City Council Meeting   2/19/2008

I'm

You see my sign?

Yeah, I know.

That's just like network TV.

Oh, man.

I think we're out of time, Gary.

I wonder if some of that is filtered.

We're going to start with announcements, but before we move on to announcements, I'd like to take a moment and to honor a gentleman who we all sadly, who's passing, we all sadly regret and mark tonight, Mitch Vanyaris, long time leader in our community, former mayor,

former delegate and a friend and a mentor to many a joyful warrior and just somebody that we're all proud to call a friend and a leader and I'd like to ask that we take a moment of silence in his memory.

Thank you.

I do have an announcement.

I'd like to show everyone the, I don't know if you can really see it from here, it's the Locomotion logo.

I want you to start looking for this in businesses around town because it's the city county effort to get people to get out and start moving and exercising.

Now I saw a lot of people running today, but it was a bit nippy for me.

But I do have an alternative.

This coming Saturday at 9 a.m., QCC Walks will be having Healthy Heart Walks for women, and it will also be a healthy breakfast served.

And this is going to be sponsored by the UVA Community Relations Outreach and Service.

9 o'clock meet in the old hospital and there's a walking route that will take place within the hospital going through the entire link.

So you can't use weather as an excuse.

Thank you, Ms. Edwards.

I wanted to announce the city's budget is out.

For anybody that would like to see a copy of it, all the information is on our website, www.charlottesville.org slash budget.

Any updates that we make, any additional information that we give city council over the next month, month and a half about the budget will be put up on the website as well.

So any citizen that would like that information, we have copies available.

in our office if somebody would like a hard copy.

I thought I'd quickly go through, on the back table is a list of all the different public opportunities in the budget, and I thought I would mention four or five of them.

There's a number of meetings with the budget, but a couple key ones for citizens.

The former budget are presented to council on March the 3rd.

There's a series of work sessions.

The first major public opportunity is on Saturday, March 15th, for a citizen budget forum.

It's a morning forum.

We're going to do this in a new space that we have in the downtown parking garage that we call City Space.

It's a nice new meeting space.

It's a great place for this kind of program.

And it would be one of our opportunities for citizens to talk more in the city council about the budget.

March 17th is the first public hearing that will be held here as part of the regular council meeting.

Then there's a couple work sessions.

And the second public hearing is on April 7th.

I gave you the city council regular meeting and the budget has to be approved by council on April 15th.

Thank you Mr. Connell.

Any other announcements or items to be added to the agenda?

I do want to note we are going to have a brief discussion at the end of the agenda tonight talking about upcoming policy issues for city council.

We will now move on to matters by the public and public comment will be accepted on the limit of three minutes per speaker.

On any item that, including items on the agenda provided that a public hearing is not planned or has been previously held on the matter.

Thank you Mayor Norris, it's a pleasure to see you again and thank you council for allowing me to brief you on something that I would like for you to be better aware of that's happening in our community.

I am Harold Bear, I'm president of Hope Foundation, better known as Hope Community Center.

I am a resident in this community now for upwards of 27 years, a graduate of the University of Virginia,

with a doctorate in sociology with also studies at Virginia Tech in criminology, police science, law enforcement, and from the College of William and Mary.

And I say that because these are areas in which I am academically experienced and had some experience in working with mental health and public school teaching and other things and teaching criminology, police science, law enforcement in colleges and universities in the past.

I am, as I've said, the president of Hope Community Center.

About three months ago, with only a few hours notice, we started keeping homeless persons at Hope Community Center.

It was without any more than six hours for us to open our doors and be responsible.

I'd like you to know in the last three months that we have done health screenings for computer classes, counseling, job resourcing.

This morning we took over 15 people, two jobs.

We have gotten some enrolled in Piedmont College.

in cooperation with Piedmont College.

We have showers in two different buildings.

There's discipline, there's bathing required, which is important to our community.

Chores are assigned and the lights are out at 10 p.m. every night and on at 6 a.m. with the discipline.

We have had no complaints, to my knowledge, from neighbors in our neighborhood because it is well contained, well behaved,

We cooperate with every agency that we know to cooperate with.

We have taken care of approximately 90 different people over the last three months, all through private donations.

We're so new, we have not been able to get any grant or any funding from anywhere else to this point in town.

I tell people I've gone to all my friends, and if you'll tell me you're my friend, I'll come to you tomorrow.

Private donations, we do our pick-up at 7.30 to 8 o'clock at night.

Police have come to our place so many times we've lost count in the middle of the night with another person.

Probation officers, as Patrick experiences calling from all over the state of Virginia, desperate because they can't release people until they have a roof over their head.

We purchased a van by faith.

I'd love to have donations to pay for it, to move people around, have had several families stay with us presently, have children ages 2 and 4 probably there tonight, been there for about two weeks trying to find a home for them and a way out.

The two buildings allows men to be in one, women in the other.

We have excellent meals in the evening provided by various community citizens and churches are better than I eat at home as a rule.

We're capable of a year-round facility and unless we get some help, unless something happens, come middle of March, about that time, we'll run out of money and there'll be about 90 people back to our streets.

So, I don't know if you can do anything about that, but it is a crying need and what are we going to do

with a young woman 30 years of age and two children sleeping in the park of Charlottesville, a world-class city.

I've traveled in about 28 countries and around the world I can say Charlottesville and people say, oh, I know where Charlottesville is and we just don't need disasters here of this kind of propensity.

Finance is the challenge.

and I want to thank you because I know that this is a regular issue and I'm very mindful and as a sociologist I keep watching the paper and seeing how frequently the newspapers are covering this subject.

It's a new adventure for us and all of us in the community.

I know you're concerned about it.

I thank you for listening, Mayor.

I thank you, Council.

And it's only to sensitize you and to make you aware that we're here, we're available, we want to serve.

That's the whole purpose of the Community Center.

That's why it was built.

And the City of Charlottesville helped us to build it, saying we need you.

Thank you for letting us serve you.

I am your servant.

Thank you.

Thank you, Dr. Barrow.

Hi, yes, I'm Jim McKinley-Oakes, a resident of Charlottesville.

and I've just given you a petition signed by 189 people who are either friends or neighbors of Jerry Mitchell or acquainted with a case where the Albemarle County police officer struck him in a crosswalk and following that he was ticketed by a Charlottesville police officer at the hospital, promised a ride home which never materialized.

Jerry was here on December 5th and quite a few members of this council spoke to him with a lot of concern.

Some who spoke with the most concern are no longer on the council but at that time we're hopeful the council might take an interest in the case and people have asked me almost on a daily basis since then what's the city council doing and I have to say well as far as I can tell they're doing nothing.

I emailed each one of you

on January 18th and on January 22nd saying I wanted to report police misconduct and I have not received one response except for a response that I received from the chief of police seven minutes after I sent the email.

He said he wanted me to come in and talk to him and the Commonwealth Attorney and city attorney.

He said he got my email from the mayor.

but I didn't hear from the mayor so I don't know if that's true or not.

I found that to be quite intimidating to have the person I was reporting, who's a police officer, the chief of police, contact me and tell me to come in and talk to him when my elected officials ignored my report.

but I don't feel intimidated now because I have a lot of community support with me and we're very concerned that the way that the police have responded and the way that the city council have responded is to serve the police force at the expense of Jerry Mitchell who has done so much for this community and is so beloved.

Some of the concerns we have are the issuing of a ticket to Jerry Mitchell at all,

Promising the ride home from the hospital and failing to comply.

Failing to interview Mr. Mitchell and the witnesses in a timely manner.

Chief Longo is telling the public that there were no witnesses to the accident.

As many of you have seen, there was a witness in the video itself, which he had.

Releasing the video only after several attempts to Freedom of Information Act.

Claiming that the video shows that Jerry Mitchell failed to push the button and entered the intersection against the walk sign when the video doesn't even show Jerry until he's in the middle of the intersection.

Failing to issue a ticket to the driver of the vehicle that ran into him and failing to charge the county police officer for moving an injured victim before medical help arrived.

