City Council Meeting   7/21/2025

Thank you.

You can start.

The July 21, 2025 Charlottesville City Council meeting will come to order.

Ms.

Councilor Oschrin?

Present.

Thank you.

Having established a physical quorum, council will consider a request from Councillor Snook to participate electronically.

Councillor Snook, are you able to hear us?

I could, on and off there, yes.

Okay, are our participants in the meeting room able to hear Councillor Snook?

Yes.

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

Good deal.

Based on compliance with policy, is there a motion regarding electronic participation?

I would say so.

So moved.

Yeah.

All right.

OK.

All in favor, say aye.

Any opposed?

No.

Okay.

I said aye as well.

The motion passes and Councilor Snook is granted permission to participate in this meeting electronically.

Welcome.

Thank you.

Okay.

Is there a motion to approve or amend the agenda?

So moved.

Second.

Okay.

Let me make sure everyone's logged in.

Okay, well maybe we'll figure that out during the interim.

Okay, I haven't voted.

I don't know.

Please cast your votes.

Yes.

Sorry, we're so disorganized tonight folks.

Okay, so this meeting will be divided into three parts.

First, there's a work session to hear and discuss presentations that do not require council vote.

Then there will be a closed session.

Our presentation for reports tonight are transit service scenarios for FY 27.

Mr. Garland-Williams will present.

Thank you.

I wanted to just go ahead and say as I look through this.

Impressions, strong impression was basically this was a response to the things that we've been bringing you all in terms of the number of drivers and so forth.

There's folks from the impact community that are here tonight, the organization that the mayor and I went to back in April.

So it's heartening to see the sort of response to the feedback that we brought.

Thank you.

I will say before I start,

The city manager and the deputy city manager have been pushing CAT to make sure that we get as much information to you, the decision makers, so you can make a well informed decision when it's time before the actual budget process for FY 27 starts.

So I really believe that this kind of really kicks that part off.

With that, I will say good afternoon.

Vice Mayor Pinkston, City Council, I'm Garland Williams, the Director of Charlottesville Area Transit.

I have my senior leadership team here with me tonight.

I want to introduce some of the individuals here that help me manage CAT on a daily basis.

This is in alphabetical order.

I need to say that for the three behind me because they push each other.

So Karen Davis, which is our Assistant Director of Transit for Operations, Barry

Barry Herring, Assistant Director of Transit for Finance and Grants Management Michael Newbill, Assistant Director of Transit for Maintenance and Facilities also we have Zoe is in our audience she's a shared member from CAT and from NDS

The city's transit planner.

She also graced our presence today.

But I also have the folks who help CAT on a daily basis.

The consulting firm, Nelson Nygaard, Jim Baker, the senior planner from Nelson Nygaard,

He will be helping with the presentation later on, but also with him is Anthony Brekert, the Senior Scheduling Associate with Nelson-Igard, and Greg Nording, who is also a principal with Nelson-Igard.

The consulting firm that advises us helps our scheduled development, service development, and also keeps us updated on Title VI updates.

Before we begin the presentation, on behalf of the hardworking professionals at CAT, which is transit and pupil, I wanted to say thank you for your continued focus on transportation.

Your continued effort will ensure that CAT is reliable and that we continue to move this system along as efficiently as we possibly can.

To that end, let's begin.

We have four items we want to cover tonight.

Service history, we're going to talk about in very brief terms the service history pre-pandemic to now, kind of the five-year look back.

We're going to do a review of the 2022 system optimization plan and validate those assumptions.

We're doing a service enhancement scenarios.

The scenarios that were in the back of the presentation, we're going to go through them in fairly

Granular Detail if we can.

And then we're going to do the Title VI analysis and talk about policy and the council's role and requirements in Title VI.

I know there's been some discussion about the active role of council, which is CAT's board, in making those decisions.

I will quickly go through the pre-COVID and our service history.

And then after that, Jim's going to take over the presentation and take it through completion.

So I was before you on March 27 of 2025 during the budget process.

And we talked in great detail about the frequency tables.

And we talked about the ridership charts.

For the sake of how long this presentation is, I'm not going to go into any great detail.

But I'm just going to highlight the fact that when service was happening five years ago, pre-pandemic, you can see from the chart above,

that we had a lot of different colors.

The colors mean different things.

So if you're looking at anything that was blue, it was 15 minutes or 20 minutes.

Anything green was 30 minutes.

Tan was 60 minutes.

And then we had these red marks that were greater than 60 minutes.

Majority of the service was 70 minutes.

Some of that made it hard for people to use CAT's system.

You didn't really know how to use it because the system kept changing the service model sometimes every three or four hours.

So we have migrated from that, became much more reliable, and that's what you see today.

We do not have any Sunday service.

We were not able to return during the pre-pandemic.

But we are operating, you would have to say, much more reliably.

Cock face head weights have been put in place and the system is actually operating at a much more smooth and reliable pace.

To that end,

If you look at the ridership model that we've talked about in great detail, from FY 2018 through 25, we had a ridership total of about 1.9, almost 2 million riders in 18.

COVID happened, 2021, our ridership, like most transit agencies across the nation, plummeted during the pandemic time frame.

We've been able to slowly start climbing our way back.

We're not at the FY19 levels, but we are higher than the FY2020 levels.

We were hoping that the completion of FY25 was going to be 1.4.

We fell just short of that.

We had some pretty rough days in May and June and we weren't able to complete all of our service model but one of the things I wanted to highlight is the fact that in FY25 we extended service to the center at Belvedere fulfilling an obligation that the city had with the center which brings us to the point that our coverage area was extended

Routes 4 and 9 frequencies were improved from weekdays, which is Monday through Friday, from 6 a.m.

to 7 p.m.

to 30 minute service.

They were a 60 minute service.

And then the Route 6, which was improved basically 6 days a week, Monday through Saturday, to 30 minute service from 6 a.m.

to 6 p.m., 12 hours of service, a marked improvement from where it was before.

Added recovery time to most of our routes, which actually helped us

make sure that we ensure timely transfers.

So we're starting to climb out.

Ridership is looking better.

We're not where we want to be, but we're not where we were before all of this, the pandemic happened.

So current model today, we still have 12 routes.

We've been talking about extending and changing routes.

Hopefully, in the very near future, we'll be able to split the two, which is a request from the county.

That's part of what they paid in their allocation for FY26.

which will add an additional route to ourselves.

We'll have 13 routes, including the trolley, that will operate.

Good afternoon, and my name is Jim Baker, Senior Principal at Nelson Nygaard.

Back in 2021 and 2022, I was working with Garland and his staff on putting together what we called a system optimization plan, a plan of just how to kind of restore service back better than before pre-COVID.

And that plan improved frequencies on a number of routes to 30 minutes or better.

It proposed reestablishing Sunday service.

If you remember one of the charts there that Garland showed, there were some routes running at 70 minute frequency.

So this plan got rid of all that as well.

And we provided some new connections with this plan.

So we improved

You know, transit accessibility between the UVA campus and the hospital up to Barracks Road.

We added some new crosstown services, such as from South Charlottesville to Barracks Road, the US 29 corridor, without having to go through downtown.

There was extended service coverage on the south end of the service area.

and including that Route 2A and 2B connecting to Piedmont Virginia Community College.

So really kind of expanding, you know, modifying the connections and improving a more direct service within the service area.

That plan at the time we estimated would require 28 peak buses.

Today it's 20 peak buses.

And it required around 132,000 revenue hours of service, annual revenue hours.

That's about over a 40% increase over today.

And at the time we estimated that the number of operators required to implement the system optimization plan was 82 operators.

You know, that was an estimate back from May 2022.

Well, since then, you know, we've been- How many operators do we have now?

Great question.

All thrives for 66, and as of today, all 66 positions are filled.

We have three operators that tested today.

Tested today for their license, so hopefully they all pass.

Nice.

Sorry.

So we've been providing scheduling support for Garland and his team for the past several months.

And with this additional information, we updated that estimate of operators.

What we found was that original estimate

You were paying a lot more overtime to operators at the time.

You had fewer extra board.

Extra board is where you have additional staff to cover when an operator calls in sick or if it's paid leave just so that you can continue to provide that service out there on the streets.

With these additional refinements in estimating the operators, that 82 operator number went up to 90.

Yes.

So Garland asked us, well, what can we do with 82 operators?

So we looked at what was achievable.

And there's a number of things that we can do from the system optimization plan.

Like, for example, Route 1 is the only route today that does not operate on Saturday.

So we can do that.

Garland talked about the Route 2 and the service that's to be implemented later this fiscal year.

We can do that.

One of the things we wanted to do is restructure service in the US 29 corridor.

We wanted to provide a one-seat ride from downtown up to the Walmart.

That does not exist today and we're able to do that and also the Route 5 currently operates just from Barracks North.

We wanted to extend that down to the UVA campus and hospitals so you have more transit choices to get from UVA and the hospital up to Barracks and we're able to do that.

Also, out on the east side of town, Route 10 that serves the Pantops and Martha Jefferson Hospital.

That currently operates at 60 minute frequencies and is a very circuitous route.

We wanted to straighten that out and get that frequency to 30 minutes.

We're able to do that as well.

And we really wanted to get the trolley service back to 15 minute frequencies.

It was running at 15 minutes before the pandemic.

Right now it's running at 25 minute frequencies, which means transfers to and from the trolley at the downtown transit station do not work well because everything else is operating on a 30, 60 minute frequency.

We're able to do that as well.

So we can do all those things.

The one thing that we cannot do with the 82 operator constraint would be adding Sunday service.

We'd have to sacrifice some of those things I just talked about in order to do Sunday service.

And just based on some of the historical ridership that Garland showed there, you really get a lot of benefit when you increase frequencies.

So just trying to get your weekday and Saturday service levels up first as a priority and then add Sunday service if you're working with a constraint of 82 operators.

So this kind of shows just what that system would look like.

I know it's kind of hard to visualize here.

But you can see on the south end, the Route 2 splits into 2A, 2B.

So we're doing that.

Route 7 is a route that would go from downtown through UVA campus up US 29 all the way to Walmart.

So again, that one-seat ride with that Route 5

in extended south to connect to UVA and the hospital and the Route 10 also being straightened out.

And this is a lot of detail if you wanted to look at the route level details, but basically with this ADG operator constraint, it's adding six additional peak vehicles.

And right now, the peak vehicle requirement is 20.

So it'd be bumping that up to six and adding about 31,000 additional annual revenue hours.

And I think right now you're around 92 or so thousand hours.

I know right now of course CAT has received some funding from the county for service outside of the city so Garland asked us to look at the split between the city and county revenue hours and it's a 31% of the revenue hours would be out in the county, 69% of the service would be inside the city which is very similar to the split today I think it's about a 29% in the county today so it's just

up in that a little bit.

This is not net additional.

This is total.

This is total, yes.

OK.

So next Garland asked us to look at the system.

I mentioned before the system operating plan, optimization plan that was envisioned back in 2022 would require 90 operators.

Garland asked us to look at what if we did that system optimization plan but improved frequencies on a number of other routes.

That system optimization plan still had some routes running at 60 minute frequencies.

So he asked, well, what if we run everything at 30 minute service?

