City Council Meeting   12/3/2007

It's pretty cold out there tonight.

You know what?

You'll find that there are other goofy people.

I hope so.

Seriously.

Blake is the bad boy.

He's not a good role model for me.

He is always, always excellent.

Thank you.

She's a woman, so we're going to go with that.

Yeah, we got to do it.

There he is.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Dr. Brown.

Here.

Ms. Hamilton.

Here.

Mr. Lynch.

Here.

Here.

Under Other Business, I'd like to talk a little bit about this EMS report under Other Business tonight.

And also, I wanted to make an announcement about the toy lift this Friday, which is at Fashion Square.

And I run into Tom Powell, who I think started it in, I think 1988, but he wanted to invite all members of council to come out there and go up in the bucket truck.

If you could, I'm sorry I'm going to be out of town.

Truthfully, I am.

But in any event, I just wanted to give them a little plug.

Before we call him back, do you know the weather forecast?

Next Tuesday, Tuesday December 4th at 6 o'clock here in this very room we're going to have the second of two community meetings regarding strategic plan for our solid waste system here from 6 to 730.

It's certainly open to the public, encourage people to attend.

And then under other business I'd like to bring up an idea regarding a clean energy resolution that I'm hoping to introduce at our next meeting.

Okay.

Any other announcements?

Okay.

If not, the next item is matters by the public.

And every meeting we allow people to make public comment for up to three minutes on any item they would like unless there's a public hearing scheduled or a public hearing has been held.

The first person signed up is Bob Stroh.

Please come forward.

I remind people to give your name and address for the record.

Mayor, City Council, my name is Bob Stroh.

I live at 1412 Kenwood Lane in the city.

I come to you on behalf of the Downtown Business Association, which I co-chair.

Our 80 members and our board of directors both have voted overwhelmingly in support of the CCTV initiative for the Downtown Mall.

We believe very strongly

that this is of utmost importance to our membership and to the continued success of them all.

This is an initiative that's been on the books and under discussion for quite some time, as you know, and I can't imagine any item of more importance to our membership.

I think the police chief has made an excellent response to your questions and your suggestions about how to resolve issues regarding policy, placement,

Management of this system, but this system has the potential to cause a great deal of good for our membership and will serve our visitors, our employees, and our patrons very well.

So I ask your support.

Mayor of City Council.

My name is Henry Hackett.

I live in 02 Pinehurst Court.

I'm also here in support of the cameras for downtown.

I'm a downtown business owner.

You know, we have a really good police department.

Chief says we need these cameras to do a good job.

You know, I think we should give them the equipment that he needs to work with.

I have a lot of senior citizens come to my restaurant and they have a big issue about these coming out after dark and all, you know, they don't feel safe.

So I think we should give them what they need to feel like they can come downtown because I was downtown on a wall back in the 80's and I can remember at 5 o'clock you went home and you didn't come back.

Thank you.

Charles Schoolcraft Mayor, City Council, My name is Charles Schoolcraft.

I live at 501 Orange Street.

In support of the cameras, I'm also an employee of Henry Downtown.

I support the police chief with the cameras as far as, you know, we have plenty of officers, you know, downtown they can do all they can do, but you can't get the coverage that you go with 30 cameras downtown.

I mean, we have a lot of senior citizens, a lot of people that come down.

Also, as far as being a pedestrian mall, you know, you want to bring your family down, you want to feel safe, you don't want to come downtown and, you know, have the vagrants or have somebody bothering you or, you know, at least if you have the cameras, the people that would cause problems would know, you know, I'm not going to say it's going to deter them, but it might, it should help.

Good evening, I'm Rod Gentry with Union Bank and Trust at 400 East Main Street I too am here to encourage you to support the cameras on the mall I think it is a valuable tool for our law enforcement officers to effectively expand the police force to make downtown safer We've used cameras, the same sort of system in the banks for years

and frankly couldn't exist as a bank without them and during the robbery that occurred this year, the presence of the camera, the quick response of our police force, we had a good result but we might not have and had the person who robbed our bank, attempted to rob the bank, escaped onto the mall and there had been cameras and the police had not been there, we would have a way to effectively identify that person.

I think we always have to look at downtown Charlottesville as a place where we're competing with every other entity that has a retail establishment in the county as well as elsewhere in the city and I think those cameras help people feel safer and effectively help the merchants to be safer and it is just good business.

Also I'm assuming that a $300,000 expenditure would be capitalized over a period of

at least five years.

Is that the case?

No.

It's a one-time expenditure and that's it.

Well, in that case you kind of look at it as an insurance policy and it's paid for and it gives us the opportunity to observe if there is any criminal behavior to help Chief Longo and his folks work with that.

Also we can't effectively employ police officers and get them trained in on the street quicker than a nine month turnaround.

So, and we're nine slides short in the city right now.

So I encourage you to support that, this initiative.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, City Council, I'm Jennifer Ward, 1701 Bruce Avenue.

I'm here to urge you to do whatever is in your power to stop the destruction of the Beta House.

My sister and I own the property across the street, across Maury Avenue.

We grew up there.

We've been in the family for 70 odd years, 70 some years.

That's also a Bradbury house, also Eugene Bradbury.

And these two houses, the Beta House and our house, have been just gyms of the neighborhood, real landmarks of the neighborhood.

At the same time that the Jefferson Scholars were hunting for property, we were offered $4 million for our house and land, and we turned them down.

It was our decision, but we felt it was our responsibility to preserve the house and the land.

We thought we owed it to the city of Charlottesville and there was no indication that they would preserve the house.

We believe then, we still believe that it's possible to develop the property and preserve the house.

This is a historic house, Veda House is historic, our house is historic and we feel very strongly that you should do whatever is in your power to preserve it.

I think there's a local landmark designation

that could possibly be put on the house.

I'm talking about the Beta House.

We would just like to urge you to do whatever you can to stop the destruction, which looks imminent.

Thank you.

David Repass, 227 East Jefferson Street, Charlottesville.

It is the primary duty of any government to provide for the safety and security of its citizens.

Back in September, this council failed to take action on security cameras in the downtown mall.

Since September, in the downtown area, there has been a rape, three aggravated assaults, three cars stolen, three robberies, eight thefts from motor vehicles, and 20 acts of larceny.

all in just three months.

As you know, I live two blocks from the downtown mall.

I've already mentioned to council that my wife and I do not walk out after dark.

A number of people who live outside the downtown area have remarked to me that they no longer come downtown either.

All this hurts downtown business, as you just heard.

Now, you may say that these kinds of incidents curl over the city.

Why is the downtown special?

Well, the answer is the downtown has a concentration of likely targets, people going to stores, restaurants, theaters.

The downtown is a unique area that is dependent on people coming into the area to shop, eat, and work.

Cameras are an efficient way to cover this kind of concentrated area.

Also, this is an area that does not require the personal touch of community policing.

Indeed, installing cameras downtown might free up more police for community policing elsewhere.

Some say we should hire more police downtown.

In the first place, we cannot even fill existing vacancies.

But suppose we could hire extra police.

We are talking here about a one-time expenditure of $300,000.

Now $300,000 would buy you one patrolman for maybe four years or for $300,000 you could buy 30 sentinels, 30 cameras, which would last far longer than four years.

These sentinels would be on duty 24-7.

They would identify the corporates and provide concrete evidence for trial.

Offenders would be off the streets surely and quickly.

Whether or not cameras prevent crime is debatable, but it is clear that they can do a lot of police work, like identifying corporates and gathering evidence all very efficiently.

This city is blessed with an outstanding police chief and an excellent Commonwealth Attorney.

These officials have had decades of experience in law enforcement.

Collette Hall, 101 Robertson Lane, Mr. Mayor and Councillors.

I actually have a couple of different neighborhood issues but they're all neighborhood issues.

As president of NDRA, which is North Downtown Neighborhood Association, I was recently refused admission to a 250 interchange meeting on historic resources that will be affected by the proposed 250 interchange.

I was requesting entrance not as a participating speaker, but as a listener.

I was forced to go to the federal government, specifically to the Federal Highway Administration, to receive permission as a consultant party to gain future entry to these meetings.

How frustrating that the neighborhood in which this structure is to be built cannot attend meetings, especially when federal, state, and eventually city monies will fund the project.

Second, I very carefully fill my recycle bin with allowed items and have noticed on certain weeks that recycle is not picked up in my neighborhood by the recycle truck, but is dumped with the rest of the trash into the waste management truck.

I assume this means all these recyclable items I and my neighbors think are going to be recycled instead eventually go to a dump.

Can someone please answer me why this happens?

Despite what Mr. Repass said, most of the North Downtown residents that have contacted me do not think cameras on the mall will be a crime deterrent.

If the North Downtown Business Association and the Pavilion Management do, we suggest they pay the cost.

And last, I invite all Northtown residents and lovers of the mall to attend a public hearing on the 4th or 5th Street crossing at the Planning Commission's December 11th meeting.

Since this is a public hearing, you will be allowed to speak.

This may be your last opportunity.

Okay, thank you.

Mayor, Councillors, my name is Daniel Bluestone, 501 Park Hill in the city.

Last time I was in the council chambers, you all did the right thing.

You voted unanimously to defer action on the industrial

development bonds for the Jefferson scholars asking them to please come back and tell you either that they were going to preserve the historic Compton House or that they had a really good reason to not preserve it.

And they decided instead, as you are well aware, to do an end run.

What was characterized by the head of the Industrial Bond Commission

as a curve ball thrown at the mayor of the council and local preservationists simply taking the money that had been approved before you understood what was at stake here and their demolition plans and to run with that and not to come back to you.

And as you know, they're now seem resolved to

demolished this house that Kevin Lynch at the time that I was last here said was probably in the top 100 houses in the city.

I think it probably is.

There's no question that the Compton House, Eugene Bradbury's house, designed in 1913, is one of the finest houses designed in the city of Charlottesville in the course of the 20th century.

It's in a very small handful of very fine and important architectural gems in our community.

So what recourse do you have?

Well, I think you have a recourse this evening or in the near future to pass a resolution encouraging the Board of Architectural Review

to take up the individual designation of that house as a local landmark.

That might seem to some as an arbitrary action, but it seems no more arbitrary than deciding to engage in the wasteful practice of demolishing the Compton House for no good reason, to squander the resources, our cultural resources in this community, and indeed the resources of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation

and I think that you can simply decide to explore the landmarking issue which will give the community further chance to discuss this.

The community has been pretty much locked out by not getting the plans.

No one has shared plans for that site.

by not being engaged in the conversation and actually by being publicly deceived and I think you all know that there's been deception on the plans for this house and I think the best thing to do would be to do what we probably should have done years ago but there's no reason not to do it now.

I think you all understand that that house is a local landmark, that house can be preserved and

The Jefferson Scholars can build their 23,000 square foot building on that site.

It would be a win-win situation.

I think that it's no more arbitrary for you at this point to say, let's hold on to that house and explore land marking.

than to engage in the actions that the Jefferson scholars have.

The city has the power to preserve local landmarks.

You have the authority to do that and I'd encourage you to exercise that.

I didn't want it to come to this point but I think you probably should step up now and explore actively the timing of this and I think that while you explore that- If you could bring your comments to us.

While you explore the landmark designation, I think that would be a good reason to put on hold the demolition permit for the house and that would follow the precedent that the federal government follows when they have historic resources that are being impacted by federal government actions.

So I think there's plenty of legal precedent for you to do that.

Hi, I'm Tami Londere at 813 Locust Avenue, Apartment C, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902.

I've come to talk about two things.

The first thing is I asked in the past for water collection barrels to be offered for either free or at a reduced price for poor people.

Some of the money that we've spent this past year, I think on a whale's tail, could probably have bought a lot of water barrels.