These concerns are part of the community conversation, and we want the city council to be part of that conversation, and we're confused why there's been 100% silence on the matter.

Can I read some comments from some people that signed the petition?

From Megan Killingsworth, it is despicable that such things should be allowed to happen

It's shameful and flies in the face of what the police force is supposed to stand for.

Rather than being on the side of justice, our world is becoming more and more self-serving to the point that our police force only acts to save itself from embarrassment.

When a cop cares, a cop should pay.

Having a badge should not make them exempt from the law.

Diane Conant-Wolver, do the right thing for this man.

Give us a reason to respect you.

Mr. Taylor Voigt, I feel this is wrong.

The next petitioner's name was removed.

They wrote quite a lengthy statement, and this morning they called and said, you know, I'm really afraid of police retribution.

I want you to take my statement out.

Mr. Nicholas Joris, where is the justice?

Daniel Dorsey, come on, counsel.

The police behave badly.

They're human.

They make mistakes.

Admitting that and apologizing is the first step to redemption.

Mr. Sam LeConhorn.

This man needs help and it should be provided for by the City of Charlottesville since it was their police department that caused the suffering experienced by Jerry Daniel Long.

Who polices the police?

I think we've got the sense of the, maybe you can give out the web address if people want to read all the rest of the comments.

I don't have it here.

Okay, great.

Thank you very much.

I'm glad to hear, but I'm not the only person that doesn't receive answers.

Okay, you sure did.

Anyway, Councilman, Mr. Mayor, Council Lady.

I've come before council tonight to address the budget surplus for the fiscal years of 2006 and 2007.

Mayor Morris was kind enough to send me the memos outlining where the surplus revenue was allocated.

It is my understanding that the budget monies amounted to approximately $15 million over two years.

I think it was $9 million one year in 2006 and about $6 million in 2007.

I have two questions that I feel that should be answered by the council.

One, why wasn't the money applied to next year's budget and the tax rate reduced accordingly?

Since you were not going to return the money to the taxpayers, then why wasn't the money used to finance some of the capital improvements that we need, such as the replacement of the city's water and sewer pipes?

I have reviewed the memos and it appears that in most cases the various departments were allowed to retain any monies that were budgeted but not spent.

However, the memo did not indicate what the money was spent on.

While I'm sure the city department heads made good use of that money, it would seem that the unspent money should have been returned to the general fund to offset the next year's budget.

According to the morning news, the city of Waynesboro has managed to reduce their tax rate 20 cents over the last two years.

Based on the amount of our surplus, Charlottesville should have been able to reduce their tax rate by a comparable amount.

That said, I feel the taxpayers of Charlottesville have done a great injustice.

I do not address the council tonight as a representative of any opposing political party, nor do I represent any group asking for a handout.

I'm only here to express my concern as a taxpayer, being taxed out of my home while the city seems to have no limit when it comes to spending.

While they must balance the city budget, they also know that they can always raise taxes to meet their inflated spending needs.

Thank you for allowing me to express my concerns.

I only hope that some of what I have said sinks in, but I will probably leave council chamber with little confidence that I have accomplished anything.

My name is Joe Mooney.

I live at 201 Sunset Avenue in the city and I do appreciate, Mr. Mayor, the opportunity to speak and giving other people in the community the opportunity to speak this way.

Maybe I have some good news and that is here's a way to save money if we're talking about budgeting.

What I'd like to do is to call attention to an article in the Daily Progress just a month ago and that was

Airport considers expansion, 800-foot runway extension would increase direct flights.

Now, for those of us who have been advocating a second look at dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir, this seemed like manna floating down from heaven, a golden opportunity, because

As most of us know, the airport is three and a half miles away from the reservoir and the opportunity for that water and sewer and the airport authority to cooperate is very, very attractive.

In thinking that it was too good to be true, I called Ms. Hutchinson, the executive director of the airport authority, and she said, no, it is true.

We are planning on expanding the runway.

We will need 2 million cubic feet of fill.

We don't have that on our property.

And we are prepared to pay $44 million as an expected cost of bringing that fill into the airport itself.

Two million cubic yards removed from the south fork of the Rivanna Reservoir would increase the storage capacity from its present 50% to 70% or possibly a little bit more.

As Hutchinson said that their operation would begin in approximately a year

and this would give an opportunity for us to immediately or quickly, not immediately, quickly increase the storage capacity of water which we're all concerned about quickly and hopefully cheaply.

$44 million could possibly pay for the dredging to restore the 70% capacity number.

Possibly could do more.

Experienced dredging operators have suggested to me that hydraulic pipe dredging would deliver fill directly from the reservoir to three and a half miles to the airport, eliminating truck transport, eliminating the pollution that would result from digging up fill all over the county and bringing it in by truck to the airport.

The financial and environmental savings

Good evening Mr. Mayor and Councillors, Colette Hall 101, Robertson Lane.

Soon we will be reviewing and publicly commenting on the next fiscal budget.

Last month a public hearing was held asking the citizens for suggestions on making city government smarter and more efficient.

Tonight we will hear a report from the Ad Hoc Committee on Sister Cities.

If I am correct, Charlottesville already has at least three sister cities, one each in France, Bulgaria, and Italy, according to the report listed in the city's agenda with background material.

Frankly, and this may sound heretical to some, I do not care if Charlottesville is called a world class city, is a world class city, or remains a world class city.

My concern lies in the ability of residents who live here now and are trying to stay here despite rising real estate taxes, rising utility rates, rising fees, lack of affordable housing, and on and on and on.

I lack interest in titles, world competition, or this sort of false prestige.

The report goes on to say in item 8,

quote, charge the committee to use the budget for, end quote.

When I hear the word budget, I hear the sound cha-ching, cha-ching.

I simply do not believe that in the future this city will not end up spending money when acquiring additional sister cities.

To me, what will become or maybe already is a line item in the annual budget is not smart and efficient government.

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council.

I'd like to echo the sentiments of Dr. Mooney and others to thank you for giving the public the opportunity to address you at this period in the city council meetings.

I am a resident of the city of Charlottesville.

I live at 112 Robinson Woods Drive.

I'm the director of the Piedmont Program for the Nature Conservancy in Virginia.

And this is the second in a series of discussions.

I had started two weeks ago.

I promised, some would say I warned, that I would come back every two weeks and give an overview of the Nature Conservancy and what we were doing in this community and why we came to work here in the Rivanna Watershed.

I won't rehash what I said two weeks ago.

I'm sure that my three minutes of eloquence are indelibly locked in your brains.

I'll only repeat that we are a science-based organization, and we use science to determine where we work and what we do in the places that we've identified.

Starting about a decade ago we engaged in two parallel processes and one was to find the best examples of Piedmont hardwood forests left in the Piedmont of the United States which stretches from Maryland all the way to Alabama.

So we're looking for intact hardwood forests that we could protect as the best examples of hardwood forests.

We did a similar process looking for the finest freshwater systems remaining in the Piedmont.

And as a result of those analyses, we determined that here, surrounding the city of Charlottesville, we have not one but two of the finest examples of Piedmont hardwood forests remaining.

One of the finest freshwater systems.

The two hardwood forests, we looked for forests that were at least 10,000 acres in size because our scientists have determined that you need an intact area of about 10,000 acres in order for the processes of the forest to really make themselves manifest, to have the habitat you need for interior breeding songbirds and others.

So we looked for blocks of forest, fairly intact, 10,000 acres in size or greater.

We found one 60,000 acre forest blanketing the east slope of the Blue Ridge.

So that's one of the areas of focus here.

It also happens to be the headwaters of the Rivanna, which is nice.

You can do two things at once, both forest conservation and watershed protection.

We also identified a nearly 20,000 acre forest that blankets the Southwest Mountains, the range that Monticello is on.

But I'd like to talk today very briefly about the Rivanna watershed.