And in addition to everything that was proposed in the SOP, the optimization plan, and that would increase that to 108 operators.

and I would bump that peak vehicle requirement to run everything at 30 minutes or better by 15 additional peak vehicles, so you're going from 20 to 35 peak vehicles and an additional 71,000 hours of service.

And with that system optimization plan, everything operating at 30 minutes or better, it's still a pretty similar split between the city and county.

29% to the county, 71% to the city.

Versus 15.8, but that doesn't include new buses that would be needed?

And I know, so you're saying peak bus, current peak vehicle is 20.

If we wanted to achieve this, we would need 15 additional out there.

Michael just pointed to me.

We have 43 vehicles on property today.

We're about to retire three.

About the retired three, so we have 40 in our complement.

But we're a small transit agency, so we try to go a little bit higher than that.

So we did some more of these frequency charts like Garland showed before.

And this is the existing frequencies.

At the time we did this, there were 65 operators.

Now there's 66.

And again, you can see the yellow is where a route's operating at 60-minute frequencies.

And the green is where it's operating at 30 minutes.

With the exception of the trolley, that's a 25-minute frequency on the chart.

So that's the oddball.

If you remember the pre-COVID chart Garland showed before, there was some red, where there was some 70-minute frequency.

Since then, CAT's been able to eliminate, improve frequencies on those routes.

This would be the partial implementation of the system optimization plan with 82 operators.

So if I just kind of toggle back, you'll see that there's more routes with green.

So we're expanding the routes with 30 minute frequencies.

You'll also see that, whoops, I went the wrong way.

There you go.

You also see in the evening there's some inconsistency as far as how long routes are running in the evenings, both weekdays and Saturdays.

And one of the things we'd be able to do with 82 operators is have some consistency where routes are operating until 1030 in the evening.

Some routes are at 1030, but not too many.

Okay, thank you.

Oh, I see.

and then with the full implementation with that 30 minute frequencies you can see everything is running at 30 minutes or better on weekdays up until 7 p.m.

and on Saturdays between 9 and 6 or 7 and also on Sunday so during the daytime on weekends we have everything operating on 30 minute frequencies

Again, we have that consistency as well as far as the end of service time as well on all days a week.

And so this 108 operators, that 108 comes from if this was our schedule, this is how many we would need?

Correct.

Next, we wanted to talk about just going, you know, we were asked to just look at some scenarios that go beyond the system optimization plan.

Michael, do you have anything, any questions so far?

Help me remember the 6582

I had a lot kind of going on in the last three, four months.

So that was the assumptions that were made in FY22.

So part of what is happening today is to validate those assumptions, right?

And we've come to the realization that the 82 model

doesn't hold water today.

It's really 90 to do this, the basic.

OK.

All right.

One of the major reasons for that change is as we add more service, we have to increase our number of extra board operators, that filling gap, so we can make sure that we're staying reliable and consistent.

So when someone takes off or someone calls out, we still need to be able to have a person that we plug in so we can make sure people still get to work on time.

Okay.

We've thrown a lot of numbers at you, we're going to throw a few more at you here and that's looking at some additional service expansion scenarios that go beyond that 30 minute system optimization plan scenario we just showed.

And what we have is really, it's six scenarios, really it's just variations of three scenarios.

And the first one we looked at, we were asked to look at is

What would it take if we ran service to midnight, weekdays and Saturdays, and still have Sunday service go till nine, and we improved, everything ran at 30 minutes, seven days a week.

That's scenario 1A.

And then scenario one, and we also had some 15 minute frequencies in that scenario 1A on four routes.

and then scenario 1B was where we added the 15 minute frequencies on four routes.

So five, six, seven, and trolley which are some of your higher ridership routes.

So scenario 1A running everything at 30 minutes except for the trolley, that'd be at 15 minutes.

Scenario 1B improving frequencies on the five, six, and seven to 15 minute frequencies.

Both scenarios assume service to midnight.

So that's going beyond what we were originally considering in that system optimization plan.

And then scenario two backs that off a bit.

It's the same as scenario one.

The only difference is that on Sundays, instead of running all Sunday service at 30-minute frequencies, it's backing off Sunday to 60-minute frequencies.

So it's going to be a little less expensive, a little less service on Sundays when historically ridership productivity isn't as great.

And then scenario three is backing off a little bit further from scenario two in addition to the 60 minute service on Sundays where we're backing off.

Also on weekdays, just going to 11 p.m.

instead of midnight.

So this is what that looks like.

It's just to kind of give you a sense of the range of what those required operators would be.

Basically, the maximum scenario is scenario 1B, where you go up to 137 operators.

And you have a pretty significant jump in operating costs as well to 28 million.

41 peak buses, which would mean it'd be around a fleet of 50 buses.

So as we went through all these scenarios, one of the additional things was asked, what would it take support staff for us to make sure that we were able to operate, whether it's till midnight or in scenario two, have our maintenance shop operate 24 hours?

So if we were going to return to a seven days a week model,

We were asked that we would be given additional inventory specialists because one of the things we want to make sure that we are mindful of is when we're asking for parts, we need a person who manages that process.

We just actually went through a trial and review and they are keen about making sure that we account for all of the parts when they go on the vehicles at that time.

That's what the inventory specialist does.

And then we need additional mechanics because one of the things that the more service hours you have, the more PMs you're going to have to do, the potential more number of breakdowns you're going to have.

So we're asking for a minimum until midnight, a minimum of an additional five mechanics.

And then the supervision, because we're extending additional hours, the model goes to we are at nine, potentially supervisors now, we go to 14.

with an additional five supervisors.

So these are additional expenses that we want you to consider.

But also, there's not a slide in this, but if we're extending our hours, I need to point this out, if we extend our hours to midnight, that has an impact on Jaunt.

They provide our ADA paratransit service.

We have to make sure that we account for their costs for extending service for those additional hours also.

I do not know what that costs are.

I have had a conversation with Mike.

He's going to start to work up a cost for what that would cost for their additional hours.

But it will be an impact not just to Kat, but also John.

Well, they're already doing Sunday, which was a good thing.

They never pulled back.

So there's not in a tremendous amount additional costs on their Sunday service.

But for the additional hours on the weekdays, which is five days a week, there will be a cost for that.

And then the 24 hour model, which is the bottom one, because we are introducing three shifts.

Three shifts on the mechanics side.

You're asking for, so you would have an inventory specialist, which we have just one now.

You would have an inventory specialist for each one of the shifts.

So you're adding two inventory specialists.

A transit bus mechanics would go to eight, because you would have how many at five at a shift at a time?

Five at a shift at a time, which gets us to 15 mechanics.

And then transit,

A transit technician supervisor, which is the kind of like the foreman, then an additional one.

We have two now.

We needed a third for the third shift.

And then the road supervisors or operation supervisor stays the same at five.

Those are all additional requests that we'd ask you to consider, because it's not just the buses or the operators you're putting on the road.

The top of the chart, the buses operate until midnight.

That means we're shutting off our mechanic.

The buses operate until midnight and also our maintenance shop stops at midnight.

The bottom one, buses operate till midnight, but the mechanic shop operates 24 hours.

It does not stop.

Redundancy, I guess.

It does, because today our last mechanic is at 5.30?

Yes, 5.30.

So we don't have a mechanic on staff after 5.30 today.

And again, you're saying that these are in addition to the revised budget numbers that you gave for the driver increases.

Correct, sir.

So we did not, because one of the things is that once a decision is made, we do have the ability to go to the state and ask for additional expansion vehicles.

Thus far, we have not had an issue getting those additional vehicles granted.

Now, it does become a little more tricky as we move to the

The clean alternative fuel vehicle models, because they are much more expensive.

But if we're running the diesel model, there seems to be a placeholder where we'd be able to get additional two or three vehicles.

But once again, when we're asking for them in expansion, there's an assumption that you buy them and you put them in the service.

They're not being held back just for relief purposes.

I think all we have left here is just some more charts that just kind of show what those beyond the system optimization plan scenarios would look like in terms of frequency.

So this is that scenario 1A with the service going to midnight and everything operating at 30 minute frequencies.

You can see here 1B is where we do have additional routes running at 15 minute frequencies.

So you're going to kind of see that visually.

and then 2A was where we scaled back on Sunday service because like you can see there on the scenario 1A, 1B we had 30 minute frequencies on Sundays.

Scenario 2A and 2B scale that back to 60 minutes with the exception of the trolley.

And then scenario 3A and 3B are similar, just scaling the service back to end at 11 on weekdays and Saturdays.

And then just kind of a few summary charts there.

Again, your peak vehicle requirement today is 20 peak vehicles.

The 82 operators generates an additional five peak vehicles.

The system optimization plan model at 30 minutes gets you to 35 and then some of those beyond the SOP scenarios where we're running more routes at 15 minute frequencies gets you up to 41 peak vehicles and just again you just at minimum need to add 20% on top of these numbers.

You can see the chart to the right shows the change in revenue hours and how those step up in progression with each scenario.

The highest Scenario 1B is 124% more than the current.

And then the operator requirements.

Again, at the time we did this, it was 65 operators, bumping it up to 82 with that first scenario we discussed, 108 to go with the SOP with the 30 minute frequencies, all the way up to 137 in terms of the highest number with the beyond SOP numbers.

Well, I would just to go back to that side briefly because to me that's the most important slide.

the previous one in terms of the costs.

Just for underlining to me, like in terms of the community's expectations, I think the SOP is accomplishing that as the bare minimum and certainly I think they would want the SOP with 30 minute surface beyond that even.

But you're talking about a minimum of three to four million dollars in additional funding from the city just to accomplish

The SOP and then in the realm of 8 to 10 million dollars once you're talking about the SOP with 30 minute routes.

And as I look at that, I think that's just important.

The goal is we'd have to figure out how to get to 3 million dollars at a bare minimum and at the higher end how do we get to 8 to 10 million dollars.

I think that 3 million dollars is

difficult but achievable, but then when I look at the $8 to $10 million, that kind of increase, I think that's feasible, but when I hear that, it starts to make me think we would have to start to look at identifying a new revenue source that is kind of earmarked either informally or formally for that purpose in order to achieve that.

So anyway, some initial thoughts to that.

Yeah, I agree.

Part of what I hope we do today is this starts the conversation.

We're not asking you to make any decisions, of course, today.

But when you're having your deliberations in the fall, when you start your budget process, we wanted you to have a context for what is possible.

And we've looked at a number of scenarios.

Do you want us to do any other scenarios?

That's part of what we're asking for your advice today.

But we also wanted to bring you to the next part of our presentation.

Greg will come up and we're going to talk about Title VI because I know you've heard bits and pieces from other people and you've heard it from me, but I think it's also important that as CATS board, which is city council, that you are aware of kind of your responsibilities as far as Title VI is concerned.

Real quick, question about the scenarios that we've gotten.

All of them are, we've talked about this before, but I think it would be good to reiterate since this scenario doesn't exist here and I'm wondering if it's possible to, which is not getting everything to 30 minute service before we get to the 15 minute service on some of the routes.

Good afternoon.

My name is Greg Nordeen, a principal with Nelson Nygaard, and I'm going to talk to you about Title VI today.

