our equity work, and she's going to be bringing you a report in a couple months as well.

We have some operating agreement work that's been underway during that quarter, SPCA, so setting up a new arrangement with the City County and the SPCA.

Court operations in regards to security of the two courthouses, the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, as well as the new General District Court when it comes online next year.

So we've worked with both sheriffs in getting some of that work done, so we bring you those details soon.

A lease at Sugar Hollow, which is one of our reservoirs that has very much a lot of recreation around it.

There's some safety improvements that need to be done out there for life and property priorities that are important.

We're working with the county to get that squared away shortly, and we should be able to bring that forward as well.

Emergency Management Mutual Aid.

That's our three-party relationship with City, County, and the University.

That is in draft form.

All of the attorneys are right now reviewing the document and working to get that resolved.

So we hope to be able to bring that to you in the way of a completed regional agreement.

And then I have signed the Teamsters Collective Bargaining Contract.

So we will have our fourth collective bargaining contract go live July 1 of this year with the new fiscal year.

which is important for us to be able to realize Council's vision of making collective bargaining a part of our operational plan and we have been able to successfully do that now four times over.

We have two remaining.

Some internal priorities that we continue to work on, and these are across the team.

So a number of people are involved, but some of these are what I've been prioritizing.

We have resumed service recognitions.

We had gotten off track with that a little bit.

So I was able to host the first service recognition event was in, I think, November.

We had a good number of employees who had reached different milestones.

We do a luncheon for anyone who is 10 years of employee service up to.

And I think our longest tenured employee was 40 years.

We had a couple people in that category.

So we do that as a special event to thank them for their service to the organization and to the community at large.

And now we will resume our annual schedule for doing that.

I'll ask the I team, which is our internal team to work on bringing back all employee events focused on morale building.

So we're going to have our first one in April.

We're going to try to do two per year.

The second one will focus on the relaunch of our employee recognition program.

That's a chance for us to tap someone on the shoulder and say, I see you doing a great job and we want to thank you for doing that.

and to recognize them amongst the team.

We are currently administering an employee survey, so that's a good tool for us to be able to get an opinion of how things are going, where can we do better, what do you need, what would you like us to know?

It's a chance for all employees to participate, so we're in that process right now.

We have some department level continuous improvement assessments that are underway.

These are our chances for us to figure out how to get better at what we're doing, make sure that we're sharing across different departments some of the various challenges that we may be faced and working together.

The goal of course is to always work well together.

but to make sure that the work is getting done.

We would rather that it not be about our inability to collaborate as to why we haven't gotten some work done versus some of the challenges that may be out there on the street and doing the work or what we find when we dig a hole and there's more going on there.

And then we're reviewing standard operating procedures.

That's important for me because I want to make sure that everyone understands what it is that they need to do, and they know how to do it.

And then therefore, there is no question about what it is they're supposed to do.

So that's all just kind of weaving what it takes to keep an organization like this moving.

Like this, Lacho.

That is not moving.

Thank you, Remy.

It's not moving.

There we go.

This is the best slide in the whole thing here because these are key positions that we have filled.

I wanted to make sure that I gave a spotlight to all the people who have chosen to join the city organization.

We welcome them all and we will do our best to keep them.

Our DS our new DSS director Leon Henry started today.

so I'm sure we have overwhelmed him on his first day at the job but we know he's going to do a great job.

Our CAT assistant director of operations Karen Davis has been on the scene for a few months now.

She was actually probably back in October because I know she went with us to Champaign Urbana for the site visit and learned some things there.

Promoting from within, Matt Alphaly has been promoted to planning manager which is a new role that we added to make sure that we can get some

some better coordination within Neighborhood Development Services.

We have added a new employee who also started today, Osay

Akin Lotan, I tried, is our new Long Range Planning Manager.

She comes with a very, very deep and rich experience from Pittsburgh, so it's a great opportunity for us to have someone with broader perspective.

I also promoted Brennan Duncan internally to City Engineer, and his old seat has now been filled by Caleb Smith as a traffic engineer.

We were able to add two deputy directors to Parks and Rec Katie Lockhart and Rachel Smith one then Katie being the parks replacement to Rion being promoted to director and then we have two new city attorneys Vaden Hunt who's been with us a few weeks and Su Chan who starts on Wednesday So we have filled out a number of seats.

We still have a few more to go

It's okay that we have some because every organization has vacancies, but it's really this allotted right here that matters the most to me.

These are the last two seats of who's missing from my leadership team.

And we are in the throes of finalizing these two recruitments, hoping that we might be able to make offers this month and maybe see these two bodies walking around the building with new responsibilities in the next 30 to 45 days if I could have my way.

and again this is important to me because then this would be the first time that the entire leadership team for the City of Charlottesville has been in place at the same time.

Very important.

And then the last thing I wanted to share with you is, and we're going to post this again.

This will be posted on the council webpage, but we'll post it in the transparency portal as well.

I've worked through the first six months of the year laying out for you all work session topics.

These are the opportunities in your four o'clock session where you can work on things, ask questions.

I've tried to pick up the things that I know that we've been talking about that need a little more attention.

Staff has been able to share where there are

Project areas that may need the benefit of hearing council's position and or priority and direction and then some of these are just matters that I need to get clarity on by having staff present to you to see where it is that you are interested in going on various political issues.

So you'll see that I have booked the entire six months, but I've left blank spaces there because we know that there are going to be a need for things to come up from time to time.

So a goal will be to try and preserve some of those slots.

And then there are some other topics that we know that aren't fully baked at this time that may come.

And the goal was to be able to ensure that there was some flexibility to accommodate those.

The bar across the middle highlighted in blue are your budget work sessions.

So those are the remaining sessions that are associated with the budget review process.

The key being that March 4th I will present to you by recommendation for the FY26 budget and then you will unpack my work and the team's work from there and we will hopefully get everything wrapped up to have you adopt the budget in the middle of April because we have to.

but I'll be bringing you a balanced budget as you know.

And I also added down below the city manager's report because I've gotten in the habit of trying to make sure that the city manager's report is not just a simple series of here's something we did, something we're doing, but also to kind of give you a chance to hear and the public to hear.

updates on various things.

So you'll see there that the next meeting, Crystal Ritterville will come and talk to you about the plastic bag tacks because we have not had a conversation about that since you put that in place.

And the goal is to just share with you how that program is working and what are we doing with the money that we've been able to collect.

And we'll continue to do that over the course of the remaining six months.

So that's my report.

That's where we are.

Thank you so much.

Questions?

A couple of questions.

