City Council Special Meeting (Reports)   11/16/2020

All right, I call this meeting to order, and I'll turn it over to Mr. Blair.

Ms.

Mayor Walker?

Present.

Vice Mayor Magill?

Here.

Councilor Hill?

All right, thank you.

Well, thank you, Mayor Walker.

And it's obviously just for public's awareness, the council wants to try something a little different for right now in terms of reports and understanding that the community has had a

has certainly made some comments about the length of meetings as well as staff and counselors.

So this is an attempt that for the council to receive reports at four o'clock on Mondays, council's gonna try something new and receive its reports at this time rather than at this regularly scheduled business meeting at 6.30.

Kicking off our inaugural report during this four o'clock

session will be the Food Justice Equity Initiative and their report to council.

The one thing I would like to say is that the city, we are appreciative of the work that they've done for us.

I know Ms.

Demick is here as well from a staff perspective, but I'd like to turn it over to Ms.

Bingham at this time and start their presentation.

Thank you, Mr. Blair.

And Jeanette is here as well.

I do know that we appreciate this partnership and we actually had set out to have Kaki and Missy kind of open us up.

So I don't know if we still want it to go with that.

Sure, I can do that.

Good afternoon, everybody, and council and mayor.

Thank you for this opportunity to kind of come together, not only in an earlier timeframe, but just to get together and celebrate the investment of the city and the work that Jeanette and Chantelle have done through the food equity initiative.

I've been the city liaison to the food equity initiative for the last two years.

To recap, we were here about a year ago to deliver a report on year one.

and that year was sort of characterized by this group leveraging relationships and investing in the community and engaging with experts, community members, planning teams to come together and incorporate all of the feedback that we've gotten from several activities, including map to health, local food, local places and others to sort of set an action plan in motion.

And that's very much what

Year two has been at this time last year council allocated $155,000 to support year two and so this year has been about Chantelle and Jeanette and their work transitioning from the nebulous sort of concept around what system change can really look like and transitioning it into the implementation phase of many of the action items that they outlined in year one.

I

am consistently floored by the level of meticulous data that they collect all along the way.

They're about to give you a robust presentation of not only what they've been doing, but what they've gleaned from that learning and what they've been doing.

And I think this year is marked by the way that they were able to pivot quickly and respond to the emergency food needs

and our community based on COVID-19.

And they were able to do that work through the city's investment in the food equity initiative altogether.

Thank you, Misty.

Brian, do you have our slides ready?

Awesome.

So thank you for letting us be here.

I will say, I know that the report we sent y'all was quite long.

We have done a lot of work.

And to be honest with you all, we just didn't know how to succinctly get it down without giving space for everybody to have been doing all the things that have happened.

And this year, as we said before, is really focused on that first year of us coming together with a strategic review and action plan for the City Council's Food Equity Initiative.

And so all of the stuff that you're going to see here is actions that we've put in place and have actually done to uplift a lot of that came out from that first year.

You go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

So, overarchingly, the City Council's Food Equity Initiative, we took on two things because COVID happened in our community and we also wanted to

continue to do the work that was laid out.

So this first column one through three is really how the Justice Network partners pivoted for the city's response to COVID-19, specifically looking at the food security impacts on our community.

We were able to leverage a lot of those solid partnerships from our previous year of working together with nonprofits, city departments, and community members, as well as donors to pivot our operations and respond.

A lot of that helped us to strengthen our local government's ability to support our low income communities of color during this time.

We had a process where CACI obviously kind of was one of those folks in the EOC, the Emergency Operations Center, that we reported to on a monthly basis biweekly at the beginning with some reports that they were doing and then as time

went on that kind of decrease.

But that was all focused on creating system and processes to support our residents during this time during the recovery period.

And then we also heightened that conversation and practices around emergency food relief.

I think during this time, people got the idea that direct food support is what food equity is about.

It's definitely a piece of it.

We have to be able to respond in emergencies.

but really it shouldn't distract against those long-term efforts that we're building in with the city comprehensive plan, the strategic plan we're trying to do.

All the work that residents said before COVID that they wanted to see happen in terms of healthy school meals, transportation being fixed, things like that.

Those are what we mean when we say long-term food equity strategies.

And so just being able to hold space for both of them.

The three through seven that you see on the side is those are our long-term strategies that we continue to support.

That's the stuff that you all saw at the last report to city council for the food equity initiative.

And what we continue to do was hard to do both, but it's important that we're able to, if we really want to see that long-term change.

Yeah, and in the detailed report that we submitted, the first several pages of tables address these in terms of having the impact numbers for each of these areas and what we've measured.

So just hiding the conversation and the practices around the difference between emergency food relief efforts and what food equity is, elevating that cross-sector understanding of community planning around affordable housing, climate change, food security, et cetera.

Sorry, I have someone knocking at my door.

And building the self-sufficient citizens across all ages.

So working on that piece.

As you know, a big goal for us is ensuring that resident and youth voice is central, both to the city planning process and to our work.

So hosting small groups with the consulting team to engage partners.

We did a lot of on the ground surveys for the comprehensive plan using what the

Seville Plans Together team had done and getting feedback at our community markets, et cetera, to make sure that that voice was included.