We, the Nature Conservancy, looked at all freshwater systems in the southeastern United States, trying to find the best remaining examples of freshwater systems, with the idea being that we can't protect every place, but let's protect the places that have the highest quality examples of the aquatic systems and the aquatic communities that are needed to represent the diversity of life on Earth.

And lo and behold, the Rivanna watershed was one that was identified through that process.

After we identify a place that we work, we then go through a process with the community of identifying what are the threats to those places.

As it relates to the Rivanna watershed, there were two overriding threats that were identified.

I'll briefly mention them tonight and then I'll talk about them more in depth in installment number three, something to look forward to.

But the Nature Conservancy in 2004 finished a conservation action plan and this is a document that we put together after we've identified a place.

We don't just rely on our own expertise but we really reach out to the community and look at experts in the community to identify the threats to the places that have been identified.

And in this community, the Rivanna Watershed has two overarching threats.

One is the threat of excessive sedimentation.

We are literally suffocating the life out of our rivers and streams.

And the second is excessive water withdrawals.

During periods of low flow, we are taking too much water out of the system and causing it to decline.

Thank you Mr. Schuyler.

Would anybody else from the public like to speak?

Okay, we will close the matters by the public.

Dr. Brown.

After years of going last, I now get to go first.

It's kind of fun.

First, I'd like to respond to Mr. Sampson.

I'd like to thank Mr. Sampson for coming forward.

I'm notorious for not always answering emails, but you've noticed that.

I think you made some good points.

I share his concern about us putting money into infrastructure and that being a priority.

In fact, I think when we talked about the surplus, I argued successfully that we dedicate more money from last year's surplus to that point.

I also expressed some concern which you may have noticed if you watched the meetings on TV.

about the carryover funds from different departments and whether there were some savings we could garner there.

What was pointed out to me by Mr. Taliaferro and I think has some real logic is we don't want to penalize our departments for being efficient and to feel like, well, if you save any money, it's just going to get taken back.

What you can do if you save money is you can talk about other needs you might have or other ideas and I think that the budget at that point did detail a lot of the specific uses that the different departments were hoping to do with money they hadn't spent.

The main comments I want to make are regarding the comments in the petition from Mr. McKinley Oakes and you know Jerry Mitchell's a friend of mine, acquaintance of mine and I certainly

I felt bad about what happened to him.

But I also feel strongly that we have a really good police department.

I think it's of high integrity.

I think

I think it's a police department that we should be really proud of.

And I would encourage you, Mr. McKinley-Oakes, to take the time to meet with Chief Longo and find for yourself, as a lot of other people have, the kind of leadership we have in that department.

one of the comments you made that was said that say well you know police are human and they make mistakes you know issuing a ticket to Mr. Mitchell certainly could fall into that category but that's all I think it was and I would have to say for me to see a petition which contains the words that we should investigate suspected corruption

I mean, that's a harsh statement.

To me it's a completely unfounded statement.

It's an unfair statement.

I think it's, to me, it kind of, to me,

kind of colors this whole conversation in a way I think is unfortunate because I think it takes away from the fact that this is a really sad episode for Mr. Mitchell and for the city.

I'll just add that I concur with Dr. Brown.

It was an unfortunate situation and I think one of the things that bothers me a little bit when I read this is it kind of says well the police are covering things up and I can tell you that's not what really happens.

I mean you can go back in time and there's some things that there's public record of that have happened in the past where officers have been disciplined.

There are a lot of things that are not public record, they're personnel actions but

And I can tell you that the police department does discipline officers when they don't do what they're supposed to.

I think the situation with Jerry Mitchell has just been very difficult and very painful because I've known Jerry for a number of years.

kind of multiplies those feelings, but I think that when part of the issues are the role that police have within the community and that role of authority, it can be intimidating and there are decisions that are made that aren't always that visible to citizens.

All that said,

I think the idea of having, and I think it's been talked about having a citizens committee or advocacy group will help to build true relationships between people and the police because police aren't often seen as people within our community because of the uniform and the badge.

But all people do make mistakes.

Police officers are people.

The other thing I wanted to comment about was

I think that there hasn't, and maybe on our part, been enough said about the entire situation to bring out some semblance of healing.

And sometimes silence is often interpreted as a way of not caring or not hearing or not understanding.

But I think the silence that you may see, it's been difficult.

and I really hope that things work out well for Jerry because ultimately that's the bottom line, making sure that things work out well for him and I'm not sure what the best next step would be to bring about some forgiveness but I do believe that

having the citizens group to work better with police officers is at least one step in going in that direction because it should be a feeling of being able to talk to the police officers at any point in that feeling of intimidation which has historically been there for a lot of reasons in a lot of part of the community and I can't take away from that but I think the citizens group will really will help with that

I guess the other thing I have, question for the city attorney.

How much, and I'm not sure if the plan is for a lawsuit pending.

If there's any, because there is a lawsuit pending, should we be talking about it?

because that was one of the things that may have been just another rumor that went around.

But again, and I think because there were similar things said,

Some of the things that happened, how to interpret the information, how to process it all, the words used in the petition.

I just really believe it's just the way people are struggling to bring closure to this.

Thank you.

the petition and Mr. Mitchell and I agree with just the comments that have been made.

I will also add that unfortunately it sometimes does take incidents like this to take a hard look at some of the ways that we're doing things and we've learned a lot from this incident as a community and I know the police department has learned

internal to their policies and procedures.

I know, for instance, we now have a pedestrian safety committee, and this wasn't the only reason that we created the committee, but it certainly was a spark, and we're looking at how to make our intersections safer for people who are pedestrians or people in wheelchairs.

We are looking at the possibility of us re-implementing the Citizen Review Board.

I know there's some internal policies and procedures that they're looking at in the police department so we are using this, learning from this unfortunate situation to try to improve our policing and our public safety.

Secondly, Mr. Sampson, I thank you for coming down tonight and I can assure you that your comments were well taken and

As Dr. Brown said, I think there's broad agreement that surplus dollars, if we're not going to return them to the taxpayers, as some of us would have liked, that at least we use a large portion of them to offset some of those infrastructure costs that we all are faced with.

and Dr. Mooney, I appreciate you bringing forward information about or at least the idea of exploring, dredging to meet the needs of the airport and also to help increase the capacity of the south fork.

It's an idea that I believe strongly merits further exploration and I'll be pursuing that in the weeks ahead.

I'm not interested, and I've talked to you about this before, I'm not interested in going back to square one in the water supply plant itself.

However, this to me makes imminent sense in terms of something to pursue if we can realize some cost savings and help the airport out while we're increasing our capacity.

It makes sense to look into that.

So thank you for bringing that forward.

Okay, so we're gonna move on now to the next item on our agenda, which is appointments to boards and commissions.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to move the following appointments to the Charlottesville Albemarle Commission on Children and Families as a Joint City-County Appointee, Brian Hemmert, to the Public Defenders Advisory Committee, Shawn O'Brien, and to the Rivanna Solid Waste Advisory Committee, Jeff Greer, as a joint appointment with Albemarle County, and also Chad Crabtree and Kevin Martin.

Is there a second?

Second.

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Motion carries.

Thank you Dr. Brown.

We now have our consent agenda.

There are

Six items on our consent agenda tonight.

Item A, minutes of February 4th.

Item D, appropriation of $31,495 domestic violence coordinator grant, second of two readings.

Item C is a resolution waiver of fees for the Dogwood Festival.

It's the first of one reading.

Item D, resolution authorizing $25,000 from the council reserve to the Charlottesville Community Scholarship Fund, the first of one reading.

Item E is a resolution authorizing transit grant application for FY09 state funds, the first of one meeting.

And item F is an ordinance, amendments to the signed ordinance, the second of two readings.

Any items that councilors would like pulled from the consent agenda?

Otherwise, I'll entertain a motion to approve.

So moved.

Second.

Any discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Okay, the next item on our agenda has to do with noise ordinance amendments and I believe Mr. Jim Tolbert is going to present tonight.

I have my backup singers, the Phillips coming down to join me here.