So if you're unfamiliar with Title VI, well, there's about four parts to this presentation.

I'm going to explain exactly what Title VI is, what is the guidance that's available to CAT for achieving compliance with Title VI, and then some of the considerations that you'll need to think about as you're adopting Title VI programs.

So the first thing that we're going to answer today is what is Title VI?

And Title VI is in reference to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Section 106 of the Civil Rights Act says that no person in the United States shall on the basis or on the ground of race, color, or national origin be excluded from participation or denied the benefits of or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.

And so because most transit agencies, including CAT, receive federal dollars for the operations of their agency, they are required to comply with Title VI, which means they cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, or national origin.

To implement this, the Federal Transit Administration in 2012 issued circular FTAC 4702.1b, which is a lot, but it's basically just detailing the process and procedures that transit providers have to follow to be compliant with Title VI.

In the 90s, there was Executive Order 12898 that was passed by President Clinton that sets the guidance for environmental justice that expanded the definitions, or the definition of people that were covered under the Title VI program to include low income populations.

So essentially, Title VI is ensuring that there is no discrimination against people based on color, race, national origin, or income status.

This is the foundation essentially for all transit agencies in the United States to determine that the services that they provide do not discriminate against minority or low-income populations.

So as I was saying, the FTA has issued circular C4702.1B.

This is generally known within the industry as just the circular.

And this sets the requirements that transit agencies have to meet.

There are nine chapters to this document.

But for the purposes of transit agencies, there's really only two that they need to be concerned about.

Chapter three, which are the general requirements, and chapter four, which are the requirements specifically for fixed route public transportation providers.

States and metropolitan planning organizations, because they also receive federal transportation dollars, have to comply.

They have their own sets of requirements.

We're not going to cover those, but we're going to talk about chapters three and chapters four.

Chapter three, these are the general requirements.

This is actually a list of all the requirements that are required within chapter three.

So for the first one, you have to actually develop and submit a Title VI program that's done on a three-year basis.

And actually the CAT document is getting ready to expire in this November, so they'll probably be coming back to you all in the next few months with an updated version of that document.

The second is the notification of beneficiaries of the protections offered under Title VI.

What this means is that transit providers are required to notify their riders and anybody who's interested in their system that they are of these protections.

And so you'll see things like notices on buses that say that, you know, the cat does not discriminate or the transit center.

As part of their documentation, they have to provide a list of those locations that they post that information and make that available to FTA.

Beyond that, they also have to develop a complaint process and form that sets the rules so if someone does feel they're being discriminated against, what is their recourse within CAT before it actually escalates to the federal government and the federal government will come back and check and confirm that that process has been followed if they do get a complaint.

Beyond that, any complaints that are filed within the period of time between your current Title VI program and your previous Title VI program have to be recorded in a log, so you'll have a log of any investigations, complaints, and lawsuits that have come out of Title VI.

You also have to develop two plans that are focused on engagement.

You have a public participation plan.

The public participation plan defines how CAP will engage with the public, what are the tools at its disposal, how does it try to reach the public, are meetings in person, are they virtual, answers those types of questions.

And then you also have to develop a language assistance plan.

The language assistance plan looks at what are the demographics of your community, identifies languages that are of

particular significance and then CAT has to develop a strategy to ensure that people that speak those languages have access to the system.

So very commonly a lot of agencies are now just developing everything in English and in Spanish because most places in the U.S.

the Spanish population is well above that threshold, or Spanish speaking population I should say.

As part of the bottom three here, you also have to develop a list of the racial composition of your planning and advisory bodies.

It's not this body, but any other bodies that inform the work that CAT does.

So if you have passenger advisory committees or those types of things, you have to provide the racial composition of those groups as part of your submission to FTA for Title VI.

Subrecipient process and monitoring.

As a direct recipient of federal funds, CAT can make available federal funds to non-recipients if they're providing a transportation function.

A lot of places you'll see if there's rail service or ferry service that's provided by a different provider who might be a private operator, they can access federal funds through CAT.

As a subrecipient, CAT has to have a process to monitor and ensure that those funds are being used appropriately and also not discriminating.

And then finally, the final piece in chapter three is the facilities siting assessment.

And this is basically any facility that is an operational facility that a transit agency builds has to be evaluated for impacts to that community to ensure that it is not discriminating against other parts or that community in favor of other parts of your community.

This does not include passenger-facing infrastructure.

It's strictly limited to operational and maintenance needs.

So building bus shelters are not part of this review.

Transit centers are not part of this review.

But if you are building a new maintenance facility or a new operational facility of some sort, you have to evaluate where that facility is being sited to ensure it's not discriminating against people in that neighborhood.

Any questions on Chapter 3?

Chapter four is a little more straightforward.

These are the requirements that are for public transit operators specifically and there are four requirements in chapter four.

The first one is that every transit provider has to set system-wide service standards and policies.

This basically defines how frequent is your service, how late at night does it operate, how early in the morning.

And basically, this becomes a standard by which all of your service is assessed.

On the policy side, you also have to develop a policy that indicates how you distribute bus shelters.

So you don't have to have a standard for it, but you do have to have a policy that describes

how you consider bus shelters throughout your community and also how you distribute your buses when you're assigning service in the morning to ensure that you're not putting the newest buses in the nicest neighborhoods all the time.

The three other requirements for public transit providers are actually only for public transit providers that meet certain criteria, specifically that you have to operate more than 50 vehicles in peak service

and being a UGA that has greater than 200,000 people.

At the moment, Charlottesville has neither of those.

You're operating about 20 vehicles and you're just shy of 200,000 people.

But as you guys are quickly moving and trending in the direction of, at least on the bus side, growing towards that number.

So these are things that you'll probably want to be mindful of in the development of the next Title VI program.

The first one is that you have to collect and report demographic data.

So this is basically understanding where people live within your community, how minority populations and low-income populations are dispersed throughout your community, and basically you have to compare your service.

In the second one, you then compare your service by some service to those maps to ensure that those services are distributed equitably throughout your community so you're not favoring one community over another.

And then the final one here is that all transit agencies over this certain threshold, any time they make a service or a fare change, they have to do what's called a Title VI equity analysis, which essentially looks at the nature of that change and whether and how it impacts different populations of people.

It's not looking at the change itself.

It's looking at the communities that are impacted by it.

And so if you decide that you want to add service to a community,

You have to look at the demographics of that neighborhood and just ensure that you're not, again, negatively impacting other communities as part of that.

As I was saying, currently at the moment, you guys are well, Charlottesville and CAT is within the limit for the lower designation, so they only are responsible for the system wide service standards and policies, but you are trending towards becoming a larger agency and that transition does, will, when you do hit that threshold, you will be required to meet these increased obligations.

Moving on, complying with Title VI.

Title VI is not something that generally results in direct action from FTA.

They're not actively monitoring on a daily basis what's happening at CAD from an equity standpoint or a Title VI standpoint, but essentially transit agencies on an annual basis, they're signing their certs and assurances, they're submitting their Title VI program into FTA through their online portal, and

NFTA signs off on that plan when it's submitted.

That happens once every three years.

CAT will be doing that again later this year.

And then whenever the agency goes through its triennial review process, which also happens once every three years, auditors will then use that as the opportunity to look back to ensure that there's compliance with Title VI.

Sounds like you all just went through the triennial review just last week, so you've got a couple of years there before that'll happen again.

But essentially, they're performing a three-year look back.

If compliance with Title VI is not shown, generally you will be put on some sort of mitigation plan to address that.

But at the extreme end of that, there's two outcomes that could happen.

First is that you could have your federal funds frozen, meaning you'll receive no more assistance.

Or in an even worse case scenario, there's a potential for recoupment of federal funds, which has happened with other transit agencies in the past.

Most agencies, though, it just results in a finding, some sort of remediation strategy or something that will, depending on the nature of it, it tends to be unique to whatever the issue was.

These are some considerations.

These are really not anything that's written in stone, but these are just things that I've learned over my time in implementing Title VI and working in this environment.

Again, the facilities assessments are really only referring to operational assessments.

Anytime you're building passenger-facing infrastructure, there's already a process for evaluating the equity of those investments, so those are not covered under Title VI.

Only operational facilities are.

There's also within Title VI, it is a framework for decision making is one way to think about it.

They have some pretty strict rules, but there's a lot of latitude within those rules for you all to set your own thresholds and understanding of what your community looks like, especially when you get into service and fair evaluation considerations, which you don't have to do just yet, but you will eventually, you'll be setting thresholds for what is appropriate levels of difference from

That's the word I'm thinking of.

Anyways, yes, you'll end up setting thresholds when you'll get to that size.

FTA has always intended that Title VI is meant to be a floor, not a ceiling.

So the circular specifically encourages transit providers to think about considering extending their definitions to consider other priority populations.

Like I was saying, Title VI right now, it covers minority and low-income populations, but other communities, there's precedent for other communities thinking about things like age discrimination or veteran status or

students.

So really, you can expand this definition.

However, if you expand it, FTA will expect you to report on it, and you will be held to that standard.

So you can expand beyond minority and low-income populations, but you will be held to that standard.

This is another one that is actually becoming increasingly important for transit agencies, especially as microtransit has really expanded.

Title VI only covers fixed route services, so this is the fixed route bus network.

It does not cover paratransit, and it does not cover microtransit.

So those are two types of services where you don't have to do any.

There's no equitable evaluation required when making changes.

And then probably one of the biggest flaws with Title VI as it's designed is that, generally speaking, Title VI analyses are completed at the end of your planning process, which often puts transit providers in a position where they're defending decisions that have been made long prior that are inequitable.

This one thing that we like to recommend at Nelson-Eggart is you start thinking about the Title VI process very early on in your planning, because at the end of the day, it will become a pain if you do not address it early on.

And that really is about it.

Thank you.

No, the largest one you answered was, did it apply to paratransit services?

Yeah, the thought process, I believe, is that paratransit is supposed to be a reflection of your fixed route network.

It's supposed to be complementary to your fixed route network.

by design.

So if you're making a change to your fixed network, generally speaking, the thought is that it would impact paratransit riders the same.

It assumes that paratransit riders and fixed riders use the network in the same way, which they generally don't.

But that is why that's the thought process there.

Right.

And I guess relevant for us is, I mean,

What is the scale of risk for having 15 minute routes in some areas?

Is that the kind of thing that other agencies would get in trouble for?

I think it depends on a lot of things.

Let me put it this way.

I've never seen a situation where FDA has said you need to take service from here to here to move it.

But generally speaking, it's the awareness that, oh, you know what, there is a community here that is underserved.

And I think it's when you set those service standards and then hold everything to that bar that you're essentially solving that problem in some ways because you're setting a universal standard that's equal for everybody.

Sure.

Yes.

The system that we had pre-pandemic, and I guess this is probably why this is a part of the presentation today,

We've been asked to really focus on four or five routes, making sure they are very frequent.

That is, assuring that we try to make sure we increase our ridership.

I appreciate that.

But we can't, at the detriment of everything else, leave everyone else out.

So the way, if you look at one of the first slides that I had here, where we showed how we had a litany of colors, the red, the green, the yellow, the blues, no one would know how to use our system because it changed so frequently.

And then we had some of the most infrequent routes in some of the poorest areas of our system.