And then, as many of you know, because some of you are engaged, we have an upcoming racial equity training.

This was initially planned for in-person for this fall and shifted to online.

On Thursday, we'll have our Uprooting Racism training with Soul Fire Farm.

And we have about 140 folks signed up for that.

It's increased since we did this.

And then finally, Chantal and I are both involved in various regional or statewide efforts that are integrating, including Cultivate Charlottesville and the City of Charlottesville was profiled in the Virginia Road to Map to End Hunger.

The state is looking to create coalitions, regional coalitions to end hunger in various areas, and they utilized Cultivate Charlottesville and the work in Richmond around the Food Justice Network

to as examples of how that might look.

Thanks, Brian.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

And as we're going through these, if counsel

If you all have questions, please feel free to ask.

I know there are a lot of new counselors besides Mayor Walker and Counselor Hill.

Just to give you all a background on what brought us together in the first place, we continue to have these slides.

I'm sure you all know that Charlottesville continues to have a food insecurity issue.

And so this is really what brought us together in 2018.

It continues to be the center of our work

and getting our food insecurity down.

Yeah, in 2018, City Council directed the Health Department and city staff to research this work.

And because the Health Department was a part of the Food Justice Network that provided a really great avenue for us to kind of dig a little bit deeper.

And this is just a background, this number has changed since COVID.

But prior to that, you can see it's about one in six Charlottesville residents, 16.7% food insecure.

And our goal is to get that down to 6% by 2020.

Didn't really happen, but there's a lot of things going on that I think are really promising that we could see a huge drop in some years coming forward.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

Disparities in Charlottesville youth, again, you probably already know this work.

But for those who don't know, just a refresher that nearly 37% of Charlottesville third and fifth graders are classified as overweight or obese.

And this number is about one in two for African American youth.

And we already know that people with low and economic resources and people of color in Charlottesville suffer disproportionately higher rates of diet related illnesses.

And so when we're talking about food equity, we're really talking about racial equity in Charlottesville and really tackling those systemic barriers.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

All right.

And so here's our food equity definition for those.

It's an outcome that we're trying to get to, right, where all residents have equal opportunity to acquire, own, profit, and share.

Good food in our Charlottesville community.

And that meets our nutritional and cultural needs.

So that includes restaurant people that are in the restaurant industry.

It includes grocery retailers.

It includes farmers markets and those who are able to sell goods there.

It's more than just being a consumer.

It's about full active participation in our food system and that being an economic force within our community.

to really drive prosperity and further equity.

Jeanette, do you want to take this slide really quickly?

And this is mostly for the newer folks.

This is the Charlottesville Food Justice Network's equity framework, and it comes out of a larger framework at a national scale called Whole Measures that looks at what it takes to create a healthy and just food system.

And the various values squares speak to the idea that

Food equity, food systems work is not isolated.

It's integrated with all with spots all along the food system, which is what initially drew us together as a network that we have people working with thriving local economies, vibrant farms, culture and identity.

All of these things intersect with what it takes to create a healthy and just community.

And these are some of the practices that we've outlined.

So this is just an opportunity to revisit and share our framework with you.

So

Next slide.

All right.

So these are just some photographs from last year.

To just get other counselors, I know that Sena counselor Magill was at local food, local places.

And these are the really those grassroots community gatherings that we held in the first year.

to really hear what folks wanted to see in the food equity initiative.

And that's what we did in year two.

You can go ahead and go to the next one.

So these are the strategies that were uplifted through not only last year, but the years prior on what Charlottesville needs to be focusing on in terms of strategies.

You'll notice that one is grayed out, the transportation, and that is also within the longer report

and you'll see that we've been keeping track of all the strategies and actions that we've done.

Transportation is one that we just did not have, we didn't have time to get to, capacity to get to this year round, just to speak it out loud.

But other than that, affordable housing, we've made a lot of efforts there, you'll see in the report.

The affordable housing came up as a serious cost burden in Charlottesville.

We already know that people's budgets are strained.

This includes their family's grocery and food budgets.

So it is a strategy of ours to strategically support affordable housing development in Charlottesville.

And really working with housing developers, the ones that are key to us are

CRHA and Piedmont Housing Alliance as well as Habitat are those three core affordable housing organizations we've been working with to really ensure that food equity is a part of that strategy.

Urban agriculture also came up over those years and understanding that cultivating food equity in our community is something that has come from the ground up.

A lot of folks have started to

way before I was a blink in Charlottesville's eye in 2007 with QCC Farms and the work that Karen Washington has done.

Mayor Walker, I know you were a part of that early on strategies that residents found for themselves.

And so really supporting that work through redevelopment has been a core strategy within the Food Justice Network and Food Equity Initiative.

and then as well as healthy school foods.

The prior slide is saying the majority of Charlottesville students in our public schools are at risk of food insecurity.

We already know that 55% overall of our Charlottesville public school students qualify for pre and reduced lunch.

And in some of those schools, it's up to 85%.

So if kids are receiving two out of three meals a day from CCS,

It's important that we're strategically supporting them through this time with COVID, but also long term.

It's been a strategy of ours to make sure that those school meals are full and have youth choice in it.

It's not just something that's coming from the top down, but youth are deeply engaged in seeing the transformation of their school program.