The evidence before you tonight is one that probably is ill-timed given the fact we're in winter and there's no noise outside and as we looked at it trying to get ready for the season of when we have outdoor events

You haven't been getting the usual complaints so you may not have been on the radar but last year you asked, the council asked that we start exploring some changes to the noise ordinance to try to deal with a few problem areas that we were having and what you have before you is a result of that work.

and let me just walk through basically the changes and thanks to the city attorney for putting in a very succinct outline.

Residential areas, the current ordinance that we have restricts noise emanating from the residential zone or building and those limitations are 55 decibels between 10pm and 6am and 65 decibels between 6am and 10pm.

and this ordinance proposes no change to that, no change to noise within a residential area and that's noise coming from a residential area.

Commercial.

The current ordinance does not apply to any noise generated in a commercial area except for the downtown mall.

So the current ordinance has no restrictions whatsoever if you're not on the downtown mall from a commercial area.

The proposed ordinance includes a new restriction applicable to restaurants as defined in the ordinance and this limitation is 75 decibels between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m.

So the proposal would say that a restaurant, and that's a broad definition as you read the ordinance, bars, nightclubs, that sort of thing, but that the decibel level there would be 75 decibels and it would be after 10 o'clock.

On the downtown mall, the court ordinance uses a decibel level of 75 decibels and it has restriction after 10 a.m. on weeknights and 12 a.m. on

The noise cannot exceed 75 decibels after those times.

The proposed ordinance would be a 24-7 restriction at that same level for what's defined as the downtown mall.

Questions have arisen about the pavilion and whether it affects the pavilion.

I would point out that the pavilion, even when it was the Charlottesville amphitheater and Fridays After Five was not covered by our noise ordinance then, that was governed under special events permits.

The current pavilion is governed by a lease that restricts the noise at certain times and certain levels.

So it's dealt with separately and this ordinance change proposes no changes to that.

The reason, to remind you, since council's changed, it might be important to think about why some of the council even asked for this, but I think there's a couple of things that have occurred.

As we've been successful in our mixed-use districts, we've gotten restaurants that are surrounded pretty much by residential areas.

We've got some in the Belmont area, some that are, one that's on Preston.

We've had in the past one in the University area, but some Washington areas there that have started to get complaints that are outside of downtown, but those are ones that are relatively new in the complaint patterns, but one or two of them may have been around a while.

On the downtown mall what's happened is in the past couple of years the advent of battery operated amplifiers I think has caused a change in the type of music.

Four or five years ago you would see somebody set up with an acoustic guitar and playing and that was not offensive.

Now you can find an entire band playing with amps that are plugged into a 12 volt battery

and they can really hit some high noise levels.

And we've gotten a tremendous number of complaints from citizens trying to dine in the cafes, the businesses that are trying to operate and have that noise going consistently, and some of the cafe operators who are getting the complaints when they don't come to us.

So the proposal here tonight

really tries to address the areas where we were having problems.

The several restaurants we're out in the community that are where we're having noise issues.

The downtown mall, not so much from the businesses, because what we found with the current ordinances at 75 decibels, the businesses can close the doors if the complaints go away.

It's only when they leave the doors or windows open consistently

and you get the continuous noise and you get the complaint levels.

But it's really those folks that are sitting up outside and turn the amps up and there's no control over it that are causing the problem.

But this would allow us to address a restaurant or bar that might leave their music turned up entirely too loud and open the doors and windows.

But it's really aimed at trying to get a handle on those two things primarily that have been causing

I've been the source of a lot of complaints that council has gotten that we've gotten down through the last couple of years.

And the police are here tonight.

They are the ones that actually enforce the noise ordinance.

I would say that before we came up with a successful level, I understand we made some videos somewhere,

We actually ran on the mall and tested, set up with an amp and electric guitar and played and tried to test different levels to see what the impact was.

That's how we decided to stay with the 75 decibels that was currently in the ordinance.

We felt like that was an appropriate level to carry on a conversation 30 or 40 feet away from where the person was playing.

You know, if Mr. Herndon had had his guitar case open, he would have.

He had two offers, but they declined when there was no place to put it.

Any substantive questions?

I must tell you, I have a

You know, written them down and added them up.

In the last couple of years.

I would defer to our folks here.

I've been called many things Mr. Tobor but never a backup singer.

I don't know that you want me to do that.

particularly not that we're televised.

Obviously, there are certain businesses that we've received numerous calls about that we simply had no means by which to enforce.

We have had some discussions with some of those businesses, but the fact of the matter is they're in business to make money, they're an entertainment venue, and while they try to work with us in the community, they're a business nonetheless.

I think what this proposal will do will at least give the officers

another tool in their toolbox in dealing with some of these issues.

We've had in response to Mr. Huja's question, 46 pages of calls for service for noise complaints across the city, some 1,500 citywide, 52 in the immediate downtown area.

And there are some reoccurring themes with respect to businesses.

I think the ordinance, as

as it's been proposed by Mr. Brown certainly gives us an opportunity to exercise some greater enforcement latitude.

We have four leaders currently assigned to the Patrol Division.

Many officers are trained to use them.

Lieutenant Pleasance is here with me this evening.

Captain Bibb, who well received the Patrol Division, particularly the evening shift with Lieutenant Pleasance, have informed me that enforcement should not be an issue.

Thank you.

I just asked the question, if we don't do anything, what happens?

What's the downside of that?

Honestly, Chief, I think it's more, it's got to be more knowledge, the individual, you know,

One example I've used is last year eating an outdoor cafe and there was two men sitting there playing in the city street.

They had a battery, they had a very large amp playing the guitar and the drums.

They were about as good as the band I'd left at Friday's, but they were so loud we couldn't carry on a conversation.

And we were sitting in a restaurant and people complaining, tourists complaining.

That's the ones that we don't, currently we have absolutely nothing to deal with.

We really, as Mayor said, the ones that we've asked, I think the Chief is right,

I used to live right across the street from one.

We'd go across and say, could you please close the door?

They closed the door and you didn't have a problem.

I think so.

I would add to this, on the night of the event, the loud noise, sometimes the police have difficulty getting the business to

Turn it down, shut the door, they can speak to that but eventually it gets done by it may end up being a follow-up visit or complaints don't come from the neighborhood area until a day later or that kind of thing.

I guess I wanted to hear more about, some of the concerns I hear mostly about the Denoisson Pavilion.

The pavilion is under a separate contract and lease.

It has hours of operation that are 11 on the weekdays and 12 on the weekends.

It has to end by then.

And they have a decibel level set that's measured actually at the post office.

It's where the measurements are taken.

Their readings are, for the last year, are actually below the levels that this ordinance would allow.

I think two years ago, three years ago, we were getting a lot of complaints.

Last year, I'm not sure we got any complaints.

If it was, it was just a handful.

Plus the building, the new building.

The transit center's been built.

I've got the decibel ratings, which we take every event.

and they average right around 70 decibels.

So there were major efforts after two years ago to try to get the sound down and get the baffling in, work with the operators both on the scheduling and the night of the events to be sure that

A citizen emailed us and asked if this ordinance would or should apply also to trash haulers, street sweepers, etc.

It was related to the entertainment type of noise.

We debated the other and just don't know exactly, you know, people have to do business, have to clean up and just not sure how to, how best to do that.

Okay, well we're going to go ahead and open the public hearing and then we'll have a chance to discuss it further.

Good evening.

This is the first time I've addressed city council and I hope it's the last, but we'll see.

I have an issue with the noise ordinance and I live at 431 Monticello Road, which is right in Belmont.

It's at the intersection of Meridian, Carlton and Monticello.

I'm going to read the statement because if I forget something, I know that I'll have to backtrack.

My family has lived in Belmont since 1942 and shortly after moving, my father, Herman Dorie, purchased Belmont Market on Munsell Road and ran it for 38 years.

I was born and raised here and watched the area grow from a quiet older neighborhood into a vibrant, friendly area with the influx of young couples who appreciate the old architecture and history, the ability to leisurely walk, jog, bike, stop and talk to neighbors and just anyone in the street.

all the while having the advantage of the downtown mall just three blocks away.

