City Council Meeting   11/16/2020

Yes.

The city council certified by recorded vote to the best of each council members knowledge only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion convene the closed session were heard, discussed or considered in the closed session.

Ms.

Councillor Hill?

All right.

Thank you.

So I call this meeting to order.

Ms.

Thomas, would you do a roll call, please?

Vice Mayor Magill?

Here.

Here.

Did you respond?

I didn't hear you.

Sorry, here.

All right.

Thank you.

And we'll have a moment of silence before we get started.

All right, thank you.

I move to approve the agenda.

Roll call, please, Ms.

Thomas.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

Vice Mayor Magill?

Yes.

Councilor Hill?

Okay.

Oh, and that carries five, five, zero.

Sorry about that.

Mayor Walker, I would like to remind the public to be aware of the governor's new ordinances that came in.

and that people make sure that they check up on that with limiting space groups of people to 25 or less, masking requirements.

All right.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Okay.

Ms.

Appropriation.

Virginia Department of Education Special Nutrition Program Child and Adult Care Food Program.

$30,000, second reading.

Appropriation, Virginia Outdoors Foundation Grant, Dragon Mountain Land Acquisition, $65,000, second reading.

Appropriation, Runaway Emergency Shelter Program Grant, $209,444, second reading.

Appropriation, Local Emergency Management Performance Grant, $7,500, second reading.

Ordinance, Amendment to the Text of Chapter 34, Zoning Ordinance of the City of Charlottesville, 1990, as amended, to provide updates to family day home uses.

All right, thank you.

If you're joining us on the Zoom webinar and you'd like to give council feedback,

On one of those items on the consent agenda, click the raise hand icon, or if you're on via telephone, press star nine.

Thank you.

Is there a motion?

No?

OK, and my only comment is for number five, the ordinance.

I 100% agree with it outside of the fact that it's being changed due to COVID.

I was told yesterday during my Facebook Live that there was a comment made about moral leadership.

but I think it's just very important for us to understand that if these daycare providers come to us in the future and need some assistance, wrap around holistic services because they don't have insurance or because they lose income because they get sick,

none of which is covered by us increasing this and every time we deem someone as essential, just understanding that they are being put at risk.

All right.

Ms.

Yes.

Thank you.

Next up, we have the city manager's response to community matters from the November 2nd meeting.

Mayor Walker and Councillors, a few matters to go over tonight.

At the last meeting, there was a question about Chief Brackney's meeting with Ms.

Rose.

She had a meeting with Ms.

Rose and I believe Mayor Walker on October 29th and she had an additional meeting with Ms.

Rose on November the 2nd.

There was also a question about the council restarting in-person meetings.

Both the Charlottesville and Albemarle school boards are not performing in-person meetings now and so far they don't have anything

But I think as people understand right now with case counts nationwide rising,

Certainly that's at the council's discretion.

I want to point that out when you want to consider meeting in person again, but just wanted to give you that bit of info.

A couple other items.

Vice Mayor Magill at the beginning of the meeting mentioned the COVID executive order from the governor.

It is my hope that either on Friday or at your December 7th meeting, we can have your

previously adopted COVID ordinance before you to come into compliance with the governor's executive order.

The main difference being that when you all took action back on July 27th of this year, you had a 50 person limit to gatherings and that was more restrictive than the state.

but the governor on Friday evening has now lowered that to 25.

And so we are going to need to change the ordinance to put it in compliance with the executive order, but it is important to note that the executive order takes precedence over our local ordinance.

So for any of the public listening, the governor's executive order is now what applies to in-person gatherings.

and the governor set that limit at 25, which is more restrictive than the local ordinance.

So again, the governor's order controls in this matter.

The other thing I wanted to let folks know is that tomorrow at 10 a.m.

you can register via Zoom.

There's going to be a site plan conference and that is concerning a site plan at 200 Carlton Avenue.

And I'll just add the, I think another part of the citizens comments regarding the 2020 meeting was about staff safety.

And if staff are in the buildings working that we can have in-person meetings.

And I just want to say that I think that it's, and hopefully it's being done.

but it's gonna be very critical, especially as numbers were asked for us to make sure that we are rotating staff out.

And this is a conversation that I had a lot with the previous city manager about not having the entire departments on hand.

There was a good example of this recently at one of the,

I think the pediatric ICU clinic at UVA where there was 170 people potentially exposed to COVID and because they all work in that unit they all have to continue working or that was the decision made and just being more hopeful than actually knowing the outcome of that so hopefully that we are taking heed to you know situations like that occurring and making sure that we don't put our staff in that

you know those predicaments and understanding from a citizen perspective that that may mean that certain services and especially you know when you know people cannot work you know do the teleworking that that means that there may be a slower response to service and just that you know we get that message out to the community and

hopefully they'll understand, but if not, we'll, we should just make the, you know, the employee safety, the number one priority.

And, you know, we had just had a conversation, bars were included in the Governor's, you know, the limitation, and we had just had that conversation.

And of course, I'll say the same thing I said about 50, that about 25, that you all have,

So I'm sure that people can contract COVID with 25 people in the room.

And I just hope that we are paying attention that sometimes we may have to push at the state level a little bit harder and our regional partners and ourselves on more restrictive measures

when it comes to this virus because it's taken them quite a long time to get around to it.

And I know there was this amazing article about, again, Charlottesville rates and how well that they were doing, but I just hope we know what kind of signal that sends sometimes to the community.

We also know that the testing capacity

may not tell the full story.

And we always have to be aware of that, not just on whether people have received the test the first time, but some people may think that because they received a test, that that means that they may not be positive.

And there are the false positives and there's also, you can have a test on Wednesday, have an exposure Wednesday night and need another test.

And I don't think that we made that clear.

And so those were my only two points.

So thank you, Mr. Blair.

Next up, we're at the community matters.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

We did have six people sign up in advance to address council during community matters.

I only see three of them

on the webinar at the moment.

So I will call out their names, but if they're not present, we'll come back to them and see if they join us later.

Council will hear from up to 16 people for three minutes each.

And if you would tell us your place of residence when you introduce yourself to council.

The first person who signed up to speak in advance was John Hall.

And again, I do not see John Hall in the webinar at the moment, so we will come back to him.

Next person who signed up in advance is Mary Cherie Lewis.

I do not see her on the webinar.

Next person who signed up in advance is Deborah Lawrence.

Deborah, you're on the city council.

We can, go ahead.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Deborah Lawrence.

I live at 525 Grove Avenue here in Charlottesville.

and I'm an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia.

I have been teaching an introductory class on climate change to 300 students a year for the past seven years.

Each time I teach it, I learn more about the devastating impacts of climate change that we're already facing.

I learn how it disproportionately impacts the poor and people of color and how those impacts will grow and get worse the longer we wait.

But every time I teach it, I also get more hopeful about stopping climate change.

We have the tools we need from new energy technologies to policies and ideas that can be implemented by a city like Charlottesville.

Please make climate change central to all you do on council.

Every budget decision, every major plan.

Climate affects everything.

The cost of our food,

of heating and cooling our homes, of getting to work and staying healthy.

Make a bold climate action plan and put climate into the strategic plan.

Thank you for working with Albemarle County and the University of Virginia to set bold targets.

Keep working with them to lower our emissions, especially from transportation.

I urge you to join other municipalities in the Commonwealth to advance climate policies that you need at the state level in order to be effective at the local level.

Engage us, your citizens, to advocate for our city.

Tell us what you need us to say to our legislators.

We can't wait for federal action.

Please take action in Charlottesville, here and now, so we can have a better future.

That future depends on addressing climate change now.

Mayor Walker, the next person who signed up in advance is Myra Anderson, and I've received information that she will not be able to attend tonight.

I will keep an eye on the webinar to see if she joins us.

The next two people will be Peter Krebs,

followed by Susan Cruz.

And if you'd like to get in line to speak, just click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar or press star nine if you're on via telephone.

So next up will be Peter Krebs.

Peter, you're on with council.

I'm Peter Krebs from the Piedmont Environmental Council.

I live on Tufton Avenue in the city.

We are going to hear tonight about the streets of Charlottesville and how they can be safer.

I will be especially interested in the report about 5th Street and why it is so unacceptably deadly.

Make no mistake, it is unacceptable.

Imagine if a water pipe or some other piece of infrastructure took half a dozen lives every year.

I don't think you would allow that to continue, nor should we.

I'm not singling out Charlottesville.

we see a very similar pattern all across the country.

Certain streets often dating from that era of urban renewal are designed for high speeds and bisect low wealth communities.

Does this sound familiar?

If we want to save lives and have any hope of stitching those communities back together, we need to slow the vehicles down.

Lowering the speed limit may help, but only if people honor that

And anyway, I'm not sure we want to increase interaction with law enforcement.

If we do, it should only be for purposes of education.

Better to modify behaviors by changing the road design back to something more human scale.

There are long-term changes that are proven to reduce fatalities and quicker interventions that can help while we wait.

All of them will require trade-offs, but I would place the highest priority on human life.

which is irreplaceable.

As a matter of policy, let's make this our goal.

Zero fatalities or serious injuries on city streets.

It is attainable.

Let's commit to fund proper infrastructure at a level that reflects the seriousness of the enterprise.

And it's one that only the government can execute.

Let's encourage and empower staff to try new things.

Coincidentally, PEC is holding a free virtual event with Safe Streets author and advocate Angie Schmidt on Monday, November 30th at 5 p.m.

She will talk about national trends, but they will feel very familiar to our local situation.

Details can be found at pecva.org.

I look forward to seeing many of you there

and also to tonight's presentation.

Mr. Wheeler, I'm on my phone tonight, so I can't see the timer and I thought I pressed it, but I didn't.

You know, I've already reset it.

Okay.

Okay.

Yep.

I will set the timer moving forward.

Thank you.

Yep.

Next up will be Susan Cruz.

Again, I'll check back on some of the other people who signed up in advance.

If they don't show up after Susan will be Tanisha Hudson followed by Andy Orban.

Susan, you're on the City Council.

You are.

Great.

Good evening, Mayor Walker, Vice Mayor Magill, and Charlottesville City Council.