And then the last one, a neighborhood food access, which kind of confuses people from time to time.

But this one was brought out because Charlottesville's neighborhoods don't develop equitably.

Some neighborhoods have better food access than others.

And so being able to work with neighborhood development services from a neighborhood planning perspective, right, to really ensure that each neighborhood looks the same in Charlottesville and has the same access to food,

has the same access to transportation to get where they need to go, their jobs, all those types of things.

I just wanted to add a little bit.

As Chantel mentioned, we're working at different levels with each of these.

And when I say we, it's not just Cultivate, also many partners.

So for example, the affordable housing piece, we're more of a secondary partner.

FAR and many other organizations are more of the primary partners with that.

The Healthy School Foods Initiative, you all might have heard recently about the award from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation for the Shaping Futures grant.

So what we did was through grassroots organizing with students and families created a five year plan and working very closely with the nutrition department at the school to transition 40% of the meals into healthy, fresh from scratch food.

And it's a very detailed plan.

And then we have funding from

the federal with a USDA Community Food Project grant, the state with a Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth grant, and then locally with this Shaping Futures grant and its five-year project.

Now, we've been off track a little bit this year.

We've redirected some of our funds.

So a good portion of that five year, $100,000 a year grant from CACF goes directly to Charlottesville City Schools to buy equipment.

So for example, we started by buying knives and cutting boards just so that they could have more fresh food and have the resources to do that.

With the switch to COVID, we ended up purchasing

Coolers so that the school could more easily deliver their foods.

We help purchase a new oven at Johnson because they've been doing the majority of the cooking.

So that's like a very detailed project.

Awesome.

Thanks, Jeanette.

I'm really trying to pass through this.

So you can get to the next slide, Brian, just some more photographs.

And then we can start on the implement, the investing and implementation.

So this year, investing in the implementation of the Food Equity Initiative really started

Early on, so that bottom photograph is us at the Community Food Projects last year presenting in December.

You'll see the photograph of Food Justice Network community advocates and BAR taking a trip to see a co-op in Harrisonburg together.

And then there was also the pivot to some meal programming that we've talked about a little bit before for COVID.

So just some views from this year.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide, which is our timeline.

So here's a high-level timeline of everything that has gone on.

There's way more activities in the packet.

But for you all to just see really quickly, we started in October.

In February, gathering, that's usually the time period where we're writing grants.

This year was a little bit different because everybody was with us from the year before.

So we were able to hit the ground running with writing a couple of really key grants to support really implementing the stuff that residents wanted to see.

And so Jeanette already referenced the half a million dollar CACF grant.

This is also the period in time where we worked with CRHA and Riverbend Development.

for that $2 million Vibrant Communities Initiative grant, which we ended up winning at the state level.

We're also meeting with the comprehensive plan consultants to start introducing this idea.

This is pretty early on.

We weren't originally on the steering committee for the comprehensive plan consultants, but through Alex and a couple others, we were able to meet with them and they ended up adding us to the steering committee.

and then we were also supporting our youth and community advocates as they were just exploring and really getting deep into this work.

Going to present in Georgia at a food systems conference and also, you know, FAR, the Community Advocates Co-op Grocery Store.

I think FAR also took another trip to Durham, North Carolina that year as well and visited a co-op.

In March, that was kind of when we had planned for

More engagement, but then COVID really hit.

So we were pivoting a bit during that time as well.

You can see some of the stuff that the Food Justice Network organizations did in terms of responding.

One of those key things was setting up a steering committee for the World Central Kitchen Frontline Foods restaurant initiative.

And our steering committee really was focused on equitable governance of this

initiative, which kind of looked like it was coming from the outside at the beginning.

We really wanted to ensure that specifically our black and brown restaurant owners had access to, you know, a specific initiative that would help them during this time.

And we were able to do that through this steering committee.

We also, like I said, we had proposed to launch our city meetings.

That ended up being something different.

Like I said, the steering committee did have folks from the city.

So Jason Ness from the Office of Economic Development was a part of that steering committee.

We had folks from Thomas Jefferson Health District was a part of the food line steering committee, but we weren't able to necessarily kick off our

You know, long term food equity meetings with city staff as we did last year.

And then we're also having conversations on community testing events, and designing those with with with community feedback.

Which, you know, I do want to give a shout out to Mayor Walker, who brought us into that conversation early on, which we were able to develop, start working developing things.

Kaki

also was really huge with the community testing events and bringing us into the picture as well.

So I don't think we would have been there if it weren't for Khaki and Mayor Walker being able to let us know what was going on and getting us on those phone calls.

And then April, you can see that we're continuing to do that COVID response.

The blue is the city departments if you all need

help kind of going through this.

The purple writing is the youth and resident actions that were being taken.

And then the orange up top is what the Food Justice Network is doing.

And black is what we're all doing.

May, again, a lot of that same work.

We've highlighted that we were also working with CCS in the school meals and really integrating community feedback mechanisms into that.

through our community advocates program.

We also had community advocates working with those community meal distributions.

So people not just coming in and saying, hey, your community wants food, but really having folks that are on the ground that are telling us where to go or specifically telling Frontline Foods where to go and where the community really needs meals and being in a collaboration with them.