Mr. Sanders, first of all, I note in the report that is included with the agenda materials that you are talking, you've talked a little bit about the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, in particular the Central Line Project

has significant escalation and budget with the newly realized need to bury the line deeper than existing city services to avoid unintended impacts either infrastructure.

Do we have a sense at this point of how much more that's going to be?

How is that likely to affect water rates in the city?

That sort of thing.

We've been getting emails from DD Smith, former city councilor who's been very interested in this issue.

and in part I wanted to assure her that yes we do read our emails but is there anything you are in a position to tell us at this point?

You say more details to come.

Yeah, I mean basically the summary there was meant to just let everyone know that that's the conversation that's been had in our revan and board meetings.

We did receive some information from Bill Moyer today.

I got a chance to really kind of skim over it but not really go deep.

I know that there is more detail work that has to happen in regards to letting the public know more

changes and or variations to what's happened.

But in talking with our utilities director, there was a conflict discovered in the the planned placement of the water line.

And the goal was to make sure that we were not creating future problems for ourselves by having the water line run parallel to existing lines.

The desire was to have the new water line go below

report.

Today the commissioner of the news office is beginning taking applications and recertifications for tax relief for the elderly and disabled and we've gotten a number of emails from people who are distressed because they are on fixed incomes and they're

assessments have gone up 10, 15 percent in some cases or six or seven percent either way.

It turns out to be a lot of money.

And wondering, gee, how am I ever going to make any of this work financially?

And I just wanted to make sure that folks understood and have served as one more opportunity to remind people that we recently amended the ordinances that deal with tax relief to broaden the number of the categories of people who can get tax relief

and that they, if they wanted to go do anything, they could take a look at the website at Charlesville.gov slash Relief or call the Commissioner of the Revenue's Office.

But then I had one other question for you and this is not something I expect you to be able to answer tonight, but just to sort of flag for perhaps whether it's, it'd be possible to have a discussion of this in a couple of weeks or as we go through the budget process.

None of us knows what is going on either in Richmond or particularly in D.C.

with government spending, and I am concerned that as we make decisions over the course of the next few months on budget, even for the current year's budget, that we, I just really want to make sure that you all are on top of what changes may be coming and what actions we may need to take

to deal with what may be some significant changes in funding formulas and things like that.

Sure.

So there were two things there, so I can respond to both honestly.

With the tax relief program,

Mr. Divers has confirmed that there is usually funds still left over after the relief has been applied.

So that shows us that we feel like we're not underfunding the program.

We are definitely funding the program appropriately.

The question is, are we missing people?

So that's why he has been doing additional outreach work.

He's been doing some things that both myself and Deputy Marshall have shared with him in the form of ideas on how to connect to the public that normally doesn't come to meetings like this and engage with the government, except for those various needs that they may have.

We've seen some increases there, but we do have built into the program that it slides up when the assessment goes up.

The question is always, is there enough money available?

And we are assuring that in the new budget that we're going to make sure that there's enough funds.

for that associated increase based on the assessments going up.

So that's part one of your statement there.

Part two, in regards to what's going on with the federal government, who knows?

How do we deal with that?

We just get ready.

And the goal is just to stay up on what's happening.

We are paying a lot of attention to what are the grants and agreements that we have that are associated

with the federal government specifically just received an agreements inventory is what we're calling it very much like the grants inventory that you saw.

The city has 120 different agreements in place across the entire organization and our community solutions team has assembled that work.

I'm about to have the deputies review that.

They hadn't heard that, but they're about to review that for me.

and make sure that we're not missing things that we all know about.

But the goal there is just to stay up and we feel like that's and that is the professional advice that we're receiving from the different groups and national organizations that we're members of.

Everybody says we're in a wait and see mode.

But for me, I'm not waiting too much.

You're going to have a surplus conversation very shortly and there will not be a recommendation on spending that money because I'm not bringing that to you at this time.

is my recommendation that you hold that money and let it sit and let's give ourselves a few weeks of seeing what happens with more time with the administration figuring out what it wants to do because it's going to matter when final decisions get made as to the impacts of changes that might result and we should anticipate that there will be changes.

That's always the case.

It doesn't matter what administration is in place, but ideally we need to be

Pruden with the funds that we have and probably be a little more conservative than we probably ordinarily would with having that savings available to us at this time.

I actually had the tax announcement flagged as well, so thank you, Lloyd, for having us.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

The next thing on the agenda is we have a public hearing and resolution, an appropriation to amend the FY25 budget.

It's the first of two readings, so are you doing this?

Oh, okay, okay.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of council, and Chris Colton and the Director of Finance.

Hang on, Chris.

Can I check, Chris?

Remy, is there an adjustment to volume that you can make?

Yes.

Okay, Chris, go ahead.

Yes, that's better.

Great, thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of council.

I'm Chris Cullinan, the city director of finance.

As the mayor said, this is agenda item is the first reading of the fiscal year 2024 year end appropriation and public hearing.

The total amendment to the FY 25 budget is $27,851,605.84.

And this is spread across a couple of different

of the city's funds, the largest of which is the general fund, the funds remaining from FY 2024 total approximately 25.1 million is the total appropriation.

The surplus portion of that is approximately 22.4 million.

There are a few other housekeeping items that we need to take care of in that fund.

We've had some pretty extensive discussions about that, both at your last meeting and actually the meeting for that as well.

If you haven't answered any questions that you might have, I wasn't planning to retrace through that this evening.

We also have recommendations for some year end appropriations of the silage repair fund, the grants fund, the school gain sharing account, and again, all of those adjustments total $27.9 million approximately.

and if you have any questions you might have, as Mr. Shader did say, a recommendation as it relates to the general fund surplus portion of this, the $22.4 million is to place it in the city's CIP contingency account per our financial management policy.

It has a reminder, anytime we tap into those funds, it does have to come back to council for your consideration.

If you have any questions you might have and

Before I forget, there is a public hearing.

The public hearing notice ran on January 25, 2025 in the daily office.

Thank you, sir.

Any questions or comments from counselors?

I've got nothing.

Okay.

So just to clarify, this is the

No, no, this would not be related to the March 4th presentation.

That's your new budget that I'll be presenting at that time.

This is the results of the budget that ended June 30th.

And once the books closed, there was this amount of money left over.

Unallocated

Dr. Michael Payne

We have identified that there's $25 to $30 million of federal money inside this city budget.

If the spigot were turned off, if we say that's what happens and it never comes back on, that's the kind of impact that could be had to this organizational budget.

That's more than 10% of our budget in some years.

that would go away.

And I think what we want to do at this moment is just kind of give a little room for the desire for change in D.C.