The area is a distinct mixture of residential and commercial with Crust just opening a wine store offering breads and cheese with a new restaurant also opening in March.

For nighttime activity, the intersection of Carlton Road, Monticello Road, Meridian Street and Hinton Avenue

now have Moss and La Taza restaurants and the Saks Jazz Lounge in a two-block radius.

My properties are located between Moss, which is open until 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday, and Saks with fluctuating opening times and random venues until 1 to 2 a.m.

I have no issues with Maas or La Taza, as they keep the music inside and at a reasonable level.

I appreciate the outside dining areas with its laughter and conversation, and in the summertime it's a minimal intrusion.

However, the noise ordinance is a welcome change and strongly supported by residents surrounding SACS.

I read in the progress that SACS has been soundproofed.

but the volume of music has only slightly decreased and the noise problems still exist and is compounded when SACS opens the windows and doors.

This was in evidence a couple of weeks ago when a private party for I believe 13 to 18 year olds was held there leading to police intervention at about 11.30 that evening due to fights in the middle of the street.

The danger is the violence from the arguments with fights spilling into the streets and the annoyance is the noise level.

When my walls in my living room vibrate, I know that there's a problem.

The noise factor is part of a larger and a more serious problem with fights breaking out in and around SACS with a couple of fights ending up in my backyard.

Broken beer and liquor bottles and streets and yards are a normal occurrence after some of these venues.

To have a primitive venue like this in a mixed residential area was questionable at best, but we who live there would like to coexist peacefully, giving them the opportunity to provide their music venues.

but only when they comply with noise restrictions and provide security to ensure the safety of area residents and the large amount of foot and vehicle traffic that constantly goes back and forth there.

Many people have invested quite a lot of money to buy and renovate homes in Belmont and design and implement commercial ventures.

We take pride in the improvements and embrace the vitality and the transition of the area.

This area has made great progress with its image in the last five to ten years and the last thing we want to do is to have it tarnished.

And I realize that Raul's the owner of Saks is directly behind me and I do want to tell you that I know him and he's a conscientious and a compassionate man.

But I hope by having this hearing and hearing what is actually happening in the area and the intrusion to the residents

Thank you Ms. Hatcher.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Councillors.

Call 101 Robertson Lane, President of NDRA, which is the neighborhood association for North Downtown.

The north downtown neighborhood includes the mall and its side streets.

We now have hundreds of residents living in that area.

Noise has been a long-time complaint of these residents.

As we now know, this carefully worded boundary description in the proposed ordinance leaves out the Pavilion, one of the worst noise offenders on the mall.

A recent article in the Daily Progress reads, quote, the pavilion is excluded from the ordinance because owner Korn Capshaw has a separate contractual agreement with the city that requires shows to stop at 11 p.m., Tolbert said.

They already have a contract and we couldn't very well change the contract without mutual agreement, he said, end quote.

Thank you.

I seem to recall that that contract is absurdly long.

I strongly suggest that the ordinance read something similar to, and I'm not a lawyer, so I'm just adding this.

Immediately after the current contract ends, where there is a change in contractual ownership, this ordinance covers time and noise emanating from the pavilion.

Life changes.

Who knows how long Mr. Capshaw will want to be in this contract.

Let us be prepared to capture the contract in this ordinance without the need of another future ordinance process.

Thank you, Ms. Holm.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, Councillors.

My name is Jill Williams.

I live at 101 3rd Street Southeast in a building that fronts the downtown mall pretty much dead center.

And I support the proposed ordinance.

I was speaking before you 10 years ago about an ordinance and probably helped initiate section 16-10.

Anyway, what I like about this is that it does give the police more tools, as Chief Longo said,

to enforce the laws.

I understand that when you live on the downtown mall that obviously you're living in a mixed-use area and I understand that it's an entertainment magnet and that there's some coexistence that must go on.

We take that.

We understand it.

But I think that it would help.

I think that the ordinance would help and I think particular clubs and restaurants would help us by recognizing our need to coexist.

So I support the ordinance.

I think it would be very wise if there was a way to get everybody to close their windows and doors in those warmer months starting around April and ending in October because that's when you really want to have your windows open.

And I think that that really would take care of a lot of the problem, but I like the ordinance anyway being rewritten.

And I don't know how you force particular places to close their doors or windows, but that's a critical thing.

I can say that I have made calls

over the years to the police department to complain but not always and sometimes I've gone myself to particular places to ask them to close their windows or doors or I've called them up but when you call them after 11 or 12 or 1 they can't hear the phone so they don't answer it or they can't hear you when you talk to them on the phone and so you have to go over there and stand in a mess of people and hope to get somebody's attention but you don't really know who to talk to because it's so crowded with people having a good time and I understand that so I think it would be really good to put something into place that's a little more

I said there are a couple places that periodically are kind of annoying late at night, but first probably we do deal more with the street musicians on a regular basis.

It's not my cell phone.

Anyway, there are some outstanding musicians there and that's all great.

I will tell you that customarily on Friday nights we often leave our house because you can't really watch a movie in your house when you've got massive guitar sounds coming through for three hours at a time.

So my hope is that particular musicians might also on the street take the initiative to perhaps

move every hour to a different intersection so that they can spread the wealth and I can have some movie time in my house.

And really, I don't dislike the street music.

I mean, I might rant about it from time to time, but really it's part of the situation and I wouldn't ever want to end it because it's what makes them all cool.

So yeah.

And I'm trying to think if there's anything else to say.

Somebody was asking about the morning noise.

The only thing I ever

here people complain about are the leaf blowers and why don't you just give everybody some brooms.

So, because that may be silly too.

Anyway, the only other question I have for you is I was reading over your proposed ordinance change, section 16-10 and I was reading a download of this from the computer and there were certain dashes and deletions and stuff like that and I couldn't tell whether you were getting rid of the language about 125 feet away and if that was just all to the side so I hope that

I mean, I know what you said, but I don't know if I'd make sense of it when I read it.

So there.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ms. Williams.

Thank you all for letting me say a few things to the council and even Dave, Mayor.

Also, Mrs. Hatcherd, I'd like to say

What you've said, it means a lot to me.

It means a whole lot and I would just like to say that we have taken the necessary steps to soundproof the building and sometimes I run into a problem.

I'm going against my better judgment.

There are groups or individuals or organizations, they'll come down there and they'll ask me, can we have a venue there?

And a few weeks ago we had a group of teenagers and they were between the age of 13 and 17

and we were serving water and they started talking about football, basketball and one guy stood up and shouted what about lacrosse and everything just hit the air and so everybody started arguing in the building and they all ran out and we called the officers down there and I didn't actually see a fight but of course I didn't stay out there all night long but I will assure you and also Ms. Hatcher that that's not going to happen anymore because

Matter of fact, the property owners, they're here as well.

The East was there, written up a new contract, you know, stating that I can, well, do venues of such that will stimulate such noise.

So I'm just here to say, you know, I'd like for this just to be fair, fair across the board as far as the noise audience is going.

You know, I've been looking at the sign to say it's a great place to live for all of our residents.

You know, so if we can just look at this and just be fair and just give everybody an opportunity to make amends, you know, and if neighbors like Miss Hatchett would have come by and just told me that there is a problem, and I guess if there is a problem somebody really doesn't have to tell you, but I sure would have appreciated it and I would have made the necessary changes at that particular time, but the building has been soundproof.

The windows are not up because they cannot come up.

That's where the phone is over.

So I'd just like to say, just taking all that into consideration, that's not going to happen as far as SACS though, you know, anymore.

Thank you, Mr. Thomas.

Anybody else in the public like to speak on this issue?

Mr.

Thank you, Mayor, Councillors.

My name is Michael Rode.

I own Rapture, Club R2.

We probably have a lot more amplification than anybody else, but we've also hopefully not get too many complaints.

Sound why?

I'm actually very much in favor of this.

We do a lot of business on our outdoor cafe.