And then June through August,

Again, COVID stuff, but we're starting to transition a lot of those COVID wraparound services that were developed to city and health department partners.

And for those of you all who don't know specifically what the COVID wraparound services were that the Food Justice Network developed, we did that in collaboration with the community testing events.

And the COVID wraparound services

allows residents that are testing positive with COVID that need support to not only get prepared meals, they get shelf-stable food for two weeks worth delivered to them.

They have access to be rehoused potentially if they need a hotel space, and that's done through DHS in the city.

They have access to be able to get medication support, and that's done through Seaville Community Cares,

that collaboration.

Residents also have access to some financial support just in case they're not able to go to work during that time and they need help paying their bills.

Originally that was supported through the Equity Center.

And then we were able to wrap that around again to the city's financial services and those hotlines.

And the Food Justice Network through this work is just providing a lot of direct coordination of all these partners.

Everything is housed at the Salvation Army.

And there's dispatches from volunteers that go out.

Oh, I also forgot to mention that UVA Health also gives PPE.

So folks that are needing masks, face shields, things like that, sanitation, things, they're also getting

from those dispatches.

So it's a full wraparound model just to ensure that our residents can shelter in place or not shelter in place, isolate for two weeks at a time.

All right, Jeanette, do you want to take the next slide?

I mentioned a little bit before about how we focus on those different five areas.

And so this talks about the chapter champion groups.

So for example, around healthy school foods,

Local Food Hub, PB&J Fund, Charlottesville City Schools, City School or Garden work together to reach out to their stakeholders, to their participants, to glean feedback and then to move towards action.

Urban Ag is the same with like the New Root, IRC New Roots, the Urban Ag Collective.

different groups and then the same with affordable housing.

So that's how we've kind of been organized the various organizations and grassroots group to focus on different chapters of the core focal areas for the work.

All of this is driven by youth and community leadership and both in making decisions and giving advice.

Do you think I need to say more about that Chantelle?

I think y'all know about our youth leadership program, the youth food justice interns and the Tammy Wright

leads the community advocates program down here on the bottom right.

And then the picture on the top is the youth doing a workshop in Savannah, Georgia last year when we went to the conference.

Establishing equity and inclusion indicators as we go along.

Chantel mentioned that, how we did that with frontline foods, how it made that important, and then focused on the comprehensive plan.

So those are the four core ways

of Advancing This Work, the four core strategies that we're engaged in.

Next slide.

These are some pictures of our youth.

Last year, we were able to give you in person their food justice leadership cards.

And we'd be happy to send those to anyone that's interested.

They did them again this year.

So we had 10 interns.

Given that they weren't able to go to school, we extended the program through the school year.

So they're currently still working twice a week.

We maintain social distancing.

They're working in the gardens as well as working with Carlton Jones on taste testing and recipe development, as well as continuing to learn about food justice and food equity.

We recently toured the Ivy Creek Farm to learn a lot about the Carr and Greer families.

We have a group of black and brown farmers that have been providing insight into how we can

expand our food system to include support for black and brown farmers.

And the youth are doing interviews with them to do profiles.

So they're an amazing aspect of our program work.

And we'll move towards wrapping it up really quickly.

Oh, I forgot this slide.

This is Audrey Oliver, who you all know.

Again, just bringing Community Voice into this work.

I really like this quote that she shared, because it gets to the nitty gritty of, you know, you can have an aspiration, but this is really what it looks like.

And she's just sharing about her experience going through these co-op grocery stores, and what it really needs to look like in Charlottesville.

So I drew saying in the co-op grocery store as far visited,

The prices weren't where they needed to be for our residents, so when it comes to building an affordable grocery store, it's something our community needs, but we have to be creative, and I don't see why it can't happen.

If we have programs distributing good local produce to residents for free, if it's something many of us have grown up with, then I believe it's possible.

So that's Audrey Oliver on the co-ops.

We do continue to push for that.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

to wrap us up.

These are some high-level achievements that we pulled out of the report.

The 20 equity and inclusion indicators for the five sectors, you all will see.

If you had time to look through the report, there are definitions between equity and inclusion that we hope you all were able to read and understand.

But really quickly, when we talk about equity indicator, we're thinking about concrete assets that we're building for our community.

We're talking about things that are connected to wealth building.

And then with inclusion, we're really thinking about what are our processes that we have when we're bringing folks together.

We only could really highlight that in terms of the number, but that's really also like, do people feel like they can share in a certain space as well?

So there's a lot of soft strategies around inclusion.

Out of the 32 city department recommendations, 21 of them are already underway with being implemented.

And you'll see in the longer report that the city's departments have submitted their review of what they're up to.

So you can read through each department in their profile pages.

Here are some highlights from money that we've been able to get by writing and collaboration with folks, which is really important.

And then more than the partners that were involved in supporting implementation as well as

writing the different grants and things like that.

You can go ahead and go to the next slide, Brian.

So here's a quick overview of the budget and what you all can expect from next year.

So we're going to continue to do our COVID-19 response.

You'll continue to see community leadership through our advocates program as well as a youth food justice interns.

And as our world opens back up, we'll be doing more heavy engagement with the community.

As always, we'll continue to work with city departments on the implementation items.

Some of those key things right now around urban agriculture in the parks.