See how that comes in the form of ideas, what sticks, and then from there we take steps.

I'm not saying that I won't come back to you even in the next meeting with the plan to spend some of this $22 million that's available, but right now I'm not there.

We're actually later than normal.

We would have done this early in the year.

We probably wouldn't have done it at the first meeting in January since we cancelled that.

But we would have done it a little bit sooner based on our normal schedule.

We had some last minute issues with getting details from the auditor at the close of the year, which is when we probably would have brought you a series of recommendations for you to think about.

It goes into CIP contingency so that's viewed as an essence of savings account.

Gotcha.

And that's a perfect segue.

Open the public hearing up.

If there's anyone from the public that would like to speak on this appropriation, the public hearing is open.

Anyone like to speak on it?

I will now close the public hearing and this will be on the, um, that we want on the consent agenda item for Nick's, um, date team.

Okay.

It'll be on it.

Lloyd, you okay with it on the consent agenda?

Yes, I am.

Okay.

So, um,

Ms.

Good evening, Council.

I have a few items before you this evening.

I'm going to start off first with a presentation sort of around our safe street strategy and how that relates to bicycles and our bicycling network infrastructure here in town.

Then we'll move on to a presentation on our e-bike pilot program, which our bike and pedestrian coordinator, Tommy Sophranic, will be delivering to you.

with a little assist from me at the end.

And then we'll move on to a safe routes to school presentation by our safe routes to school coordinator, Kyle Rodlin, also with a little assist with me at the end.

Both of their presentations are related to resolutions before you.

The bike program will be about moving some existing funding around to create a new e-bike pilot program fund.

It'll just make it easier for us to do the work for the e-bike pilot.

So that's sort of administrative.

The safe routes to school resolution is going to be related to appropriating grant funding from the TAP grant for non-infrastructure projects into NDS so that we can pay for having a safe routes to school coordinator this year.

First, I'm going to start us out talking about bicycling, though.

And I'm going to mess it up by calling it biking and bicycling.

I was here a couple weeks ago talking to you about a Safe Streets strategy.

Didn't really talk a lot about bikes when I was talking about that and then we saw what was on the next agenda and it was this e-bike resolution and a safe routes to school resolution and it seemed like a good idea to talk about how do those fit in with this bigger strategy we just talked about two weeks ago.

So just a reminder, we talked two weeks ago about a three phase strategy that would be looking at making our streets safer over the next five or so years.

We're looking at what are the existing projects that we're working on, what are our current budget requests, and what are some future needs that we're going to have in the system that we can start working on.

This is taking work that we're already underway with and combining it with sort of what is the long range vision of things that we need to keep our eye on.

How do we line this up so that we are

updating all of our plans for a new generation of planning in the city.

And that isn't just cars, that's not just pedestrians that may have been the focus of last week.

We were very focused on traffic calming, speed limits, figuring out how we're going to deploy some of these things quickly and test them out and see if they work.

That's not just going to be working with

Crosswalks.

That's also going to be bike infrastructure that we need to talk about.

Luckily, investing in bike infrastructure also gets us safer streets so we'll talk about how that sort of helps out with the bigger picture as well.

Before I jumped into that, I wanted to give you an overview of how bikes fit in with the bigger picture.

These are the breakdowns of the mode shares that people use in our city, in the metro area around our city and in the state of Virginia as a whole.

Biking doesn't make up a huge percentage of our commuting right now, but we do a lot more of it than anybody

who's our neighbor and anybody else who's in the state.

We do it three times more often than folks in our direct region and we're pulling up that regional average quite a bit ourselves and we do it about nine times more than the rest of the state.

I also love to point out this breakdown in mode shares because in most places we assume everybody's just driving alone.

In Charlottesville, it's just barely a majority of people are driving alone and it was not going to take very much effort for us to change that math.

One place that we can make that math change a little bit is bicycling.

We have a lot of opportunities to improve our infrastructure

and expand the use of bicycles and drive down a number of folks who are needing to drive alone to get to the things they need to do in Charlottesville.

So there's an additional benefit to doing that, which is it makes everybody else safer.

When studies have looked at cities that have a lot of biking infrastructure and compare them to cities where there just isn't a lot of biking infrastructure, sort of the typical American city,

The biking infrastructure city is safer for pedestrians and folks in cars, not just folks on bikes.

In cities with heavy bike infrastructure investment we're seeing like three times less

Rates of crashes for pedestrians and for cars.

So it's got an added effect beyond bicycling.

Some of this is attributed to changing turning speeds.

If you're adding in spaces for bikes, you've added in more space that now a car has to cross as it's making a turn, and that's changing the turning radius and that's changing the speed.

That becomes even more pronounced when we're talking about adding protection, when we're talking about adding buffers because you're adding that space, you're creating more space that the car now has to go through in order to get

around his turn, and it's slowing it down.

The other thing that they're finding, and not really quite seeing a reason why in the research, but the parallel speeds of cars that are traveling along a protected bike lane are also going slower.

You're not seeing as much speeding, and it's not that there's any sort of conflict that's brought in that's helping slow down the cars, it's just

Seeing a bunch of people ride bikes makes you slow down.

And if you have a lot more people confident about riding next to traffic, there's going to be more people in that bike lane.

So you start to see a change in the culture sort of baked into how people are driving when there are more people out riding bikes.

When we're looking at our safer street strategy, this was sort of the three phase strategy I laid out for the next five or so years.

When we're looking for where do bikes fit in here, it's everywhere.

Every part of this will impact the bicycle network and the bicycle network vice versa will impact these projects.

Things like traffic calming testing may be directly related to slowing down a car, but a place where a car is going slower is a more comfortable place for a bike to be driving or riding, I guess.

similarly helps pedestrian safety and perceptions of safety as well but you've got that same effect across the board that's happening for bicycles so

First, I want to start with where are we starting from?

This is our existing bike network.

We've got about 17 miles of unprotected bike lanes.

We also have quite a bit of trails, pathways.

We have a few protected bike lanes.

We have the protected bike lanes on Belmont Bridge that were recent.

Those are permanent concrete protected ones.

We also have a very new one that is probably got some snow still in it over on Belmont Avenue.

behind Summit Elementary.

We have a one-way road project where we've used the additional road space to add in a protected bike lane, but it's protected by parking, so it's not exactly the same hardened

Permanent Landscape as what you see on Belmont Bridge.

In addition to this network, we've got bike parking.

We've pulled together an inventory of where all that bike parking is.

Some of it's public, some of it's private.

We've been adding to the public side of that equation over the past couple of years to the tune of about 106 racks.