The difference, the impact on my business is very tangible.

We have drummers, and particularly these kids who bang on buckets, and they come out, and they bang so loud that I watch people come up to inquire, how long is the wait, and I'll try and tell them, right, and then they'll go, let's go somewhere else.

And last summer, it was making a difference of between one and $2,000 a night on a weekend night.

A good weather weekend night, a night where I could have expected to be on a waiting list and I'd watch that waiting list as those guys came out banging on their drums or banging on their buckets and it would, I would be

one-fourth to one-half empty on a night when I should have been full.

And it was very clearly people going, let's go, so it's too noisy.

What?

I said it's too noisy.

And I haven't complained to Jim Talbert, so whatever his number, however many dozens of complaints he's gotten to answer, I think it was Huja's question, add one, because I always have other things I have to talk to Jim about.

So as a business owner, it is very tangible reasons for me to be in favor of this.

I also agree that street musicians are wonderful, they add a lot, but you have to be able to have a conversation.

Thank you, Mr.

Rode.

Morgan Perkins, H. Boone Gallery, 420 East Main Street.

Mr. Mayor, Council members, I'm here to support the ordinance because as a business on the mall, we have experienced over and over and over again the noise.

I mean it's just, it ends up being noise.

We have the street entertainers, and we love street entertainers.

We really do.

I mean, I love to hear them play, but I don't like to hear them play so loud that I can't even talk to customers in my gallery.

We can't have our doors open in the summertime when they're playing because it's so loud you can't even hear in there.

It's terrible.

We had an experience with this just, and I don't like to tell Mr. Tolbert he's wrong, but yesterday we had an experience where it was awful.

My husband recorded it.

It was terrible.

and it's ridiculous for us to have to put up with that.

I go out, I try to be very nice, go out and say, would you please lower the volume?

They turn it up.

You can't tell me what to do.

And up it goes.

So I'm frustrated.

I know that a lot of the businesses on the mall are frustrated because they've even gone out and offered to pay them to move.

Would you please move?

I'll give you money if you'll leave.

I'm not going to do that.

So it's ridiculous for us to have to do that.

Again, I can't emphasize it enough, my desk in the gallery is all the way at the back.

And when I cannot hear on the telephone that far back in my gallery because of some street noise, that's just ridiculous.

So hopefully you all will support this and pass it.

Thank you, Ms. Perkins.

Anybody else?

Mr. Mayor, Councilman, I'm Jim Perkins.

I'm the other half, the owner of Sage Moon Gallery, and I do apologize for this noise, but this is the type of thing that actually occurs often, unannounced, when we're trying to do things outside.

This video that I took yesterday is one that was just down from our gallery.

I stood in front of our gallery, and I actually played this.

took this picture from the actual part.

I think you could hear if I can get this up here.

that the noise level was coming from a man who had a little acoustical guitar with just a little box.

He didn't even have a battery with it and he was singing and making these sounds which, before I played.

You know what I'm talking about.

And you can see, this is from my door, and we couldn't tell him to move because he's in front of another building.

Chief Longwell and the police have supported us admirably.

For Huja's comments about statistics, we don't always complain to the police.

We know that they're hamstrung because of the ordinances, and we would like something done about it to aid these gentlemen in supporting us down there.

Thank you, Mr. Perkins.

Good evening.

My name is Fred Nelson.

I live at 707 Northwood Avenue here in the city, and I currently own an apartment house at 214 South Street where I lived for 20 years.

Nighttime noise, as you know, some of you who I've spoken to specifically, has always been a particular problem in the South Street area.

In fact, when the current

Mall ordinance was proposed 10 years ago and reviewed, we asked that our area be included in the boundary and for whatever reason City Council did not do that.

So nighttime noise has been a continuous issue over there.

I was told by several police officers standing on my front porch by staff in the city attorney's office and staff in the city zoning office that we have absolutely no noise ordinance in the South Street, Water Street

Garrett Street area, none whatsoever at any time of the day, any day of the week, that we are in this unique area in the city where we are currently totally uncovered, not covered by anything in any way.

So my question, I support your effort here tonight, but I want to know, I want to be reassured that it is going to adequately

My question is, for instance, if we have noise from an apartment house next door.

are we going to be covered?

Because I see reference to residential uses as being covered under another ordinance but yet I've been told repeatedly that we are not covered by that.

That we have no protection whatsoever and we've been encouraged by the police to do something about it.

My other question is when

The Parks and Recreation Department issues a permit to a private individual to have an outdoor event on private property like ACAC where music is played at full volume from 8 o'clock at night until 2 in the morning.

Are we covered there?

Because that has happened.

And my third question would be, are private clubs such as Club 216 covered under this proposal?

Because that business has certainly been a serious noise issue for our neighborhood.

Thank you, Mr. Nelson.

Anybody else like to speak?

Okay, we'll close the public hearing.

And I want to begin, before we move into discussion, just to get some clarification on some of the questions that were raised, whether that's Mr. Brown or Mr. Tolbert.

First of all, Ms. Hall asked a couple questions about the lengths of the pavilion contract and the decibel levels that are allowed under that.

The initial term of the lease is five years.

There are potential renewal terms.

I believe there are five renewal options, each running an additional five years.

So conceivably it could be for another 25 years.

2009.

The lease agreement or the contract

Thank you, Mr. Brown.

That is not affected.

That's not being changed.

The only change to the downtown mall restrictions is the removal of the hours that limited

it to a nighttime restriction by removing the hours.

For residential properties, the rules are not changed by these proposed amendments.

The ordinance currently applies to noise or sound generated within a residential building or a residential zone.

and that's the rule for South Street and Garrett Street just as it is in the rest of the city.

The only change that this ordinance works is the addition of restaurants as one particular type of commercial property that is subject to the noise restrictions.

I'm not familiar with the zoning of either the ACAC facility or Club 216.

I suspect they are not residential.

That is correct.

They are not residential.

That's right.

Right, if it's coming from, if it is a restaurant, let's say a South Street restaurant on South Street, then it would be impacted.

If it's coming from the apartment house next to Mr. Nelson, it would not be

regulated because it's not in a residential district.

No sir, the ordinance says residential district or residential building.

Well residential zone is defined as certain specific zoning classifications, that's why I was

A little hesitant there.

If you look at the ordinance that is in your notebook, and this is at the bottom of page three of the ordinance, section 16-8, maximum sound levels in residential zones, and at the top of the next page it says nighttime,

Construction is allowed.

Contractors can work if they're...

Okay.

But it does provide specifically for restaurant, bars, lounges, taverns, I'm not the lawyer here, that if the noise is emanating from that,

That's correct.

And that's what's new.

Right.

It's that business that's loud and the sound goes into the residential neighborhood.

Yeah.

The back of where ACAC now was used to stage Fridays After Five while the pavilion was being built.

I think Mr. Nelson and I talked very much on the phone about one or two o'clock in the morning one night when there was actually a party in that building when it was under construction and I think there were two or three of those that happened.

I'm not aware of anything since that property opened that's been

of a nature of that.

I have one more question for Mr. Tolbert.

Those are things that, you know, the First Night Virginia

the lighting of the Christmas tree, that ceremony, those type of things.

There were rarely some things that happened with special event permits.

The only one that I've received any complaints on in the last couple of years was actually one that was not a regular community event but got a special event permit that set up down on one end of the mall and had a full band playing.

We were able to get the owners to stop and not do that anymore after the first weekend just by talking to them.

I'll offer a couple comments.

I think this ordinance is a great idea and I think it's needed.

I think Mr. Tolbert and the city attorney, Mr. Harris, should be commended on this.

I support it.

I think it addresses the issue which I've been concerned about, which is the change in the character of noise on the mall from being sort of acoustic and low key to being loud and widespread.

I also think there are a lot of other venues that may or may not generate complaints, but certainly are pretty noisy, and I'm pretty sure that Kendra Hamilton, if she's watching this, will be happy to know she can now complain about the Outback if they're

have their windows open and it's very late at night.