So you may see coming up soon a request from Parks and Rec around how we can better use parks space for urban agriculture.

We're also continuing to implement the local food, local places action plan.

We'll continue to work with the city comprehensive planning process on food equity, which right now it does.

from our engagement.

And then we're also going to continue to raise funds for project implementation.

So the idea of a food equity fund really came up, especially as we were kind of hustling to get more grants to do this work.

You have a large community feedback session where you're asking people what they want to see.

And now we're moving into implementing that work and it needs funding.

Being able to get some creative strategies for our city to really uphold CCS mill transformation, work with FAR and CRHA and other housing developers around a potential community-owned grocery store.

Let me go through the fun.

Okay, so I'll just go over the money quickly.

On the next slide, you'll see the budget for this for the past year that we're doing this report on from October 2019 to September 2020.

This is how we spent the funds you'll see in the third column there.

And just to clarify, so we're actually in the first time the city council gave us funding, it was like for a partial year, kind of our pilot year.

So then we went

2019 to 2020 was the second year of the food equity initiative and the first year of our three year match program.

So that's the funding that you just see here.

And then the next slide looks at our current budget that we're in for fiscal year 21.

Oh, sorry, maybe it's the one after this.

So as I mentioned, the investment that we have, I'm sorry, that should be fiscal year 20 to 23.

We have a three-year grant, USDA Community Food Projects grant, and then there was a one-year EPA Environmental Justice grant and a three-year Virginia Foundation for Healthy Youth grant for $30,000.

And so the city has been matching that for year one.

That's how the breakout was.

And then year two to four, this is the breakout.

And then this is the fiscal year 21 budget that we're in right now, right here in these last few columns.

and as it has been in the past, the majority of our funds are for staff.

Our work is really people driven, not only community members through our community advocates, the youth interns and our staff.

Next slide.

And that's it.

We'd love to take questions if you all have any.

Well, thank you.

for sharing the report with us, Jeanette and Chinto and Misty.

So really, you know, thorough, detailed as usual.

So, you know, I said before that I really appreciate that.

First, I'd like to thank you all for the work that you're doing.

That's very necessary.

And I wish it wasn't, but it is.

I know you help a lot of people.

And one of the things I'm curious about in mentioning with talking to Parks and Recs Department, has there been any exploration of urban food forests?

Yeah, I mean, I think Chris Jensen was really interested in that.

At one point, we talked about potentially doing some activities along some of the pathways.

I know we're talking with the

I don't know if the Botanical Garden has a new name or not yet, but we're talking, they're gonna potentially put in a food forest demonstration garden there.

But beyond that, there hasn't been much more discussion.

We are working, if you don't already know this, we are working with Albemarle and city school districts to launch a new

Farm plot at KTEC to make up for the space that we're losing at Friendship Court.

It might just be an interim space, but they have land behind them.

And so we did a presentation to the board and we're currently in that proposal period of getting approval and might potentially put chickens and bees there so that the vet students could work with them.

Are there any other questions or comments?

I'll just reiterate, as with last year, this really thorough summary of a tremendous amount of work that's been done.

Even just at a high level, I'm curious,

Especially now that we're underway updating our comprehensive plan, what kind of things you all would see that could be valuable to have incorporated into that plan?

You're on the steering committee.

Sure, that's a really great question, Michael.

I think, you know, at a high level, we need, in general, a lot of more community wealth building strategies.

So, and that relates to, obviously, the food system.

It also can relate to housing, if you're talking about home ownership and things like that.

So I'm one of those, I think when we talk about strategies that work in a lot of different sectors, we're really wanting to support those strategies that can have a lot of wins for all of us, especially when we're thinking about our strategies where transportation and affordable housing is a part of a food justice strategy as well.

So

Yes, it is really, really good to have targeted language.

We do want to see more targeted language about our food system and really thinking about food economies and things like that, but also being able to take a step back and see that, you know, the more general strategies are also good as well.

I think we're more, at least with the Food Equity Initiative implementation, it was helpful to have organizations that are directly linked to

a strategy or something we wanted to see.

So I know that report was really long and thorough.

To be honest with you guys, it's mostly like how we coordinate.

And so we probably could have done a little bit of work with like, how can you put this into a report rather than sending y'all our coordination pages between all the things.

But I think it's helpful to have that

We're able to see what you mean by a community wealth strategy when you have an organization that's attached to it.

Otherwise it's kind of like, okay, what does that mean?

And who holds it and who implements it?

And I think that's what the steering or the consultants are trying to do.

It feels like Charlottesville, we come up with a lot of plans and then no one holds it and no one implements it.

And that's just, that feels like lip service sometimes if I'm just being candid.

I have one question I had.

I realized that I was thinking about this.

In our comprehensive plan discussions, we've talked about our desire to have measurements of the success of our various programs.

What kinds of measurements do you think would be appropriate for your efforts?

Yeah, so if you guys go through the report, you'll see all the metrics there.

We were pretty clear about if we think it's good, you'll see it highlighted as green.

If we think it's like kind of okay, it's yellow, or if there was no real way to measure it this year, it might be grayed out.

And then obviously if we're not doing so well and that metric gets red.

So that's definitely in each sector, you'll see that.

I know off the top of my head, urban agriculture, for example, has some red in it.