My name is Susan Cruz, and I am the Executive Director of the Community Climate Collaborative, or C3.

I wanted to be in my remarks tonight by sharing with you the network that C3 has been building for the past two years.

In this time, we have worked with more than 400 households, more than 100 businesses and dozens of nonprofit organizations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

When the city was setting its greenhouse gas reduction goal, we brought you letters signed by 1,000 residents, 43 businesses and nine social justice organizations all asking for leadership and an equity focus on climate planning.

This is a network of informed and committed community members ready to do their part to help Charlottesville lead on climate.

Now, nearly 17 months after setting its climate goal, the city is engaging in not only one, but three processes that will impact its ability to reach these goals.

Comprehensive planning, strategic planning, and climate action planning, which I hope will begin soon.

Comprehensive planning and strategic plans will take us just five years away from our climate goal.

It's certainly challenging, I will tell you, for residents to engage meaningfully in all three of these processes simultaneously.

So we are counting on you to ensure that climate is emphasized in these plans.

C3 has reviewed the current draft of the Comprehensive Plan.

Affordable housing, food justice, and transportation equity are all important factors in climate leadership.

And we applaud the sections of the Comprehensive Plan, these sections of the Comprehensive Plan.

That being said, the current Comprehensive Plan draft falls short on climate leadership.

To begin with, climate action needs to be included in the description of the guiding principles.

While climate leadership is mentioned in the title, the current draft seems to avoid the mention of climate change, rather talking about environmental footprints and clean air and water as if they are taboo.

We need to be willing to name the challenge we are facing so we can meet them head on with eyes wide open.

When the city's greenhouse gas reduction goals are mentioned in reference to our environmental footprint, the draft currently states that Charlottesville will make steady progress toward these goals.

Steady progress is not what climate leadership looks like.

We need to make ambitious progress to show other localities that progress is possible.

C3 is submitting these and other comments to the comprehensive planning team.

These plans will last for five years.

Please, let's not let the more than 1,000 residents down who are asking you to lead.

It's time for Charlottesville to get serious about climate.

Mayor Walker, next up is Tanisha Hudson.

Tanisha, you're on the city council.

I just wanted to speak on a few things.

First and foremost, I would like to correct something that was discussed on the mayor's live last night about Fifth Street.

There were conversations happening about Fifth Street well before

Some of these most recent accidents even happened.

And some of the suggestions were either a red light at Bailey Road or a roundabout.

So the conversations were happening long before.

She doesn't like to give any credit to Dr. Richardson and his relationship that he had with people in the community.

But I know several people who wrecked on Fifth Street that met with him, that talked about things that needed to be done on Fifth Street.

and he gave some suggestions.

So whether council worked with him on that or not, I don't know.

I also wanted to point out that she said something about accountability and being consistent.

You also said Mayor that sometimes changes like multiple pieces of puzzles, trying to make a picture with different pieces of puzzles.

Well, let me go ahead and just give you my version of your little analogy you tried to use.

You are the only piece of the puzzle, you and a couple other people on council, that don't want to work with people.

When it don't go your way, y'all have a way in making people do what y'all want them to do.

I just got a foyer today, $424, and you want to have it here going back and forth, discussing Dr. Richardson.

Now if NBC 29 and the Daily Progress and Seaville Weekly or Charlottesville Tomorrow wrote stories correctly here in Charlottesville, then they would be able to point out the manipulative BS that you guys are doing.

And then the other three leaders are just so weak that they don't say anything.

I mean, look at John Glenn.

He look like he ain't even getting no sleep.

Y'all probably running circles around him.

He's a nice man.

He's not going to say no.

He going to do whatever it is, just because.

That's just him.

That's his personality.

But y'all are like, I mean, Trumpism is right here in Charlottesville, and the audacity of a Black woman to be doing it.

And then you act like you so conscious, you so conscious,

But you ran for office in a system that has held us in bondage forever.

But you're so conscious.

You're the only one that's amazing at your job.

And nobody else is amazing at what they do.

Nobody else.

But y'all had these secret messages.

You act like this stuff can't be foiled.

Y'all sending emojis to each other.

Y'all asking what should be in this work plan for the city manager.

Like, y'all, won't y'all take accountability that y'all just didn't fit with that mad puzzle piece?

Won't y'all take accountability for that?

Just admit it, but you won't.

Thank you, Ms.

Hudson.

I will add that it's, again, I have been doing foyas for years before I arrived at the city in this capacity, a lot of years.

And so I'm very aware that whatever I put in writing can be foyed.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

Next up is Andy Orban.

I'm Andy Orban.

Can you hear me?

Yep.

Thanks.

Good evening, Mayor Walker, Councilors, Mr. Blair.

I'm very happy to see that the traffic safety is on the agenda.

And I'd like to comment specifically regarding the Fifth Street extended corridor.

So this deadly stretch of road is past due for study and solutions.

And while I agree that the speed limit should be lowered and the intersections improved, there is a significant aspect of the road design that must also be addressed.

The current four lanes should be reduced to two.

A single lane each way from Cherry to Harris would make the road much safer for all users.

Currently, the road is far too dangerous to use

for people on bikes and those walking along the road.

When cars speeding in excess of 40, 50 miles an hour, zooming along with the sidewalk right there, just the slightest distraction can take out a life along the road as well, not to mention the high speeds that have led to car crashes.

So what I would like to see along the road is to have one lane each way converted

into a protected bike lane.

This would serve to buffer and protect the movement of people outside of cars.

And it would make this drag strip like section of road safe for people in cars as well.

I know there are concerns about congestion if we reduce lanes, but this change can be done as a temporary study to see the effects.

And we may find that the reduction in speeds and increased safety for biking and walking would be a greater benefit for everyone using the Fifth Street Extended

Road.

Please consider this design option as you continue to study the safety improvements for this road.

Mayor Walker, next up is Kristin Lucas.

Kristin, you're on with City Council.

I can hear you.

We can.

So my name is Kristin Lucas.

I live at 1053 5th Street Southwest.

That's sandwiched between Bailey and Cleveland.

And I'm here talking about the traffic study as well.

I walk on 5th Street almost every day.

I bike to work sometimes on 5th Street.

And I walked out my door when there was a crash and someone had passed away on 5th Street.

And I strongly support changes to 5th Street to make it not only

Safer for drivers but also for pedestrians and bikers and those that are living on this road and are concerned that you might be rear-ended or maybe hit by a car while you are just going about your daily life on this stretch of street.

So please consider better bike lanes, more lighting, roundabouts, traffic lights, better street design, not just lowering the speed limit to 40 miles per hour.

but all of those things to make the streets safer, not only for cars, but also for the people living and working and walking in this area.

Thank you.

Our seventh speaker will be Rory Stolzenberg who will be followed by Joan Alberston and then Robin Hoffman.

Rory, you're on the city council.

Thanks, Brian, and good evening, Council and Mayor Walker.

So thank you last week for the discussion on Tuesday, a thoughtful discussion about the parking garage.

I'll be reaching out to you with more on that soon.

That's not what I'm here to talk to you about, which I'm sure you're relieved by.

But I would recommend, if you don't want to hear from me, I know John Sales has reached out to some of you, and I urge you to reach back out to him and

and talk to him.

But instead, what I'd like to talk about tonight is one of your reports from today.

And in particular, for the third budget season in a row, I'd like to talk about the parking fund.

You heard today that the parking funds transfers to the general fund will be reduced by half a million dollars because of reduced revenue.

And that's part of a general strategy to quote, wean the general fund off of the parking revenues, in effect to make

The parking fund, what they call self-sufficient, but really means that all of the money it earns in profit just stay within the fund.

But the problem is that staff has never articulated what the parking fund is for.

In its original envisioning, it was thought that maybe it would contribute to a transportation demand management plan that could help fund multimodal improvements and sidewalks, or even

I know this sounds ridiculous, but parking.

But we know that the parking fund is not going to fund the parking in the garage that we're building and spending a lot of money on and debating.

So what does it go to?

and in lieu of an answer to that, I would ask you to consider what to do with that two and a half million dollars plus that's sitting in that account that has no apparent purpose.

Mayor Walker, next up is Joan Alberston, who will be followed by Robin Hoffman,

and then Joanne Robertson.

Joan, you're on the city council.

Yes, I can.

We can, go ahead.

My name is Joan Alberston.

I live in Willoughby, 921 Royer Drive.

I own property in the city as well in Fry Springs.

And I have read the traffic engineer's report for Fifth Street

And I would like to thank them for their recommendations to make 5th Street safer.

In particular, I'd like to thank them for recommending a flashing yellow arrow in place of a green light.

They don't specify at Harris and 5th Street which travelways would be affected by that flashing light.

And I'm hoping that they would be installed for at least the eastbound Harris Road travelway.

I also would like to ask, they don't mention in the report whether the site triangles at Fifth Street and Harris were reviewed, and if so, if they were found adequate.

In my experience leaving Willoughby, and as a landscape architect who has some experience with site triangles, I'm not sure that they are adequate for the speed of that road.

I know that there were garden plots last week in Willoughby that were mowed down by the Virginia Department of Transportation and I'm assuming that was for site triangles and so I just wanted to check to make sure that that was part of the solution as well.

I think that the reduction in speed limit approaching the 5th Street-Harris intersection should help drivers to see

oncoming vehicles barreling through 5th Street and can defensively maneuver.

And that's it.

Thank you.

Mayor Walker, our ninth speaker will be Joanne Robertson.

Joanne, you're on with the council.

Hi, thank you for allowing me this time.

I just wanted to give some major, major kudos out to Melissa Morton and the amazing job that she did over the voter registration and all the amazing planning that she did.

I know there were times where the line was wrapping all the way out to Market Street, down Market Street.

So good job there.

I also wanted to say about Dr. Richardson.

Dr. Richardson really helped people in the community.

In fact, he was one of the only

city employees that went out to visit elderly and disabled people to see how they were doing.

And one of the things that he said when he first came here was he was eager to work with the community.

And as a community activist, that's one thing that he did.

So whoever comes in after John Blair as parliament,

A city manager has some big shoes to fill.