And I'd like to go ahead, since the issue of the pavilion came up, I'd like to thank the pavilion for the efforts that they made to address this issue.

I think it was, you know, it was, it cost them a lot of money and I think it really did improve the situation dramatically.

And I kind of think that, you know, I came up with having a sense of the kind of community we have when we have

I'm just wondering what the balance is because one of the things that makes the downtown more unique are our roadside musicians.

So I'm hoping that it looks like this is going to move forward, that this is going to be a good way to make sure that the dialogue still takes place between the musicians and the owners.

I think the example with Mr. Thomas and Ms. Hatcher is just an excellent example of how that communication and collaboration can take place also.

So I guess my question is,

Our operational policy has always been to approach the source of the noise if we can identify the person responsible.

Sometimes it's hard in a fraternity house, but to give them the opportunity to lower the music before we take any enforcement action whatsoever.

We will certainly do that even with this tool.

For example, if we get the call, such as we heard about just a few moments ago, the person playing the guitar loud in the middle of the day and this

Ordinance is enacted, we would, before citing that person, approach them, advise them what the law is and tell them that they would have to bring their noise level down to the appropriate standard or they would be cited.

So we do exercise some good judgment and discretion with respect to that.

Mr. Mayor, I think this is a great improvement on existing ordinances and it will help the downtown area.

I don't know if it's time for that or not.

Well, let's just continue the discussion first.

I'll offer my comments, which is I appreciate the intention behind the ordinance.

I personally feel like

It's a little unfair to hold small businesses to a different standard than we're holding the pavilion.

So it troubles me a little bit about that, and I'm not trying to argue that we necessarily crack down on the pavilion, because as Dr. Brown said, they've done an admirable job responding to citizens, frankly, as most of the small businesses have done when issues were raised.

I think what I heard tonight was a real concern and I think a legitimate concern about the performers on the Mall being sort of the bigger source of annoyance and it's anything that we can do to deal with that issue I'm strongly in support of.

I'm a little bit troubled by

Other noise ordinance?

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Brown.

So this will carry over to a second vote.

Thank you all for coming tonight and speaking out.

Thank you, Chief Longo and Mr. Tolbert and others.

I've seen you before

and Michael

Music playing

I'm

A film by Aperina Studios

you

Transit-ready development, which is a new policy that Albemarle County is applying, it fits with our regional transit authority discussions as well, and we've conducted the same kind of

Quarter plans in several of our other counties.

Incorporating some of the age-friendly community's principles and really getting to a more of a statewide policy of changing the way we're actually investing in transportation projects.

Several of you actually participated over in the gym where we vote in our un-gym brainstorming a few years ago where many council members and county board supervisors members actually picked the

Route 29, Route 250 and Hydraulic Road area is a key problem, choke point and great opportunity.

VDOT leadership agreed with that and co-funded the initial studies that came to be called 29H250 Phase 1 and Phase 2.

Those initial studies actually were about three quarters in the city.

I'll show you a map of that in a minute and just a quarter in the county.

Places 29 is really the third phase of that, of the full quarter, most of which is in Albemarle County, but it includes

and wraps around the 29-250 study.

We tend to call it re-engineering the suburban strip.

That's taken from the bridge looking up at the initial.

This goes back a little ways.

You can see Aunt Sarah's pancake house there, a little pre-best by.

We started again at the south end, did the first two phases.

City staff participated a lot in these early phases, a little bit less in the county.

Long Quarter Project, but again we've coordinated with city staff the whole way.

Several things are different.

We actually had an interagency tech team.

We didn't just hand the whole project over to the consultants.

There was MPO, city, county, interagency team, a lot of public and business involvement, really balanced goals of multimodal mobility, safety, economic development, neighborhood and business protection.

A lot of these fit with what you're currently calling sustainability and a lot of the city's sustainability activities that were presented a few weeks ago.

The Places 29 project includes the 29 North Quarters study which is a VDOT led process that we're the lead consultant on and the city land use plan, this was actually based on

your commercial corridor study, those pictures that hang in Aubrey's economic development office, it was kind of led out of his office.

We actually, the design is real similar to what came out of that original project.

And then Albemarle County's Place is 29, which is their master plan for the northern development area along 29.

This is the original concept that came out of the early 29th-250 to separate the regional and local traffic streams, provide parallel streets.

Hillsdale Drive Extended is the obvious example of that and focusing investment at key locations.

We looked at three designs.

All three of the designs in that first 29th-250 worked from a transportation standpoint.

One of them was much better in terms of less community impact and really better economic development opportunities.

Those preliminary solutions, again, from a transportation viewpoint, all of them worked.

Lots of development scenarios.

The selected alternative would maintain the current level of service for 20 years while evening out the traffic flow.

It could increase tax revenue by two and a half million dollars a year within seven years by basically, like on Hillsdale Drive extended, having new main street value property on what is currently parking lots.

It increases ped, bike and transit access and as you can see with the Hillsdale Drive project can be built in affordable segments.

This was, again, just a diagram of that original parallel road network.

This concept, since we came up with it here, has really been absorbed by the Commonwealth and is a real strategy that the Secretary of Transportation talks about, the idea of building a network next to our main suburban strips.

It's becoming Commonwealth policy.

We also looked at development opportunities.

We met with your development staff individually with a lot of the property owners, again, just to look at the potential.

Behind the pretty pictures there was real world development examples in economics and looking at parking ratios and things like that.

We didn't show anything in the pretty pictures that wasn't actually a realistic development project potential in this market at this time.

One of the things we showed early on was the concept of redeveloping along the Kmart site.

The city has moved ahead now, and this is again where the whole foods market is.

We showed in this case some housing on that site, but the idea of having development occur along with a Hillsdale Drive extension makes sense.

We also looked at real sort of

more significant development opportunities there if all the parcels were combined or planned together would have significant more potential.

When we showed this to your planning commission it somewhat intrigued them recently late fall because again if we're looking at sustainability, housing options, I was fascinated by your three hour conversation on housing a couple weeks ago because this is the kind of place and Mayor Norris some of those diagrams are actually you know on potential

redevelopment properties there as well.

So this is something that we could track and it's a real opportunity for redevelopment.

Here's just a couple of the pictures of examples of Hydraulic Road that Car Wash, since we came up with this, has been removed.

You're not currently planning on this level of development in that location, but you're building the grid network that will allow it in future.

I did have someone say I was

I have to say this in Mitch Vannieri's honor, he was next to me the biggest fan of roundabouts in the region, really introduced legislation and I think Mitch would really be a great person to be a statue in one of the first roundabouts around here.

he would get a kick out of that.

He was a big roundabout fan.

Looking at the same intersection from 29 north we start getting into the more complicated grade separated intersections and this is Kmart on your left looking south towards hydraulic in the distance on your right that new Albemarle Square in the county on your right and

This is what it would look like as developed as a high capacity boulevard with some of those bus rapid transit vehicles we've been showing.

But in about 15 years, the traffic model shows that we need a grade separated intersection for anybody who's actually driven on Route 29 in DC through Dupont Circle or other places.

It's like dips down for about a block and comes up the other side and you keep through traffic moving.

More importantly for us here, it links the two sides of 29 for

business, transit, bike, pedestrian, driving access across 29.

If you've ever sat there through three cycles trying to get across at rush hour, that's really even more important to us locally than maintaining it through traffic.

Moving on to places 29 again,

coordinated VDOT, MPO, 29N corridor study, the county's development area master plan, links land use and transportation, and most importantly for our recent discussions about what it'll take to build ridership for regional transit authority, the county's really focused on developing and requiring transit-ready development on the corridor.

again just out of the county's comp plan these are the kind of place types that they're looking at which are really based on when we did the model of transportation we actually looked at northern north downtown and commercial areas near the downtown mall as the basic kind of density that we're looking at for these sort of neighborhoods

These three slides say it all about the transportation part of it.

I'm going to show you three cartoon diagrams of the model.

The through trips through the corridor from Green County border through past the city of Charlottesville and southern Albemarle or Lynchburg is only 12% of average daily trips, the through trips on that corridor.