We don't feel really comfortable about how we're doing with land acquisition.

Jeanette shared that there's a lot of things in the works, but you know, if it's not final, we're not going to count it until it's final.

Don't want to count our eggs before they hatch.

So there's a lot of different things that are happening with urban ag.

The affordable housing sector looks pretty good for us.

That's the first time we were moving that way.

And it's because we're responding to the community.

So there's a lot of green indicators there.

So just to help clarify, pages two through eight are really like outputs, right?

So they're speaking to, we told you we would do these certain goals and activities.

And those first pages comment on what we accomplished that we said we were going to do.

So those are mostly outputs.

And then what Chantal is referring to are, there's like the intro page and then pages six and on.

You'll see, well, I guess the table starts on page 12.

with the attachments.

So that's what she's talking about in terms of the red and green areas.

What I was seeing was, I think on, it's on page 28, according to one way of denominating it, page 41 of our packet, there's some red and green indicators.

but I don't really see any values attached to them except in terms, oh, I see a few more, I guess, on the food response section on what's that page 47 or 34.

Okay, that's a little bit more helpful.

And to follow up, Michael, with your question about, Councilor Payne, about a policy platform at our next mid-year report or even before then,

we could send a more abbreviated like one or two pager of some of the core policies that are coming out just to bring them to the top.

Thank you.

I want to say when the governor was presenting the roadmap to end hunger,

He really expressed his, I don't know if any of you saw that, but he expressed his appreciation to Charlottesville City Council for supporting this effort, for having this type of partnership with our organization.

And it's innovative and different.

And just one question for me, cause we really, well, I personally was a little bit nervous about

The report and the formatting, because you all are reading so many reports.

If you have feedback for us about length or what you would really want to see, that would be helpful.

As Jeannette explained, like there's a lot of outputs and that's because that's how the memo was written.

So we feel like we have to hold ourselves to what

We said we were going to do in the memo and what you all want to see, but then there's just a whole other background of how it really works.

You know, it really did help me understand and feel like I understood a little more than the typical, you know, our memo and report.

And I would concur.

I think the more detail we receive, at least for me and I imagine for everyone, it's just helpful to give us a better sense of what this work means concretely and what it actually means to get from point A to point B and kind of doing this work and building different things.

Well, thank you all.

Mr. Blair.

Thank you, Mayor Walker.

And also, again, want to want to express our thanks for the Food Justice Equity Initiative.

And the next report will be from Mr. Davidson.

All right, thank you, Mr. Blair.

Brian, if you go ahead and put the presentation up, please.

Okay, so this afternoon, we're going to continue to provide you with our monthly snapshot of the revenues and expenses for the general fund and the utility funds, as well as how we progressed through the approved CARES funds.

These slides are, again, just

The highlights of the report, more detailed information is in the report that we gave to you and what's posted online.

First two slides are going to be a repeat of the information we shared with you last month.

There are a few areas that are on the next slide that we updated, but we wanted to again show you the revised projections and what we're working with.

last month we showed approximately 4.5 and now we're looking at about 4.9 million dollar decrease which is about two and a half percent reduction from our original budget and i want to actually first of all i want to start by thanking the revenue team who works on this many many hours the commissioner of revenue the treasurer director of economic development economic development staff city assessor director of finance

budget staff, city manager, deputy city managers.

We're meeting at least every other week and sometimes more often to work through these things.

And I just wanted to give a huge thank you to all of them and all the work they put into above and beyond where we asked them.

That being said, this group is always monitoring these revenues and we're always looking at it.

And these are kind of the, some of the larger reductions we were looking at last time.

One thing I did want to point out was

On the meals tax, there's approximately $400,000 of this meals tax decrease that is related to the portion that is transferred to the debt service fund, and there's a corresponding decrease in the expenditure related to that one.

We had talked about that and discussed that at the work session this past Thursday, but I wanted to point out that of that total two million, it wasn't two million plus an additional 400,000 that was related to debt, that $400,000 is captured in that $2 million figure, $2 million reduction that we achieved.

I just wanted to clarify on that one.

Brian, you can go ahead to the next slide.

So this slide, again, most of these are a repeat of what we had seen in the previous month.

The last three are additional items, additional reductions.

We had told you, and there are additional changes, I should say.

We told you we were going to come with these changes at a quarterly basis.

Given the amounts of these overall changes, we felt that it was best to go ahead and do these now and let you see these and let you know what we were thinking, what we were anticipating with these items.

Public Service Corporation, about an $83,000 increase.

That was our initial projection.

We're going to skip parking real quick and go to the transfer to the CIP.

These are the mall vendor fees.

This is based on the

The revenue we get in from the mall vendor fees and based on the suspended payments and the reduced payments that we had for the mall vendor fees, this item is slightly reduced than from what we had in the original budget.

But like the debt service piece, there's a corresponding expenditure related to this.

So this will also see a corresponding expenditure decrease.

These were used for a CIP project to help with mall infrastructure, benches, brickwork, things of that nature.

And so there'll be a slight decrease in the expenditure for this.

The final one I wanted to point out and the largest decrease that is of our new decreases is the transfer from the parking fund.

There's several factors that led to this and Chris Ingalls here to provide more details if necessary.