Another thing that I wanted to mention on talking about police in Charlottesville, and I keep hearing defund the police or

You know, people do not necessarily mean defund the police.

We want to see police do different things.

For example, elderly and disabled people in Charlottesville should know who is the officer that maybe they can reach out to that's on that beat.

I don't know if that's what...

meaning in that community or in that area.

So those are three things that I wanted to point out.

And I think Charlottesville addresses the issue that you have police officers that are totally

Unconnected from their community.

You know, people are not going to feel safe.

They're not going to feel like someone really cares unless you get that community connection.

So I think that that's one thing that we're missing.

And that's all.

Thank you.

Mayor Walker, our 10th speaker will be Robin Hoffman.

If you'd like to get in line after Robin, just click the raise hand icon.

The council has room for another six speakers.

Robin, you're on the city council.

Yes, hi everybody.

Hope everybody's doing well.

I'm calling because, I mean, I'm calling.

I'm talking because there was a news event today on Channel 29 about air quality indoors, and they are doing some studies.

And in fact, the air purifiers are working.

but it's not pulling out the air at this point as fast or as, depending on how many people are there who have COVID and that sort of thing.

So there's, I think they're still looking at that.

And then also Data Palooza at UVA attended that Zoom.

They were talking also about the different types of technology and also

the occurrence of poverty and things that are going on.

I was wondering if you guys could, and by the way I want to say also I appreciate because I'm on all these Zoom meetings and conferences around the world as well, that your leadership is really cool.

I'm glad, I personally am very glad that you represent Charlottesville.

and hopefully we get some more intel about how people can get monies to keep going for the next year until hopefully the immunizations work.

But we need to have more leadership, I think, talking to the governor about

people being unemployed and really hungry and also lonely.

So, and that's all I have to say.

Mayor Walker, I've checked again for the three people who signed up in advance.

All right, so we'll just continue since it's not time yet.

So the first action item is an allocation for the employee assistance proposal.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of council.

Actually, I'm going to defer to Ms.

Good evening, everyone.

This item is in direct response to concerns expressed by city council at the last meeting and at a special meeting, I believe, in between.

about the status of the employees that were subject to a reduction in force as a result of the COVID pandemic.

I believe there are 228 individuals who were laid off for lack of work during this reduction in force.

And so this is a request to allocate $100,000 and what remains in the COVID contingency fund.

to provide support to the neediest of the 228 employees.

We propose that Human Resources upon your approval will send a notice to those affected employees letting them know that this money is available to them.

We designate one individual in the Department of Human Services to receive their calls to try to prevent or try to preserve confidentiality and

that those employees who have area median incomes of 50% will receive up to $750 and those with the area median incomes of less than 30% would receive up to $1,000.

And if there are additional funds left over between now and December 30th, we might be able to provide a second round, but I think that's about the right amount of money for the number of folks who are affected.

When you have been kind of fielding questions, I'm sorry, requests from the broader community over the course of the last eight months, can you give a sense in terms of the scope of some of that need for people who found themselves in the circumstances that we're seeing?

Some of our employees are in now, but maybe they were there six months ago.

Do you have a sense for just kind of the rough range of dollar amounts for requests and what that actually is going to allow them

I should note that employees, regardless of whether they receive these funds or not, would always remain eligible for any assistance through the Pathways Fund or even through the state's rent and mortgage relief program.

And we have seen requests come for as little as $300 to do a critical repair of a car.

as much as $7,500 for arrears for someone facing eviction.

And so we've had a pretty wide range of kinds of requests.

We have split the request around rental assistance at about $1,000.

So anything less than $1,000 can be accessed as the sort of path, local pathways funds, anything more than $1,000 that we've been referring to the state funds.

It looks like the state has agreed

has found and agreed to continue to provide support for the rent and mortgage relief funds through next year.

And they believe they have sufficient funds to meet the entire need for the state for rental assistance based on their eligibility requirements through 2021, which is pretty astonishing and a great deal of relief for the rest of us who are scrambling to try to provide services

In addition, we've heard that there's a significant tranche of money coming for utility assistance as well.

And so that would leave the sort of local dollars, particularly starting in January, to fill in the gaps for these sort of major state initiatives.

And then we might get a better sense of what people need.

So I think $1,000 is certainly helpful.

It is symbolic.

It's not addressing someone's poverty concern.

And it might be very critical for that month, but it's certainly not a sufficient amount of money to address someone's ongoing concern.

You know, there are, you know, people who could have been working full time hours before that are just able to get just whatever the city has available for them, you know, at this at this time, which a few weeks ago that was, you know, five hours a week for some people.

So I just think that

If, while we are considering this and we may think because they may still be on payroll, which it appeared since we didn't get any clear information about how that decision was made, it was more for the city benefit for them to be able to work when needed versus really the staff benefit.

And so, I just want to make sure that council, you are

Again, aware of how significant when you're talking about a reduction in hours and what that would mean for the employees that we're talking about.

That is pretty significant.

It's certainly a possibility that as we begin to assess the use of the CARES money that's already been allocated

that we consider this in mid-December as an opportunity to use any unspent funds, whether left in the contingency fund or returned to the city.

In addition, there have been proposals internally around the sort of creation of a shared pool for sick leave or for vacation leave that would help many of these employees and also the possibility of no interest loans and small grants for employees.

None of those things are

I want to thank you very much, Kathy.

I know you and I talk some back and forth about some ideas as well, and I just

So at this point, we'll allocate this fund amount.

Exactly.

That would be a fairly straightforward process.

Should we get to that place?

Thank you.

Thomas, could you call to vote, please?

I think I have to make a motion or somebody does.

Oh, yeah.

Second.

Councilor Snook.

Yes.

Mayor Walker.

Yes.

Vice Mayor Magill.

Yes.

Councilor Hill.

All right.

Thank you.

That carries 5-0.

And just the comment that I have is just for us to be really aware of that these are the lowest

paid employees in the organization.

And that even though they were considered temporary, they worked weekly hours regularly scheduled.

And that the reduction in hours for the people who are still on payroll, because we never got clear answers about that, is pretty significant.

So I think that we should probably take a break now because I don't know how lengthy this discussion for this topic is going to be.

Is there anyone who's opposed to that?

No?

OK.

Sounds good.

We are, Mayor Walker.

Thank you, Mayor Walker and city councilors.

I'm just going to go sans camera since I was having some connection issues the last meeting.

So Brian is going to pull up a presentation here.

Go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

So there were a few community traffic concerns that have come to council and city managers, traffic engineering over the summer, Cherry Avenue, Willard Drive, and Fifth Street Corridor.

I think most of this discussion will be Fifth Street, but we'll go ahead and start with the other two.

So Cherry Avenue, there is a petition submitted to council on July 24th, mostly relating to the 35 mile an hour posted speed limit.

The petition itself

really didn't meet kind of the criteria that the city would normally have to start a traffic study for this, but we already had one scheduled as part of the Cherry Avenue small area plan.

It had been on the books

since you know just before COVID hit and once COVID did hit and traffic patterns changed we kind of put it on the back burner waiting for traffic patterns to return to normal.

They've mostly come back so we went ahead and

had scheduled it.

We just got the traffic numbers from the consultant.

We hired to do the counts on Friday.

So we will be

You know, putting together kind of a final report for that.

Some of the preliminary findings just in looking over the numbers where the traffic does today does not travel even at the posted speed limit.

So there probably will be some sort of reduction in the speed limit there, but we need to finish going through all those numbers before we can really present what, what our

recommendation would be for the corridor.

And I anticipate that, you know, over the holidays and stuff, we'll put that together and come back to council with that finalized report in January.

Next.

The next one was Wheeler Drive.

This was a citizen comment.

It's been talked about at the Fry Spring Neighborhood Association.

There's been a lot of talk about this one.

The original letter really spoke to vegetation overgrowth of signage, location of signage, a lot of truck traffic using wheeler drives to cut through, noise generated by the speed bumps.

So those are all kind of the concerns that were brought forward.

Next slide.

We've, for the most part, all of the signage and vegetation concerns have been taken care of.

We've cleared off the signs and we've added some speed signs, moved some speed signs.

We are still planning to install no-through truck traffic further out.

at the main roads as they kind of come up to Willard Drive to try and cut down on that.

That won't remove all truck traffic, but hopefully it will give trucks advance warning that they shouldn't be using that.

The speed humps themselves were done as part of the traffic calming handbook process.

It was one of the first ones in the city that was done to my knowledge.

Looking back through the records, it was done in 2008 in the traffic calming handbook.

was done in 2008.

There was no, at that time when the traffic calming handbook was put in, I don't think there was much thought put into what happens down the road if people want to remove those traffic calming measures.

So what we're kind of recommending is an update amendment to the traffic calming handbook that would basically lay out the same process that we use to install traffic calming

but to relook at it, we would put a caveat on there that we would only do that after said features have been in service for at least 10 years.

And that's just to give traffic a chance to acclimate to the measures, traffic patterns to equalize, people to get used to it.

But over time, traffic patterns do change, new developments go in.

So we do think that it's appropriate to have

Something in there to remedy that.

So Fifth Street, a big one.

So Fifth Street corridor safety.

We have had four fatal accidents or five fatal accidents in the last four years.

And then just overall corridor safety as well.

Next slide.

So Charlottesville Police Department, we've been looking at this.

Charlottesville Police Department has actually had their smart radar machines out there twice over the last 18 months getting vehicle speeds and data for us to look at.

both times that those were put out there the results were extremely similar even with it being you know in COVID for this last one but you know the average speed on the corridor is between 42 and 44 miles an hour.

85th percentile which is a you know

traffic engineering term, but basically it's 85% of people are going less than five miles an hour over the posted speed limit.

We will always have outliers that are well exceeding that, but

Um, based on those numbers, you know, it's, it's my assertion that there's really not a speeding problem with the posted speed limit of 45.

Um, but I had said in my, my report to council, you know, we do have a corridor that allows for higher speeds for those that do want to break the speed limit.

Um, the safety and the fatalities that have happened, um, they are

unfortunate, but in looking at the vehicle crash reports that were provided by Charlottesville Police Department, none of them were attributed to the roadway design, and they were all, you know, contributed to driver behavior.