If we were to get challenged, even though we are a smaller system, there is no basis for us to say why we did what we did.

So me coming here six years ago, we started following a process, because I'm from a larger system, where we're starting to migrate and make sure that we can account for why we're doing what we're doing.

And then there's a validation process in case we ever do get challenged.

And our system is getting bigger, so we need to do those processes anyway and get used to them so we don't get challenged.

I have been in Richmond when we did our reimagining project.

Actually, Jim was the consultant at GRTC when we did the reimagining project there.

We held no system.

We had no route harmless.

So if you had 30 minute service, you got no worse than that amount of frequency in your area.

Most places got better service.

And that was the key.

So in our model, it's hard to say that the ridership is in developing.

We can see in the maps that ridership is connected to frequency.

where we've had really frequent routes, our ridership has been really high.

And they're in areas where we have had

Terrible frequencies, our ridership is low.

It should be because it's hard to ride a system every 70 minutes.

So if we get to a standard of 30 minutes, which is that's the basis, now we have real validation and a foundation to build on.

And we say, everything is at 30 minute service.

These are the routes that are worthy of having 15 minute service or better.

five to six to seven, the trolley.

And we will see those, hopefully we'll see those numbers for ridership skyrocket.

Because everything else works in tandem to get to those routes and make those routes even more frequent.

Because you're not, some of them have a one to ride, but some are transferring from one to another to get to their places.

And if the connections aren't working, I mean if I have a 70 minute route,

to get to a 30 minute route.

If I miss the 70 minute, I can't get to my 30 minute.

But if everything is 30 minutes, then it works better for everybody to get around.

And the mobility and access for everybody increases.

So that's really what the context is.

So if I'm hearing correctly, one, pre-pandemic, perhaps we're not following what could be considered best practices that are more common in larger localities.

Correct.

Yes, unless we're going to expand our number of drivers immensely.

And we are working towards doing that.

But we're a small system.

We have to build our infrastructure to support 10, 15, 20 more drivers.

Those all things take time.

We have to train.

We have to get the system.

We have to work about where to place them.

All those things take time.

So incrementally, we're making changes to our system.

We're going to eventually be able to get there.

We have our current administration.

I'm not sure if they really care about what's going on.

On the Title VI analysis, but that doesn't mean the future administration won't come back and ask us what we did during that three-year period of time, if it's in our trial and review area.

We do have to answer for what we've done.

And I want to be able to defend what we've done, because we've followed the Title VI rules.

All right, I've got a couple questions.

So this is probably in here somewhere.

But for people listening and watching at home, can you explain the funding sources?

What is broken down for city, county, and fed, and state?

Or was that a nut chart?

I do not have those numbers in front of me.

Great.

So let's answer the infrastructure first, because I think that's the easiest one.

Today, the city is the only organization that's paying for the capital side, for the match, regardless of whether it's 4%, 10%, or 20%, whatever grant application we go out there.

The city is the only funding partner for the match requirements.

On the operating side, we get money from the federal government, from the state government, and we get money from the city, the county, and then we generate some of our money ourselves.

In the past we would have done it through the fare box.

or do we do it through advertising.

So we don't collect any money right now.

We're running a zero fare model and that's through June 30th of 2026.

So that decision is coming up about whether we're going to continue to do that model or not.

But the number from the federal government, I think it's like $5 million, 5.1 or 5.2.

This is the first budget that the city's contribution is actually higher than the federal government by $100,000.

The state's numbers are 2.3, 2.4.

$2.6 million.

Thank you, Barry.

And then our local contribution, like I said, is the cities was $5.3 million.

And then the county for the first time is $2.6 million.

And I know this was all in the budget presentation we got at RTP, but just to kind of explain that this is not all city funded.

We're also not sure what's going to happen with federal funding, but for now that's what it is.

If anyone wants a fuller budget presentation, you can go watch the RTP meeting from last month.

My next question is kind of a series of questions based on the Title VI presentation we just got.

I'm sure we're all familiar with that graphic of three people looking over a fence trying to watch a baseball game.

And it's describing the difference between equity and equality.

And so if they all got the same size box to stand on, the short person still couldn't see over.

But if they all got a box that fit their needs, then all of them can watch the game.

So I was thinking about that when thinking about your presentation and the equal distribution of timing before improving some down to a more useful frequency.

And that kind of feels to me like that difference between equality and equity, especially when the seven covers

the qualified census tracts of our lowest income residents.

So improving that first kind of seems to hit that equity, if we explain it this way and show that proof, kind of seems to hit that equity nail on the head.

Well, and I of course know it is sort of a chicken and egg scenario where you fund frequency begats more riders.

We have existing current high demand for the five and seven.

That's where we've heard specifically the most demand from, not just impact, but various other users of the service over the last several months and years.

that is kind of one piece where it's like how come that doesn't get counted as equity.

So great question.

So your line of thinking, so I'm just going to point out one

You're now still on the 7th, it does hit some of our low income areas, but the route that hits the majority of our low income thresholds is the route 6.

If you look at where the route 6 was before, and you look back at the original presentation where we were pre-pandemic,

It had 60 minute service or worse, right?

So applying the standards that you just told us about, we're giving everybody what they need, that route should have been the most frequent route in our system.

It was not.

Because that is what the individuals who do not have cars, who are transit dependent, should have had access to the most frequent, reliable public transportation system that we could have provided for them.

We have chosen in the past to provide service for other lines that touch but don't necessarily access as many folks that are on that spectrum.

We are working through that, so setting a standard of giving everybody 30 minutes.

One, it helps with the network.

It helps with connection points first.

And it also allows us to figure out whether we are putting our resources in the best place.

So it's the chicken or the egg.

If I put it, will they come?

If I increase the frequency, are people going to use it?

We have not answered that question for a number of routes in our system.

We've answered the question for the five and the seven, because we have run those at 20-minute service or 23-minute service in the past.

So we know we can build a ridership on that because we've seen it happen.

We don't know about the rest of the system.

Building everything around a 30 minute model allows us to actually put systems in place, put measurements in place, and figure out whether it's working or not.

Then we can retool the network.

Planning happens, should happen, constantly.

It's not something on a transit system that you do sit, put it in place and let it go for years.

Part of what I did at GRTC when I was there as a planning director was

Every six months we looked at how our transit patterns are changing.

Where's the ridership happening?

And we made adjustments.

We made adjustments actually there four times a year.

We were only doing it here twice.

So we have to continue to retool the system to take advantage of how patterns are changing.

Where the new activity centers are happening.

We need to be going

putting service where people want to go.

It does us no good to put something in place and not actively manage it because then we will see ridership fall off and it's our fault for not managing the system.

So going back to your scenario, we want to try to put the system in place, figure out

Do we have enough service?

Will people use the service that we put in place and then really focus in on areas like the five, the six, and the seven where we know, one, if I got challenged by the feds, I would be very comfortable in defending the five and the seven.

which touched some areas of low population but having the route that has the most low income population with that same frequency, I think we pass the smell test on an equitable distribution of services for low income families.

So I think you asked a question earlier about like what kind of other scenarios would we like to see and I would like to request a scenario that has a 15 minute service on 567 as kind of like the first thing and then backing into what else we could do beyond that knowing that maybe the routes that touch it would need to get to the 30 minute first but maybe the 9 which has a significantly lower

Yeah.

I mean, it depends on the demographics of the crops.

Yeah.

I'm not sure I could defend.

A complaint.

That's really what this is about.

If we're asked by the Feds why we did what we did, and the answer to that would be because

So one of the things that we did in the Reimagine Project in Richmond, and I hate to keep going back to that, but I think the two are very similar in nature of what we're trying to accomplish here.

We were challenged about some of the frequencies in the area because the initial request for them, they wanted 15 minute service instead of the 30 minute service that they had already had.

We were able to defend that because when we changed the model, we did no harm.

You had 30 minute service, you were no worse off than you were before, right?

But it also noted in the complaint that

the access points of being able to transfer because everything else around it was 30 minutes made the timing.

So if the numbers were off, that we gave them 30 minute service but everything around them was 15 minute service, it would have seemed out of place and it would have looked like we are disparaging them.

So I'm concerned about how we apply the network first before we actually

So it's easier to say everything is at a level point, a foundational 30 minutes, and then start talking about adding 15 minute service on select routes, because it's justifiable for the additional ridership, as opposed to the opposite way, where I work high frequency, low, because that's not what happened in Richmond.

We did high frequency.

But nothing around the high frequency corridors.

So we've got 10 minutes.

Game out the scenario and if the scenario is bad then that's still a presentation worth reviewing.

because the 30 minute model would have been played in place first.

So we've been able to test what's going on and see how the standard is applying to everything.

And then the justification is the ridership that we know of.

The ridership in certain areas warrants more ridership because you would be able to see.

Even if folks are using the service in the five minute area, they're not going to stop using the service.

Hopefully, we are starting to build a better service by bringing everybody up to a 30 minute model.

And so the idea there is that everyone has an equal baseline.

Okay, but yeah, just clarifying that it's not 30 minutes that sets the standard.

OK, thank you.

Those are my Title VI questions at the moment.

And then for some of the questions from the first part, so nice to hear that we have gotten our, well, hopefully those three drivers passed their tests to get us to the fully staffed budgeted amount.

But for the service that we're providing, how well is that number of staff going to meet the requirements?

Yes, we're still doing that because our extra board numbers are not high enough to complement everything today.

So, example, and it's a quick one.

A week ago, we had eight people call out in the morning.

We don't have eight standbys.

So I think we had four standbys that day.

So four routes.

We had to pull four buses.

That's not what we want to hear.

And that gets reflected accurately on the live updates, right?

It does.

Okay, thank you.

And then for the, actually I do have one more Title VI question.

CAT has a CAT advisory board.

That's the only body that's really subject to that regulation.

And that body's not active.

OK.

And then I know this was on the public transit portion.

Ms.

Davis?

How are we doing?

I'm good.

How is it?

100% full-time, not the... So, the... You're absolutely right.

So, we have two different groupings on the scuba side.

There's ten full-time positions.

As soon as those become vacant, they fill up quickly.

And the other four... is it 12 or 14?

The other twelve, we have four vacancies right now.

We're actively recruiting.

If you want to apply.

So our marketing team is doing a wonderful job.

We'll have a full bus wrap here in another couple of weeks, focusing on school bus side.

But we're going to be using a transit bus to focus on school bus.

All right.

Yeah.

Counselor Snook, are you there?

Yeah, a couple of them.

My first question is looking at the need for bus drivers and that sort of thing.

My understanding has been that in recent years the major constraint for us to decide what new service to offer has been the number of bus drivers.

We are authorized for 66.

We have hired 66.

So you've got 66, but you've got three who are about to be added.

They are a part of the 66.

So all 66 will be able to be fit into the model for working purposes.

The majority of those three are going to be added to the extra board because that's really where we need them right now.

So those three are not, we're not adding more service.

I'm not, you know, I'm not going to be asking Anthony to add two or three more buses.

So looking at the last couple of years, it seems like the major limiting factor on even considering some of these scenarios has been bus drivers.

I would say this is just my observation so take it for what it's worth.