But basically due to the usage of the garage, the temporary suspension of payments for the monthly parkers, various other things led to this overall decrease in what we would see as the revenue that was being transferred back from the parking fund to the general fund.

As some of you, some of your counselors who were on council when we started this, we were always

planning to wean the general fund off of the parking revenues.

These were all once in the general fund and moved to the parking fund.

And so we had to transfer back to slowly wean the general fund off of those revenues until eventually we got down to zero.

So this is just speeding that up for us a little bit.

Okay, Brian, you can move on to the next slide.

These are the,

Five major revenues we talk about each month and I realized that I had told you I would separate out real estate and personal property for this month that I neglected to do that, but I make sure I get that changed for next month.

Wanted to point out a couple things.

with where we are.

The year-to-date projected, these are based on our actual projections, our original projections, I should say.

And one thing we wanted to talk to council about is as we've shown you for the last two months, these revised projections about removing this year-to-date projected column from the reports, because we're no longer really using this as our baseline.

Our revised projections truly are our baseline.

So in looking at those,

You know, we will continue to have the, we didn't want to pull this column and remove this from the report without first informing council that that's something we were looking at to, to make this report a little less confusing and a little more streamlined, but something that we would like to do to be able to pull that out, because we really are looking at the percent of the budget that's being collected on an annual basis, as opposed to these year to date projections now, because we've made these four, almost $5 million worth of revised projections on this.

That was one thing that I would like to bring up, and if there's no objections from council, look at slightly altering the report that we send you next month.

So it would look a little bit different, but we would still have our revised annual projections in there.

We just wouldn't have this month-to-date annual projection based on this first set of data we shared with you.

Okay, Chris, we can go, or excuse me,

Brian, we can go to the next slide.

So again, these are the expenditures.

We've grouped the report, goes into a little more detail on the individual departments within these groupings.

We're currently through about four months of the fiscal year, roughly 33.3, 33.4%.

If you're looking at what this would track as percentage wise, schools, as I'll point out, that's both our contribution and our contracts with the schools, public safety, police, fire,

Healthy families and community, the reason that's a little bit higher than if you were to split it across 33.3% is because of the payments to some of the outside agencies, the human service agencies for the first and second quarter, so that's slightly higher.

And then if you get down to the non-departmental activities, those are really our larger transfers for debt service, transit, CIP, all of those which are done

normally at the end of the second quarter into the third quarter and are also adjusted at the end of the fiscal year as we move through.

All right, Brian, next slide.

The final slide is our CARES Act allocation.

I know you guys, council will be having a meeting with, or we'll be having a report and a discussion about this next month about potential reallocations and where we are with some of these.

But we just wanted to show you where we are

between this is both the first and the second round of the CARES funding.

We're at approximately 84% of the total funding for both rounds.

And as to what's been allocated or approved to be spent on these, some of these dollars haven't been actually expended at this point due to supply delays and ramping up the projects and other things.

But these are the ones that have been approved and allocated to be moved forward at this point.

But again,

when Mr. Cullinan gives the larger report on the CARES funding and the potential reallocations next month, you guys can get into some more detail.

We'll get into a lot more detail with that.

So I know you've had that.

As I recall, we had in the budget that we wound up passing back in May a reserve of basically $6.6 million coming from not having made the cash contribution

to the capital program.

And my understanding or the way that I've been thinking about this all along is that as long as the dollars change column doesn't exceed $6.6 million, we don't have to do anything.

Is that a fair way to look at it?

Well, as Mr. Davidson stated, we have looked at some internal measures.

I think it's important to state that you're right

on a theoretical level, Counselor Snook, as long as it doesn't exceed 6.6.

However, what we're looking at is we are one third of the way through the fiscal year and already 4.9 of that 6.6 has kind of vanished.

And so when you look at that burn rate, so to speak, it's pretty concerning.

And obviously,

You know, looking at what's going on around the state with COVID, looking at the governor's new restrictions released on Friday.

You know, we could be looking at a few months of even more, of what would you say, even less revenue than our new projections in terms of meals and lodging tax.

So I think

You're right, the council doesn't need to do anything until we hit that $6.6 million level by looking at the burn rate and some possibilities on the horizon that may reduce revenue.

But to be clear about the $4.9 million, that is where you have

looked at what you've come up with so far and you have figured out what you think we're gonna be like at the end of the year.

In other words, you've already annualized that.

So it's not $4.9 million down after four months.

Well, yes, but I might ask maybe Commissioner Divers to jump in here.

I think our projection numbers, you're right, they are still for the entire fiscal year, but that new revision was based on the data we had at that point and projecting it out for the remainder of the fiscal year.

Again, if something, you know, and there's still a

in those projections still built in something of an increase in terms of capacity at lodging and sales.

Yeah, I'm sorry, John, I didn't mean to step on you there.

Yeah, we make some assumptions about how fast we're going to come back and what each month is going to look like.

And so if things work out to be close to what we

I hope they're going to look, or what we have estimated them to look like, then yeah, we're going to come out at the end $4.7 million down.

And that would then be assuming that restaurants and hotels through the winter would be doing as well as they're doing now in the summers and fall, correct?

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, we've built into it that the winter months do slow down.

And so we're assuming a percentage decrease from what the base typically would be.