You'll see most of them around downtown.

There's quite a few of them over on Water Street in front of the Water Street Garage, which is a great example of where we're adding that capacity.

So this is just sort of breaking down the legend.

If you're looking at this, the sort of royal blue, dark blue is our unprotected bike lanes.

The red is our permanent protected bike lanes.

The green is our paths.

We're not sort of differentiating between shared use paths and trails here.

We're just saying paths just to make it easier for us.

And then the light blue we're saying is an interim protected bike lane or something that's not protected by a physical barrier.

And what I'm going to do with this presentation is sort of layer on what we're planning through that safer streets strategy and how it affects this map.

So some of those colors are going to grow as we're going through this presentation.

So phase one of the safer streets strategy, the big heavy lift of that is doing the work we've already committed to.

And quite a bit of the work that we've already committed to will make our bicycle network safer and stronger.

A few of those projects are associated with our VDOT project portfolio.

That includes an Emmett Street scape, Fontaine Street scape, which would both add pathways, which is what we're calling the shared use paths.

Washington Park Connector Trail, Rugby Avenue shared use path, and Meadow Creek Valley Trail are all VDOT project portfolio projects.

There are also a couple of VDOT-led projects that are not going to be administered by the city.

Currently, we're working with VDOT on the Fifth Street Trail Hub, which also

is a project we're working on with the county as a partner.

We're also going to be starting a new project in the next year.

We've done sort of the planning work and we're moving forward into the design and engineering and implementation of the Avon Street shared use path.

So there should be more public outreach for that coming in the next year.

We're also working with VDOT on some existing studies that

Don't necessarily have the explicit, like, infrastructure baked into them at this point, but we're looking at pipeline studies in the U.S.

29 corridor with VDOT, and we also have a study here at the intersection of West Main Ridge, Water, South, Ridge, McIntyre, which we'll sort of tie in with our West Main Restriping Project, which is one of our projects on the right column.

We also will be working with VDOT on our Fifth Street road, diet, and bike way.

They've been kind enough to supply us with technical assistance on that and coordinate that with some of their other projects in that corridor.

We're also working on the e-bike voucher program, which you'll hear more about tonight.

Safe Routes to School, which you'll hear more about tonight.

Those are both programs.

We've gotten started and we'd like to continue.

And then we don't really think about scooters as bikes, but

The scooter permit regulations update is something we're working on this spring.

It will affect sort of how the scooters interact with the bikes and where they're supposed to be found throughout our network.

So that sort of bakes in with the phase one stuff that we're doing.

If we start adding those things to the map, we are adding in in this phase one with just the stuff we've already committed to another about two miles of protected bike lanes.

Not a huge number, but definitely more than what we've got right now.

And another four miles in pathways.

So those are shared use paths or trails.

This doesn't include any of the investments that are associated with the urgent transportation improvements.

This doesn't include traffic calming things.

This doesn't include intersection improvements that we are currently working to identify.

This is just the stuff we've already said yes to and we've already committed to.

In addition to this, we will also continue

rolling out bike racks.

We're expecting to be at that same hundred every two years kind of clip for this foreseeable future.

In addition, during phase one, something else we're looking at is lowering speed limits on low volume, low speed roads.

These are places where you might feel comfortable riding on a bike on any given day, but the second a car comes by, you feel real uncomfortable about it.

That's because the speed differential is there.

All the cars are going somewhere around 20 to 25 miles per hour.

And on a bike, you're at best doing about 15.

And that's if you're not on a hill.

We have a lot of hills that get pointed out a lot when we talk about bike infrastructure as man I would love to get there but there's a hill and I'm not trying to get you know stuck on a hill with a car passing me and I'll sweaty going to work well if the car wasn't passing you that's one thing that we need to to rectify and make it so that that car is not scaring you as you go by and making you feel uncomfortable so we can

The other thing that we can do is add e-bikes to the mix.

That brings up the speed of the bikes.

So we're both lowering the speed of the cars, bringing up the speeds of the bikes so that they're more

Welcome, everyone.

and along with lowering these speeds we'll also be adding in some traffic calming testing to make sure that we're not just changing out the signs and that we're actually enforcing that there will be lower speeds in the slow stress network.

The other part of the Safe Streets strategy that we're going to be looking to do is figure out what is the bigger network.

Some of that is going to go into our transit

or sorry, our citywide transportation planning effort that we'll be scoping over the next year or so.

There's going to be sort of just a bigger dialogue that we're going to need to have to understand where are those connections across town that aren't being served by our current network.

We're also going to be working on sort of corridor by corridor assessments of where can we continue to lower speed limits, not just on the local streets and people's neighborhoods in front of their houses, but on places like Elliott Avenue.

where we have a large arterial, but we have a speed limit that doesn't really function the way that our streets that work guidance says that they should.

Both of these are going to be really heavy lifts to tackle this greater network of what we call our framework streets.

These are from the streets that work framework.

These are our big arterials.

These are our streets that connect all of those neighborhoods together.

working through on corridor by corridor basis or through a city-wide transportation plan is going to be a lot of effort.

This is going to take a lot of time and funding, frankly.

I can't tell you exactly how much yet, because we haven't really started doing this on a consistent basis, but we will be working on the West Main Streetscape restriping this year, as well as the Fifth Street Southwest Road, Diet and Bikeway.

Both of those projects should really give us a good insight into what does it look like when we look at another corridor in the city that's as big as this one.

There are opportunities that this won't necessarily be just we're going corridor by corridor, doing corridor plan by corridor plan.

We could bake this into other planning efforts like small area plans.

So there may be different flavors of how we tackle these problems, but this is going to be sort of where the stickiest issues in our network are going to be hashed out.

So when you take this, hey, we're going to talk about this whole network in the next five years in some fashion or another, and you add that to

The Framework Street

through Phase 1 and Phase 2 to tackle a lot of these and identify what are the projects in Phase 3 that we want to start going after federal and state dollars, hoping that they're still available, to do bigger, more permanent applications of this network.

So this is what we're working up to over the next five years is filling in all these gaps in the network so that we can take our existing network and turn it into something a little bit more robust through expansion of our network, through existing projects, expansion of our network through lower stress streets and lower speed limits, and planning on our framework streets through either corridor restriping plans or through the citywide transportation plan.

In the meantime, this is sort of what we're working on right now.

Highlights for this spring.

We are going to be rolling out design options for the Fifth Street Road Diet and Bikeway.

This is a project that's lingered for a while.

I believe there was an iteration right before I came on that was looking at a road diet in this corridor.

There were some traffic issues associated with that design.