When the federal government started laying off large number of folks with the current administration, the number of folks replying for CAT jobs which are stable union jobs increased.

We saw a bump in the folks applying.

That's good for us.

We train, so that's also a plus for us.

Because one of the budget discussions we were having six months ago, I guess, was if we

If we're not able to hire the number of buses that people wanted us to be able to hire, did we need to do something different in the marketplace to make us more attractive?

I would say, once again, this is just my assessment.

I believe that is true, that we are becoming more appealing, stable work with benefits, a great starting salary.

You'll get to the top of the scale in six years, seven years.

Six years, you'll be at the top of the pay scale.

Do we have any meaningful statistics on what I would term on-time performance?

always have an on-time performance, 82% or however many of our flights arrive at the time they're supposed to.

We do, sir.

Our data portal.

One of the tabs is our on-time performance OOTP.

Our on-time performance is abysmal right now.

It's 68, 69 percent.

High quality performance transit agencies are well in the 90 to 95 percent range.

We are not anywhere close to being that

Correct.

Well, the lack of drivers coming in to do the existing work that's scheduled, which is a little bit different than before not having the drivers.

Now we have them, but we've seen a high number of vacancies, specifically on Mondays and Fridays.

And then the last question I have is not really part of what you're presenting to us here, but I wanted to talk a little bit about sort of future plans.

I mean, here we're looking at scenarios for future for FY 27, so we're already looking to the future.

Every time I drive up 29 North, I am astounded by the number of additional apartment units that are being built beyond our present bus service into Greene County.

I don't know how many of those people come to work in

Charlottesville, how many of them may come to work at other places in Charlottesville, an Albemarle that might be something that a bus service ought to assist with.

And I recall that we have been told that we don't do our planning based on future growth, but it seems to me that we ought to be talking to the people, either in Green or in Albemarle, to say,

Do you know where those people are going to live?

If they're planning on coming and working in downtown Charlottesville and we don't have places for their cars to go and to park and whatever, then we really need to beef up our bus service.

So as your transit director, I would say if we're not paying attention to the growth around us, we are woefully negligent in our abilities to manage the system.

We do know what's happening around us, we just don't have the ability to make the changes.

We operate at the privilege of

the jurisdictions that we run in.

If the county wants us to run up or green wants us to run, they have to allow us to do so and they have to pay for it.

Those conversations, Kat's always willing, which also comes back to city council, someone's got to pay for the additional drivers, the additional vehicles, the additional buses.

In the past, that has been you.

We're hoping that that model changes in the future.

There needs to be much more detailed conversations between the jurisdictions about future growth plans.

We can be the answer to overcrowding.

We can be the answer to congestion.

We can be the answer to parking issues.

High frequency transit provides all those answers.

OK.

It's just a little after 5.30.

OK.

A couple points that I just wanted to make briefly.

Obviously, the market has been a constraint.

We have a union in place.

We pay well.

But we've got to actually add these

We need to make a decision about adding these FTEs into the next budget, which is why you're coming to us.

So that I think is important to keep in mind.

The funding piece, I see the good folks back there from the PDC.

The funding piece, one of the main reasons we stood up CARTA, which has got a meeting on Thursday, is hopefully to find another funding source to help us

So that's really I think the larger strategic question that needs to be asked.

And then the last thing that I'll just put out here is maybe we can talk about it at our retreat.

My sense, and I can't say that I've thought about this in a whole lot of detail, but it seems to me like we may be at a crossroads of we had wanted to do a lot of things with the climate side of our buses, and a lot of that was predicated on a prior administration that's no longer there.

playing that off and I hate to put it in those terms but what does that situation now look like versus if I had to pick frankly between the scenarios of the hydrogen and the battery electric buses

That future versus what's been described tonight of 110 bus drivers, I would pick the latter because I think that that lifts the whole community up in a way better than the other would, even though I think the other is important.

So there's going to have to be some conversations that happen between the folks on the climate side of things and the folks that are focused on just increasing it.

I realize it's not

I'm not trying to set things at odds against each other.

I realize both they complement, but at some point it just seems to me, and I won't be around to vote on these things, but it seems to me there's going to have to be some hard discussions about where do we put our money?

Is it in bus drivers?

in diesel buses that are cleaning good diesel buses or do we put it in something that we had anticipated having a lot of federal money for but don't?

I think we're at the close of this time.

Yeah, I have the closed session meeting.

And I'll just say quickly, again, to me, I think the average cost of a bus driver is about $78,000.

And just quick math, implementing the SOP is like $2 million.

SOP with 30-minute routes is over $3 million just for the bus drivers.

So to me, the most important question is, coming into this next budget cycle, do we identify transit as one of our top three priorities and commit to finding that $2 to $3 million?

Historically, we have not done that yet, but until we do that, progress will not happen, but we'll just say that.

All that said, the motion for a City Council closed session pursuant to section 2.2.3712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that City Council close this open meeting and convene in a closed session as authorized by Virginia Code section

2.2-3711A7 for consultation with legal counseling pertaining to actual litigation where such consultation would adversely affect the negotiating or litigating posture of the public body, specifically White v. City of Charlottesville.

2 is authorized by Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A8 for consultation with legal counsel for specific legal advice pertaining to matters involving the city's zoning ordinance.

And 3 is authorized by Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A1

for discussion and consideration of prospective candidates to be appointed to the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority.

Yes.

Yes.

All right, we are in closed session.

Thank you for your presentation.

We appreciate it.

Sorry for a couple minutes late.

Yes.

I move that this council is certified by a recorded vote that to the best of each council member's knowledge, only public business matter is lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion convening the closed session were heard, discussed, or considered in the closed session.

Okay, please cast your votes.

Voice vote?

Yes.

Are there any announcements?

I have one from Paige Hill.

Okay.

This is an announcement from Paige Hill, a committee member of Chehomba.

If possible, can you please make this announcement, please?

The African American Cultural Arts Festival will take place this Saturday, July 26th at Jackson P. Burley Middle School from 10 a.m.

to 6 p.m.

There's a phone number and a, I'll just give the email address, seedsofculture at gmail.com.

Beyond announcements, board commission.

Oh, yes, please.

Sorry.

Sorry, my apologies.

Do we need to vote on that?

Yes.

Motion passes.

Thank you.

OK, as I mentioned earlier, the mayor is out, so I'm here in his place.

We're at the point of community matters.

There are five pre-registered speakers leaving slots for 11 additional speakers on community matters.

Each speaker will have up to three minutes to speak.

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

Is our first speaker available?

I'm not Kim, but I'll go first.

I don't mess her up if I don't.

Anyway, my name is Gordon Hare.

I run a foundation, Ben Hare Just Swim for Life.

The last time I was here was about, I guess, seven years ago with the same plea of trying to offer Learn to Swim and improve the drowning problems in Charlottesville.

For the YMCA, we were successful and a Y was built and it has increased or improved the

Better health outcomes, but I don't think it really has addressed the demographics that I tend to attract.

Fry Springs Beach Club lets me use their pool because I bring a demographic that they can't attract, and ACAC allows me to have some swim lessons at their pool for the same reasons.

My demographic is

leans heavily towards non-white and low-income kids.

Probably 82% now is a non-white demographics.

I just recently signed a contract with the YMCA

to teach all of the second graders in Charlottesville, Albemarle, Louisa, and Greene County how to swim, but it's a five lesson, 40 minutes each lesson, and what it'll really do is give an orientation or a beginning to learn to swim, but we'll probably not teach a second grader how to swim, but it will increase

the membership to the Y and will create an interest for many people to learn how to swim.

And that's the legacy that I wanted to leave was to be able to offer swim lessons for everyone in Charlottesville and Albemarle County in my son's name.

I have been with

Charlottesville Parks and Rec.

When Erica Sims ran the Parks and Rec, she gave me 300 children in the summer to teach how to swim.

We ran several years.

The fifth graders at Walkersville came down and we taught them how to swim.

and I used to anytime I could find no one at the pool Parks and Rec would let me use the pool to teach kids how to swim.

I presented this to Rob Hutchins in March

Okay.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

My name is Kim, so I am Kim Basilewood.

Okay.

I am part of the Ben Hare Just Swim for Life Foundation.

It is imperative as over six children have already drowned in Central Virginia this year, this summer, that we continue to teach children how to swim.

It is a real big thing that the city could do because we have

131 children who are learning how to swim in the Fry Spring Pool right now.

People of color, people of different nationalities, people of all sorts of backgrounds.

And to be frank, there are 20 pools in Charlottesville, Virginia.

17 are privately owned, so none of these children

will learn how to swim without Ben Herr just swimming for life.

The three pools that are of public would cost a family of five over $25 or $30 just to go on a daily basis.

So what we're trying to do right now is potentially go with the Crow Pool.

The Crow Pool is your pool.

We would like to rent the pool.

And when we rented the pool last year, it was at an exorbitant rate.

We'd also love to buy the pool, but we would decline that.

So what we're trying to do is just ask you all to help us help the children of Charlottesville.

We are teaching lessons to the Boys and Girls Club.

We are teaching lessons to Southwood.

We are teaching lessons to everyone.

but we are not getting the support that we feel like we could from the community if we just came forward and said we need your help.

And that's really what we're doing today is we're coming forward to say these children are not going to learn how to swim.

These children are going to potentially be drowning victims.

These children and their lives and their families deserve

I teach Mommy and Me every Sunday and Saturday mornings.

It shouldn't just be to pretentious white people that I'm teaching these lessons.

It should be to everyone in the community.

Everyone should be afforded the opportunity for this.

And so that's why we're coming today, to ask you to please rent the pool to us.

at a reduced rate, or even sell the pool to us.

And we will raise the funds if we have to.

Great.

Next up, I'm sorry.

No, I'm sorry.

Thank you.

My name is Alicia Lenahan.

I'm a county resident.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

I'd like to start by thanking Councilor Payne for his presence and remarks at the Good Trouble Lives On event last Thursday.

There are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US.

Undocumented immigrants are generally not eligible for Medicaid or CHIP.

However, those who meet other eligibility requirements like income can receive coverage for emergency medical services.

In March 2025, over 78 million people in the U.S.

were enrolled in Medicaid.

Of that number, nearly 50 percent constituted child enrollment.

Why are those numbers, 11 million and 78 million, important?

Last Monday, the government gave ICE access to the records of all the people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants who aren't even eligible for the program.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients' name, ethnicity and race, birth date, home address, and social security number.

The administration is gathering and consolidating personal data so it can exert power and control.

ICE is using surveillance technology and data collection as part of its mass deportation efforts.

That laser-like focus is going to be turned on more and more of us.

In the Charlottesville metropolitan area, just over 22,000 people are covered by Medicaid.

ICE now knows who and where they are.

We are deeply concerned about the aggressive, cruel overreach demonstrated by the Federal Administration on a daily basis.

Our immigrant and refugee neighbors are the most vulnerable.

However, numerous reports and video evidence show that U.S.

citizens and immigrants with lawful status have been detained, questioned, or targeted, exacerbating distrust and public safety risks.

We are offering a resolution modeled after the one passed by Huntington Park, California,

that condemns non-transparent federal immigration enforcement tactics and affirms our community safety principles.

You each have a copy.