And we're assuming an eventual uptick at some point.

I think we were thinking near the end of the fiscal year or kind of crawling out of it as we approach the end of the fiscal year.

So do we have that scenario laid out even if, I mean, we're hopeful that it doesn't happen?

Are you all,

Do you wanna answer that?

I mean, we're talking about it and we've looked at some scenarios.

I don't think we've got anything hard and fast.

Anything we do, we're making some guesses about how this thing's gonna play out.

And so the treasurer actually sent out an email today kind of teasing out some possible scenarios that we make and look at.

But you could have an infinite number of scenarios if you wanted to.

So I think we're gonna talk about that.

I think we've got a meeting Wednesday.

And Mayor Walker, I also think one thing that we need to inform the council about when you ask about those scenarios is we're probably I think in order to be a more accurate to paint the most accurate picture we can before coming back

with some hard numbers in terms of revised projections, we do need to look at our real estate collection rate, I think.

And again, I'll let Jason and Todd talk about that, but we need to make sure where we are in terms of percentage paid of real estate taxes.

And that also can,

affect where we look at in terms of going forward for the remainder of the fiscal year.

If we're close on percentage collected, that's good.

But again, with COVID, and I'll let Jason or Todd talk about that, it could be another major aspect that it wouldn't really do us a lot of good to bring you anything in December.

Yeah, I can address that just real briefly.

Just given the size of the real estate and personal property as a percentage of the budget, even a very small decline in the collection rate would have a pretty significant impact.

Now, we have factored in a small decline based on the June billing and what we saw in June and kind of what we think might happen in December.

But we really won't know for a few more weeks, maybe a month or so, what

the December deadline is going to look like as far as collection rate.

Okay, thank you.

And Mr. Davison, I just had a question around the general fund.

You mean the reduction that I'm showing of $550,000?

Yeah.

Chris Ingalls here and he can speak to this a little bit more but a lot of that is based on declining parking revenues and there not being the revenue to transfer to the general fund.

So that was the main impetus behind that change.

We had had it as high as 1.7 several years ago, and we'd been walking it down several hundred thousand dollars per year.

So that full amount is what would have been transferred at this point, like to date, or is that amount taken to account what would be transferred also at a later date?

Typically, we do this as a one-time transfer towards the end of the fiscal year, so that would be for the entire, that would estimate for the entire fiscal year.

I think you covered it, but I mean, in general terms, we were expecting

1.2 million to go back to the general fund.

At this point, it doesn't look like that's gonna be possible.

The Parking Enterprise Fund was started a couple of years ago.

And as Ryan referenced earlier, all the monies from parking used to go into the general fund.

It was around $2 million.

And so incrementally, we've tried to step that down.

We were at the $800,000 level when this happened and it ended up,

Reverting back to the 1.2.

So we were on our way to sunsetting it, but it didn't quite make it.

I'll say again, you know, I just continue to be very concerned about the potential scenario of, you know, we're already seeing the governor's new restrictions.

If COVID is worse through the winter months than projected, combined with the composition of the Senate providing no additional support from the federal government, you know, the potential scenario for this to be

I think we will exceed what our reserve is and just continue to think that council and the community are going to need to take a brutally honest look at the trade-offs of this budget cycle because I think it's very conceivable that we would look at the kind of budget impact that would start to impact vital programs and core functionalities within the city.

Are there any other questions?

OK, well, thank you all for the report again.

And I assume that for counselors, taking out that second column, the year-to-date projection column, right, Mr. Davis, and that was your question.

I mean, I am.

I just want to make clear.

So the year, the first column, the $191 million, that's what was approved.

That's what we approved in the budget in May for July.

And then that middle column was after a few, like a month or so into it, we started realizing it was going to be less.

So it got re, so really at this point, it's just,

since we've got enough months in the year to date now that we can now look at kind of more year to date.

Okay.

That's what we were thinking.

So it doesn't seem like there's any concern there, so that's fine.

Okay.

All right.

OK.

So this link is the link we read off of?

OK.

Thank you.

Steve, back here at 5.30.

Are we taking a break?

Come back to the same meeting to make the closed meeting motion.

And if you're still watching the meeting, Charlottesville City Council will go into a closed session in about five minutes.

In one hour, council will reconvene in a separate Zoom webinar for their 6.30 regular meeting.

You must register separately for the 6.30 p.m.

meeting, and you can do so at Charlottesville.gov slash Zoom.

If you'd like to get the agenda or packet for any of our public meetings,

You can go to Charlottesville.gov slash agenda.

All right.

Sure.

Pursuant to section 2.23712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that City Council close this open meeting and convene in the closed session as authorized by Virginia Code section 2.23711A1.

for discussion and consideration of the performance of the acting city manager.

In section 2.2, 3711A3 for discussion or consideration of the disposition of a lease of office space within Market Street parking garage structure to a specific entity where discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the negotiating strategy of the city.

In section 2.2, 3711A29 for discussion of the award of a public contract to conduct the search for a new city manager,

Second.

Ms.

Thomas.

Mayor Walker.

Yes.

Vice Mayor Magill.

Yes.

Councillor Hill.

All right, and so we'll go to a closed session link, and then there's a new link for the 6.30 meeting.

Correct.