You know, there's a few things that as traffic engineers we really can't design for.

You know, there's, you know, drinking,

drugs, there's impaired driving, there's reckless driving.

And we just, all of the accidents that have happened over the last five years have kind of fallen in those categories.

And it's not necessarily attributed to roadway design.

The previous five years to those, we had zero fatalities, nothing had changed.

in the roadway.

So I think we could go another five years and not have anything, or we could have another two in the next month.

But it's really, we'll get into some of the measures that we'd like to take to mitigate those, but there's always going to be kind of those outliers that we have very little control over.

The last kind of item is just the overall corridor safety.

We finished up the Fifth Ridge McIntire multimodal corridor study around this time in 2018, two years ago.

And at that time, one of the things that we had looked at and identified was that Fifth Street in general is much higher than the statewide average, three and a half times higher than the statewide average for just overall crash rating.

Not all of those are severe crashes.

A lot of them are, you know, rear end, fender bender, some angle collisions, intersections.

Brendan, which section of road, I'm sorry, are you referring to when you looked at the, and I'm talking about the Fifth Ridge-Macinsire Study,

Okay.

I just want to be sure I know the segment.

Yep.

Um, so as far as recommendations, we kind of broke them down into some immediate midterm and long-term, um, recommendations.

Um, so for immediate recommendations, um,

We do recommend reducing the speed limit from 45 to 40.

This, again, it wasn't necessarily because people are breaking the speed limit, but nearly a third of the accidents in the corridor are rear end collisions, which the reduction of the speed limit will hopefully help mitigate some of those.

We will probably need to amend our zoning code.

I think a lot of our speed limits in the city are stated in there.

We'll have to bring something to council to amend that and then we'll obviously need CPD to help enforce.

We'll put out advance signing several weeks ahead of time and CPD will probably have warning period as well as drivers get acclimated to the new speed limit.

that will be needed.

We are going to install flashing signal ahead signs as kind of noted in the top right of the picture there.

We do want to link this to our signals themselves, so both the Cherry Avenue signal and the Harris signal.

So these would go, you know, 500 to 1,000 feet in advance of the signal and would activate and flash

when that signal turns red to give drivers just another visual warning that they're approaching a red signal.

And then similarly for the unsignalized intersections, so Bailey and Old Ridge and some of those, just doing regular intersection warning signs just to give drivers a heads up again that they're approaching an intersection where people may be slowing down to turn or turning out.

the signals themselves where we'd like to install high visibility back plates and then replacement of the permissive left green with a flashing yellow arrow.

This is something that VDOT has kind of pushed and enacted in a lot of the rural communities.

Again, nothing changes about the functionality.

You know, you're supposed to yield on a green ball anyway, but it's

It's been found that it alerts drivers more that they are supposed to yield in that condition.

One of the other things that we think should be done is to remove the unsignalized crosswalk at Old Ridge.

Again, with the width of 5th Street there, it's really five lanes.

You've got two lanes in either direction and then a turn lane.

You're not that far from the intersection with the signalized actuated pedestrian crossing that you could get across to the park or whatever there.

And then lighting of intersection.

So none of, I don't say none, most of the intersections have inadequate lighting.

They're lights that were kind of thrown on power poles that may or may not have been in the area

Um, and they don't really give kind of what the guidelines for intersection lighting would be.

So we do recommend that, you know, as a, as a measure to increase safety at nighttime and the intersection would be to light those.

Um, midterm options.

Um, so I think most counselors know at this point, you know, we, we have since the,

Fifth Ridge McIntire plan got finished.

We actually, we've applied for two projects so far.

We applied for the intersection of Cherry and Ridge.

That was awarded.

And then this last round of SmartScale, we applied for the section between Cherry and Monticello or West Main Street to improve, you know,

As those rounds of smart scale come up, we think that we should continue to apply for them or look for other funding sources to implement that Fifth Ridge McIntire plan.

Another midterm solution might be pedestrian scale lighting.

So this would be what we have downtown on West Main Street or the like where we kind of have

a more pedestrian level lighting.

This would be an expensive option because of the length of the roadway, but it does give a sense of place.

It makes it safer both for cyclists and pedestrians who are walking there as well as just kind of giving visual clues to drivers that it's a place that should go a little bit slower.

And then finally would be the installation of a roundabout

This would go just north of Bailey, kind of where the community gardens are today.

What this would really do, and I think Peter Krebs kind of spoke about it in his public comment, is it breaks up the corridor.

Again, I think I had said we have a mile long stretch between Cherry and Harris that's straight.

There's kind of a sag in the middle, so from both directions you can kind of accelerate.

So again, we don't have a speeding problem for the majority of traffic, but what we do have is a straight segment of roadway that people can get up to excessive speeds.

What the roundabout would do is really put a

a damper on that right in the middle of the corridor where drivers are forced to slow down.

And, you know, it's kind of at the lower end.

So exiting it from either side, you'd be going uphill instead of down.

So, you know, I do think that it would be something that would help mitigate maybe some of the fatal crashes that have involved higher speeds.

A long term recommendation is really a mode change, you know, encourage more use of bike, pedestrian and transit options.

Fifth Street is a heavily used, heavily commuter corridor.

We have 14 roads in and out of the city from the county.

And this is one of the main ones.

It's nearly 21,000 vehicles.

that come in from the 64 direction there.

And in this particular section of roadway, there's 18,000 vehicles a day.

So in order to really mitigate the congestion and that kind of stuff, we need to come up with something to get people to switch the mode that they're using.

One of the options is to do a park and ride.

increase our transit.

I think it would require kind of a fundamental rework of how CAT operates.

I know I've spoken to our director about that.

Right now we kind of service a lot of the community and not so much the main lines, but if we could service the main lines first and get those

Lead times between buses down to 10 or 15 minutes and have a parking option.

I think we could get, you know, it's not going to be everyone obviously, but we could get people to actually, you know, park and transit into the city rather than just driving their cars.

So again, that's, that's kind of a long-term option and, you know, it's not going to be done anytime soon, but it's something that we need to have on the horizon.

especially considering new developments that are planned along this corridor.

I know that we have several developments that have preliminary site plans and the such in this section that would add, I think it's about 500 residential mixed use units, which would add another 5,000 vehicle trips a day.

Again, I had said that we're at 18,000 vehicle trips now, that's almost increasing that by another

Porter to Third.

So there is a significant number of vehicles that will be added to this roadway in the not too distant future.

So the cost of some of these, the immediate items, signage and the like, we can do the majority of these within our current departmental budget.

So there's no real increase to the city budget or ask from city council to implement those.

Midterm solutions was kind of in order of cost, not necessarily priority, but intersection lighting itself.

would be like 50 to 100,000 per intersection, depending on what lighting is already there.

The pedestrian scale lighting would be roughly $2 million.

A roundabout option is between $3 and $4 million.

And then kind of implementing this section of roadway for the Fifth Ridge McIntire plan.

And just to reiterate, most of that is

buffered bike lanes, adding, you know, wider sidewalks, shared use pads, um, you know, making it a much more multimodal corridor with some traffic vehicular traffic improvements with that, um, would cost around 15 to 29.

And then again, the long-term, you know, park and ride options, transit options, you know, those it's really hard to quantify without having a project scope.

I have a question about the recommendation to remove the crosswalk.

That's my first one at Ridge.

Yes.

You know, I think that could potentially lead us to a more dangerous situation because if you have, there's a way to access Tonsler by the tennis courts.

And you have a lot of youth who live in that area that cross there.

And I think that instead of going up and crossing at the light, they'll probably just run across.

and then with no crosswalk there, that could create a potentially more dangerous situation.

So if there's other avenues that we can explore there, I would be interested in that mainly for them.

I know adults who are out running and walking with their children and stuff like that, it may be a different scenario, but I'm concerned about that part.

My other question was how many of the 18,000, and you said one third of the kind of fender bender or fender bender accidents that would... Yup.

So how many total accidents are, if you're saying that we have 18,000 vehicle trips per day,

How often are we having accidents and are they always attributed to speed or is it something else that's happening there?

Just a moment.

It's towards the end.

I think it's the last two slides.

So to answer your question, this is kind of the plotted accidents in the corridor.

So you can see how they're kind of congregated around the intersections for the most part.

The yellow on that, the yellow squares are angled collisions, which is usually when someone is trying to pull out or pull across traffic and gets hit.

The red triangle or the red squares are the rear end collisions.

So you can see there, you know, again, they're, they're fairly evenly spread between all of the intersections themselves.

And then you can go one more slide, Brian.

So the one on the left there is not kind of the section we're talking about.

This is the one lane.

section of bridge that goes between Cherry and West Main Street.

And you can see all of the accidents that are there.

And, you know, again, those are, are not high speed at all.

Those are really congestion related accidents in that corridor.

And there's much, there's much more kind of interspersed between the intersections themselves as well.

I don't know if that answers your question or not.

Oh, you questioned how many total accidents.

I think on the whole corridor for the Fifth Street study that we did, there were roughly 250 accidents going from Harris Street on the north.

So up by 250 all the way down to Harris Road on the south.

And that was over a five-year period.

I don't have it broken down for this specific stretch of roadway.

All right, thank you.

Counselors, questions or comments?

My questions were also just similarly around.

It seemed like a lot of the feedback we've gotten prior to this summer was around the Harris intersection near Willoughby.

And I was just trying to get a sense for what that looked like.

And I've seen it visually versus Cherry Avenue.

But again, a lot of that also is because of the speeds coming off of 64 and then going through that intersection.

You don't have to stop.

It's just continuous.

Whereas I think when you get to Cherry Avenue, there's just so many things kind of remind you to slow down.

That's why I'm just concerned a lot of these crashes aren't even in that straightaway.

I'm not saying there hasn't been significant crashes.

There have been, but a lot of them are at the signal, which is a stop.

I mean, where it should be a stop.

Well, and that's, that's something kind of shown nationwide that I think a lot of people ask for traffic signals.