Use this resolution to state unequivocally that the city council believes that non-cooperation must not be confused with inaction and that Charlottesville police and city staff will proactively work within legal bounds to document, verify, and safeguard against federal overreach.

use this resolution to state unequivocally that the city of Charlottesville is committed to the rule of law, civil rights, and the safety and dignity of all its residents regardless of immigration status.

We're also circulating a petition that members of the audience can sign in support of this resolution.

Thank you so much.

My name is Emily Kingsley and I live in the Frye Springs neighborhood on stolen Monacan land.

I am here to say that the people of Charlottesville are paying attention and that we will not condone complicity with ICE or with the Trump regime in any form.

The Legal Aid Justice Center warns on its website that many local governments, even including many who are otherwise pro-immigrant, go above and beyond to make it easier for ICE to detain and deport immigrants.

This is unconscionable and Charlottesville must not go in that direction.

It is good that Police Chief Kochis has said that CPD will not cooperate with ICE and it is essential that this policy remain in place, but I want to see the city take an even more decisive stand against ICE.

Approving the resolution that was presented tonight would be one such action you could take.

Other cities have passed similar resolutions and can serve as a model for what those actions might look like.

On Tuesday, July 15th, the King County Council in Washington issued a resolution barring county officials from sharing civilian data with ICE and specifying the types of signage that must be posted in county buildings in order to clarify public versus private areas.

Last Friday, City Council in Long Beach, California started an emergency fund to raise money for immigrant families and businesses.

It has already raised over $100,000.

In Paramount, California, where some of the first major ICE raids took place, the City Council took similar action and put $60,000 of their own funds into that emergency fund.

These are just a few examples of what is possible if the city of Charlottesville were to truly live out the values it so proudly professes.

I know there are myriad complications and factors to consider, but I also know that this city can make things happen very quickly when there is enough pressure on it to do so.

And this pressure will inevitably come from the governor and from the federal government as they continue to turn up the heat.

But if the forced removal of Jim Ryan shows us anything, it is that compromising with fascists won't save you.

King County Councilmember Teresa Moscato observed that local jurisdictions must in this moment be the last line of defense and I call on the Charlottesville City Council to put up those defenses to approve the no collusion with ICE resolution and to invest as many resources as possible into the systems of support that already exist within this community.

Hi.

I am here with the Ben Hare Foundation as well.

I am one of the instructors for Ben Hare, and I've worked with them for about three years now.

And I want to kind of reinforce what we've been talking about, the Ben Hare Foundation.

I teach safety to adults and teenagers that go from being terrified of being in the water to having the ability to be in the deep end and grab a wall if they are in trouble.

I'm also teaching parents and teenagers how to enjoy the water safely, showing them different games that we can play, showing them how to stay safe, how deep is it too deep to be, and also reinforcing a skill, something that maybe someone already knows how to do, how can we improve it and make it better.

I have seen a teen go from not barely doing the doggy paddle to doing a triathlon in the course of a year and a half or less.

I think it's an important skill.

Didn't grow up in this town, but I did grow up around the sport of swimming.

I was fortunate enough to grow up in a team that looked like me, and it was plus 30 individuals.

And I think that it's important to have the sport of swimming in the life of children that are surrounded by so many lakes, creeks, and pools in this town.

I'll also say it opens the doors for a career path in some ways.

There are many jobs that go without being taken in all the different pools in this town for lifeguards, pool managers, and instructors.

and also is a path for academic growth because you can develop your academics with a scholarship and a sport of swimming.

Thank you so much.

Okay, so we have space for 11 more people to speak.

If you'd like to speak, please raise your hand.

Kevin Cox, I live at 311 Fairway Avenue.

After I used spray chalk to put a crosswalk down, a protest crosswalk, down on Elliott Avenue, the city came and painted over the chalk with some kind of black paint.

A couple days later, it rained.

Well, the city had claimed that that was white paint,

And the black paint probably would have bonded to it, but it was chalk.

When it rained, the black paint that was on top of the chalk and had not bonded washed off, revealing the chalk lines underneath it, which have now washed away completely.

All that's left is a stencil from the blacking revealing the gray pavement underneath it.

The gray pavement indicating my lines.

They're kind of ghost lines of my work.

It didn't work.

The paint didn't work.

But I am being charged $607 for the paint that didn't work.

Who's next?

Hi, counselors.

I'm Alex Joyner.

I'm pastor of Charlottesville First United Methodist Church and a regular rider on the 5, 7, and 11 buses.

and co-president of IMPACT, which is an interfaith organizing group representing a diverse group of 27 congregations in Charlottesville and Albemarle.

I'm also a resident of the county who works downtown.

I want to thank the members of the city council for your continuing to identify transportation as one of your top priorities in the city budget.

I know you face many difficult decisions about balancing priorities and I heard Councillor Pruitt say at this afternoon's session how the current needs of the bus transit system may force you to decide about whether to make it a higher priority in order to meet the lowest thresholds of goals in the SOP that was presented by City Transit Director Garland Williams this afternoon.

Here's what I've learned as a transit rider and as a pastoral leader listening to a lot of stories from people who depend upon the CAT system.

A bus system is one part of a larger transportation network, but it is the backbone of our transit system.

It is little d democratic in that people of all types of income, ages, and physical abilities can access it.

It is an investment in our common good.

It improves our common quality of life, affordability, traffic conditions, and our overall economy.

It's essential to a good community.

The second thing I've learned is that an underdeveloped, under-resourced bus system is a tragic waste of money.

Garland Williams noted that the reliability of buses leads to increased ridership and

And he went on to note that Kat's current on-time performance is about 68%, a figure that he himself called abysmal.

What it means in human terms is that real people miss doctor's appointments, are late for work, they stand at bus stops with refrigerated groceries and produce going bad, and just generally get ticked off.

Your options in situations like that are to spend money you may not have on an alternative like Uber or to give up on the system altogether.

What that means is that empty seats could go by that could have been filled by willing commuters, and that is a waste.

What we heard this afternoon is that our system needs 90 drivers to get to the level of service identified in the 2022 SOP.

It needs 108 to get to 30 minute wait times, expanded hours, and Sunday service.

all when we have still not gotten to pre-pandemic levels of service.

I get that we're a long way from where we need to be and that we have a lot of hard choices to make as a community and you have a lot of hard choices.

But I want to urge you to continue to make transportation and bus transit in particular a real priority for the lives of real people.

Thank you, sir.

Who's next?

Good evening.

My name is Allison Webb.

I live in Albemarle County.

I am a retired public health professional, and I am here today to call your attention to some important public benefits which have previously been available to undocumented immigrants and which will no longer be so.

This will impact the health and well-being of many individuals and families in the community, and I'd like to call your attention to it.

On July 10th, the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services announced a change in a law from 1996 saying that the law had been misinterpreted since then and that the law had previously allowed illegal aliens to access programs Congress intended only for the American people.

With that update, HHS says that undocumented immigrants will no longer be eligible for these public benefits.

I'm going to list off those public benefits.

It's going to feel tedious because it's a long list.

Head Start, mental health and substance use disorder treatment, prevention and recovery support programs.

Title IV-E educational and training voucher program.

Title IV-E Kinship Guardianship Assistance Program, Title IV-E Prevention Services, and Title X Family Planning Program.

Organizations and programs that serve undocumented immigrants will also be impacted.

Those are certified community behavioral health clinics, Community Mental Health Services Block Grant, Community Services Block Grant, Health Center Program, Health Workforce Program,

projects for assistance in transition from homelessness grant, substance use prevention treatment and recovery services block grant.

The list is not complete.

HHS says it will continue adding to it.

To make matters worse, the USDA, which is governed by a different statute, has issued a similar notice about benefits, and here they are.

So this means that undocumented immigrants will no longer have access to emergency food assistance program, commodity supplemental food program, special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants, and children.

That's WIC.

WIC Farmers Market Nutrition Program, Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program, National School Lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Child and Adult Care Food Programs, Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Programs, Special Milk Program, and the Summer Food Services.

Obviously, excluding undocumented immigrants from this incredibly long list of benefits will have a tremendous impact on our community, particularly in the areas of childhood education and nutrition.

Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, Council.

My name is Rory Stolzenberg.

I'm a planning commissioner speaking in my individual capacity, and I'm a resident of Water Street.

I'm here to discuss the presentation you received in your 4 o'clock session.

It's widely acknowledged in transit planning that the 15-minute frequency interval

is an important threshold in a transit service.

It's where taking the bus becomes a viable alternative to taking the car or other means of transportation, where you can go to a bus stop and expect a relatively short wait without having to plan your entire schedule around when the bus comes and enduring long waits if you miss a bus.

As you know, during COVID we slashed service, including all of our high frequency routes, and predictably, as this chart shows, ridership plummeted.

CAP became a system of last resort that you only ride if you have no other alternative.

Now, our consultants and our transit director would have us believe that civil rights law requires that we restore every route to the lowest common denominator service that still is mediocre and does not provide a viable alternative to cars in order to satisfy our Title I obligations.

It's simply not true.

For one, this transit strategic plan that you all should recognize you adopted just a year ago has a Title VI review included and does not have better than 60 minute service on all lines.

that's justifiable because we know that our higher frequency routes serve more disadvantaged areas of the community including on Georgetown Road and up 29 and in the core of the city and we know based on CAT's own ridership surveys from before the ridership plummeting that even when ridership is higher that riders of CAT are more disadvantaged than the population at large and so

If we continue with this line of reasoning, we'll make a massive investment into improving cat frequencies on every route to merely okay, to not be a viable alternative.

We won't recover the ridership that we had before.

And one thing that was mentioned in all of that funding discussion is that state revenue or state operating assistance is dependent on ridership, that state funding is not exogenous to what you decide, but rather as ridership increases on a three-year rolling delay,

your funding increases.

And so making a choice of spending a lot of money without getting ridership will mean that our funding will continue to decline, in particular because the Europe ET is currently updating its funding formula so that ridership is more emphasized and spending money without gaining ridership is punished.

So you'll be spending more and more money over time just to keep the same mediocre service.

Whereas if you start with high ridership routes, you'll get more money from DRPT and be able to use that to improve other line service later.

I urge you to send the plans, the scenarios back to the drawing board and come up with a reasonably effective transit system.

OK.

Who else would like to speak?

Anyone else?

Okay.

Well, that closes community matters for now.

Okay.

We're now at the consent agenda.

Ms.

Consent agenda number two, resolution to appropriate Virginia Department

of Criminal Justice Services, Victims of Crime Grant, Crime Act Grant in the amount of $123,600, second reading.

Number three, ordinance regarding an easement to Dominion Energy for undergrounding of electrical equipment at Penn Park and Quarry Road, second reading.

Number four, resolution to appropriate additional funds for Emmett Street Corridor Streetscape Project.

Thank you.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Please cast your votes.

Yes.

Yes.

Motion carries.

Yes, this evening we have Inez Gonzalez and James Watson.

I'm not sure who's presenting.

Yes, we're doing Walker presenting the police civilian oversight board annual report.

Sorry about that.

I gave you a new last name, James.

Sorry.

That's true.

Good evening, counselors, Mr. City Manager, distinguished members of the LEAD team, as well as the community.

My name is Inez Gonzalez.