So I wish that we could look into purchasing some and either offer it at a reduced rate to citizens so they can collect the water and help us with this drought, I mean for next year.

Hopefully we're not in the drought anymore.

And either just have a reduced rate or have a contest which

The citizens can just fill out a form and you won it.

So the second thing I've come about is, you know, I don't have a problem with cameras on the mall.

What I feel can be a problem is that there has been some questionable treatment by police towards area citizens in that downtown area.

There was a case tried on November the 29th, 2007, where an officer, actually the officer's not being accused in that, it's the two people.

Two people that said that the officer almost ran over them and then he arrested them and slammed one person down on her ear.

I don't know if he lost his temper, and I know that it's innocent until proven guilty, but another individual dialed 911 at the same time when a police officer was there.

So I think it's about time that Charlottesville has

a citizen review for police behavior with citizens where it can either help the police officer if he's being accused wrongly or the citizen who's been accused wrongly because I do know that in the city of Charlottesville an innocent person was tried and that was me in 2000.

I was beaten up by my three people.

I was not allowed to receive a warrant for those people and I was told that I needed to feel guilty for that.

I didn't really feel guilty for that because, hey, I was beaten up.

Good evening.

I'm Susan Lanterman.

I live at 405 Ridge Street in the historic district.

I'm here tonight to confirm that you've received a petition from me and 77 other neighbors.

We share concerns about the possible sale of public property to a private developer for a major project at the corner of Ridge Street and Cherry Avenue.

Mr. Mayor, Council members, I'm Morgan Perkins and I own Sagan Gallery at 420 East Main Street and I'm here tonight to speak to you about the cameras on the wall.

I support

the police chief and wanting to have these.

I believe that I support all the things that have already been said.

I'm not going to go over it again.

You know all of those arguments.

But there's another side to having the cameras on the mall I think we haven't thought about.

We are encouraging our citizens to bring their children downtown.

We're encouraging them

encouraging them to use the downtown area and to feel safe and to feel good about coming downtown with your children.

I'm seeing some things happening in my gallery and on the mall that they're not bad things, but what if something happened?

For instance, people will come in and they get so involved in shopping, they forget about the kids, the kids sometimes have to say, excuse me, your children are wandering out the door.

And these are little guys, I mean really little.

It only takes a few seconds for a child

We would at least be able to have some kind of direction in knowing where to go and how to help this situation.

I know that there's a lot of conflict about this, but I also know that sometimes it's important for us to look at the big picture and what's going to happen down the road.

If we want people to come to the mall,

We want to encourage them to enjoy the mall as families.

Then we have to make the mall a safe place for the whole family.

And that's, I think the cameras will definitely help in that direction.

Okay, thank you.

I'm John Falz.

I'm live at 1503 Rugby Road.

Mayor, City Council, you've been reading the Daily Progress as I have and we've seen this last two weeks, all these articles about, you can show the audience too, I think they're much more interested, these ridiculous stories about the budget, this and that and balloons being flown, it's the silly time and it comes around every year.

It's time for the City Council and the Democratic leadership to tell the public just what it wants for the coming year and what messages it's sending to Gary O'Connell and the budget planners.

First, we must stop posturing.

Why did you guys flout the possibility of a cut in affordable housing?

That was in the progress on the 23rd.

I thought you were all committed to it.

Is it just another round of scare the citizens so you really won't have to control spending?

I know, this happens every year.

Remember we had large trash pickup would have to be cancelled.

We have unfounded mandates that we're going to have to, so keep us off balance.

I think it's so that we won't focus on the real problem which is runaway spending.

Look at what's happening.

The lower line is the cost of living increase.

That's what people who are living on Social Security are getting.

Look at the increase in the city.

Particularly look at last year.

If you five all want the city to spend more, you must explain your reasons why.

But it should be noted that increased spending and with it increased taxes does not lead to affordable housing.

Next, we must separate what the city needs from what it wants.

According to reports, our sewer and stormwater infrastructure is crumbling.

Maintaining our aging infrastructure is a need.

And although only $275,000 seems to be necessary for the stormwater upgrades, none of the $6.7 million has been applied to it.

That's the surplus.

Why not?

And in fact, it's been suggested that we have a monthly fee imposed upon homeowners to pay for that upgrade, that need.

Only after finding our needs should we even think about our wants.

I think we'd all like to see two new pools, but however desirable such pools might be, they're certainly not needs.

and said much of the extra $24 million you want for projects seems to be for kinds of pleasing items such as the rich buy for themselves at Christmas time.

That's $24 million you want over and above the basic costs of simply running the city.

Look at the huge increase that we had this last year.

How much was that spent on aging infrastructure?

Any of it?

Really?

Any of it?

Could you tell Gary to stop expanding the city employee base, even though we don't seem to be getting mentioned more in services, and keep spending in line with the consumer price index?

Couldn't you restrain yourself from just spending more and more just because the project seems worthy?

That would be a real Christmas present for all the city residents.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Peter Klineman.

I live at 407 Head Street in the city.

I'm here today to talk about one of the goals that you have on your Vision 2025, which is to have a smart, citizen-focused government.

And in there, there's a statement that says all of your decisions are informed at every single stage by effective communication.

and active citizen involvement.

And I'd like to request that the city perhaps expand upon that relationship between citizens, active citizens and the city and staff as to how they can effectively work together.

Based on a comment that Ms. Hall presented earlier, I was at that very meeting as a consulting party and there was a very vocal discussion at the beginning of the meeting about

allowing the public to participate in some way and to certainly at least be present and the decision was made that the citizens of the city were not invited.

As a Federal highway project and Federal laws, I read it says that citizens are supposed to be involved at any point where critical decisions are being made.

And if this committee is not making critical decisions, then why are we meeting?

and this is not the only meeting in the city that citizens have not been allowed to.

I know it was reported in Charlottesville Tomorrow's website about the questionability of their being present at another Federal-aid highway project which was the

Hillsdale Drive project.

And so if citizens can't be involved even to attend, I think we are going to keep citizens from attending meetings at which they're unsure whether they can attend.

And so that's a step toward less citizen involvement rather than more citizen involvement.

So I would recommend that the city consider something like a statement of involvement opportunity for citizens.

maybe a citizen's bill of rights or something of that nature that people can refer to and say under certain circumstances covered perhaps by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act that if certain items are being discussed at the meeting citizens can't attend those whether it's about financial issues hiring and firing of

staff related to projects, whatever it might be.

But in all other cases, I see no prohibition to having citizens present, just as they attend city work sessions or council work sessions or other meetings.

So I think that it would be a great opportunity for the council in the very near future.

to make some statement to citizens as to under what circumstances they would not be allowed to attend and that they would be allowed to attend all other meetings that are run by and for the city.

Okay, thank you.

Mr. Cleveland was the last person to sign up and we will have another time at the end of the meeting.

It doesn't look like too long a meeting tonight where there will be more chance for public comment.

So next is Council Responses to Matters by the Public.

Mr. Lynch.

Well, we'll be talking at length about the safety and security cameras later, so I won't respond to that, but I did want to get to a couple of other points.

And one, I'll start with the open meeting.

Question.

I agree that we should have at least an informal standing policy of when steering committee members get together, that if there's not an issue that would be covered under FOIA, such as land sale personnel,

anything that would really encumber the strategic position of the city that we ought to have a standing policy of allowing citizens to attend.

Whether or not they actually speak at the meeting I think that can be up to the discretion of the people there that they ought to at least be able to watch unless there's a compelling reason for them not to be there.

I think that was a good point that was made by both individuals who spoke to that and I would certainly be in favor of us having that policy.

On the subject of rain barrels, we had a program last summer that was, I believe it was run by Parks and Recs, where citizens could come and essentially make their own rain barrel.

It was 35 bucks and it sold out weeks before it ever happened.

I've heard it was very popular and I hope we'll do it again and maybe have a couple of sessions so that it's not so limited.

And what was the last one?

I apologize.

There was a third one there that I wanted to get to.

OK. You can come back.

I assure you that the drought continues even though we've had a little bit of rain.

It's nowhere near enough to make up the deficit.

I'm going to leave my comments on our camera discussion for later in the meeting, but I will mention that the idea of citizen review has come up before I believe Mr. Chapman's office

You know, issued a statement on that.

This was back at the time when I first got on council when the Carrie Cook case took place over at Friendship Court.

So I can't remember the exact details of that, but I do know that that idea has been floated from citizens before.

Mr. Faulds, last I heard the Daily Progress does not take its talking points from counsel, would that they would.

So it's not some scheme of counsel to frighten the public.

The media seems to be very well capable of doing that all by themselves.

And I would be interested to find out if this notion of local landmarking is indeed legal.

Yes, I'll just respond to Mr. Falls.

Mr. Norris and I have been in the process of trying to take a look at the budget.

And I think that our council is interested in that.

I think we did last meeting, I think we put a cap of 5% increase on the budget.

I want to second the comments made by Mr. Lynch and thank Ms. Hall and Mr. Kleeman for raising this issue which I totally agree that a policy like Mr. Lynch has suggested is appropriate and warranted.

I also would be interested to hear from Mr. Brown on our legal options regarding the Compton House and I don't know exactly where we are right now with the Ridge Cherry issue.

Excellent.

The other issue was the Beta House and I thank Kendra for bringing that up because I really think that this is, it really is a larger issue than just the Beta House.

In that area we've seen some really fine houses get knocked down in the last couple of years.

There was one on JPA that's actually a couple of them that are both apartment buildings now that were nice old manor houses and I would call them landmark houses.

Probably none of them have the same landmark prominence that the Compton House has on that corner.

but there are other ones in the city as well not just that one that are at risk and I think that they do contribute to characters and neighborhoods and I'd like to see us be as aggressive as we can in bringing those under individual designation perhaps starting with the Compton House as soon as we can make that happen

I do think that this council was misled as to the intentions of the Jefferson scholars.

I'm surprised that a group with the Jefferson scholars' name would want to tear that house down.

If they called themselves the Donald Trump scholars, I could understand that.

Well, I'll offer a few comments.

I agree with the comments said about getting clarity on public meetings and giving the public as much access as possible.

I agree with the sentiments expressed on the Compton House, but I have concern about, you know, our tradition has been not to change the rules after someone's made an application for something.

So, for example, if an application for a demolition permit for that structure has been

applied for and now we're to decide that it's a designated structure that strikes me as going against the tradition we've had in some ways.

That's just a comment I have because I think we should be clear on the precedent we might be setting.

I'd like to thank Ms. Hall for bringing the recycling issue to our attention.

I hope you've contacted Public Works and not just waited to come to council with that issue because I think that's the appropriate thing to do if you notice the recycling doesn't appear to be dealt with properly.

I think that's an important thing for the city to know because I don't think there's anyone on this.

I feel like we've actually been taken immediately on that.

And finally, I want to make a comment on the people frequently say, well, how come city budget rises more than the cost of living?

Why does that have to happen?

And there's a couple issues.

One is, and Kevin could be more eloquent than I can on this, but the cost of living often involves factors in which the price of things has gone down, such as consumer electronics and clothing and things like that, which the city doesn't really share in those economies.

At the same time, the city has cost

that aren't part of the cost of living, which are things like having to spend more money pretty much every single year, hundreds of thousands of dollars more on things like the Conference of Services Act, which is mandated, cleaning up the Ivy Landfill, which is mandated, the cost of incarceration, which is mandated.

So there's reasons, pardon me?

Concrete.

I do remember I meant to respond to Ms. Hall's concern about the dumping of the recycling and we got a report on that from Judy Newler right before the last meeting, well it was during all those discussions about the solid waste

Any other comments?

If not, tonight we have a new item on the agenda, which is appointments.

Typically we make appointments to boards and commissions at the end of the meeting under other business.

but it doesn't allow people to see that we've made those appointments and it's also a chance for us to let you know there are boards and commissions that we need your help with.