Um,

for various reasons, but that's why we're a lot of times hesitant to put them in is because most of the time, your number of crashes will actually go up, even if your severity goes down, just because you are introducing people who are slowing down or slamming on their brakes because they weren't paying attention and they see a red light or they thought they had a red light or a green light to go through and somebody else had a green light.

It just kind of, you know, when you don't have a signal, usually people, especially if you were, so take for instance, Bailey, you know, if you don't have a signal there, you know that you have to look for an opening to get out.

Whereas if you had a signal and you get a green light, you might not be paying attention to the people coming down the roadway.

And so you'll just pull out cause you had a green light.

And if someone else runs the red light, you know, it's a more severe accident.

So yeah, I mean,

Can you talk a little bit more about the potential of a signal at Bailey?

Because I think the public would be interested in hearing, so if the severity of the accidents could potentially be decreased, and I know that the timing

of these accidents have been something that has been mentioned as why that may not work because the light may not be red at that time of the morning or something like that.

Sure.

Brian, can you pull up the third slide in that presentation?

While he's pulling that out,

Essentially, again, there's a manual that we use as traffic engineers.

It's used all over the United States.

It's called the Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices.

And it really sets forth where signs need to go, spacing of signs.

when you put in signalized intersections versus a stop control, just a stop sign.

And it really gives that uniformity all over the United States so that when you approach an intersection, you see a sign, you know what it means, and you kind of know what to expect.

And it has several warrants for when to install a traffic signal.

Those go into

You know, the first warrant is really, it's volume-based.

How many vehicles are coming out of the secondary street?

And, you know, is there so much of a delay that you really need to have that signal there to warrant, you know, allowing vehicles to pull out?

We did check it against that warrant as well as the others, that location, and it just doesn't meet the signal warrants.

And one of the warrants as well is accidents.

According to that, it has that you need to have five accidents in a 12 month period at that location that would be solved or mitigated by having a traffic signal.

Again, we didn't meet it at that location.

I'm not saying we don't have accidents there, but again, it doesn't necessarily meet the warrants for installing it.

I know some people have suggested to install the traffic signal to break up the corridor, but if we did install when they're kind of against the traffic warrants, it would be what's referred to as a semi-actuated.

Signal, where for the mainline for Fifth Street, it would remain green until a vehicle approached from Bailey to kind of trigger that they needed a break in traffic to get out.

And for the higher speed situations that have occurred in some of the fatalities, like installing a stoplight there would not have affected those at all.

A lot of them happened later at night.

I mean, timeframe-wise, it would definitely be quicker to install a traffic signal.

But again, it would be, you know,

However long it takes to get the funding for it and then, you know, installation is, you know, a month or so.

So it's, you know, there would be some fabrication time for the mast arms and that kind of stuff, which would be usually six to nine months to fabricate those.

Mayor Walker, one thing I would just reiterate that Wren was indicating that the signal is not warranted at that intersection.

Therefore, if it's not warranted, it would not be recommended at this time.

If you install an unwarranted signal, you create the situation of adding or increasing future accidents.

I understand, but I'm trying to figure out is, you know, what's the difference between, you know, whether it's if the law says you can't versus whether we could make a decision to do it is why it sounded like it is a possibility.

I also, when I hear what they say about the patterns of when, if this light isn't, like Bailey's a much more secondary intersection, I just don't see that it's going to solve the issue.

Whereas obviously a roundabout would, and that it would slow down everybody going through, regardless of what's happening in the opposite direction, because you're a forced slow down.

So I'm just not even sure, besides being warranted, that it would really address the concerns that are being raised.

what concerns we're talking about.

So the feedback that we have received, so there's one, you know, trying to figure out how to create a situation where people cannot get up to these speeds that results in these, the fatalities, that's one.

And then the Willoughby,

that intersection and the report that we got a couple years ago, if I'm remembering correctly about that, they were just talking about just as more developments have increased in that area, you know, the Longwood type of, you know, those developments down there that there have been since then accidents.

So that's one area that I think the people who have concerns about that area

would have very different concerns from like Bailey Road.

I don't know how often you all come off of that Bailey Road, but you can sit there sometimes for quite a bit of time, depending on what time of day it is, trying to get out of there.

So that just would be

another, you know, area and then up further they are talking about speed and better lighting for crossing and stuff like that.

And then Brennan introduced

and that's what I was thinking when you were talking about Red Street because just living in this area, depending on what time of day it is, those cars are back to back and I think we talked about this before, we talked about just the signalization being off and where in terms of correcting those things, because that seems to be still a major issue.

at that intersection, to getting up to Red Street.

And I think by Barrett, I've seen people try to get across the street to their cars near that crosswalk.

So I think there are problem areas, and depending on which ones people have to use the most, their interest in what we do would be different.

So I understand we have to take the whole thing into consideration and the recommendations, but I think it's important to know whether it's, you know, what's possible and what does long-term, you know, look like?

As Brendan indicated, the circumstances can change.

And in evaluation, one of the things you just identified is intersection delay.

So if you're sitting at an unsignalized intersection,

The longer you delay, that is one of the warrants.

The traffic signal is installed to correct certain type of accidents, certain delays, so we can continue to evaluate that to make the determination of once it does meet warrants, come back to city council with a recommendation for installation.

We have to follow the Virginia code, which follows the Virginia manual traffic uniform control device, the MUTCD, and by that,

continue to evaluate those unsignalized intersections.

But the recommendations that are presented this evening are based upon the conditions that are observed out there today and what we anticipate.

But part of the evaluation will be continue reviewing the conditions out there as they do change and as circumstances do warrant or necessitate additional changes.

And Brennan, one of the commenters earlier today was talking about just the ability to reduce the number of lanes in this stretch.

And I'll be honest, my time's driving there.

It's never really been a situation where the lanes have been completely congested, but obviously then you're coming up onto those intersections.

Yeah, I can.

I need the fifth, five, six, and seven.

We can start with five.

So this was an option, Heather, that we had explored because there was kind of a push from the community on Twitter and some other people contacting me about what would it do?

So I was interested to see

I kind of had a feeling it might not, but I wanted to give them, you know, respect their ideas and at least explore that.

So we had EPR who did the fifth street study and had kind of the model all built out.

So the main issues aren't necessarily in the stretch between Cherry and Harris.

They're on either end and that's where

the issues really kind of come to a head.

So you can see in this slide, this is the area just south of Harris between there and 5th Street Station Parkway.

The blue line would be kind of what is there as far as the queue today.

If we

took the section north of there down to a single lane.

The yellow line is what the queue would look like in the, I believe this is the AM peak, yeah, AM northbound.

So as you can see, it actually views through the intersection, which I don't think it takes a traffic engineer to kind of see why that would be a bad idea.

When you kind of approach that,

You know, situation, you know, it results in gridlock.

You can't have, you know, you can have a green light coming from Wegmans on Fifth Street to head north, but there's absolutely no place for you to go.

So you're just kind of stopped, you know, in the roadway waiting and, you know, who knows when it all clear that you can actually go.

If you go to the next slide, Brian.

So this would be the queue.

So this is Southbound.

This would be in the afternoon.

So this is from the same intersection, but coming from town back out.

And there you see the queue would go all the way past Brookwood and approach, come close towards to Bailey up there.

So the new development of people coming out of, is it Beacon on Fifth and Harmony Ridge and those,

It would be very, very, very difficult for them to get out of those.

And then the last one, the next slide, this kind of shows what would happen at Cherry Elliott and Fifth.

And really what worries me is, again, these are kind of today's traffic numbers.

As we increase housing in the city and vehicles and whatever else, the leg coming from West Main Street is only two, three, maybe four cars away from the intersection of Monticello.

And because that intersection is so close to West Main Street and some of those,

If you gridlock that intersection, the domino effect of that takes you to Monticello and Second.

It takes you to West Main Street and Ridge, which takes you to Fourth and West Main, which you can get the idea.

It kind of compounds and dominoes through the network of just gridlock in downtown at peak hour.

It's just not an option that I can recommend doing.

I have a question.

If the roundabout option was brought forward, would that also assist with people turning

and coming onto and leaving Old Ridge Street and would it also help with people trying to turn from Bailey?

And if you could add Cleveland Avenue to your comments too, that would be helpful for me.

So I see it as one piece of the puzzle.

One of the recommendations that was in the corridor study as a whole

was to install what's referred to as an R-cut, which is basically a forced U-turn.

And you basically wouldn't allow people to make left-hand turns either in or out of those.

So if you were, for instance, if you were heading northbound and wanted to turn left into Bailey, you'd actually go up to the roundabout, go around, and then come and make a right-hand turn.

So we would have to install one of those forced U-turns to the south as well.

But having two of those on kind of bookends in the system would allow us to do that in the future, to eliminate those left turns and just kind of force people into a

Counterclockwise motion around to eliminate those left turns.

The other thing that would do if we chose to do it would be if we no longer need left-hand turns, we could get rid of the majority of that median that's there.

and we could reallocate that space to protected bike lanes or multi-use paths or something along those lines.

It gives us more space to work with.

Right now, I had looked it up and I forgot to write it down, but I believe it was sometime in the early 2000s that the city installed the bike lanes that are on there now.

And

You know, in order to do that, we didn't change the pavement width.

All we did was narrow the travel lanes.

So what we have today is, you know, minimum travel lanes, minimum bike lanes, and minimum sidewalks with no buffer for any of them.

And, you know, that's, in my opinion, is what's led to a lot of the uncomfortable feeling, both for pedestrians and cyclists,

is that everyone's just kind of crammed into that space and shoehorned in.

It's definitely better than not having a bike lane there, but it does put you dangerously close to traffic that's moving at 45 miles an hour.

So it's one of the higher stress environments that was identified in the corridor study for cyclists and pedestrians.

And just to your point, because that was something that I had in my notes, I think this is also something we need to think about when

You know, the conversations around reduction in car usage and we attempt to modify like the roadways based on the demands, you know, for the bike and ped.

But we haven't actually, it appears, reduced the car usage yet.

And that was just a question that I had was,

I think if there were, they were pretty minimal.

Normally the type of accident that you would see from that would be a side swipe or something like that where you've narrowed the travel lanes

And there were fairly few of those.

Again, two thirds of all the accidents during the study period fell into either the rear end collision or the angled collision.