I'm the executive director of police civilian oversight.

To my left is our management analyst, Mr. James Walker.

We are here tonight representing the PCOB and presenting to you the annual report.

The annual report this year is significantly more comprehensive than last year's report.

And as such, I'd like to have Mr. Walker explain to you, as he is the architect of this wonderful document, because of its size.

It's about 120 pages total, about 112 pages of actual text.

Good evening.

Again, I'm James Walker, the management analyst for the Office of Police, Civilian Oversight.

I think I can control.

Let's see here.

Just wanted to go to the table of contents, if possible.

There we go.

Perfect.

So, oh, I went too far.

So the table of contents of the report lays out the basic structure.

It is broken into four main sections.

There is a section that focuses on the work of the board, the efforts of the board, professional development, summaries from board meetings, as well as attendance and policy revisions and recommendations that the board itself made.

Each section also ends, you'll see, with an overcoming challenges portion.

This lays out some of the challenges faced, how those have been addressed, and recommendations to move forward

from those challenges.

The second section is the Office of the Executive Director.

This focuses on our work internally in the office, including some of the priorities and strategic initiatives that we have had, as well as professional development that we have completed, and systems and processes that we use to conduct oversight.

There is also a breakdown of the PCOB's budget and how funds have been spent, as well as some trends over three years, or actually five years, I believe.

And then finally, again, you see the overcoming challenges section.

We try to organize those challenges as it related to the themes in the report of the four different sections.

The largest section is the next one that focuses on oversight of the police department.

In this section, it talks a lot about the internal affairs complaints and cases, ones that we received that came through the PCOB.

and the full broad spectrum of all the ones that went through internal affairs directly.

A big portion of this are visuals and breakdowns of trends and statistics related to complaints, the allegations, the findings, and the outcomes of those.

Additionally, we dive deep into the police department budget, lay out some trends over the past three years, and look at how some of those trends, we ask questions about them, we don't make any assumptions or statements, we just say, here's what we see in the data.

And then lastly, again, that finishes with the overcoming challenges.

And then finally, we have a section on outreach and community engagement.

There is quite a substantial amount in that as well.

It includes everything from events that we have participated in, whether as we were invited to speak or hosted an event, everything to going to community events and going to speak at UVA or answer questions of students at UVA.

That has occurred, I believe, once.

And so also there is media coverage of the PCoB, so we just document any media coverage locally that specifically spoke to the PCoB or about the PCoB directly.

And then as well we also document all the internal department

collaboration that we do with, for example, the Office of Human Rights as well as with the police department and others.

Again, there's an overcoming challenges section there as well.

This report is posted on our website and there is going to be a digital appendix.

It is in production.

It will be posted this week.

We're just trying to finalize those documents.

And so please use the table of contents as a guide to walk yourselves through this document and we hope that

It is enlightening and it fully displays the work of the board as well as the office.

And that was one of the things that we were most proud of as far as this document is because again, and this is a reason why I specifically hired Mr. Walker.

There was a method to my madness.

He has made incredible improvements not only to transparency as it pertains to our website.

He's actually upgraded the website significantly and as far as the contents of the annual report,

The whole purpose of the digital index is for you to be able to click on a link for a document that we make reference to in our annual and be able to go directly to that document.

He also, again, like I said, something that we did this year that we didn't do last year

was to be able to get into granular levels of analysis as it pertains to data, our own data as well as the police department's data.

Again, as he said, we don't make any assumptions, but we provide enough information so that the reader could look at it and ask questions.

It should actually prompt you to be asking additional questions.

In addition to that, he is very careful when he provides you with the graphs to the various sections that he's discussing to tell the reader exactly.

He provides you with the legend and tells you exactly how to understand

what it is you're looking at.

And as he said, the most important thing, which I was primarily responsible for, so I take full responsibility for that, was the overcoming challenges section, because I've been here long enough to know what works, what doesn't, why it doesn't.

And I make very, I think, considerate recommendations as to how it is we can improve our existing situation.

And that's all we have, if you have any questions.

Questions, anyone?

I don't know if there are necessarily questions or maybe thoughts, and I know we're not going to solve this tonight.

But to me, speaking of overcoming challenges, I think one of the elephants in the room is that the PCOB is not in an ideal place right now in terms of counsel has not been able to recruit a quorum of applicants.

There's currently not a quorum.

I remember when we were looking at case studies of PCOBs,

around the country a lot of them had that moment of kind of activist pressure to create it and then they struggled for multiple years to figure things out and there was an inflection point and some of them where they either gave up on the idea or they were able to figure it out and get you know stick with it and I feel like we're in that inflection point moment to me I don't know if you're seeing that in terms of the scale overcoming challenges

But all of that to say I wonder if we need a work session between City Council, you, and the PCOB at some point to really try to hash all these things out because to me there are a lot of big questions about how we systematically recruit

I don't know if that makes sense but that's... It makes absolute sense and you've actually made an old lady's day by saying that because I think that's something that's long overdue is having that open conversation with the members of the board, members of the community but the practitioners

Because I can tell you this, we need look no further than the staff that you currently have to bring to you solutions for how to address this issue.

I've been doing this long enough to know what I believe will work and why it doesn't work right now.

And so in order for me to get you all to understand there has to be that opportunity for either myself or Mr. Walker to be able to

bring that to your attention.

I do address that.

And I turn the frown upside down.

It's not all negatives in there.

We talk about, again, looking forward to how it is we can make this better.

But there are some very specific recommendations to things that we saw as a problem.

But actually having that open dialogue directly with the city council, I think, is a badly needed sort of response to what these issues have been.

And again, recruiting the right people.

Because here's a problem.

The community, the board, and I can say this, again, having done it for over two years now,

They don't know what they're asking for.

They don't know what to ask for.

The things that they want are not necessarily doable under the current structure, but they are still doable under a different structure that makes more sense.

And so that's what I was hoping to relate to all of you through this annual report.

Right, and I appreciate that, and I would humbly request of the city manager, I'm not saying when it needs to happen, but I do think we need a work session with city council.

PCOB staff and PCOB board members to figure out on the city council side how are we actually going to operationalize and implement various recommendations that you all have put forward.

Because I think until we do that, I think the conversations are just so in depth that I just don't feel like city council is going to get there in terms of making changes at our level until we're able to have an extended conversation, that kind of work session environment.

But at least just that's been my interpretation of where things are at, and I do think, you

And I appreciate you putting this forward.

Absolutely.

Again, there are things that I can clarify.

I know that there has been some conversation where a lot of folks are under the impression that some of the

Some of the challenges that we're bringing forward are hypothetical in scope, but I assure you that they are not.

One of the things, or one of the, I guess, actions that drive my recommendations are I looked at every aspect of the ordinance.

So for example, as it pertains to subpoenas, I'm not saying that we can or cannot do subpoenas basically because it's my opinion.

I went to the chief justice of the city of Charlottesville and had a conversation with him, provided him with a copy of the ordinance and specific questions in advance of that meeting to say, hey,

This is what the ordinance says we can do.

These are the questions that we have.

How do you feel about it?

And we walked away with more questions than we had answered.

And that's problematic all by itself, because what we think we can do may not necessarily be what we can do.

And I think a lot of what transpired was that, which you're right, there was a sort of pressure put on the city council to get this thing done to get it done quickly.

And a lot of the actions that are stated in both the ordinance and the operating procedures that say that there are certain things that we can do with the expectation that the other parties will cooperate, but that's not necessarily the case.

So there are things that, for example, it says that the PCOB can make recommendations to the chief of police for discipline.

We now know that that's not the case because the chief will not accept recommendations for discipline unless there's an internal affairs investigation.

But there's a very good reason for that.

and you know to coin something the Chief of Police says all the time and I use this quote all the time, process matters.

So it's important for us to do that but for us to incorporate all of the parties that are going to be involved in this entire process to make sure everybody's on the same page with the same understanding of what it is our responsibilities are.

Yeah and again I would just underline I think my big takeaway is just the need for that kind of meeting for council to be able to figure out and really get into the weeds and finally come to you know collective decision on what we're going to do and two that it's really vital that we do that because

I think the existence, being able to figure this out and make it work is going to be very important to have a permanent institution that I think the mere existence of it will change behavior.

And I think we can't, I'm certainly not ready at all to give up on it because I think it plays a vital role in the long term.

Thank you for saying that.

I think there are a lot of people in the community who would agree with you and appreciate that you said that.

Thank you all very much.

So I want to take a couple minutes to add a little bit of context to the four o'clock session for members of the public who were not able to tune in to the transit scenarios conversation presented by the transit director and our consultant with Nelson Nygaard.

I wanted to, because we ran out of time, just make sure that I frame for council really what our next steps are.

The conversation or the presentation this afternoon was really meant to spark conversation for all of you to begin thinking about how to balance the big items that are on your list.

I think you got a good taste of what transit costs in the presentation that was made this evening.

We are going to take our next step to prepare a presentation for going another layer deeper for the Finance Committee to hear further analysis on this particular subject of transit investment.

the goal would be for you to have that information and with two of you being on the council you'll be able to dive in a little bit deeper and then we'll help bring the other three members of council up to speed the plan is for that feedback to frame a little bit more of where we're headed what really the picture looks like but to also inform the conversation that will occur at your August 15th and 16th council retreat that retreat is framed around three priority areas as you all have identified them for staff of

There are some big tickets related to all three of those categories which is why I am

more or less putting them before you saying are these your three big items for the FY 27 budget so that we can begin doing the work to prioritize making certain investments to meet your expectations.

The goal will be in that conversation to then be able to designate those as priority outcome areas that you would like to see reflected in the proposed budget that I will bring you in March of next year.

and I will always do my job of requiring that you hear me at least hear that I said there's a balancing act to all of it.

There's a lot of obligation in decisions that you all are making that we need to make sure that we never lose sight of and when you think about the presentation this evening about transit

We didn't just talk about drivers, although that has consumed much of the conversation.

We did hear that there are additional supports that are needed in the ways of other staff to support the fact that more drivers and buses are on the street.

We have a need for shelter amenities across our network to protect those individuals as they're waiting for a bus.

We have climate action that you all have made a decision that we will invest in and invest heavily in.

That now becomes a bit more challenging when you think about the loss of federal support and how we're going to deliver on that big, bold, innovative decision.

So there's some questions there.

We have paratransit enhancements that are needed.

The entire time that I have been here, I've heard complaints about John while I've heard praise and support for John.

and I think there's additional work that we may need to do with them to identify what else we can do to improve that service and that's gonna come at a cost because those funds pass through us.

There was, as the transit director pointed out, continuation of fare free, that's a cost.

We have to eat that cost if that is our priority.

There are capital projects expansions that are required for a lot of the things that we're talking about in the climate space specifically that have to be paid for and also reminded that today

City pays for that only, not anyone else.

We have to make sure that we continue the conversation with our copayer, and that is Albemarle County, for any changes that we plan to make.

We're not a one go, one decision made by this body alone.

We have to take the county along with us.

We have engaged them in conversations recently to make sure that they understand where things are going, because I would appreciate them not being surprised the same as I do not enjoy a surprise.

and then we are having to also wrestle with capturing the regional opportunity just beyond our current network because where opportunity lies is an opportunity to increase ridership and bring more funds to us.