And so we've gone back to the drawing board and looked at a design that doesn't remove a lane in both directions, but only removes one in one direction and adds in

and a protected bikeway facility.

We have been working closely with the VDOT bike ped office in central office.

They were the ones who gave us the money to do this study.

They had some additional road diet funding from doing some work across the mountain in Harrisonburg and said, you guys have a nice corridor here and we've got an interchange at the end of it and we need to figure out how this is going to work.

We do have some draft designs and we're pulling together sort of the public engagement materials and are aiming to do that

Michael Payne

what happens when you get to Harris Road or Fifth Street Station.

So more to come on this in March.

We will also be talking this year about West Main Restriping Study.

This is sort of following onto previous work in West Main where we had a streetscape project there previously.

It became

not possible to do due to financial implications of spending that money there instead of somewhere else.

And so now we have a corridor with no existing plans for it.

What we're planning on doing is coming in and looking at what can we do in between the curbs?

We don't want to tear up the sidewalks, we don't want to move parking to some offsite location.

What can we do to maintain the amount of parking that we have on West Main but provide protected facilities for bicyclists on West Main at the same time?

This is an area that I probably hear the most about.

when it comes to demand for bike infrastructure.

The question before us right now is we know we can move the existing bike infrastructure somewhere else in that curb to curb space, but does it make sense to be along the northern curb or the southern curb or do we put one on both curbs and how do we protect it with parking and how does that interaction happen on the ground in terms of where we put

Fake rubberized curbing.

Where do we need to put reflectors?

Where do we need to put paint?

So we've got some things to work through in that corridor.

It's going to be a fun project.

We're currently working on sort of internal scoping before we go out to get consultant support.

But we should be getting a consultant underway fairly soon so that we can do a lot of this work over the summer.

We're also coordinating this project, as I mentioned, with the project at the Westman Ridge Water South intersection.

The last big highlight I want to point to for this spring is e-bikes.

We have our new e-bike pilot programs.

I'm going to take this moment to introduce Tommy Sofranek, who's going to come up and walk us through a few slides.

So, Tommy?

See you in two weeks, right?

Yeah.

Yeah

So here is this is the first part of phase two is talking about the framework streets.

Yeah, some of this is going to be aimed at lowering speed limits and how do we do that in some of these bigger arterials.

Right.

Okay.

And then the next

That's what I'm really trying to say.

For the phase two stuff, no, we don't have anything in the CIP for that specifically.

And for some of the phase one things, we don't have those in the CIP quite yet either.

So are you going to be able to get that wrapped up prior to budget?

Yeah, we're currently pretty deep into it.

So I would suspect that we should have clear answers, especially on phase one projects within the next month or so.

The phase two, I think, is going to be more dependent on sort of the outcomes of the West Main project and the Fifth Street project to understand how much money is it going to take for us to do some of these framework streets?

Yeah, I had seen that in like, I don't know, 20 years or so, so it was good to see that breakdown.

Yeah.

How, I'm sorry.

Go ahead.

It's the 2023 five-year ACS.

And I looked back through a few of them because I was a little shocked the first time.

I saw it like, when did that change?

It's been pretty consistent like that for over a decade.

Yeah, it's good to see that we are higher than the area.

I mean, in a certain sense, like we want everyone to be higher.

But it's nice to see that people in Charlottesville are beating the average there, but still 3% leaves room for improvement.

And it's definitely one of the chicken and egg things.

You know, people are biking in spite of the hills, in spite of the infrastructure.

I will give some of our neighbors a little bit of credit.

It's easier to bike here because we are a smaller locality and don't have as much mileage to cover it.

So we have that going for us, which is a strength for us and we should lean into that and be able to build out our network to facilitate those kinds of trips.

Absolutely, but hopefully, you know, once Charlottesville is more hospitable to biking, some of those people in the urban ring will feel more comfortable crossing the City County line on their bike instead of a car.

Yeah, and the benefit to the bikers and the pedestrians is outsize compared to that.

When you bike down West Main Street now, you're biking on the driver's side of the cars, and every parked car has a driver coming out of it.

But not every parked car has a passenger coming out of it.

So your risk of getting doored, which is when the person opens the car and doesn't look for you and you hit the door,

is dramatically reduced by even just being on the passenger side of the car.

So something as simple as that, you're not taking space away from anyone, you're just rearranging it, and it makes such a big difference.

Good evening.

Can you all hear me?

Yes.

All right.

I am Tommy Sophranic.

I'm the city's bike and pedestrian coordinator.

Um, and to some of the points that were just made, uh, I had a three o'clock meeting over by the verve.

So stadium and Emmett, uh, had to leave that three o'clock meeting at four o'clock for a four o'clock meeting over

Martha Jefferson, it took me six minutes on my e-bike to get across town, so down West Main Street, and I did not go in the bike lane.

I stayed in the bike in the traffic lane because I was going 22 miles an hour.

So it looks like Ben has brought me to the right slide.

So I'm here this evening to talk about the benefits of e-bikes and about what we're doing here in the city of Charlottesville.

for eBikes.

We want to expand access with this new mode of transportation.

We want to make biking a more realistic mode choice for people.

eBikes does that.

Like I just said, one of the reasons is because it brings the speed up to a safe speed with car traffic.

We want to also provide educational resources about maintenance, safe riding, and new places to ride.

I'll just mention now that we've got over a thousand applicants for our e-bike voucher program.

Only 25 applicants are going to be able to get that voucher, which I'll talk about here in a moment.

But 700 people have applied to get emails about biking and walking here in Charlottesville.

So people want to know more about

biking and walking, they want to get more resources and we want to be able to provide that for them.

So we also want to promote our local bike shops.

They're great people.

So when we do our e-bike voucher, we are working with our local bike shops.

We're not using online bike vendors, for example.

And we want to, you know, have an opportunity here for climate action towards electrification, as you can see, of transportation.

multiple options for deploying subsidies, grants, policies to test and use together to compound success.

So that kind of brings us into our next slide and I believe the big

Beautiful.

So we have multiple programs that we're kind of working on.

The two that we're really going to highlight this evening are the e-bike voucher pilot program which I'm about to go into and the e-bike social mobility grants pilot that Ben is going to touch on here in a little bit.

Both these pilot programs will be funded out of the e-bike pilot phones program which you all think are going to

The E-Bike Voucher Pilot Program

You know, over the past year or so, we have been going around researching other e-bike subsidy programs.

We wanted to learn what other localities were doing and see what we could replicate here in Charlottesville.