OK.

Counselors, are there any more questions?

So if everyone, Mr. Wheeler had sent me a message that Ms.

Rose had raised her hand to speak, and I think just given the circumstances that if there's no, if you all are okay with that, to allow her to, if she has,

Any questions at this time to have a three minute time here?

I note that she also just a moment ago, sent an email through the city website about this meeting, and I assume about some of the discussion we're having.

Mr. Willard.

Ms.

Hi, my name is Benta Rose and my son was one of the fatalities on 5th Street extended.

I had some concerns regarding that roadway as well.

Even though speed may contribute to his fatality, I just had a question about the

I know that you guys were talking about some lightning in the area, like the median.

And I know that the cars that pull out of the driveways there, so my son actually in the, you know, driving down that road, actually we pulled out and pulled out into the traffic.

And so he tried to avoid the vehicle and he hit a tree.

So it's there, you know, with the cars that pull out of the driveway,

is there something that, I know you can't put lights up everywhere, but is there like that area, I don't know if you guys are familiar with the accident before you get to Cleveland, there's a tree with flowers in his memory there.

So I just had some concerns about how the vehicles pull out into oncoming traffic.

because I'm thinking that he was trying to avoid the truck.

And so that's how he went into the tree.

But then in that area, there's no lightning.

Like at 921, him going down that road and driving a motorcycle, it's just one way.

You can't really, with your helmet on, you can't see to the right because you're just going straight ahead.

Okay, so the question is just lighting around that end where I guess the duplexes are up to that Cleveland Avenue

and maybe a little bit above that area in terms of we can make things more visible there.

Yes, Mayor Walker.

Because the trees and with the branching, I think the pole that's there, it's not enough light there.

And I guess if there had been

Um, something there at Billy, I think people just tend to have that, that fifth street as a, you know, that straight stretch quarter where you can just kind of zoom down the road.

All right.

Ms.

Rhodes?

No, ma'am, Ms.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah, and I think we had spoke to that a little bit as far as I think, you know, the pedestrian scale lighting, you know, along the corridor would kind of help because of the tree canopy.

Tall lights probably won't do a whole lot.

We have that kind of in several spots in the city where we're trying to strike the balance between tree canopy and lighting and they don't always go well together.

It was noted in the police report that it was dark that night when

How do we, I guess, balance that in terms of making sure that trees are present but that things are visible?

Yeah.

Again, it's, you know, trying to keep, if we can keep those lights under the tree canopy, um, you know, again, the majority of the lights that are out there on the corridor now are the kind of the dominion scale light that are, you know, on a power pole.

So there, the lights themselves are sitting up, you know, 30 to 40 feet above the roadway.

So if there's a tree nearby, it blocks a lot of that light.

I had one question.

I mean, it sounds like the fundamental

The problem is just the basic design of this road in the lack of design and structure that's pedestrian and human scale.

Would you say that the Fifth Ridge MacIntyre plan as is,

addresses those fundamental issues and the challenge is securing the funding and the timing of it?

I mean, I think it addresses what we can address.

Again, this is always going to be,

In my opinion, at least, this is always gonna be a traffic centric corridor.

Again, we have 14 places in and out of the city.

So if you think about, we're gonna neck this down or we're not going to have this as a vehicular lease centric corridor, which of those other 14 are you moving those vehicle trips to?

We have, I kind of gone through and added them all up,

With our population, we have 185,000 vehicle trips in and out of the city every single day.

We are the economic driver for Albemarle County and the surrounding area.

Whether we like it or not, we have

commuters that are coming in and out.

The corridor study, it does provide a lot more room for bicycles with protected bike lanes.

It provides a lot more room for pedestrians with shared use path and wider sidewalks.

It introduces some more crosswalks that could be protected kind of at the main intersections, whether that be Bailey or some

Brookwood or whatever.

So I think it goes a long way to address kind of the concerns with not having enough space for those other modes.

But as far as completely removing vehicles, that kind of speaks to my long term

Those other 13 main entrance corridors to the city, are there others that are less dangerous, more dangerous?

Is this one seeing more crashes and fatalities than the others?

We haven't done necessarily a safety analysis on all of them, just to kind of run down

The list quickly, you know, we've got High Street, Locust Park, John Warner Parkway, McIntyre, Rugby Avenue, Lower Rugby, Emmett Street, barracks, Ivey, Fontaine, Old Lynchburg Road, Fifth Street, which we're talking about, Avon, and Monticello.

So, you know, if you think about all of those, like some of them are just a much different character to the roadway.

They were always, and this kind of goes to how our city has developed, a lot of those roadways were never intended to be, to carry traffic.

They were residential roadways that as the city has developed and the county has developed, they've gotten a lot more traffic.

If you speak to anyone on Locust, I'm sure they would say that they don't like the fact that they're right off the 250 bypass and vehicles are kind of going down their street.

The same with rugby and some of those others.

Really the only ones of those 14 that were kind of designed as arterials are Emmett Street, Fifth Street, and you could maybe argue High Street.

And all the other ones are just kind of absorbing traffic that those other three just can't handle.

We could fit, you know, this section of roadway, we could fit more vehicles on because we have four lanes, but you immediately get to the section just to the north of Cherry where we're down to a single lane.

And, you know, that section's pretty much at capacity, which you can see in the crashes that I had shown, like, you know, the more congestion you get, the higher your accident rate is going to get as well.

And then we added the one, which is the Parkway that was new.

Right, I guess I was using kind of the, I'll call it the urban ring, using U50 and 64.

But yeah, I mean,

John Warner Parkway even really wasn't designed.

I mean, we intentionally designed it not to, you know, hold more traffic.

I know there was a lot of reports that said that that should have been, you know, four lanes heading north and the county didn't want kind of that, and the city didn't want that, you know, cut through that area.

So it was designed as a lower speed two lane roadway.

And it does have, you know, a significant amount of vehicles,

And my last question is more, I guess, for Mr. Blair, but I know we had allocated, you know, some funding of maybe 2018

Yes, 2020.

So I think it was 2018 for increased lighting on the downtown mall and that area.

And at the time, it seemed to be more of perceived safety risk versus actual.

And I'm just wondering, since we know that lighting could be better in this area, and it's not necessarily just

It was several intersections, but that was mostly supplementing existing lighting that was kind of at the intersection.

Whereas I think, you know, depending on what we're talking about, you know, it'll be 30 to 50,000 if we're doing just the intersection lighting.

Yeah, if we're talking about the pedestrian scale lights that you put in every 50 to 60 feet, you know, that's a $2 million project.

Mayor Walker, to your question, we do have the capital

work capital improvement program work session on Friday.

Okay.

This sounds like you guys are going to go ahead and implement these immediate measures, maybe shy of that one crosswalk that maybe there's some, I agree that that might be a step that's not the best interest of those that are living there.

But I also see the risks.

But I agree with Merit Walker's perspective on that.

Yes, the only one that will take a significant amount of time, or can I say significant, you know, may take a few months, is the blinking kind of signalized warning, just because we're going to have to run conduits and more conduits along the corridor to run, you know, wires to connect the signal and all that.

I can take another look at that.

Right now, is it just marked on those fluorescent pedestrian signs?

Yes.

Pointing at it?

And what about that really, really reflective paint?

I mean, I know in some places I've seen crosswalks that, you know, that really when you come up on them not too far away, suddenly your lights are hitting them in it.

Yeah.

Again, I can look at what options we have, you know, whether it's signage or rapid flashing beacon or whatever else.

I believe that we kind of set criteria for the rapid flashing beacon with our new standards and design manual rewrite.

Thank you so much for all of this.

I know this presentation

I appreciate all the backup, like every question we had, you had something for it.

Thank you, Brennan.

You're welcome.

I wouldn't mind having those files at some point, if we could.

Just the PowerPoint presentations?

Yeah, I think Brian or myself can send those out.

Yeah and thanks to my last just reminder was just we had this conversation I think last year when we were having the discussion about the crosswalk on Main Street whether it met the criteria or you know like whatever you know like what how do you figure out how to make an exception if it doesn't so

Yep, I can do that.

Okay.

No, I believe that the majority of the signage and that kind of stuff we'll be working on over the next month.

All right.

Thank you.

Mayor Walker, if I may, I'd also like to thank Mr. Brown from Public Works, Mr. Ika Funa from NDS, and also the police department that also worked out Mr. Duncan and wanted to make sure all those departments, I mean, it's been a, I agree with Councilor Hill, this has been a very comprehensive overview of this situation.

Yeah, thank all of you for your effort.

Good evening, Mayor Walker and Councillors.

During the past couple of months, there have been some questions about the city logo raised and

In your packet you will find that there's a discussion about the history of the logo and its difference between the city seal and the logo.

Ms.

Robertson prepared some of those historical materials for you.

The current logo was adopted in 1971.

and again understanding that some of you have asked about perhaps changing the logo or perhaps having a new city logo you will find in the memo.

Our first course of action and I guess really our first course of action would be to ask the council do you want us to look at as a group do you want us to direct us to look at

developing a new city logo.

And if that is the council's wish, I think the first thing we need to do is to reach out to departments and ask what the cost of that change would be.

As you know, you see so many city vehicles and other

You see this logo in different parts of the city on different city facilities as well as vehicles.

So probably if tonight the council directs us to go forward with looking at a new city logo, we would first bring you back a report about the total cost of changing that logo.

And we probably also, if the council wants to go forward with this, we'd look at the idea of

What do we want to do to change it?

The historical materials point to this was a contest back in 1971.

That could be an option.

It could be that you want to hire a professional designer of some sort to develop a new city logo.

I think, again, that would be

depending on tonight and if you all direct us that you want to go forward with the new city logo we would come back to you with a cost and probably also in a memo present a few options for you to direct us which option you prefer in developing that new logo but

Again, this is I think tonight is more for us to just get a sense from the council as a whole.

Do you want us to proceed with revising or coming up with a new city logo?