Currently, we're looking for applications to serve on the Board of Architectural Review for the owner of a business or commercial property in a design control district.

And we're also looking for a Ridge Street representative to the Community Development Block Grant Task Force.

And so if anyone watching, if this sounds like you, you should apply.

Second.

It's been moved and seconded.

Is there discussion on this motion?

Hearing none, I'll call for the vote.

Next on the agenda is the consent agenda.

The consent agenda tonight consists only of four items, items A through D. One item, which is listed, which is the signed ordinance amendment has been withdrawn because there's more staff work to do on it.

And item F, which is not on the agenda at the door, but it's on agendas which are in the paper, which is an ordinance on rezoning a property on Rose Hill Drive has been withdrawn

by the applicant.

So the consent agenda tonight consists of item A, the minutes of the meeting of November 5th.

Item B, an appropriation of $9,403, which is a grant for the regional jail, it's the first of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation of $1,343, a carryover for the health department, it's the first of two readings.

And item D, the Boys and Girls Club lease for Buford School property, it's the second of two readings.

Are there items to be withdrawn from the consent agenda to be considered at the end of the meeting, or are there any amendments to the minutes?

If not, is there a motion for the consent agenda?

So moved.

Second.

Moved and seconded.

Any discussion on the consent agenda?

Hearing none, I'll call for the vote.

Next is a public hearing on a resolution

Mr. Mayor and council members, the purpose of this meeting is so that city council can decide whether the nomination for the proposed Fifeville-Castle Hill National Register Historic District should move forward.

Last spring, the city's consultant, Morales Calbien, an architectural historian, completed the report.

It's a nomination report and it was scheduled to be heard at the state review board's quarterly meeting in June.

Because there was not positive consensus among the neighborhood that they should move forward, the mayor wrote a letter to the state requesting that the process be held up and that it not go to the review board in June but it be deferred so that we could get more community input and it be worked on more locally.

This was a little bit unusual because most National Register districts kind of go through without much controversy.

They're non-regulatory, they're mostly honorary designations, and they allow tax credits, so there's positive benefits.

but in this case, you know, it was held up.

The usual process, it's a state process, it doesn't usually involve city council.

The state sends a letter to every property owner in the district and all the abutting property owners to the boundaries and let them know that this is being considered and lets them know that they can object to it in writing with a notarized letter and they hold a local public meeting, usually in the neighborhood

and then there is the quarterly state review board meeting and that's scheduled and they're notified of that.

At that review board meeting, if more than 50% of the people in the district object, then they automatically deny it.

So there is a process for that, for everyone to be heard.

In this case, we did take the nomination back and go over it.

We corrected some obvious errors.

and I would not say we resolved every issue.

There are several unresolved issues which I'd be happy to go into more.

I honestly think that it would be very difficult to resolve them to the neighborhood satisfaction.

Basically, one was that the historical background in the report was incomplete and does not include oral histories, which a National Register report doesn't usually do.

that it would increase property values and taxes and promote gentrification.

Another issue that was raised, they thought it would lead to a local district designation that would require design review.

And another one expressed that local designation would be more valuable than a national register.

So sort of opposite viewpoints there.

Just to review, the National Register District is regulatory and it allows the tax credits benefit.

The local district is when the BAR does the review by the BAR is required.

Also, objections to the nomination included the boundary objections.

First, that the commercial properties around the boundary weren't included and they thought they should be.

and then another one was that the block including Oak Street should more properly be added to the Ridge Street District.

So there are a lot of complications and objections.

The revised document has been on the website.

We did notify everyone in the district of this public hearing.

We did receive one email objecting to the revision from Tony Rhodes.

We also received one letter in favor of the proposal moving forward from Karen Firehawk and Tim Lewis.

And as far as staff recommendation, I think that you just need to hear from

The neighborhood again, make sure you hear any people that are in support of it as well as those that are still opposed to it and then make a decision.

I think that ideally both a national register district and a local district help to protect the neighborhood and provide incentives to protect, to preserve properties and rehabilitate them.

Yeah, I do have a question.

A couple of things.

You mentioned that a couple of the neighborhood concerns would be difficult to resolve, and I just wanted to make sure to find out if the two that included not including commercial uses in the report

and the Oak Street, the dispute over the Oak Street block.

Well, the one about commercial use is the National Register rules actually don't allow you to, their goal is to have the boundaries include as many contributing properties as possible and exclude the ones on the border that aren't contributing.

So they actually wouldn't want those in the district.

I think the neighborhood concern there was it actually got a little confused with the local district objectives because I think what they were looking for was actual design review of those properties should they redevelop.

So there's two ways to do design review.

You can do a local historic district or you could do the entrance corridor.

And I thought for the properties along Terry Avenue at least,

it would probably qualify for an entrance quarter so that would be a way to resolve that issue.

As far as the Oak Street block, I don't know what to say about that.

I think it's possible to probably cut that out of this nomination and possibly add it to Ridge Street.

The problem with that is someone has to actually rewrite

that report to re-justify the boundaries for Fifeville, Castle Hill is not including that block and then they'd have to write another report justifying why that boundary should be included with Ridge Street.

So it's more of a logistical and a funding thing rather than, you know,

to me the most practical way to get the biggest area in the National Register District is to go with this because they have justified this boundary.

But I think that it may be possible to also, you know, juggle it around and then justify that boundary.

So I don't know if that answers your question but I think it's possible but it would be difficult to do it.

I think that you mentioned in your report that one of the things that you were encountering that was difficult was the fact that there was neighborhood concern, not necessarily objecting to the National Register designation, but fearing that national designation would then be used to support a conservation district.

Well, first of all, there are two totally different concepts.

I would say that I was totally upfront with the neighborhood, I feel I was, in trying to explain that.

It's very confusing, you know, the first time you hear about these districts.

But I also feel like I was upfront about the fact that we would like to pursue a conservation district in the future, but it was still being written.

They would say, well, what does that mean?

What is a conservation district?

But we hadn't completed writing it yet.

I could tell them in concept

that it would be like an ABC district light that it was supposed to be, was supposed to just focus on the massing and scale and protecting the character of the neighborhood but it's hard to then say exactly what that would mean if they wanted to restore or renovate their own home or, you know, they wanted specifics and I could not give them so that added to the confusion and somebody suggested that the timing was bad that we pursue the national register

At the same time, we were trying to develop the conservation district, so that made it even more confusing.

I think that the question that lingers in a lot of the public's mind is, you know, if they approve a National Historic Register document which does not, you know, which gives them certain benefits and does not constrain them in particular ways.

Absolutely.

So if we were to take action tonight,

Right, and I guess the point is they'd have to come back and fight that if they didn't want it but it was, I mean it's definitely a separate process and anytime you do a local district designation because it imposes regulations it's a public hearing process and everybody is notified and you know it takes time and they have input on it.

Okay, that answers my question.

Other questions from Ms. Galla?

I just have a couple which are partly just to make sure everyone's clear who's in the audience tonight or listening.

No.

There's no regulation associated with it.

The only way there would be would be if you opt and if you wanted to apply for the tax credits.

Okay.

But otherwise, no.

Okay.

No.

A national registry district.

Would you have to get permission to tear your house down?

You could paint it purple and no one would care?

Purple.

Okay.

Okay.

Unless you apply for tax credits.

Right.

And so if you want to make a big improvement in your house, you would have the potential to apply for tax credits.

Yes.

And if you did that, then you would have rules to follow.

All right.

Because I think there are some processes where having a historic district would entail some additional process.

If VDOT wanted to build a road through Fifeville, as they did, as the city did, in the late 90s to extend Monticello Avenue,

That's true.

If it's in a, if there's a national registry district and there's a project that would use federal funding, then there's supposed to be a 106 review that determines whether that funding is spent in the best way possible or whether there's other alternatives that would work better.

And that doesn't mean they can't do it, but it means that it would have to be, would have to go through that review process.

Or is it just a federal?

I think it's just federal.

Like UVA, you mean.

And I noticed that it's 8 o'clock, and my experience is that 8 o'clock is a time when students often leave, if that's the case.

Hey, this would have been a good public hearing tonight.

Leaving means leave the room, otherwise it means take a seat, please.

Good evening.

I'm Ann Carter.

I live at 715 Orange Dale Avenue.

I thought I needed to explain myself.

I sent a letter to Mark Wagner, Department of Historic Resources, August 21st, 2007.

At first, I was in favor of the proposed Fifeville-Castle Hill Historic District.

I believe strongly in historic designation.

and I thought this would be a way to honor our community, its architecture of the past and our present residence.

However, as time went on, I now remain very much opposed to the proposed architectural design controls for our neighborhood.

I found that was the result of

the confusion that was really never explained to us clearly.

I believe by coupling these two different separate issues, the city of Charlottesville delivered an unnecessarily confusing message to the neighborhood residents.

Although design control might be appropriate for some neighborhoods, it is my personal opinion that it is not in the best interest of the so-called Fifeville-Castle Hill residents.

I can just see myself in the future, 5, 10, 15 years from now, a much older person trying to go through the application forms, trying to get here to the council or go before

the Architectural Review Board to do something with my house.

I hope that in the future historic designation is not used as a mean to implement design control.

And I'd also like to know if this app is the same application that my name is on and I was not asked if I wanted to have my name on the application.

Thank you.

Antoinette Rhodes, I live at 406 Oak Street and I should not be here tonight because this should not be on yet another agenda.

Over the last two years this has been addressed at many too many meetings, at none has wide support been shown, at all wide opposition has been shown.

I completely support historic districts, but I have opposed this one from the start because it is the flawed product of a flawed process.

It never should have gotten this far.

It has gotten this far because it is being described as revised.

I read it.

It's not revised.

All its fundamental flaws remain.

What it is is plagiarized from me.

In May, I wrote one of those notarized letters of objection to the Virginia Division of Historic Resources.

In it, to document my objections, I included a great deal of detail from my years of primary source research on related subjects.

At the same time, I sent a copy of that letter to all of you and others at City Hall as a courtesy.

Nothing more.

Last summer I asked on several occasions what the status of the district process was.

Finally in August I got a letter from Jim Tolbert telling me that Ms. Scala had suggested that my corrections, what a quaint word, would be incorporated in the application for resubmission.

I answered very quickly that that was completely unacceptable, that I had not supplied corrections to Ms. Scala, I had supplied objections to DHR.

My work is not the city's to use.

I wrote, you do not have my permission.

You do not have a right.

But the moment I looked at the allegedly revised application, I saw that Ms. Scholar had done exactly what she suggested she would do.

My work was there.

My words were there.

And I would just note apropos of what she just said, that if the corrections made were obvious, then why were the errors there to begin with?

So let's review.

First, you took my tax money, paid it to consultants to create a product that I oppose, a bad product.

Now you've taken my work against my will and against my express prohibition to enhance that product with the aim of defeating my objections.

That is, in my opinion, completely unethical.

Indeed, it stinks.

As I wrote you last week, Fifeville-Castle Hill is not an historic district.

It is a toxic waste site, and like every such hazard to civic health, it should be capped and sealed before it does any more harm.

Hi, I'm Jane Covington, I'm the owner of 513 Dice Street, which is a local landmark, which I restored last year, in hopes of getting tax cuts.

I'm here to strongly support the Fifeville Cathedral National Register nomination, and ask council to allow this nomination to move forward.

I support the National Register nomination as standalone legislation,

John Blanche, I live at 2708 Westmoreland.

I own property in the Fry Springs area.

Are you here to speak about the historic district in Fifeville?

No.

Then you can't speak now.

Okay.

But thank you anyway.

Sorry.

Sponge was the last person signed up.

Is there someone else who would like to speak on the Fifeville application?

Okay.

Well, I'll start.