We decided that we wanted to not offer rebate, we wanted to make it easy access.

and we want to try to get as many e-bikes out on the road as possible while also making it fairly equitable across the board.

So we decided to not do a first come first serve and we decided not to do it rolled out all at once.

We decided to break it up in quarters so this first go-around sign-up started January 1st and they ended on Friday January 31st and right now I'm pulling

The folks who got the voucher putting their names on the voucher and I'll be sending them email Wednesday morning that they received a voucher that they can redeem at one of the three bike shops here in Charlottesville.

Again, they have to come and see me because that's another level of support.

I want to be able to meet them.

I want to be able to like hand them resources.

and I want them to know who to come talk to if they have a question about how to pump up their tire on their bike, how to lower or raise their bike seat.

I want them to know that they're supported.

So they're going to come in, they're going to pick up their voucher and we're going to do this each quarter.

So they'll have the next three months or so to redeem that voucher and you can see here the type of e-bike

that they would be getting into class one or two, UL certified battery, and they can also technically use it to get associated gear as well.

Can you talk about what

Something may have come up.

Maybe that person decided to move from Charlottesville.

Maybe that person decided to buy a bike that wasn't on a bike shop.

Who knows?

But we want to know that.

So as soon as 90 days is up, that's voided and we can put that money and maybe next quarter we'll issue 26 instead of 25 vouchers.

So they'll be given information on safe operation, additional services available like warranties, maintenance training, and financing options.

So again, that's one of the main reasons why we're working with our local bike shops on this.

So current funding allows for this quarterly, like I mentioned, 25 vouchers each quarter, $1,000 per voucher.

Cost of a good e-bike is like $2,200?

I have no idea.

Going to sell your moped?

No, no.

It's getting warm.

So when we were talking to the bike stories, initially we were hoping that there would be at least one that would be under that $1,000 mark so that somebody could just walk in and buy one.

But currently the lowest price one I think that I've seen at their stores is $10.99 and it is, you all certified, it's not gonna like have problems with your battery.

I believe it's a class two, so it gets up to 20 miles per hour with a throttle.

It's a pretty solid bike.

And I had been thinking about getting an e-bike for a long time.

I had several tabs open on my computer when I was trying to figure out the one I wanted, various price points.

And my car had to go to the shop and they said it would be $1,400 to repair the car.

And so I figured that's my e-bike budget and I didn't get my car repaired.

And I went and used that for an e-bike instead.

I got

I took my car somewhere else and got the most minor fixes I could, and now I use my e-bike almost exclusively in the city.

So that was, to me, a reasonable way to think about it.

Some of the larger cargo bikes or bikes that you can put your kids on the back of.

Those are a little more expensive as well.

They're sturdier and have a stronger frame and motor.

Yeah.

So last one here is development of separate e-bike pilot funds program, again, which is something you're going to vote on.

It's going to make participation of outside philanthropy pretty easier.

So the main thing I want to get across to everybody that I talk about this program at any point is that this is a pilot program.

We are very interested to see how this program works, reevaluate it in six months, 12 months, and tweak it as we deem necessary.

But I've been super proud of how it's been going so far, and I'm excited about where it can go six months, 12 months from now.

All right.

So promoting staff use here in the picture, we've got myself, our NDS director, Kelly Brown on what her third day in the job, taking a ride down to the county's grand opening ceremony at the promenade to Darden Tau and Ben on his personal e-bike here with the two there are two that the city own.

and they're open to anybody here at City Hall to use for government use.

That's the one I was using earlier today to get across town.

And as we rolled up, you know, I think we made everybody in the county pretty jealous because we were having fun.

We didn't have to find a parking spot.

We just rolled up.

did the ceremony, went back and had a lovely time.

So we bought actually a couple e-bikes in 2004.

We replaced those when I arrived with these two more modern ones.

Those, by the way, get up to 28 miles an hour.

And they were used historically by transportation and zoning.

But slowly I've been getting more and more people on these e-bikes.

The police department also has a fleet of bikes and e-bikes and we're just trying to promote existing employee bike benefits.

We have a benefit here in the city.

I currently get the benefit and we're trying to identify opportunities to improve that benefit so that a, more people can take advantage of it, but maybe there's a different way of going about it.

So promoting and supportive programs.

UVA also just started their UVA Wahoo Connect program.

My wife takes advantage of that.

So this is another major community benefit and e-bike subsidy program.

I think

anyone part of that program that gives up the parking pass I believe gets a it's actually a rebate program $400 and it can if you bought it a year ago you can still apply that $400 and then also a great partner of ours here in Charlottesville is the e-bike lending library so if for example you your car broke down and you needed to rent a bike you can give Josh a call and maybe rent a bike from from his

And it's, um, the U.I.

And it's free.

Something else that I'm working on right now on getting back to the idea of supporting bikers is bike Seville.

So we're developing a website that's going to have all types of resources, including low stress bike routes throughout the city and our community, as well as videos and different types of resources that help new riders, adults and kids, and also expert riders.

Folks, right now we have a great biking community, but a lot of the resources are over at Blue Wheel, over at Blue Ridge, over at Endeavour, at Charlottesville Racing Club, at Charlottesville Mountain Bike Club, at Charlottesville Biking Club.

They're kind of just spread out, so we're trying to see if we can consolidate them, have one place, even tourism has great information, and provide them at one place called Bike Seavill.

And I'm also working with Parks and Rec to maybe provide some free guided bike rides that would be targeted at, let's say, the winners of the voucher program, for example, so that we could take folks out, get comfortable riding the traffic, so on and so forth.

But you can tell from this list that we've worked with a lot of different groups and organizations to increase biking here in Charlottesville.

This is sort of the one last thing about e-bike vouchers.

This is our newest program that we're starting to work on.

We're working with the Office of Sustainability, much like we are with the voucher program, but this is sort of targeted more at the equity concerns around e-biking.

As you pointed out, you can't even buy a e-bike with the voucher that we're giving you alone.

you're going to have to have some additional capital of your own to purchase an e-bike and so that gets us into some equity issues and when we were initially considering the voucher program we were thinking can we add in some sort of low income qualifications some things like that and as we were starting to discuss this with some of our colleagues we realized maybe having Tommy and I come up with how do you give out things to people based on need isn't the best idea because we're

not the people who have the need.

We need to have a better connection to the people who are working with populations that have needs for e-bikes so that we're identifying them appropriately.

So what we wanted to do is come up with what is this rubric for how do we give away bikes to people who can't afford them.

And what we found was we'd probably be better off if those nonprofits that work with them or those city departments that work with them

if they were the ones coming up with the rubric of how they would connect people with an e-bike.