I definitely support it and I think that the idea of maybe looking at what we get from citizens in terms of

I don't disagree like I certainly think that we need to be looking at this logo and I would love to have citizen involvement but when you lay out the steps it's going to take and the assessment by staff I just am not in support of us doing this at this time right now given the other priorities that are on staff's plates to even like evaluate the costs I just I just am trying to figure out how we can prioritize our most immediate needs right now while we are certainly

Not full on staff.

But I don't want that to say that I certainly think this needs to be looked at at the appropriate time, in my opinion.

Because I think there's some updates that are definitely needed to make it reflect more of our values.

I also feel like the timing of our strategic planning, and what's going to come out of that might help to drive some of the you know, the direction we might give and where the city logo may go in the future.

But that's just my thoughts.

I would say my feeling about it is, first of all, I've never understood why there is a cannon on there.

As far as I can tell, no cannon was ever fired in either the Revolutionary War or the Civil War within the city limits of Charlottesville.

Nonetheless, that was apparently chosen for its historical value or something.

But I absolutely agree with Councillor Hill.

We've got a lot of stuff that our staff is doing.

We've got a lot of staff, a lot of stuff that we should be doing.

Comprehensive plan, affordable housing plan.

zoning rewrites, and those are just the things that are going to be coming to us from the consultants in coming months.

If we didn't have any other huge planning issues, not to mention the question of a strategic plan that ought to undergird all of that stuff, if we didn't have anything else to be doing, fine.

If staff didn't have anything else to be doing, fine, but we've got a lot to be doing.

I am definitely for looking at it.

I think delaying it a little while as we are, I mean, I don't think that, I don't think our current city logo represents us as a city, but I think we have changed.

We have re we've been re-examining who we are.

And I think a logo is, is pretty important with that.

But I do agree that

With COVID, with our, where our, you know, our businesses are right now, where people are right now diverting city dollars or diverting staff time when we need to be figuring some other things out.

We might need to be delayed, take a look at this in six months and see where we're at there.

that would be, I mean, I'm very much for the logo changing.

Like I said, I do not think it represents Charlottesville anymore, but I would like to say, where are we at in six months from now as far as our staff's time with comp plan, with the demands on their time, and also we'll have a better idea of what we're looking at

I'd say I generally agree.

I mean, I think it would be an exciting opportunity to have the community involved through a contest or some kind of other deep community engagement to have something that's much more reflective of where we are as a community today than in 1971, especially since we don't really even have much history about why this particular logo was developed and its particular significance.

But I would agree, in order for us to do it right, I think it would require a real investment in community engagement.

And obviously, if we actually make a change, there's going to be real cost and time associated with updating everything.

And just looking at COVID, looking at leadership transition, looking at our budget shortfall, this just wouldn't jump to the top as a priority to

you know, divert our limited resources.

But I would definitely want to put a pin in it as something that I think we should examine.

And I think would be an exciting way to just involve the community in updating even just visually where we are as a community now versus 1971.

And I do like the idea of a contest again.

I think it gives people a chance.

I think we have a very creative community here and it could give, you know, people from seven to 70, you know, something to pull together and showing what it would be really interesting to see different people's perspectives of what a logo should look like for Charlottesville too.

And I just want to state that even though I support this and I think that it's you know part of the

Renaming buildings, removing statues, like it fits right into that staff, even though I support this.

And I think that it should be, I wasn't the counselor who brought this up.

So I just want to make sure that that is pretty clear, even though I think it's a good idea and I would vote for us to continue with it now.

I was not the one to bring this up to move it to the top of the list, but I still think that it's something that we,

It's my hope that you know as we're approaching budget over the next few months that might be a good time to actually ask folks to take just a look at their budget to see you know how if they can give an estimate on removal and then

You know, once the budget's adopted in April, we should be able to come back, I'm hoping, by June and give you that estimate on cost.

And again, you know, it seems like there's some interesting contests.

Okay.

Well, I only said it because I was the only one.

No, I was the one.

Yeah, I wasn't.

Just wanted to make sure that was clear.

OK.

All right, so thank you.

Thank you for that.

So we're two other business, and I know there were two items, so I'll just, I know Counselor Hill had one too, but just we received the emails.

I sent an email out last week or the week before just asking counsel if this Monday meeting date and staff, and I don't know, Mr. Blair, were you able to talk to any other staff

And so I just wanted to, I spoke to Mr. Blair earlier and Ms.

Thomas said that either a Monday or Tuesday would work best for her.

And let me back up.

I proposed, along with trying to do reports early in the day, this was something else that I thought would potentially be helpful for some of the concerns we were getting from staff about workloads and working through weekends and things like that.

I thought that this may be helpful.

And even with my conversation with Counselor Hill, when I was talking to her about it, I thought I had talked to her

um, about it before.

And she said that that email was the first time.

Um, and so it just seemed like maybe, um, it maybe it, what I thought would be helpful, maybe not, um, staff may not consider it to be as helpful right now.

I know counselors, you, um, wait in.

So just wanted to make sure, like, is that something we're just going to leave with having the council meetings on Mondays?

Cause Ms.

Thomas did say that she was working on the,

scheduled for a meeting scheduled for 2021.

And so if it was something that we were going to change before January, we would have to do it.

I mean, personally, I am incredible.

I mean, for me, it's very much about if staff found that moving it to be more helpful or not.

And if the community feels it to be more helpful or not,

I think unless there was a real benefit that staff could articulate that I'm comfortable just keeping with the Mondays.

I think that's what most people are used to.

It's a rhythm we're in.

And I understand the point about is staff working over the weekend.

I think that that mostly is for us.

Like we are the ones that probably are being the most impacted by the Monday because we get the information and we're reviewing it over the weekend and talking to each other over the weekend in preparation for that meeting.

But I'm comfortable that

That hasn't been an issue.

And I certainly think this is more of a staff question for me and what is easiest, what is most accommodating to them.

And just, just to let them all know, like we're looking at, I think we've narrowed down to Mondays or Tuesdays, because as you get later in the week, there's just a lot more conflicts and there's some standing conflicts that I think can make it more challenging later in the week.

And some of us like to just get it over with maybe in the early, maybe that's how some people feel.

So Monday, it's done.

Well, I think what Councilor Magill brought up a couple of times ago is even about sending emails, because we are often having to ask questions that staff has to chime into.

So that's it.

And so, Mr. Blair, what do you think do you want?

It just sounds like it's not, I guess,

Lightshift.

All right, Councilor Hill.

And then the other item which I have raised with several of you is looking at the rest of our meeting schedule for the remainder of the year and proposing that we would forego our December 21st meeting

Yes.

As long as there's no, we're not worried about having to pass any CARES things or anything like that, anything that would come up because that would be our last meeting of the year, right?

Well, you bring up a good point about CARES Act funding.

There is also, it's been advertised, excuse me, I'm sorry, Mayor Walker.

Okay, that would require a lot of staff support.

I guess the other question, I guess, for Mr. Blair is

Could we create a deadline for materials for that first January meeting so that people aren't agonizing over that over the holidays as if we're having that December meeting?

I'm just not sure how far in advance we can plan.

I'm just trying to avoid, I think about the holidays are between the 21st and that next meeting.

Ms.

Thomas, what do you think, since you

are the ones for getting us ready for the meetings and when staff is getting information in and what that looks like.

What would your preference be?

The schedule has already been sent out to staff about the deadline for the 21st.

Mr. Blair, what are your thoughts?

OK.

So council, what are you all thinking?

You know right now the way I am.

I want to ask every staff member that's listening what their thoughts are.

But anyway, I know that's probably not ideal to do.

I mean, I think the fourth sound, I mean, I remember last year being really stretched to, I mean, as far as my family, I mean, that's why I didn't go see my family because we started up right there after the first year.

So, I mean, I know I'm sure a lot of, I mean, school's still out then if people are traveling at all, which

I mean, I know I've just canceled all my holiday plans, but hopefully they're not traveling.

Maybe they're in the RV.

But especially with it being like a Friday, I mean,

Let's people come back after the holidays and kind of get their feet under them again and actually have taken a break.

Well, they're still probably thinking about us, but it's not preparing for a meeting.

Yeah, either.

Yeah, it sounds great.

Yeah.

Well, this one was short.

So we keep that up.

We're pretty much done.

All right, so Mr. Blair, if it's the fourth, then what do we need to do?

We'll have a motion at your December 21st meeting for you to cancel the January 4th, 2021.

All right.

All right.

If you're in the... Well, I did say I would ask every staff member on here, but you know... Yeah, and I'm glad you didn't do that.

If you're in the audience and you would like to speak to council, click the raise hand icon in the Zoom webinar or press star nine if you're on via telephone.

We have two people with their hands raised right now.

Tanisha Hudson and Andy Orban.

Tanisha, you're on the city council.

So I want to talk about Fifth Street again.

So what doesn't make sense to me, and I know Mr. Blair was thanking the Charlottesville Police Department,

but this is what doesn't make sense to me.

Chief Brackney had the audacity or her department had the audacity to put cameras up right off of 8th Street facing up towards Hardy Drive but we have no cameras on 5th Street and there's been fatalities on 5th Street.

Long before Rameen's death, long before the Brooks boy death, long before the white guy that died at the Harris Road intersection in 5th Street,

There's been accidents coming out of the shopping center on Fifth Street.

There's been numerous accidents all throughout Fifth Street, deadly ones.

No cameras at all, period.

But we have cameras in Black communities.

And then the mayor was just praising leadership in the police department saying they don't want more policing in Black neighborhoods.

But y'all throwing cameras up there, I'm not understanding.

Y'all contradict yourself so much.

on so many different things.

Put cameras on Fifth Street.

There should be some type of cameras on Fifth Street.

The tree limbs are definitely overgrown.

So when you pull it out of Bailey Road or Brookwood or whatever, I mean, the trees make it dark right there.

It's just so much, I'm just not understanding how y'all doing.

It's so dysfunctional down there.

People look out for who they want to look out for.

People praise people for doing jobs that they're doing poorly.

But then when it's somebody else, y'all ready to just cut their neck off.

And I'm going to keep coming for y'all for that.

Because y'all pick and choose who y'all want to protect.

Y'all pick and choose who y'all want to protect as long as they're your friend and they're stroking your ego or they got your back.