All of that is what we have to do in reconciling what is really going on with the priority areas that we have and again we're spending a lot in housing, we're talking about spending more in transportation and we have a school's request that is much bigger than it's ever been and will continue to grow.

So with all of that, we can not lose sight of the fact that state and federal funding will be interrupted.

It's happening already.

The state has to then learn what the impacts are going to be and then what they're going to pass on to us in the way of additional costs.

So I think it's important for us to make sure that we don't lose sight.

Tonight was a beginning conversation of where we're headed with transit.

But then we're going to add the additional factors to that as a part of your retreat.

And that day and a half will be fully packed.

We just settled on what that agenda is going to look like.

We did that last week and I promise you, you will work for a day and a half to get through the volume of things that we have for you.

And one of the things that's important about doing all of this ahead of time is that we're able to incorporate it into our budget and like you said bring our county partner involved in.

Along the way.

yeah we gave you the affordable housing update the annual affordable housing update in April you got the transit update this evening and you're going to have a joint session with the school board on the fourth you'll hear about school facilities specifically because that's the big ticket item that I want you to be aware of so all three of those things we are leading you to the retreat where we're going to go deeper we're going to ask you to think long and hard and we're going to ask you to make decisions

It'll be touched on, but we're not focusing there.

We're focusing globally on what it is that we put as our outlet to housing, and then you can get to talk about shifts.

All right.

Anything else?

OK.

Oh, quick question first, just for the public's awareness.

Yeah, so the retreat will be held at the wool factory August 15th and 16th.

It's all day on the 15th, half a day on the 16th.

We will be recording that event and then posting it.

There will be a limited number of chairs available if the public would like to attend because it is considered a public meeting as you'll be convened with a quorum.

Alright, thank you very much.

The first one we have here is a public hearing and resolution authorizing the issuance and sale of general obligation public improvement bonds of the city of Charlottesville, Virginia in an aggregate principal amount not to exceed $38 million.

This is a public hearing and a resolution.

Ms.

Yes, sir.

Good evening, Council.

Chrissy Hamel, City Budget Director.

As was mentioned, this is a resolution and a public hearing for our upcoming bond sale.

We are requesting that you give the city manager authorization.

to sell up to $38 million in new bonds.

In addition, as we work with our financial advisors, we always look for refunding opportunities.

We're asking for up to $25 million for that.

Quite frankly, that's not looking as positive now as it was at one point, but we still are requesting the authorization so that when we go to market, if the

opportunity presents itself we'll be able to act appropriately.

All of the bonds that we're asking you to sell have been part of the CIP plan over multiple years.

As you know from prior discussions we basically sell on a cash needed basis so that means that the project

has either started and we'll be reimbursing ourselves for expenses that have already been incurred or we anticipate that all the expenses related to this bond will so that the bond proceeds will be spent within 24 months of sale.

That's a requirement through the IRS to prevent us from having to pay interest or what's known as arbitrage.

So in this memo we've noted sort of the areas where we will be funding

The projects are using the bonds to fund projects.

Again, these are not limited to this.

So in other words, if we have identified a project and there's a delay or there's something that happens, we're able to quickly switch and move the proceeds to another bond that you have previously approved as part of the CIP.

And so with that we also each bond has to be rated as you know, we're triple-a bond rated We met with S&P today.

We'll be meeting with Moody's next week And we don't anticipate any troubles with our triple-a bond rating.

Okay, any clarifying questions?

Lloyd.

Okay.

All right.

I will now open the public hearing.

Is there anyone who would like to speak on this item?

Okay.

With no speakers, the public hearing is now closed.

Just very briefly, I know this is procedural, but just for the community to highlight that this represents over $12 million of investments in our city schools, as well as over $6 million in investments in transportation projects.

So I know this is procedural, but it's representing very significant investments we've made in schools, parks and rec, public transportation.

Thank you.

I agree.

Is there a motion to adopt this resolution?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay, the motion passes four to zero.

Thank you very much, Ms.

Sorry.

Item number six, resolution appropriating funds for federal transit operations and capital grants, $6,666,809.

This is one of two readings.

Good afternoon again.

Garland Williams, Director of Charlottesville Area Transit.

What I have for you is a resolution.

This is one of two readings.

Public hearing will happen on the second reading on August the 4th.

What you have before you is the acceptance and appropriation of capital funds in the amount of $3,145,636

and Federal Operating Assistance, an amount of $2,640,880, which combined represent $6,666,809.

The capital funding will be used to purchase vehicles, six diesel buses.

And the operating funds will be a split 75% to CAT and 25% to John for operating assistance.

Great.

The buses, the last one just pulled on our last Thursday.

We are only waiting on a head sign for that one.

There was an issue with it, so they're going to ship us a new one.

A new sign, not a new bus.

A new head sign, new head sign.

Great.

Okay, so the idea would be for us to move this to the action agenda for next meeting.

Does anyone have any concerns for that?

Okay, so we'll move this to the action agenda for the next meeting where we'll have a public hearing and then the vote.

All right, next item on the agenda, resolution initiating amendment and referring adoption of the 2024 development code, zoning, and subdivision ordinance to the Planning Commission for review and recommendation.

Thank you, City Council.

Matt Alfley, Development Planning Manager with NDS.

With me tonight is Kelly Brown, the Director of NDS II.

On June 30, 2025, the Charlottesville Circuit Court granted a default judgment in the White v. Charlottesville case involving the city's current development code due to a procedural error.

While the City awaits the written order from the judge in the case and pursues legal recourse, staff recommends initiating re-adoption of the development code.

By adopting this resolution before you tonight, that process can begin by referring the matter to the City's Planning Commission for recommendation and review.

Once the initiation resolution is adopted, no immediate action is required from either the Planning Commission or City Council

but initiation ensures city staff and elected officials can respond swiftly to readopt the development code if the need arises.

Per state regulation, the Planning Commission will have 100 days to review the development code and hold a public hearing.

No.

Well, I guess one question.

So we had been in a process of doing kind of the annual review of looking at what's working, what's not working, making tweaks.

I think that's obviously a very important thing that needs to happen.

We need to be taking in new information, seeing what's mashing our goals, what isn't, and be willing to adjust.

I would say the public facing process is on hold.

Staff is still doing that work so that when we can pick back up.

The last, the item we were kind of interrupted on was having a listening session with the building community, with Planning Commission.

Right.

Correct.

We're able to do some work on our end, still gathering that information, looking at what's working, what's not, making our internal recommendations on some amendments to the code.

So yeah, we're still continuing to do that work.

Okay, any other clarifying questions?

Second.

Okay.

Any further discussion?

All right.

Please cast your vote.

We'll do that by verbal vote.

Yes.

Yes.

All right.

The motion passes four to zero.

All right, the next and final item on the action agenda tonight is a resolution amending the FY2026 budget ordinance to provide the city manager authority to reallocate funds appropriated for the Office of Community Solutions.

Effective July 1st made the decision to close the Office of Community Solutions and redistribute the team members across multiple offices and departments in an effort to right size, right fit, and reorganize

and a desire for the most effective set of operations.

Multiple staff members in that office have now all been reassigned and have joined their team, I should say all of them have joined their new teams.

We have made a change to the budget office renaming it the Office of Budget and Grants Management because we provided additional staff for that particular focus to align with the work that Ms.

Hammel was already doing and it actually now gives her

a more robust team so she's not up there talking to herself she has other people to talk to and then in addition to that we have created a housing division within the neighborhood development services team specifically looking at our housing work to better analyze and connect to the ongoing big things that we are doing in bold ways our economic development office has an additional staff member to focus on downtown mall specifically

and the City Manager's Office is taking on a position to focus on planning performance management and projects.

With all of that, the goal was to do what we could to ensure that we are operating more optimally so the changes were necessary in order to pull that forward.

But we had already adopted a budget.

You had already adopted a budget.

that allocated a little over a million dollars in resources to that particular office.

We have since engaged in the work to split that money up according to these various individual staff members who made up that team.

And the goal is to now transfer those funds with them to their new team so that the work that they were going to do as this one unit are now going to get spread out over

Five or six different units.

So because the budget was adopted and the budget is now live as effective July 1st, then we're asking you to approve the reallocation of those funds.

So it's not going to cost us anything more.

Got it.

One, the role of a downtown mall strategy manager is obviously, you know,

fundamentally different than a redevelopment manager and the role they played.

I'll say that the redevelopment manager role was never really lived out as it was created.

Part of what we hope to do is we'll focus some attention on the downtown mall specifically and the redevelopment space.

But I know that we have probably four or five different individuals today that are touching on the various components.

to what a redevelopment manager would have done if we had actually fully operationalized it.

If we find ourselves in need of that position specifically to do more, I'll look at bringing it back.

But at the moment, I would say that we actually never fully deployed that role the way it may have been originally envisioned, because we actually occupied most of the time of the person in the housing space alone.

So there's still a little more work to be done, I would say, in that space.

Right.

Yeah.

See the wheels of motion over there, anything else?

We can talk more.

Is this a single vote?

Yeah, it's a single vote.

OK.

So moved.

Please cast your vote verbally.

Motion passes four to zero.

All right.

The next two items are written reports.

Counselors, do you have any questions or need follow-up?

I don't know if it was even in the report or relevant, but just a very brief, is there any, I thought the recent warning system that was highlighted recently was just a positive thing to just make the community aware of.

At the Sugar Hollow Dam?

Correct.

My intention was to include it in the next city management report so that therefore it would be available for more.

But ideally what we have talked about in the Rivanna meetings was trying to make sure that we look at the emergency management

Alignments, better improvements in being able to notify the community when something happens.

There's a bladder that runs across the top of the Sugar Hollow Dam that was compromised at one point.

It allowed more water to cross over.

It alarmed people who lived nearby because they hadn't been notified that there was an issue.

This will actually now make it possible that if something like that were to happen again, while it wasn't a catastrophic failure, it was enough of a failure that an alert would actually come and allay any fears.

We have also talked with Rivanna about making sure that they are plugged in with the city and the county as well because their infrastructure is in our footprints and they support things that could happen to our various residents and constituents.

That was it.

Thank you.

Anything with respect to the Sister Cities Commission annual report?

It's not over.

I did indeed.

I should say, I think there's a concert or a performance of some sort tomorrow by the gospel choir from Besançon.

OK, fantastic.

Thank you.

We are now at the final speaking opportunity for members of the public.

Individuals may raise your hand to speak and be recognized.

Each speaker will be given up to three minutes.

Is there anyone who would like to speak?

OK.

Good evening, Council again.

Roy Stolzenberg, resident of Water Street.

I just wanted to expand a little bit of my comments earlier.

I feel like I may have been a little harsh.

The work that the transit team and the consultants have done so far is very valuable in planning.

That said, I believe what you guys need to ask for is a menu of different options for FY 27 service, including high frequency routes, even if a baseline of 30 minutes on every

route given the budget constraints available is not achievable.

I think there's certainly a Title VI justification for pursuing that route and any presentation where you can only see that as a baseline and high frequency options in addition to that baseline don't give you an accurate picture of what the options available to you are.

Thank you.

Seconded.