Throughout this whole process, I've heard a number of concerns raised about the federal national and state register application.

and one of the, or probably the biggest concern raised was that it was a foot in the door for local design controls and as Ms. Covington has remarked, I think council has been very explicit in saying we do want to decouple these two procedures and we've, I think we've made it clear that we are not moving forward with local design controls.

and less than until we have much greater sense of community support for a local conservation district.

And I would want us to make that explicit in our approval of this application and add language to that effect so that it's on the record, that we're on the record as saying we're not opening the door to design controls that the neighborhood does not support.

I am in favor.

I think there is an argument to be made for implementing some kind of design control, working with the neighborhood to prevent demolitions of structures that the neighborhood values and to prevent bad development that the neighbor doesn't want to see happen in their neighborhood.

But I don't want to impose that on the neighbor.

I think that's something we need to work with the neighborhood to develop.

I think another concern, legitimate concern raised about this entire process is why are we spending a whole lot of time on a federal, state, design, historic preservation ordinance for Fifeville and not spending nearly the same level of attention, not paying the same level of attention to other issues that are going on in Fifeville regarding quality of life, public safety, etc.

in Fifeville.

and even though I think there are two very separate issues and sets of issues that we have to give, we need to step up our attention to the issues that Fifeville residents have been bringing to us about traffic in Fifeville, about gentrification in Fifeville, about public safety in Fifeville and other issues that unfortunately just don't get nearly the same amount of attention and I think that needs to change.

And lastly, I've heard from some people who've said that we shouldn't consider a state and federal designation because some people see Fifeville as insufficiently historic, that there's not enough historic value worth preserving in a neighborhood like Fifeville.

And I just vehemently disagree with that.

I think you don't have to be Monticello to be worthy of historic preservation.

There's a lot of stories to be told and a lot of history to be learned in a neighborhood like Fifeville.

and people like Ms. Carter have been doing the research to show that there is a lot of value in telling the story of Fifeville and I think that this application helps move in that direction.

Thank you.

Other comments?

I'm pretty much in agreement with what Dave said as well.

I think the

Federal designation as a historic district is a positive thing for Fifeville.

I think it would help the neighborhood in future development, but it certainly would have been a helpful thing to have in the late 90s when they were talking about putting a road through there.

At the same time, I'm struck by the fact that

The neighborhood doesn't seem to be particularly, well certainly not crazy about this idea.

I haven't heard anybody from the neighborhood really saying other than Karen Firehawk that they want it.

And Ms. Covington, I appreciate the fact that it would be helpful to you, but frankly the residents don't seem

I think it's something that we can offer to residents as a tool for them to protect their neighborhood.

I know my neighborhood wants it.

Will and Mills wants it.

They're neighborhoods that want us to get moving to help their neighborhood and to put this in place for their neighborhood.

So if there's a neighborhood that doesn't want it, my sense is we shouldn't be forcing it on them.

and that's pretty much the way I feel.

I don't see a compelling city need for why we should force this on the neighborhood if they don't want it.

I think the neighborhood would be smart to go back and meet with themselves and say, hey, maybe we ought to want this.

I'd like to reply to that because we had a meeting in Fifeville where we sat at small tables and heard exactly what residents thought and that wasn't what I heard.

What I heard was that the residents were very worried about anything that would lead to design control and that they were highly skeptical of design control.

They didn't want any process that meant that someone could tell them whether they could tear their house down or whether they had to get permission to alter it.

and so they're worried that these processes were linked together, but I didn't really hear opposition to this idea.

In fact, I heard, you know, it would be cool to honor the fact that this is a historic neighborhood and that this is a way of honoring that history.

I would support this, especially if we can have languages, Mr. Norris has suggested, that makes it clear that this is a standalone process and that

I certainly support the last thing that the mayor said.

I think that the problem is that the two processes have been linked in the public's mind and they're still linked in the staff report.

The staff report expresses the hope that the new conservation designation could be pursued in the future.

You know, this is the issue, is that these types of things should not be coming forward from the staff, they should be coming forward from the neighborhoods.

So I think that part of the issue is that we do have neighborhoods all over town that really, really, really want these designations.

I think that had the process been managed a little bit better, that we might have been, as Miss Gallo pointed out, we might have been able to

I have

come up with a better sense of support for the National Historic Designation.

I think the National Historic Designation is a very positive thing.

I am very concerned that people feel that their work has been plagiarized in it and that their objections aren't being used to support something that they don't actually support.

I also know that I've heard from people that however that historic information gathering process went forward to develop the original report.

that it didn't fully take into account the voices of African Americans.

So that's what I've gotten from the neighborhood.

So I think that as far as the historic designation National Register process, it's something that I can support, but not unless there can be some kind of very clear language

showing, A, we've got to get the problem with the initial report straightened out.

But there needs to be some clear language that shows that by supporting this designation, we are not thereby saying that the city is going to come back in six months and start a conservation district process on you.

That needs to be something that comes forward from the neighborhoods.

And like Kevin said, I think it would be smart to sit down and figure out how you could stop demos and how you could stop flipping, but, you know,

Mr. Taliaferro.

I will be brief and I don't want to be redundant but it is unfortunate that these two got linked together and I certainly would not support local design and control.

I will support the historical designation and

I think it does offer some positive benefits for the neighborhood, but it's already been said if we're going to get into local design and control, I think that should come to the neighborhood.

I think that's a neighborhood issue and they want a sign, I would support it.

And I'm hearing they don't want that, so I won't support that part of it.

Any further comments?

I move to approve the Fifeville National Register application.

I have a little further discussion.

I would like to offer an amendment also that the concerns with the actual intellectual property that is in the report that those concerns be addressed.

I have a little trouble with claiming intellectual property on a letter that was sent to someone and copied to all of council.

But it's not based on your own research.

It's not in plagiarism based on

I didn't accuse plagiarism.

I just said I wanted the intellectual property issues straightened out.

All right.

Mr. Brown, do you have any comments on the way this motion we've crafted here in terms of procedurally?

No.

Okay.

It's been moved and seconded.

The amendment has been accepted.

Is there further discussion?

Hearing none, I'll call for a vote.

Okay, thank you.

My Director of Communications, Rick Baric, will introduce us for us.

Good evening, Council.

This report is the product of some comments that were made during other matters a couple months ago here in Council.

Several Councillors had expressed that they had heard from some constituents that they were having some cable and some internet issues.

So pursuant to that, we did a study within City Hall on the

calls from the public.

I will say for the start that we don't have currently a mechanism in place that really tracks this specifically.

But upon talking to the points of contact in city hall, obviously manager's office, the city attorney's office, some of the other mechanisms that people use to comment on city services, it really didn't come up too much, probably a handful over the past year.

But in looking through our

franchise agreement, some opportunities came up that we may want to take advantage of that we can improve our service and improve smart and system-focused government.

One thing that I wanted to note that when people do call into City Hall and have a complaint about service, they are told that it is a private company and they are directed to 1-800-COMCAST or 1-888-COMCAST.

If it's a more specific problem or more consistent problem, there are other means that we use to correct that situation.

We have lately done some improvements to our website, Channel 10, charlottesville.org slash channel 10 with a one zero.

to allow, to offer some guidance for people that do want to make a comment to Comcast directly or to the city manager's office.

So we have done some improvements with that.

But we did look through the franchise agreement.

It was adopted by Comcast from the previous agreement with Adelphia.

It does expire in 2013.

There are some elements of the franchise agreement that we may want to take advantage of and I would call opportunities.

I've listed some for you for your benefit.

The first one is a cable advisory committee.

Essentially, that's a member of city council.

myself and other city staff along with some private citizens who would monitor cable service.

I do also want to mention from the top that our franchise agreement applies only to cable service, it does not apply to internet service.

So we are a bit more limited if there are issues with internet service.

The cable advisory committee could either deal with public access

issues or some specific complaints about the service.

I will say that of the hundred or so localities that have Comcast service locally, only one takes advantage of this and that's Blacksburg.

Special testing

which involves going to some of the construction areas and having a test done on the construction work that has to be done as a result of specific complaints about service.

Also a programming survey which would be funded by Comcast, it would be sent out in subscribers regular monthly.

bills that would ask them about their choices in programming to see if what we're offering now is really what they want to see.

Additional access channels, I do apologize in advance for my voice, trying to make it through here.

We currently have three access channels, channels 10, 13 and 14.

With the upgrades to our system, we're allowed to have three additional ones.

We could talk to Comcast about potentially pulling the bulletin board onto a separate channel, perhaps religious programming that's done through public access into another channel.

In addition, maybe meetings that we traditionally would not have on channel 10, we could have on an additional channel.

Pro bono advertising of access channels, open records request which is basically us going to them and looking at their complaint records to see if they match what we think is going on locally with the cable service and then service drop request which essentially is taking a zone within the city

and doing a special survey to see if the service quality is what we would expect based on our franchise agreement.

So those are some of the areas that you all may want to direct staff to talk to Comcast about to improve what we think is pretty good service and to provide better communications between Comcast and its clients and Comcast within the city.

I do want to mention that we made some recent improvements to Channel 10.

I hope that you've noticed.

It allows us to be a little bit more 24-7.

It also allows us to be automated, and we're able to put more emergency information and more public information very easily on the web.

Some of these improvements may help people to notice Channel 10 a little bit more, so hopefully that will make more of a difference.

Before I introduce Mr. Combs, I'll take any questions that you might have.

Okay.

We are, Public Access does have a list of programming and it's done sometimes on a basis of first come first served and there have been complaints and comments issued about not having enough time slots available for everyone particularly as it

goes to religious programming.

There is a lottery system that we do each year.

There's also some preference given to city subscribers and city residents because we do have the franchise agreement.

They buy into the franchise agreement and the county and other counties don't provide that financial incentive.

So it will give us some opportunity to perhaps free up some space.

Each of the city subscriber pays 35 cents a month, which is a PEG fee, which goes into a pool of money that's put in for paying for the maintenance and the equipment for the public access channel.

There's staff costs, certainly, and in addition, I think... Do you mean from Comcast?

We are not charged anything, no.

Okay.

It's my understanding that it would.

The only reason I bring that up is because I actually hear a lot from people in the county who watch us on TV and they wish they could see the county meetings on TV, the county commission, the county court, the supervisors meetings.

and we obviously make good use of this.

It seems to me it would be a service not just for county residents but for city residents.

Another quick question.

Absolutely.

We're looking at the possibility and this is just in the planning stages of some of the meetings that were held down in the basement conference room.

It would be possible with the equipment that we have right now to broadcast live those meetings and certainly tape them.

Live meetings of public interest go on there.

I received a request recently.

We used to televise our housing authority board meetings.

We haven't in a number of years.

And we received a request recently from a citizen who lives in a public housing city.

I think that most of the smaller meetings, but it does take us more resources for us to take equipment over to a conference room and then edit it after the fact.

Good evening, Mayor Brown and fellow council members.

My name is Paul Coons.

I'm the Director of Government Affairs here at Comcast.

My teammate, Nate Doherty, which lives in the city, has accompanied me tonight.

I got a few points I just want to briefly go over and I want to thank the council for the opportunity for us to come in front of the board tonight and speak.

I want to briefly describe a little bit about Comcast and the Blue Ridge area that we serve.

The Blue Ridge area is from the panhandle of West Virginia through Maryland through Virginia and we finished up below Danville and two communities in North Carolina.

We cover about 100 local franchise authorities, Nate and I do.

We have roughly 14,000 square miles and we're up and down I-81 and Route 29.

We have roughly 500 employees in the Blue Ridge area and we have about 100 local teammates here in the Charlottesville area.

We occupy in Charlottesville and Albemarle two offices, one at 400 Westfield Road where our customer payment center is and we have a technical and network operations at 324 West Main Street

which at one time was the payment center.

Most of our calls are handled on Manassas call center which is a regional call center so that's where the calls are handled.