Shout out to Kathy Galvin for writing a letter to the editor naming things that Dr. Richardson did do because the mayor won't give him credit for doing not a damn thing.

She swear up and down the man ain't do nothing.

Like she doing all this great work out here.

You name 12 things that you've done, Mayor Walker.

Name 12 things that you've done.

Because all you do is take up for Chief Brackney.

I got a FOIA request today where they wanted to discuss in closed session

something about the state police getting the keys to those cars.

We have yet to hear about that.

We've yet to hear about that.

I wrote an email to counsel wanting to know what happened to her for violating her code of conduct.

And yes, it's a personnel issue, but y'all so transparent that you should have said something.

You didn't have to cross the personnel line, but what happened to Chief Brackney for taking a picture in her uniform with political figures?

What happened to her?

Nothing.

She can walk around there and do what she want to do.

She can threaten the woman that works in the voter registration.

She can threaten the IT people because she wants stuff done.

She can do all this stuff and get back with it because she the mayor friend.

So because she the mayor friend, her job protected.

The mayor can send memos through the city manager's office because she want to send memos out.

But then when the things get misconstrued to the public, we point blame at everybody.

Yo, y'all are so freaking dysfunctional.

$500 almost for a FOIA request that you redacted damn near every single page.

And then you still charged me $500.

You redacted almost every page, and you still charged me $500.

Y'all are ridiculous.

And y'all lucky that the media support the BS that y'all do.

and that they won't write the story right.

But I'm going to write my own story and I'm going to expose every last one of y'all.

And it's not a threat.

It's a promise.

So I just want to, because I was quiet the last time, it's not necessarily helpful to have people spreading untruth.

So I've never sent a memo from the city manager's office.

Again, I'll say, just like I said, when you have a Tea Party member and you in agreement, I'll say the same thing about you and Counselor Galvin being in agreement about something.

pretty bogus, in my opinion, from what I know, and I'm here every day.

In terms of I wasn't praising the police department, what I stated was that in terms of looking at holistic solutions,

for the neighborhoods, making sure that we're not just putting them into a police state's continuous surveillance, that it was not healthy for the neighborhood and that we shouldn't be doing it.

And it was alarming for me that the only people other than myself who was interested in ensuring that there were more holistic measures was Chief Brackney and Assistant Chief Mooney.

So that's the statement.

the statement that I made.

And I think it would be very helpful just in terms of what the work that you have said that you were interested in Ms.

Hudson and that you have been doing is that you take, again, your personal feelings out of this and get the work done.

I think that the leadership that you are advocating for

They are moved on as you stated.

They secure the bag.

I hope that you can focus your attention on getting back to the work that you deem to be so important.

instead of attempting to find fault with issues that are just not there.

So that's my comment there.

Mayor Walker, next up is Andy Orban.

Good evening.

Thanks for Mr. Duncan's presentation on Fifth Street.

I did have a few additional thoughts.

One is that we need to look a little more holistically about biking and pedestrian networks.

You know, focusing solely on cars and congestions is kind of hiding the demand that we have for people wanting to use

safe routes.

Fifth Street extended is not a safe place to walk or bike right now.

And if we had better infrastructure, there's large areas residential just south of town that a lot of people could potentially bike into town from there.

And the other point is we are also assuming that congestion will just

be the same as it always has, but with COVID changing work from home and things like that, we're also potentially looking at commuting patterns changing.

And so we do have to think in a bigger picture, what environmental concerns and things like that we have to try to find ways to get people out of cars and to focus on just getting the most volume of cars through on a road is just long-term.

Not the best direction.

So I'd really like to make sure we keep focusing on ways to improve our biking and pedestrian infrastructure in town, even if it causes disruption of some of the commuting by car.

We have two additional hands raised.

First, we'll go to Nancy Carpenter, who will be followed by Joan Halbiston.

Thank you and good evening.

First of all, I wanna say I commend you for the bold step in utilizing funds to hopefully give payments to some of the city employees that have been adversely affected by the pandemic.

I just wish our federal government would take a page from your book and do something on a more national level to decrease this trauma that we're all going through.

Secondly, I do agree Fifth Street sucks.

as a road and I do recall talking to an older member of this community who said that when they were younger when that road was still two lanes that that particular curve where so many fatalities have happened used to have a nickname of death curve.

I think lots of communities throughout you know states and whatever have roads that have these

you know descriptors on them and I don't think that whatever has been done to widen the road has you know ameliorated any of that.

And thirdly I just wanted to say I know you've got a little big plate lots of things going on but please don't forget that the General Assembly enacted legislation this last time regarding PCRBs and additional powers that CRBs are

not mandated to have, but are enabled to have.

I know that Mr. Payne will work hard with trying to get a work session together with the Commission and Council to decide how deep those new powers will go.

I'm hoping that it's a 100% buy-in on all of the

enabled powers that the GA gave us and I know there's more work to do when they go back in January and hopefully we can get together because in January, July 2021 is when the law changes and would love to be able to have this all done and wrapped up and tidy for your June meeting so it can be enacted and ready to go as we work under still the ordinance that was in November 2019.

Next up is Joan Alveston.

Joan, you're on with council.

Thank you.

I would like to repeat my request that the site triangles at the intersection of Harris Road and Fifth Street be examined.

There was no discussion about that this evening, and there would be more accidents if drivers did not avoid collisions there.

I've started taking a tally of how many times I've had to come to a full stop in the middle of the intersection to allow someone to cross in front of me.

I took a picture while my daughter was driving this afternoon, looking south at that intersection,

If you look there, you see the guardrail.

You don't see upcoming cars.

I'm sure that the person who was hit coming out of Willoughby by the young man who was killed, who ran that red light during daylight hours in June, June, July, I'm sure that they would have stopped if they could have seen him coming.

You can't see at that intersection.

If you're going to improve that intersection, the visibility has to be improved.

We have to have tools to drive defensively.

Thank you.

Mayor Walker, there are no other hands raised.

Oh, we do have another one.

Ms.

Rose, you're back on with council.

I'm sorry.

I failed to access when I was talking the first time.

You know, when you go down Fifth Street, you know, there's a pattern of trees going all the way down.

And then when you, I know city and county council are different, but then when you get to the bridge going into the county, they don't have any trees up.

Is there a reason why the city

has to have so many trees lined up along that corridor, the straight stretch to where the accidents or the young people are hitting trees and everything.

I think it's something that I'd want to wait for the next city manager response.

One thing about that is we obviously, I know at your last meeting, I believe we talked about tree canopy and that I do think there's probably gonna be some interplay between traffic safety and the tree canopy issues that the council also is talking about.

And I think that two of the accidents, one was I think the tree further up, but I can see the, you know, in that median area, there were two.

Then the only other thing was just around the site triangles.

OK.

Hi, Mr. Duncan.

Also, I was just curious to know about that, because there seems to be, I drive that road on a daily basis.

So I haven't counted the number of trees, but there are quite many trees.

Is that really?

necessary.

And I also think with talking to Captain Durette, he once mentioned to me that the trees were placed there maybe to keep southbound vehicles from crossing over to northbound to the other side, maybe.

I don't know if the trees are placed there for that reason.

Yeah, I mean, trees in general are put in more for beautification and for the benefits of, you know,

reducing temperature pavements, you know, from an environmental standpoint.

Um, and also it, it visually narrows the roadway.

So if you didn't have those trees there, what already feels like a wide roadway, we would feel even wider.

Um, you know, those are kind of the two reasons that the trees are put inside of a medium like that.

Have you driven into Albemarle County over the bridge before, Mr. Duncan?

I have.

Do you see how when you cross that bridge, you might see like one little tree, but like the opening of that roadway is very wide, but you don't see any trees.

Like you don't really have any fatalities down that end of the road, but I know city and county are two different things.

Yeah, I understand what you're saying.

I think there's just a trade-off in that you also probably have higher speeds south of the city as well.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yep.

OK.

If you want me, I can respond to the sight distance triangle as well.

Normally at signalized intersections, the sight distance triangles are not nearly as important just because you're supposed to be controlled by the signal itself.

And in many cases, one of the warrants for

For the signal, it is sight distance.

So when you have reduced sight distance, you want the signal there to tell the driver when it is safe or not safe to go through that intersection.

So I don't disagree that having better sight distance there would be better, but I'm not exactly sure how

Thank you.

Is there the possibility of preventing the right turn on red?

No, we can do that.

But similar to the slide I showed you with the backup, where if you start removing the right turn on red, you decrease the capacity of the intersection and will

You lead to further congestion there.

Okay.

Yeah, I know I have, um, you know, two, um,

close friend and a family member who lives in there and that is usually from the what I have you know heard you know from them and one has lived there a very long time that that right on red turn especially at you know busy times are you know not part of the problem because there's also the you know trying to turn I think

and go towards the Wegmans and stuff.

That may be an issue.

Yeah, I think, I mean, one of the issues that we, that had been brought up in the past that we tried to address was just the right turning vehicles out of Willoughby and the left turning vehicles from Harris.

You know, the left turning vehicles from Harris, a lot of times would get into the outside lane and try and conflict with the, you know, the right turning vehicles.

So we did install some dashed markings through.

The intersection to try and keep those vehicles in that outside lane.

But yeah, I mean, putting a no turn on red coming out of Willoughby is not necessarily off the table.

OK.

One more.

Don Gathers, you're on the city council.

Excuse me.

Good evening, council.

I appreciate you all taking up the banner of trying to solve this issue because it's not only a fatality issue, but also an issue of non-fatal accidents that go on along that corridor.

And dare I get in trouble with the treaty commission, but

possibly removing some of the trees might be the best solution and adding in some old fashioned gas lights, I don't know, six, eight foot tall gas lights to help with the lighting along the way and then that would help the beautification along the corridor as well.

As far as the potential congestion, if we stop the right turn on red, maybe a better solution would be to restrict the times

that the turn is allowed.

But obviously you're aware that something's got to be done.

And I think that any and everyone would rather deal with the congestion than the continued accidents that we hear about so frequently in and along that corridor.

Thank you.

All right.

Thank you.

I wouldn't want to end before 10.

Why not?

It's a joke.

Have a good one.