And then they bring those opportunities to us as staff.

And we sort through them and figure out where are the best places for us to directly put an e-bike.

So in this program, we're thinking not monetary grants, but physical bikes.

And it's putting them directly in the hands of people who would use them.

We would be working with partners in the community who would help us

figure out where that use could be.

And there's a couple different use cases that we've thought through already.

Some of it could be establishing a fleet for a nonprofit, either for their employees to use, sort of to serve clients and go out and meet them where they are.

Or it's potentially a nonprofit, a place like The Haven, where you have clients who are there regularly throughout the day who could benefit from having a loaner to go out and run an errand or something.

We could also have a use case where a nonprofit has come up with a specific rubric of, you know, income levels, work qualifications, whatever the formula might be, but they come up with their own rubric of this is how we think we're going to determine who would most benefit and how we're going to track that benefit and figure out how that works over time and report it back to the city.

There could also be one-off cases, and there could also be opportunities to support nonprofit employees' benefits programs with this program.

This is something we're very much in the process of cooking, but we wanted to make sure that this was put before you alongside with the voucher program to make sure that you understood we're not leaving out the equity concerns.

We are definitely making sure that everyone is going to be covered by the REBike programs.

Our next steps are lots of opportunities to work on bike stuff over the next five years.

I think I went over that thoroughly with y'all.

E-Bikes are a major element of making sure that that is successful.

And so we've created several different E-Bike programs that we're working through.

This current resolution that's before you for this specific action item would take money from the bike infrastructure fund and money from the climate action fund and put it into a new fund for bike programs and specifically the voucher program and the social mobility grant program.

So with that, if you have any questions, happy to answer them on bicycling and e-bikes.

Kyle will be up here in a second to talk about safe routes to school in that resolution, but

Is there something we're voting on to fund this?

Is it a public hearing?

No.

It would be coming from the Bicycle Infrastructure CIP Fund, which also gets some funding from our dockless mobility permit program.

So we're kind of saying that VO is paying for a portion of this.

$75,000 is coming from offices sustainability?

Yes.

It's a good start.

As Tommy mentioned, and has mentioned repeatedly to everyone who has asked him over the past couple of weeks, this is a pilot.

This I think is a good place to start.

We know that there are opportunities for outside philanthropy to also be involved.

We've gotten a few hints of interest in that.

So will you come back a year from now and give us an update?

Is that the kind of thing that happens?

I do come back on an annual basis to give sort of a grander transportation and all the things that are happening.

My question is, it's like a year from now.

So is this being funded, help me out here, I'm sorry Sam.

No, this is just a use of funds that are available, pulling it from two categories to set it up for this intended purpose.

Okay.

Right.

Lloyd, I thought I had heard a few months ago

that the money for the voucher program was not coming from the City General Fund.

Well, it is coming from the CIP fund, but it is because we put revenues from our VO scooters into that bike infrastructure fund in the CIP fund.

So technically it is city funds, but it is not coming from tax funding.

They have gone down in recent years because we changed what the permit program was in previous earlier years.

We were getting about $120,000 in the past two years.

I had frankly thought I had understood that we had somehow gotten a charitable donation or something that was not

was not going to be city money going into the vouchers.

In fact, I've told a number of people that, and I guess I was wrong.

I don't believe we have that as part of our program and that was something we discussed at one point.

The question became do we care that much whether they resell it?

It's another e-bike that is in our network and so whether it gets to someone who is using it via

They're the first generation of owner or they're the second or third generation of owner just making sure that we are getting more of these e-bikes out on the streets and in our bike network.

Well, I mean, I could imagine the big problem would be how you would enforce it.

But if somebody sold the bike to somebody else realizing a profit because they've got it at what amounts to, let's say, a 50 or even a 60 or 70% discount, and then they sell it to somebody who hasn't used it, Charlottesville, that hasn't helped us much.

Maybe it's just more trouble than it's worth to try to deal with, but it seems to me that

Yeah, and that is something that we will keep an eye on as I'll continue to echo Tommy.

This is a pilot program, so we don't know the extent to which that sort of thing will happen.

We are making sure that we let the folks who know that they're winning these things, that they are going to hear from us because we're going to want to follow up and get their story of how they use their bike and the success stories that we can tell when we come back to you in a year and say, hey,

need to reappropriate some more money into this account.

We do want to be able to follow up with the folks who have benefited from it.

So there may be some folks that we follow up and they say, wait, I didn't benefit at all.

I just sold it off to my cousin.

Those are the questions that came immediately to my mind.

Thank you.

This has been my favorite city council meeting so far.

No, I do really appreciate programming this for us to hear the updates.

I know some people are afraid to bike out on the streets and I totally understand that it can be scary when you're

on a bike and the person next to you is in a 3600 pound steel vehicle.

So the first part of the presentation about making the roads themselves safer is going to be a huge help to get more people comfortable out there.

And then the second part of the presentation about e-bikes is particularly helpful in Charlottesville.

Like you said, we have hills.

At the e-bike demonstration last week, one of the first people there

took the bike for a spin and then told me after that she had a great time and was really happy that it was comfortable because she had both knees replaced.

And so one of the benefits for e-bikes is it's not just easier for everybody to get around, but it extends mobility for people who would maybe have trouble with an acoustic bike or whatever we want to call that.

It broadens mobility across several different factors.

So that's really great to see that we have such a focus on it coming from city staff.

And when we do get the opportunity to, you know, I think a thousand people line for 25 spots in just one quarter is a pretty significant indicator that there's a demand out there.

And so if we get the opportunity to put more funding towards this program and the rest of the programs that you've

To that point, I just want to say a thousand people did apply.

25 people are going to get this voucher for this one quarter.

And like Ben said, we're going to follow up and kind of see what the story is of those 25 people.

and 100 over the next 12 months.

But I'm interested to know what the story is of the other 975 people.

What did they end up doing if they didn't get the voucher?

Did they decide because of all this to go get an e-bike themselves?

Are we going to increase our amount of people biking in Charlottesville just because we're doing this program?

I kind of think so, personally.

I had a couple of questions.

So I just want to make sure that this is $1,000 as a grant.

And I really like the discussion, Ashley, on the office sustainability insight into this.

You know, your office trying to come up with an idea probably

made me mainly probably a lot of Caucasians, but you realize that you know what, we may not be the best to determine this, but to really look and I think that's the difference of having someone like Ashley to kind of chime in there.

So I really like that approach.

I think that you're going to come up with some good ideas, I mean, from them.

So the other 900 or 75 or whatever that didn't get it.

So the next quarter, if they wanted to do again, would they reapply?