As we merged from Adelphia to Comcast, we were finishing up the upgrade and rebuilding the local city towards the end of 2006.

And as we took over the local Adelphia system and we were coming out of Comcast, we met with the local city officials.

We kind of got an idea of what was going on with the construction.

and we also want to give credit to city manager O'Connell and the city attorney Mr. Brown and their staff because they helped us through different areas throughout the city when we were finishing up and when we were

changing from the one system over to the new system that we had employed.

We had very little problems that we thought with the construction we did.

We did roughly about 200 miles of construction in a condensed city of Charlottesville, so it went over real well.

Some of the services that we first started off as we turned on the new system was the high definition television, HDTV,

and towards the end of January and 1st of February in 2006 we added 10 additional channels in high definition TV.

Those channels were local and the major network broadcast locally.

In the next few weeks we hope to offer more additional HDTV channels and also throughout the year of 2008 we'll continue to add

more HD high definition TV channels.

Another thing with the upgrade completed, it helped us with the Comcast high speed internet and what it did there was it was able for us to offer higher speeds at the low level, the mid level which is 2 to 4 megabits and also from 4 to 6 megabits or high level.

It also gave us a feature that Comcast had throughout the country was power boost.

which power boost, if you're not familiar, it's a term that we use that senses the usage throughout the high speed internet network and also sees if there's some extra speed within the network.

If someone's downloading large files such as photos, it automatically boosts the speed to the customers no matter what speed you have from services that power boost is used.

Another function that we will be offering with the completion of the construction here locally is VOD, video on demand.

And what that is is between 4,000 and 5,000 hours of stored video services in a library and that allows our customers to automatically pull up different stored programs such as video network programming, movie channels,

If you have local taped programs, you can pull that up automatically as a customer with the digital boxes.

And one of the last things that we're doing that we're testing now in the city and also the county is our digital voice product, which we call Comcast Digital Voice.

It will allow us on our own network to offer telephone service throughout the city.

We're testing it right now and we hope to offer that in the beginning of 2008 and that will really fulfill what we've advertised throughout the nation as a Triple Play which is a video

I'd kind of like to close a little bit with what we do in the community.

As Comcastors, we try to work in the communities that we serve and also where our employees live.

Some of the things locally that we work with, we work with the United Way, you know, local

We've worked locally with the Boys and Girls Club.

We've worked with the Boys and Girls Scouts.

We've sponsored the Virginia Film Festival that was held each year here locally.

We've worked with the First Night.

We've sponsored youth sports and the collegiate athletes here at the university.

and we're also participating next week at the Holiday Toy Lift that was earlier mentioned and we will have one of our bucket trucks there if anybody would like to go up in the bucket truck and that would be our second or third year we've worked there.

Another thing that we're proud of is our Comcast Cares day and we have our day in April where we pick a local

nonprofit organization and our employees go out and work in that nonprofit organization and we pick different community organizations that we work with.

This year we're hoping to work with the Boys and Girls Club locally to pull that off.

We also, as part of the franchise agreement with the city, we offer video and high speed internet service to about 40 city schools and public government buildings.

So that was negotiated with Adelphi and we fulfilled that also.

We also offer educational opportunities with cable in the classroom.

There's about 500 hours of educational programming that's available locally.

if a school would want

We offered individual scholarships of $1,000.

So that's a little bit about Comcast.

I do have a couple.

I want to just say that I want to thank you for being so responsive when the switchover happened earlier this summer.

There were a lot of problems that were experienced by citizens, including myself.

And so I really appreciate the fact that you guys got on those issues hard, and you've cleared a lot of those cases, and that we're seeing a much lower incidence of service complaints and service calls now.

So I know that was tough.

But I think one of the, I wanted to ask a couple of questions about, you talk about issues, I think that when citizens hear things like switching over to high definition TV and you know, making things like video on demand,

available, the first thing that they think is, oh my goodness, they're going to put the bill up again.

So can you, and I think that people also have a fear that if we, at the Comcast, which is the high def, that their non-high def televisions will not work.

Well, with high definition TV, if you, if the consumer does not have

a high def TV or a card for a digital TV that they have.

We offer that box, a high definition converter box and also when we offer video on demand we'll also have a combination boxes available.

Now as you know in 2009 the FCC that's a mandated date where that's going to be required.

We'll work with our customers on the high definition boxes

But if you just have a regular TV, will you have to get the new equipment?

Yeah.

Right.

But if you want to view in hi-def, then you have to get a hi-def box.

Or have the video on demand combo box.

I have a comment and question.

I just want to thank Mr. Collins and Mr. Darby for meeting with me because I've had some concerns and heard from some people and I appreciate you being responsive.

I think things have improved.

And then I just have a question and maybe you can explain it for the folks that are watching tonight because I hear this a lot.

and it relates to the different tiers of service and I think that you're required to carry certain channels.

Well, in the city of Charlottesville we have the broadcast only, which is the basic tier, which is two through, and that consists of the local broadcast channels, maybe C-SPAN, the PEG channels, the public education and government,

and am I missing something on that?

There's a couple of home shopping.

Then the next tier is expanded which is about from 23 up to 60 something.

Can I follow up on that?

Sure.

I realize this isn't in our contract with you but you talk about community programs and this is something that I've heard from the community as a request and that is a family program that fits somewhere between your standard program and your expanded program.

and the reason I think that's important is whether we like it or not there's a lot of kids in this city, probably in the county as well, they're being babysat by the cable, by the TV and I've talked to parents who are frustrated by the fact that if you go beyond basic you pull in a lot of R-rated content

I think the industry response to that is, well you can watch what your kids watch, you can monitor that, but a lot of parents don't.

They're just not there, they're working.

I think if you had an option that basically was your basic channel, your sports channels, your education channels,

Create a family tier between the basic and your expanded, which pulls in, again, a lot of content that people might not feel good about leaving unattended, but they want the sports channels.

That's typically what it is.

To answer that question, the one thing that we provide is our digital converter boxes.

There's parental controls.

We'd be happy to work with anybody in the community that has concerns with that, with younger kids.

And we've already, I mean we're already doing, we get requests.

We come out and really the parent controls by that converter box.

what their kids can watch in different times.

Some is guided by the designated market, the DMAs.

Some at one time was by franchise.

A little bit is provided by the FCC and then other is through our corporation what program, I mean what program that we offer and what we try to, whether you're in Charlottesville or Waynesboro or Stanton, we try to have some lineups that's similar which helps our call centers for when our customers call in.

Well, I think there's two issues there.

One is the cost, which is when you step up from the basic service, which is not that expensive, to the expanded, it's a pretty big step.

And I think you'd have to take that big step and then you're backing down.

I think that's part of it, but I think really the main

The main thing is that you've got a lot of families out there who just aren't that savvy to set up their set box.

And I think if you were to come out, you say you're walking through it, and that's always the response is, well, you can put the parental controls on it.

But I think you've got a lot of families out there where the kids know more about how to use that technology than they do.

And the response when you say that to them is, why can't you just give me a family package?

Okay, a couple of questions.

I hear complaints about the price and so since it's been Comcast, the rate's been increased once, is that right?

Yes, correct.

There's been one price adjustment.

And who determines the price adjustment?

Is it done locally or is it done corporately somewhere else?

It's a combination, yes.

They're spread out.

There'd be probably some discrepancy, but I'd have to really look at the difference.

So is it capable cheaper in some communities than it is here?

The general price is the same.

And there's some difference in content?

Yes.

I mean, I would pass that question on up the ladder on that one.

Okay, so will you?

Yes, yes.

Okay.

I'll just say, you know,

really quickly, that I do appreciate the fact that Comcast has an extremely low-cost option, which is the one that I use, which is eight bucks a month.

We think it's a good bargain per day.

Other questions?

Okay, well, thank you for coming.

I'm sure the public got a lot out of this.

Thank you.

Appreciate your time.

Chief has been patiently waiting.

Mr. Mayor, members of council, thank you, Mr. O'Connell, Mr. Brown.

I have been patiently waiting.

I brought some reinforcement.

Detective Blaine Cosgrove who was courtesy enough to put together the information that we sent you in your package last week and he can certainly answer any questions regarding that.

Also, one of my law enforcement partners and the prosecutorial authority for the city, Commonwealth Attorney Dave Chapman is here as well with me tonight.

Let me make clear why we've come back before you to kind of remind the public all we're asking council to consider tonight is this, that you give and be the permission to move forward with a request for proposal for a video surveillance system.

Now the system we brought forward to you several months ago was a 30 camera system.

They were fixed cameras that came back to a centralized location.

The system would have the ability to be monitored in real time if we had the resources to do that.

But in any event, those images would be captured.

We went back with Mr. Brown and the help of his staff and developed a policy that tried to respond to some of your questions and concerns.

But tonight we're really just asking permission to go forward and put out an RFP

develop a scope of work, have some vendors that mastered this craft to come into the community to look at what we proposed, to look at the area that we proposed implementation and perhaps even give us some better ideas that could even be more cost effective for the city.

So today all we're asking for is to go the next step and to come back again with something that I think

would be an efficient way to address some of the public safety issues that we're concerned about.

Several members here from the business community that have expressed some support and concern.

Others that have some reservations in our community.

And as you review the documentation that's here in front of you, those reservations and support exist all over the country.

And since we last came before you, we've attempted to address your concerns regarding our policy.

We've given you documentation.

We've given you some explanation as to why we feel a centralized versus an autonomous system could be more efficient for us.

We've accumulated a lot of research material for your review.

Some of the areas that you ask that we address in our policy are as follows.

An express commitment that will administer the system in accordance with the United States Constitution and Virginia law.

A clear prohibition against use of the system for any discriminatory purpose.

The installation of conspicuously posted signage in the area or areas that are subject to surveillance.

Yearly training updates for staff and a yearly audit of the system and policies to ensure compliance.

A provision that limits access to this system strictly to law enforcement personnel as authorized by the chief of police and that that use be strictly limited to a law enforcement objective.

and lastly the retention of those images.

We have recommended by policy complying with the library of records, that is keeping the image for 30 days, but only longer if there is a reasonable suspicion to believe the image or images are related to a crime or pending investigation.

I think you'll agree the materials that we've given you offer a variety of opinions and conclusions with regard to how successful or effective CCTV is in the area of crime prevention.

And I think some localities boast some appreciable decreases in crime and others, frankly, the jury remains still to be out.

But what we do know about CCTV in our community is that it's been effectively implemented

and a number of areas, the grounds of the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville Public School Division properties, our transit center, our banking institutions, commercial office space, shopping center and major retailers across the city.

While reported crime incidents will vary in number due to a variety of factors,

I think that the documentation you have in front of you will certainly support that CCTV, if implemented properly, can communicate to an offender.

If you commit a crime, you may get caught.

And that's precisely the message that we're trying to communicate here.

I appreciate the discussion that we've had publicly and several of you have come to me with and have talked about publicly as well and that is let's give the police department more people to do their job effectively and I will tell you I welcome

any resource that you will give me.

I welcome the fact that you want to support the department with personnel and you want to help me find ways to recruit and retain good people and to make this job more attractive and a competitive marketplace.

I appreciate all those things, but what I'm asking for tonight is

that you respect my judgment and show support for the proposal that's here in front of you and let me take that next step forward.

As of December 31st, I'll have nine actual vacancies.

If you add the eight officers in training to those nine, those are 17 operational vacancies.

And even if I hired all those people effective January 1, we wouldn't deploy them to the streets until next September.

and keep in mind it costs us about $45,000 to $50,000 to train each one of those officers.

Cameras won't replace the police nor will they act as a sole crime prevention measure wherever they're deployed but they'll certainly act as an additional tool and a force multiplier for our deployment.

Civil business owners are here tonight but I've also received correspondence.

from Glen Ross, the Virginia National Bank.

Not only did he, and I think Mr. Mayor, you received his letter as well, not only does he support this system, he goes as far as to say I'll buy one of the cameras.

And he thinks, and he's a businessman, I'm not, I'm just a cop.

that perhaps other businesses might be inclined to do so as well.

We'll not get that far unless we're able to go out with an RFP and let them know where their money will be spent and just how.

The Omni Hotel has written in support of this.

As Bob said, the Downtown Business Association, even the Paramount Theater,

I see Chuck Lewis in the audience who did a lot of real estate on our downtown mall and I think if he were asked he would tell you he supports this and supports partnering with the police department to accomplish this goal.

When council last met here, I think it was the last meeting, perhaps even the one before, some issues of crime in our city came up and I think largely those discussions were driven by a tremendous tragedy that occurred over on St. Clair Avenue and a tremendous loss to a wonderful family who I had a chance to meet last Friday night.

who's mourning over the death of their daughter.

And when something that terrible happens in a community, it really shakes the community and rightfully so.

So it caused us to look at crime over the last 10 years because that's been the topic of conversation across town over the past several weeks.

And I looked this back as far as 1998.

And you know, we really have only had about three years in that 10-year period where violent crime was up.

99, 2000, violent crime was up in the city 8%.

01 it was up 4%, 02 it dropped down negative 15%, the following year negative 19%, the following year negative 1%, and 05 it jumped back up to about 4%.

And then last year it was flat, violent crime was flat, it was 0%.

I'm proud to say this year it's down 15% citywide.

Where we have seen increases in crime has been precisely what CCTV is most successful at dealing with, that's property crime.

Most of our property crime has been driven by residential burglary in collaborating with the county police force and our detectives have gotten together and we're seeing remarkable reductions in burglaries this year, not so much in the crime itself as much as the clearances.

We're actually capturing pattern burglars.

Mr. Chapman, when he was here last time with me, alluded to a case that just happened that very week.

Didn't say a whole lot about it then, but it was the arrest of a burglary suspect.

where we use CCTV to help identify that suspect and build a case against him.

That suspect went through 20 residential burglaries and the robbery of a convenience store.

Now, to suggest that this system or one like it doesn't deter crime, can you even imagine how many crimes we've deterred simply by taking that one person off the street?

I wouldn't come back before you three times.

if I didn't believe this.

I'm just asking for a tool.

At the end of the day I'm the one that's responsible for the public safety of this community and I take that job very seriously.

And tonight I'm asking for your help and I'm asking you for your permission to take the next step

put this project out on bid and to come back with a system that I think will serve this community well.

If you have questions about the technology, that's why I brought Detective Cosgrove along with me.

He's mastered at that craft.

I'm sure he'll be happy to answer any of your questions.

If you have any specific concerns about the studies that are in front of you, all I can tell you is they are what they are.

Some of them are very positive, some of them, as I said, the jury's still out.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Before we go into questions, I would just like to say I thought the materials provided by Detective Cosgrove were excellent.

I just want to clarify for the public, we're not just talking about security cameras on the downtown mall because the proposal before us says

Again, our first proposal looked at 30 cameras.

15 of them would be deployed along the Water Street corridor, particularly governing over our parking facilities down there, the two open and metered lots.

the Woodard Street parking garage.

We find a lot of folks who come to enjoy the venues in the mall will typically park there.

That camera system will also pick up that portion of Garrett Street which has some parking for citizens as well.

10 cameras there, 15 cameras along the mall itself.

Those cameras will also have the capability of reaching out to those side streets to connect from the mall to Water and Market.

And then five cameras around our public buildings here around City Hall and the Annex.

in our transit center and the police department.

That's not to say that at the end of the day we can't buy equipment within this 30 that we can move anywhere in the city that we choose.

If a crime issue begins to arise somewhere else, it's possible that what we purchase can be moved to another location.

We'll certainly make sure that when we develop an RFP and scope of work for a vendor to respond to that we build as much flexibility into this system

as we can.

Why start on the mall?

We chose the mall simply because it is a gateway to our public buildings.

It is a very densely populated area.

We spent a lot of money to develop this area and to encourage folks to come here and enjoy these entertainment venues.

Again, I think the system has

as implemented in other parts of the country.

So let me just make sure I got it straight.

15 on Water Street and...

Ten on Water Street.

Fifteen on the mall and five on Garrett... Around public buildings.

So it may be refined, so maybe there might be the possibility of perhaps Lee Park or some of those types of public areas on the other side of the mall might be covered too, depending on what you decide in consultation with the consultants.

I guess it's a technical question.

You talk about the MeSH network.

This is a wireless setup, correct?

And you make good points why that's necessary.

And I guess the question I have in thinking about if we wanted to be able to relocate the cameras, etc., which you kind of alluded to that we'd probably be able to do it.

What's the range on the wireless system?

It depends.

It depends on buildings and structures.

It depends on the terrain.

But in open terrain, there's the hip of it.

sufficient distance to the width of this city, but it depends upon the nodes being able to communicate with each other, and there's so many different factors that go into that.

Thanks, Kendra.

I mean, is it possible sometimes to make adjustments and relocate them so you can... Oh, absolutely, sir.

Usually there's some that are dual frequency bands, 2.4 gigahertz or 5.4 or 5.8 gigahertz.

There's some public safety bands out there of the 1.9 gigahertz range.

Okay, well the first two are Wi-Fi.

I know there's a 700 megahertz which is public frequency which is available for emergency response but I think getting to the Chief's point you don't have any kind of any close to a block or two range at most and that's unobstructed with the 2.4 the 5.1 maybe with 700 you get some range you also get a lot of interference so I guess I think that is something that

And again, this is like mesh networks now are presently on their third generation in a very short amount of time.

Other questions?

You mentioned a number of private establishments, shopping malls, I know French at Court, etc.

that have implemented their own security camera systems.

I guess there's a question better asked for them, but I think if there would be a will or desire to do that, we certainly would work with them to accomplish a common good.

At least we know of one business that's willing to accept some of that responsibility.

I'll do whatever folks are willing to allow us to explore in the way of options.

I approach this from a

It's my responsibility to seek the solution and try to find ways to do it creatively, even if it means to fund it.

But I'm willing to work with businesses if in fact that's what we choose to do.

Chief, isn't it also true, we have gotten comments from citizens that express concern about the camera system and particularly concerned about the conduct of the officers in certain circumstances.

Isn't it also true that if we create this camera system, our officers will be under surveillance as well?

Well, one of the things that you did last budget session was completely fund in-car video systems, of which we've just signed a contract with a local vendor, Clear Communications, who's going to be providing the systems for each one of our marked police vehicles.

and one of the things we mentioned when we talked about those systems is not only does it bring evidentiary value for cases that the officer will make, it's also an officer safety tool but it's a public accountability tool as well because it will record both visual and audio of the police citizen communication.

You know, anything that's within the eye of that camera, as long as we comply with

back to this proposed system.

Anything that's within the eye of that camera is subject to review, provided there's a law enforcement reason in which to do it.

I just want to say publicly I think our Charlottesville Police Department has been getting a bit of a bum rap with this whole idea of rogue cops out there.

I think the vast majority of Charlottesville police officers do an excellent job and I think sometimes they get, I mean there's always going to be incidents that need to be investigated but you guys do a great job.

I appreciate that, thank you.

I wonder if you could address the slippery slope argument, which is, here we're talking about spending $300,000 on a camera system for downtown and there's an argument to be made that there are many neighborhoods in Charlottesville that are actually much less safe than the downtown mall and have higher crime rates than the downtown mall.

How could we not turn around, how could we turn around and say to another neighborhood, the next neighborhood that comes to us and says they want a camera system, how could we say to them, you know, we're not going to give you a camera system and ultimately isn't this going to be just a tidal wave of requests from neighborhoods and ultimately we'll have camera systems on every street corner.

Well, the same question was asked by one of our local media representatives about six months ago and our response to her was, I'll put the system wherever you want me to put it.

I chose downtown because I think we have critical infrastructure down here that needs to be protected, that we have an obligation to protect.

There's certainly a lot of our tax base.

and a lot of fiscal resources we've put downtown.

It kind of made sense to start here, but I think if we design a system that will allow for some mobility with some of the equipment we purchase, we could bring it to a neighborhood that was having a particular issue with crime.

And so I think your comments are frankly realistic.

I think there will come, once we put this process in place, there will be opportunities for us to implement the system elsewhere throughout the city.

But I think we'd have a track record of showing that we know how to use the system responsibly.

We'll perhaps have a track record to show with our prosecutor how the system has aided us in successful prosecution of patterned criminals.

If I might just jump in, I also think that

But that then becomes a council issue.

I mean, the reason that we're talking about the downtown mall is because it is a commercial district, it is public space.

Once you start talking about moving into neighborhoods, then it becomes, which is thought of typically as private.

more residential types of space it becomes a different kind of conversation and in fact you know we could address it from the policy end on the front end if we're concerned about that by saying you know basically saying that this is something that we're reserving for public spaces parking lots you know gym areas that sort of thing as opposed to and commercial districts corridors

rather than something that neighborhoods need to be concerned is going to be like be moving into their backyards.

I think the

Just to respond on that briefly, if you look at the COPS study in the back of the book, one of the areas that it says is that CCTV appears to work best in small, well-defined areas.

What page are you on?

Page 19 of the COPS article in the back.

It just lays out some general findings.

CCTV is more effective at combating property offenses.

than violence or public order crime appear to work best in small, well-defined areas such as public car parks, and they use that as an example.

So I think your point about public space is an important one.

I don't want, however, to create an impression from the public's perspective that if we needed to use CCTV in the investigation of a specific criminal incident, provided we complied with the constitutional provisions, that we may not use it.

in a residential area because it may present the opportunity that we have to do that.

So I wouldn't want to create a policy that wasn't very clear about that.

Other questions?

Thank you, Chief.

Discussion from counsel?

Well I think it's, I'll just start because I know that people have plenty of things to say.

that the chief has been very responsive to the issues that we raised back when we discussed this several months earlier.

And in general, I am satisfied that if we do a good enough job of addressing the policy on the front end, then we're not going to have to worry about problems on the back end.

So I tend to support this and for a couple of reasons.

One of the point that I would like to make again is that

While there are people who have great fears of a surveillance society creeping up on them, they need to understand that there are people in this community who are already under a great deal of surveillance, that is particularly in the African-American neighborhoods.

And I would like to have a tool where instead of every person being a suspect, we know exactly who we're looking for.

then we don't have issues such as arose several years ago when we had our, it seemed like a good idea to do a DNA swab of, you know, whoever was walking by.

We know exactly who we're looking for and we can put these people, you know, such as this person who is responsible for 20 to 30 burglaries.

The other piece that I think is kind of interesting is that we've recently gotten information from Bill Lucey of the Planning Commission pointing to the decline in foot traffic on the mall.

It was a pretty large percentage.

I think it was something like 17% that came up in this consultant's report and he was trying to link this to the opening of the second crossing on the mall because I think that it's probably just as likely that it could have been related to perceptions of safety on the mall and that is something that we really need to look at when we

when that report comes forward and we consider this issue again.

So, you know, we have to remember that our mall as a commercial district is fragile and it's under a lot of competition.

There are people all over the county who are coming up.

Albemarle Place may be on the slow track as opposed to the fast track, but we have a lot of competition.

Mr. Mayor, I ought to say that I'm in support of this and I guess that I want to applaud the chief of police and the police department for really offering up the use of technology to probably enhance policing capability in the downtown mall and I think it has other opportunities also and I think

My position really hasn't changed since the last meeting, which is that I support the use of cameras.

I don't have a problem with their use.

I think that this proposal and the safeguards that go along with it have come a long way since we first started.