So they decided that we do want them to reapply.

We wanted to not assume that they didn't buy a bike.

And we also wanted to use this as more

Oh, yeah.

So we run a lottery of 1,000 applicants.

Oh, you're a city employee.

You probably said that a few times.

You don't.

So city, city employees are not eligible, unfortunately.

And so I rule them out.

And then I go through and see, make sure that their addresses are city residents.

They come pick up their voucher with their W nine because it's a grant and hand over the voucher.

They give me the W nine.

So my last question is I just want to make sure that this is going to city residents.

And I know you said that you check it.

We do.

I think all the emails I got were like, I live

on East Market, you know, at the end of Woollen Mills, but I'm a county resident, but I'm right there, you know, and I'm like, you know, it's a household resident, city resident, unfortunately.

So yeah, we verified that.

Is it, I know that we're partnering with some local bike shops, and I met several

I was really adamant that we work with our local bike shop.

One of the things you list when you apply is your biking experience.

And there's a number of people that don't have much at all.

And so if we give them a thousand dollar voucher and we say have fun, you know, here's a website you can buy and they don't have any experience.

They buy the wrong bike, it breaks down, they have to assemble it.

There's just a lot of issues with that.

I want to make sure that everyone felt supported through this process.

So yes, they're working with our local bike shops who are amazing.

If something goes wrong, what if they can easily take back?

Correct.

Thank you.

Any other questions or comments?

Welcome aboard.

I think this is your first meeting lease that I've seen.

Welcome aboard.

Lloyd, do you have any problems with being on consent agenda on 18th?

No, I don't.

I know you read it tonight.

I won't go too far because the next one is going to be about safe house to school, so Remy is going to pull that one up.

I'm going to introduce Kyle Rodlin.

He is our Safe Routes to the School Coordinator.

He's going to walk you through a presentation he's given parts of to various other groups around the country so you get to have that wonderful experience.

I'll come in in the end and sort of wrap things up and

I'm going to keep you short, but I was not that short.

That's really clear.

I was like, how do I advance this?

All right, I'm Kyle, Safe Rescue School Coordinator.

This is not my first meeting, but this is my first meeting in a while.

So I'm going to go over a little bit of history of the program if you guys aren't familiar.

and just kind of share what the program has been up to since the inception of it.

So this is, as it says, an oversimplified version or an oversimplified history of safe rights to school.

So the program started in 2016.

That's when I started as coordinator.

When the program started, I got the job as a coordinator, and I've been the coordinator the whole time.

The position that I took on began as a part-time position, and that lasted a few years.

And the way the program started was it was focused mostly on education and awareness, so kind of programs.

This was on a grant from VDOT that was

and so some of these programs were bike education events that were like walk and ride to school events and there was a lot of collecting feedback, student travel data and identifying the needs and the safety concerns of school families, school communities and also the people that lived around schools.

Again, this is an oversimplified history here.

And so kind of half, we're about halfway now, you know, pre and post pandemic, but the pandemic was a turning point for this program in two ways.

One was kind of happenstance because right around when the pandemic hit, this program shifted from the current or the grant that it was on with V dot over to the tap grant.

and that did a couple of different things.

It didn't really change how much funding was provided.

It changed how much reporting we had to do, how we had to report it, so all this admin stuff.

But it also opened a couple of doors.

It opened doors.

It ushered in the access to the high school because previously this program was just K through 8.

So on the new grant around the pandemic, we were able to work with the high school

Not that we weren't working with the high school before a little bit, but we were officially allowed to work with the high school and also work with infrastructure projects.

The other thing that the pandemic brought us was a lot of problems.

It was the pandemic.

So school went virtual for a while.

And then when school came back, there were some issues that I'll talk about on the next slide.

and then, you know, since the pandemic, we've done a lot.

Like this program, kind of the meat and potatoes really changed here.

So we're working a lot with infrastructure improvements, policy changes and a lot of advocacy in local government.

And the heartbeat of this program has been and continues to be our really, really strong and solid relationship with the school system.

So we have an amazing partnership and it really is like

The lines of communication are open and that they always are.

And then the other thing that has kind of been taking in the background, but is really, really massive, especially with new leadership, when new leadership came in after the pandemic, there's been an integration of this program into the foundation of the city and its planning and design and policy kind of going forward.

So the city has really kind of put its arms around this program and and taken aspects of this

and really kind of changed standards in the way that things work, especially in the planning design and policy aspects.

All right, so here's that slide I was telling you about what happened during the pandemic.

So this was a big shift, like I said.

What it gave us, again, this is an oversimplification, there's more to be, I could talk about this forever.

But basically when school went back in person, the state mandated bus distancing guidelines.

Those were in place.

I mean that and that was that could not be overridden.

and then also came the school bus driver shortage.

This is a national shortage.

This is not unique to Charlottesville and this remains to this day.

So this is a big, big issue.

So the fallout from this was the bus capacity with the distancing guidelines went from 50 students to 18.

That's since changed, but this is just the history here.

And so with the bus driver shortage, we had fewer buses.

So not only could we carry less students on a bus, we have less buses as well.

And so since there were less

Bus seats available for students.

This was going to create more car traffic at school.

And this was going to leave a lot of families and communities without a way to get their students to and from school, who previously relied on bus service.

So the first steps that we did after kind of seeing these problems and freaking out was we call the meeting with the school superintendent, who is the former superintendent.

We put all the issues and potential solutions to those issues on the table.

Like this was total brainstorm, like throw all the spaghetti at the wall, like nothing was off limits to just talk about.

We didn't implement a lot of those ideas, but it was good to workshop that.

And this was the beginning of forming the Student Transportation Committee.

And this is kind of the fabric of

of this relationship with the school system.

So the pandemic kind of, you know, there's a silver lining to it, right?

It helped make this bond.

And this committee consists of myself, now Ben, Brennan, the traffic, where Brennan's not the traffic engineer any longer, but Caleb will come in, and then it's Kim Powell, the assistant superintendent,

What's her title?

No, she's not assistant superintendent.

Her title changed.

Operations.

She's operations.

School communications used to be transit, so student transportation.

And then we have a rotating cast of characters who come through, like sometimes CPD joins us.

Sometimes, who else joins these meetings?

who's the safety officers.

Anybody, we have special guests that kind of come in and out of these meetings, but we were doing them monthly, we were doing them weekly, then we were doing them bi-weekly, now we're doing them monthly, and you know, sometimes we throw an extra one in there if we need it.

You look like you have a question.

So we prioritized the issues in these early days.

One, the first thing was the decrease in bus service.