Where I object is a centralized system for gathering and keeping that data.

I don't think it's necessary and I think it does take us down that slope of going from using camera surveillance as a forensic tool to making it something that's more obtrusive.

That is a problem that I have with any central system.

I don't think, you know, we've heard

That was a standalone system.

I think if we had standalone systems that we thought we could deploy in areas where there could be a problem, if there's a problem,

Hope to see

I'm not willing to participate

of the number of people that are coming downtown, I think that's partly generated by merchants going, oh no, we've got a crime problem.

It's not safe.

We need cameras.

I just don't see that.

I feel very safe when I'm downtown.

I feel safe in most areas of the city.

I'm concerned about how this would escalate.

If the merchants want to put cameras in their own businesses, if the DBAC wants to get together and say, we'll do this, every business can have a camera,

Fine.

They can do that.

CPC wants to put one on their parking garages.

That's fine.

I have a problem with the city making this a centralized system.

I think if you look at how liberties get taken away historically, it doesn't happen all at once.

It happens incrementally.

I'm in full agreement with Mr. Lynch and I too am in favor of using cameras on a limited basis, particularly in areas of the city, neighborhoods, hot spots where we know there's been an increase in criminal activity and we can use them as a forensic tool.

And I would like to see us develop and expand our flexible system, but I'm not in favor of a fixed, centralized surveillance system for many of the reasons that Mr. Lynch

alluded to, but also I feel like to me it's a lot like Ms. Hamilton mentioned the mall crossing.

The mall crossing did not come down to a data-driven decision because one group will point to studies which show the mall crossing is going to save downtown.

Another group will point to data which indicates the mall crossing is going to

What it comes down to, frankly, is what is the perception.

I'm not convinced by the, even though I really appreciate all the research you provided us, I'm not convinced that cameras, surveillance cameras, really do lead to a reduction in crime.

For every study that shows in one community that there's a correlation or implies that there's a correlation between cameras and reduction in crime, you can find other studies which show that there isn't such a correlation.

We do know what works in reducing crime.

and we do know that improved lighting tends to reduce crime, we do know that improved policing tends to reduce crime, that proven crime prevention strategies can reduce crime.

I'd like to see us invest in those kinds of initiatives

I'm in favor of a flexible camera system where we can use it for the reasons, for the things that we know that camera systems can be effective in addressing, like again, forensic analysis and trying to identify perpetrators of crime in a

neighborhood when a situation where crime is prevalent.

I do agree if the businesses downtown, the property owners downtown would like to have this, by all means, they are welcome to do this.

Friendship Court didn't wait for the city of Charlottesville to come in and install a video camera system for them.

They did it on their own.

Many other private property owners have done the same.

and if we want to provide technical assistance to them in that endeavor, I think by all means.

Hard for me because there's no one in the city that I have more respect for or a higher opinion of than Chief Longville.

Yet I'm still not prepared to support moving forward with cameras.

I agree with much of what has been said by Mr. Lynch and by Mr. Norris.

I think to me this is different than asking for the computers and the cars.

It's different than asking for cameras in cars.

It's different than asking for more money for salaries or more money for something else because I do think it's a tangible step that I'm personally uncomfortable with and have been the whole time we've had this discussion of having cameras that are filming everybody in public spaces.

It's something that

I have a lot of concern about the trends in this country, not locally, but in this country, about this erosion of our privacy and the erosion of our rights.

I think there's wiretapping going on, there's lots of things.

I sort of share with Mr. Norris, people come here, the concerns expressed, and I really think they're expressed more because of perception than reality, but the concerns expressed are about violent crime.

People feeling safe walking from their car to come shop.

I don't think there's been a tremendous amount of violent crime in that type of crime, but that's really not what this is about preventing.

If you read through the literature here, the conclusions are all about property crime, and I agree it's not done.

So I'm not prepared to support this, and I feel bad saying that because I

I like to feel like I'm a strong supporter of Chief Longo's and I also like to feel like I'm a strong supporter of the time-time business community and what I will say is that I would

We'll challenge the other councilors who are agreeing with me tonight that if we're not going to move forward with this, then we should be prepared in the next budget to be more fully supporting the police department, thinking of what can we do if the answer is to have more police officers here.

What does Chief Longo need in order to hire him?

Can I ask a quick question?

Before we go much further along those lines, I'm wondering, Chief Longo, is it possible for the RFP that you issue to be crafted so that it

satisfies the objections of Mr. Lynch and Mr. Norris chiefly, that it's a flexible system, that there's not a room for monitoring, that we take an incremental step rather than a giant step.

You know, I think that if Council is willing to allow us the opportunity to explore a more flexible system that could be redeployed on a needs basis and also meet the needs and concerns of the constituents who came here tonight to voice their concerns to you, we will be happy to do that.

But at some point we've got to go forward with vendors and say,

What have you done?

What can we do?

How much will it cost?

And I can't do that unless you say I can.

So I'm willing to move in that direction to get us to the next step, if that's counsel's will.

Well I think that's a very well taken suggestion and I would certainly support an effort to issue an RFP to design, procure and design, develop a flexible camera system that can be used in areas of the city that are experiencing

The problem I have is with the centralized system.

As I've said before, I don't have a problem with the cameras.

I have a problem with pulling all the data into one place, monitoring it from one place, storing it in one place.

I think cameras can be effective as they are in banks when data is stored locally, as they are in convenience stores when data is stored locally, as there would be in somebody's house if they were using it to catch a burglar where they would store the data locally.

Do you see a wider fashion RFP to do that?

Do you see a way to fashion an RFP to do that to where it's not a centralized system?

Yes.

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Well, I think the proposal is going to need some work.

What will we have in front of us, mesh network, centralized location, storage essential.

Again, I don't have a problem with looking at something that's very different than this.

I'm not sure that we're going to be able to create that tonight.

I'd like to make a motion that we permit them to go off RFP for a non-centralized system.

and obviously they're going to get some different, I'm assuming some different proposals back.

That's correct.

And once we get those back, we can take a look at those then and then we can look at the policies during the interim.

Okay, there's a motion.

Is there a second to that motion?

I'll second.

Okay, we moved and seconded.

I think that'll work as long as we're clear what we mean by non-centralized.

I think there's a serious discussion that we need to have about how do we really take this to the next level.

I'm really interested in seeing more than two cops doing community policing in the neighborhoods.

That's something that you talked about.

I'd like to see more cops involved with kids at an earlier age.

I'm willing to put money there if that's what it takes to get them involved in sports programs more integrated with the community.

I had an interesting experience of being on a grand jury recently.

One of the things that struck me was that a fair amount of the evidence that we got is testimony of police officers, of what suspects told them, because they hadn't been arrested yet.

So there's quite a lot of evidence that comes in.

Alright, getting off track a little bit here, we have a motion on the floor, it's been seconded, is there any further discussion on the motion?

Hearing none, I'll call for the vote.

Okay.

Thank you, sir.

Could I make a request, because this has come up a couple times and the Chief is here, could he have two or three minutes and just talk to you about his strategy of community policing?

Just so the public has a chance to hear it, because what happens is individual citizens come, comments get made at a council meeting, there's no opportunity to give the other side of that.

I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to respond to some of Mr. Lynch's concerns but in a broader way respond to some of the issues that citizens from time to time come before you with and I won't go into a lot of detail other than to say it has been our priority and has been for the last seven years which will be February for me of this year

Seven years of trying to infuse a philosophy throughout an entire police department.

As I've said many times before, community policing is not about a certain number of positions.

It is a philosophy that has to touch every member of the police department.

And I think that we've done a pretty exceptional job at communicating to police officers the importance of going into neighborhoods, developing relationships, working with citizens to develop long-term problem solving strategies.

I'd like to think that a lot of the success we've accomplished over the past seven years is in large part because of that.

I do think there's a higher level of professionalism, a better way of communicating with citizens, and I think it plays out in just about everything that we do.

We've talked a couple times before about problem solving plans and projects.

We have well over 100 what we call PSPs in our records management system.

Problem solving is a huge component of community policing.

over 100.

That tells me that if I only have 60 patrol officers working the streets in our field operation division, that at least at one point in the last several months, each one of those officers has embraced a problem solving initiative.

That's community policing.

It's not lemonade on the front porch.

It's not just riding bikes in neighborhoods and walking footbeats.

It's a philosophy that transcends every single thing that we do.

I was at a Christmas party over the weekend, met a woman that I've never met before, lives in your neighborhood off St. Clair Avenue.

who came up to me and told me about some experiences that she's had with police officers that made a difference on her perception of the police.

And I think in large part that's because of the philosophy that we've been trying to penetrate through the organization.

I think we've done a remarkably good job in implementing community policing.

and we're going to continue to do that job in everything that we do.

Can you just add something to that?

And I just want to commend the Chief because we've seen a real commitment in the Police Department's commitment to working with the Housing Authority and particularly the PSP.

problem solving, what is it?

Projects.

Projects, that I can never remember what those acronyms mean.

But it might sound like a sort of band-aid approach, but I've been really impressed with the results.

And I've been really impressed by the commitment of Sergeant Albemarle to come into our housing authority meetings.

to explain the policies, to explain what's going on.

It's been a tremendous help.

So, you know, we may not see the bodies, but I do believe that the philosophy is working.

Thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Next on the agenda is the year-end appropriation.

It's a second reading.

Mr. Ray is going to introduce us.

Mr. Mayor, Members of City Council, as you recall, two weeks ago we had the first reading of the year end paper.

I would like to update you on, we did have an audit adjustment of $270,000.

that increased the $6.7 million balance to $7 million.

For those of you who are interested, it had to do with the personal property tax relief that the state provides.

And we were accounting for it based on the time the tax payer actually paid the bill.

The artist came in and said, it changed last year.

It's a grant.

You need to count it all as it comes in.

So that's where the $270,000 came in.

As you recall, the prior resolution recommended $5 million to Smith Pool of the balance and 1.5 to the School for Technology.

The resolution before you actually will appropriate $5 million to Smith Pool for the 2009 capital improvement budget and put the balance of $2,035,000 into the CFP contingency fund, which city council will program in the future in the 2009 budget.

So that was basically the only updates from the first reading of the paper.

We've invited the schools here tonight too, Jim Henderson, his staff.

I'd like to make a comment, question.

First of all, I appreciate the information that the school sent us.

I think last meeting I was pretty clearly skeptic about the whiteboards, and while I'm still a little skeptical, I think the smart boards, the information on them is pretty compelling.

And one of the things that I noticed in all of the information about it is that they recommend taking some time, that it's something that

is only effective when teachers are trained on it, when they really have time to build their lesson plans around it as opposed to just using it as a visual aid, which is where a lot of them start using it.

And so one thing that occurred to me after looking at some of those videos and reading information about it is maybe a strategy for putting these in there, and I can certainly understand how you'd want them, would be

to roll them in there.

I think the proposal was 240 classrooms.

What if we started with 100 classrooms?

I appreciate the work that you did in cost reducing this thing, going from about a million and some, million one, million two, to a $700,000 range proposal.

I think that certainly helps.

I think that

doing this incrementally will have a couple advantages.

First of all, you start with the technology leaders that you have in your individual schools, get them started with it, get the people that have a sense of what they want to do with it, working with it.

And as we roll it out, I suspect that if projector technology continues to fall at the same price that it has in the last four years, the last phase of our implementation will be a lot cheaper than the first.

In 2003 if you wanted a high definition video projector, it sets you back three or four thousand bucks.

Now it's a thousand bucks.

I suspect in four years it'll be two hundred bucks.

Understand your comment about professional development for the teachers.

What we've done over the last four years in addressing professional development is actually set up a technology academy, two years already implemented within our district.

And the teachers currently go to

Harrisonburg to James Madison University during March and October to receive training.

So these teachers are already well versed in the training because we're asking the University of Virginia and James Madison to do that training.

Each school has an average of five.

And we have nine schools.

So if we deployed only 140, we already have a population of teachers who are ready to receive the tools.

So which 140 would I select?

And that's a hard challenge to decide.

Who gets it and who doesn't?

And what's the justification for?

Mr. Connell, could you just refresh us where we are in terms of the

We talked last time about perhaps in concept preserving a portion of what was requested to the schools, but we're not appropriating this at this time.

What we put in front of you, which is what we think we heard, was to designate $5 million of the access that would go specifically for the Smith Pool Aquatic Program.

and reserve the remainder, which turns out to be about $2 million to go into the capital contingency.

You'd also ask us to bring you back additional information about some items that were in the year-end appropriation, but specifically more information about the school's technology request.

And the issue tonight, I think, is

If there's any more guidance and direction you can give us about trying to put the capital budget together, because this request is going to be in front of the council in the spring, if not tonight.

And those funds would be available to use towards that or some other possible capital kind of funding, but since they were here, I just wanted to point it out and that there's additional information in here.

and if we can answer or respond to any questions while they're here tonight, great.

If you've got any guidance, great.

I don't know if you guys have already covered this, but I did have a question about the school's technology request.

And that was in the technology infrastructure improvements requests attachment that we received.

So, you know, what is broken down is we're given the cost of the smart boards, the shipping, the installation of labor, all of that stuff, and the total cost per classroom, and that's 1.08 million dollars.

But then, on the second page, there is installation of a robust and flexible wireless network in each school.

That's $250,000 for all nine instructional buildings.

And then three, improved classroom network access, which includes an increased need for data connections, which was of the same amount of money.

So my question was, if you were thinking of getting wireless technology, then why do you need to

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council,

What we did is that we came in the first time with a request and then due to some additional information we went back and we looked at what we were asking and that was basically to put to making our classrooms the delivery of instruction through technology more effective and that's by putting smart boards and putting the right materials in those classrooms and to answer your question Mr. Lynch is that

Things that we've always done in school is we've always sort of done piecemeal.

We start a little bit in one school and a little bit in another school and it seems by the time we get to the end we're having to restart again.

And where are the staff that we have now through the efforts of Ms. Lewis behind me and Mark Leach is to develop a professional development which we've been doing for the past couple of years to make sure that our teachers are

Technology Smart and then being able to impart that information to our students and making sure that we have the appropriate infrastructure in our classrooms.

And part of this is getting the smart boards in the classroom.

Smart boards are driven by software.

Software is going to change and so part of our annual budget would be to make sure that we continue to look at our software and making sure it's doing what it's supposed to do.

and that will change over time but that is something that we're well aware of.

The second piece is that we went back and looked at the wireless and we, because of the request and making sure that we get our infrastructures in place, we found another funding source for making sure all our schools have wireless capability and so we took that off the first request.

and then lastly the infrastructure is that in our classrooms we have locations where we're set up to do work with our smart boards but it's only if you go into a classroom it's usually on one wall and we don't have the flexibility to move that classroom around and by coming in and making some changes to our classroom it will create a more flexible classroom and Mr.

Basically the short answer is that there are some applications that lend themselves particularly well to being run over wireless.

But at this point, wireless networks aren't as robust as a wired network.

So there are certain applications and places in our schools where a wired network works better and fits better.

So we're asking for funds to increase the ability for our classrooms to meet those needs where a wired connection is necessary.

Mr. Henderson alluded to the fact that we may have classrooms when we go back and we go and put these smart boards in where we need to add an additional wired connection in order to be able to meet the needs of bringing in video, for example, one application that doesn't necessarily always work so well over wireless because of the amount of bandwidth that it requires.

I was at the Omni Hotel recently with a very compelling presentation by a gentleman from National Geographic Society, I believe.

Thank you, with the Jason Project.

talking about new frontiers in scientific education in our schools.

And he kept referring to this technology, I think he called it Internet 2.0 or something like that.

I know nothing about this stuff.

I'm assuming that he's referring to Internet2, which is a consortium of research agencies and other entities that have a need for moving their traffic off of the commercial Internet and some of the limitations that that provides.

We currently, through the school system, do have a connection to the Internet2.

There's a gateway to Internet2 through Network Virginia, which is a consortium of

Mostly government agencies, higher ed, K-12 throughout the state that utilize a common internet service provider, so to speak, easiest way to put it, to have access to internet to resources.

So this proposal doesn't directly address that because most of that happens outside of our network.

We bring it into our network and then we have to deliver that content.

Just one other thing I'll add.

The Web 1 that first came out, or Web 1,

1.0, I guess is how you would call it, was so that we could actually just look at the information that was out there and was presented to us.

We were merely consumers of the information.

In the Web 2.0 generation, individuals would like to be participants and therefore students, teachers, parents, everyone are putting up content on the web.

So that's a new phase, another facet to consider.

and so by utilizing a smart board we're allowing the teacher not to be just the facilitator, I mean to be a facilitator of information and not merely the expert and the all-wise person.

Thank you.

I have a logistics question because since the last meeting and tonight the school request was sort of rolled into

the general pool of CIP requests at least since it's been presented and the advantage of course of having it be looked at separately as it was two weeks ago would be the money would be available six months sooner.

Does that really affect your implementation strategy to be able to

If we were able to put some of this earmarked, essentially some of it now, does that have any material effect on how quickly you're able to get the equipment or if you were to get it all in the budget and have it on July 1?

I don't think so.

Well, in terms of getting it to them,

There's a generation of students that are going to depart and leave us.

Is it physically possible to get it to them before September?

I guess is really the question that I'm asking.

We would just start sooner and with implementing the process.

In other words,

You're saying there would be some money now and some money later, is that what I'm hearing?

My question from last meeting, and maybe I just remember this wrong from the discussion, but I thought our discussion was that we were in agreement to provide, to use some of the surplus towards the schools, but not the whole amount, and I think we discussed using half

I certainly would be comfortable with that and I think the difference between doing it that way versus rolling it into the CIP is that potentially the money could be available now if it were possible to install projectors say over Christmas vacation or as time permits it could happen as opposed to

It's the second page in your package.

If I could suggest an amendment that for three things, one is designating $5 million to the Smith Aquatics Program,

Actually you have the number on the back here, it's like 720, 761-200.

Yeah.

Is that half of what it is?

Okay.

So someone write that down when they make a motion.

I'll make a motion.

Well, we can do that when we do the whole resolution.

Is there any other discussion on the resolution?

The other thing I brought up last time and I thought there was whether

A big part of this is looking at the year-end adjustments is taking money that wasn't spent last year

and rolling it back into the department.

And some of that is for things that weren't spent last year, but they're going to get spent this year and the money's appropriated for it.

For example, a new fire truck would be a clear example of that.

There's other ones where for reasons of just having maybe not as many people working in the department or there were savings that accrued.

And I remember this discussion because

Julian pointed out, and I think appropriately, that one of the things we don't want to do is to create a disincentive for departments to save and be frugal by taking away whatever they save at the end of the year.

But nonetheless, I also feel like it's, you know,

There's sort of a way in which I agree that this is sort of a budget process that's kind of at the end of the year where money can go other places.

And I asked whether Mr. O'Connell had a sense of whether he could look through here and perhaps find us another couple hundred thousand dollars from the ongoing, from the rolling over of funds that we could also designate into the CIP, specifically looking towards stormwater.

I think at the last meeting I went through most of the major ones.

The only ones that I know of are in essence unallocated balance money which would be in the year in excess anyway that would go into the capital fund.

But there's some smaller ones, the council reserve historic resources, there's a training item and there's some computer equipment.

Well, I mean, let me, actually what I hoped you would do is you would come back before us and have more specifics.

But I'll give you an example.

There's $332,900 in budgeted but unspent funds in Public Works Department.

And it looks like the things that are listed here are, it's not clear to me whether are these things that we're in the budget to get that haven't been bought or are these things that are

They're unspent funds for equipment needs that, I think Aidan said this last time, to either use this money now or we'll have to build it into next year's budget.

Part of what we were trying to do with some of these items was use unspent monies that were in departmental budgets that I think is

Mr. Taliaferro pointed out, people are pretty careful and I think frugal overall and use it towards things that we might have to budget next year's budget because next year's budget is going to be more difficult.

I just wanted to bring that back up since I was asking you to come back this time and

Maybe a related question would be, would we want to take some of that money that's designated to go into CIP government fund and see if it's possible to put that into any of our stormwater projects now, again, freeing it up theoretically an additional six months before it would be otherwise by going through a regular budget process.

I think that's really a question more for Jim and for Junie than it is

I agree with that approach.

I think that we have this large amount that's been designated for contingency.

What I was hoping to do, just by looking at all of these rollovers to find additional funds, and I like your idea, is that at our work session on stormwater, we basically were presented with a menu of choices, some of which was to make the whole thing fee-based.

with the advantage of being fee-based is there will be a reliable revenue stream that can be used for planning.

The other idea at the other stream is just to do what we've been doing which is to take it from general funding from CIP money.

Well, the problem with that is it now competes with affordable housing, it competes with the school, you know, retrofitting our schools for ADA compliance.

What I'd like to see us do, since we have some surplus, is to go ahead and designate a healthy chunk of that surplus, what's left over, into jump-starting the stormwater program.

So, in other words, if we're meaningfully going to try to balance it off with general funds, let's go ahead and put some real money to help them get it started.

Then the only practical question is does it really make any difference to get that now or could it come through the regular CIP process?

I mean you could reserve that, you could designate that for stormwater if that's where the council is.

And I think we have a work session scheduled mid-January.

We actually, I mean we could present it with that built in there to show you what it would look like.

Or not.

I support reserving a whole amount.

How do others feel?

How much did you say?

Just a point of clarification, you've got two documents before you tonight, one is the FY 2007 year end appropriation which was in your package last time and secondly a resolution designating the 2007 fund balance target

Access.

I think it should be access.

These funds are not being appropriated.

If you want to get the 761,200 to the schools before FY09, you need to come back with a formal appropriation and because it's over $500,000 that entails a public hearing.

Okay.

Can we do that on a single reading?

You could start it tonight.

Could you not?

I mean, if we designate it tonight and we started it at the next meeting, is there any reason we couldn't finish it at the first January meeting?

You've got a new council, can you do that?

I thought that was an issue.

You can't do that?

Okay.

Okay?

The difficulty with that, you actually looked at it a little bit, unless you make it a one-time change and then come back the following year, that's a continuing use of money, plus you split

a calendar year because of the way the tax bills are paid so there's some dilemmas in doing that since it's not a one-time expense.

I mean it's possible to do but you're setting I think in all likelihood that you're going to have to have that amount of money in next year's budget to be able to do the full calendar year.

I'd rather wait on that.

Isn't that right Mr. Ray?

You have to do the June and then you'll have to do the subsequent year.

The bar and bonding stand point in the rating system to look at, okay, you're putting 500,000 dollars in.

If it's one time, I guess the issue is going to be the people who are receiving it are lending it one time.

Once you give it to them, it's going to be hard to deny it the next year.

If you don't deny it the next year, then you're going to have to increase the budget if you don't have a consumer social revenue to pay for.

Well, if I remember correctly, I read somewhere that you're talking about increasing the tax relief initiative next year, allocation for tax relief initiative next year anyway.

I read it somewhere.

I think we've been, I think there's been a request to do that, and we're trying to calculate what the cost would be.

versus the number of people that, but we've just started into that.

I'm ready to make a motion if, okay, we're ready to hear it.

Okay, I'd like to move the resolution with the following amendment, that instead of $2.35 million in contingency,

Second.

Okay, moved and seconded.

Further discussion?

and now we have... Let me ask a related question.

Frank, you mentioned it would be possible, it would take two readings to appropriate for the school monies.