A quarter, 24% of the trips near the bypass are with one end outside.

So somebody commuting from Greene County and going to downtown or going to work at Seminole Square, that's about a quarter of the traffic.

Once we saw this number, 64% of the traffic starts and ends within this project corridor.

So, if you remember the Pogo, we have seen the enemy and he is us.

If we could get our local trips off of 29 on routes like Hillsdale, on routes like Berkmar extended, we have unlocked the through potential of this corridor for a long time to come.

and so when we look at the preferred network the parts that I showed you on the left there are essentially unchanged from the 29H250 recommendations.

Everything that we worked out in the city area in the southern part of the county really still works.

What we did is plug it into the longer model and validate it as part of the

10 mile long corridor modeling.

But the other part of these parallel routes is many of them will get built by developers as they either redevelop existing areas or as they're building the new developments.

The proposed developments in the county on the upper right are all roads that are proposed by UVA Foundation or North Point or Holly.

Some of those sections are already built, Holly Meared near the airport.

And the other part of this is we don't need to build

the entire network to get the advantages.

Every time we have a short segment of it, like this short Hillsdale Drive segment, it really unlocks a lot of the potential there as well.

And the nice thing about doing this project with VDOT, with VDOT staff on board, with them looking over our shoulder, with getting their central modeling staff reviewing every technical detail of this is VDOT supports and understands and agrees that this whole modeling approach works.

Again, like you're working on Hillsdale, it's talking about building a new type of road.

So we can't, we've been seeing a lot of articles in the paper about people getting hit, about not only the city, but in the county recently, and we can't build roads that are not gonna be safe to cross anymore.

So new type of roadway design, we've got about 20 or 30 different sections designed for each of those lines on the map there.

Again, some improvements as 29 redevelops.

and again the preferred network for transit to expand gradually up the corridor and we've handed all of this study information over to the Regional Transit Authority consultant so they're plugging it into their thinking.

Looking at a couple more of the grades separate, I'm just gonna finish with some images here of quickly, this would be the potential grade separated urban intersection at Rio Road with sort of a new kind of street grade level, main street type grid for local circulation around it and then looking at that section of Rio right near the, what is the SunTrust Bank there?

Looking south, Albemarle Square, ACAC over on your left,

and this is what it would look like with a grade separation.

Same number of lanes but dividing it up again so it's safer to cross and there's little stops for pedestrians all the way along and seeing gradual redevelopment, mixed use infill development over time as the market allows and the county's new comp plan will both encourage this kind of stuff and support from a planning level as well.

These have become our transit targets again for a regional system that will work and bring folks in from the

from the area.

And that's just a zoom in of the details.

So again, 29, the model says this works better for traffic than is currently there, and you can see that it'll be a lot safer and easier to cross.

Picking another location on the lower bottom right there, the blue area, that's Albemarle Square, Circuit City.

Just as in our discussions on Hillsdale, the developers, the owners of these are not saying they're going to do this, but they've allowed us to draw these ideas on their property and just see if it works.

Floating the ideas and again looking again next to Circuit City, the library.

This is the kind of parking lot that there's never more than about 20% of the space is full.

as it currently is, so it's ripe for redevelopment again over time.

But you can see that there's room for new housing approaches.

If anybody's familiar with the, I think it's Wood's Edge senior housing right behind the mall, but it takes about a mile to walk around.

If that kind of housing were built here, what a great place for our seniors to live or young people right near the activities redevelop the buildings over time.

Looking up at, again, into the county, the University Research Park area, Airport Road, we offered some suggestions to the university for slight changes in their development plan to be a little bit more transit ready.

Not very different from what they're talking about, and that's under consideration.

Like anybody else here, they're not committing to doing exactly this, but really intrigued by the ideas to redevelop in a way that is a little bit more transit ready.

and again, Ryle leading down to the new Meadow Creek Parkway.

There are some areas here that would make great transit targets.

If you look at the density maps along areas like this, there's a lot of folks within walking distance, but here are commercial centers, three or four gas stations and a car wash.

So the county is looking at something that would be a fairly, and again you can see here how you fix these five lane roads to make them crossable and more safe, but also a relatively short investment.

And we'd kind of like to see this happen along around the same time as the development of the Meadow Creek Parkway.

because the Meadow Creek will get built with some really good pedestrian facilities that could lead to here and you can see redevelopment here to become a neighborhood center and this is right around the corner from that new Belvedere development that's a walkable place as well.

A couple more quick images linking the centers across US 29.

Let me go back one.

This would be dependent on the shopping center owners work together.

On the one side is Berkmar, and that's where Whole Foods would be moving from, so there's some redevelopment opportunities at that development.

And looking across to Fashion Square Mall,

Again, over time, as part of our transit development, we need to be able to get people across the way there.

So this is the one place where we showed a pedestrian bridge because the grade favors you from fashion square across.

And so looking Burkemar across the fashion square, fixing Burkemar again to make it more pedestrian friendly because again, you're not gonna take transit if you can't cross the street to take the bus back.

And seeing again, infill,

in the Fashion Square Mall parking lot, again, as the market allows.

I should mention that developers across the country are doing this kind of work.

It's happening in real markets like ours.

And I think I have a zoom here to just show what that would look like, again, with the pedestrian bridge, possibly a garage there for redevelopment on what's currently the Whole Foods area as well.

and I think I just have one more in here that is up by Sam's Club because again we've determined Burkemar Drive extended would be a really good local road for most of us to kind of get up to the airport area.

This is what it would look like if you took it through behind Sam's Club and gradually over time redevelopment what is the Sam's Club and back of Doubletree area.

Three, maybe three opportunities for the City of, you know, continue work on Regional Transit Authority, and I want to thank you all for the go-ahead that we had last week in terms of completing our work.

Continue to focus with the Planning Commission on Redevelopment Opportunities in that 29H250 area.

Again, I showed this longer presentation to the Master Planning Council at the University.

They're very kind of interested, so how does this fit with the University's opportunities along Emmett Street?

They're interested in exploring that as well.

And then really continue your participation in Places 29 and review of those final documents through your work on the MPO.

and I think most importantly we're feeding this into the UNGEM 2035 update which is our transportation plan for the region.

We're gonna have probably a regional summit.

Rather than go out in every county, we're gonna have a regional summit it looks like in the first week or two of May and we'd again like your participation in that as well.

That's the end of my presentation.

Any questions?

Thank you, Mr. Roo.

I have a couple questions.

You have these wonderful computer-generated images of how attractive some of these roads could be that are currently just like lanes of asphalt, and how safe they could be to cross, and it seemed like the common feature

in New York.

You know, the incidents that have happened on both sides of Riot Road from 29.

I was wondering if there's any discussions at the MPO or any other bodies about trying to not wait for some grand vision in the future, but are there specific steps that we can take

We would be happy and eager to be so directed by Mr. Taliaferro and Mr. Huja at the next MPO meeting, which happens to be tomorrow.

If you remember, I'm trying to remember who was, it was Mr. Norris and Mr.

Lynch who were at the MPO meeting about a couple months ago where I spent a fairly extended period of time showing these kind of potential solutions.

We do have potential strategies and some examples of doing this in local places.

I think

Again, I think the time is right for action.

Money is really the issue, not money.

We can do a staff exercise to come up with these kind of things.

It's the money to actually make the improvements.

But again, like we did on Hillsdale Drive, we did that response to the, not the extension, but the safety study that we did for existing Hilldale, which is mostly in the county, but city, county and VDOT staff came together.

I didn't hear any discussion on bike lanes or bicycle access for this corridor as you envision it.

Sure, you'd need more than the 10-minute version to get into that, but there is a, if you notice from the pictures, there were bike lanes on most of the roads.

We didn't put bike lanes on 29 itself because the preferred bicycle routes would be

off on the Main Street, the parallel roads, but every one of those does have bike lanes.

Many of them, there's a fairly sophisticated, we've called it the green infrastructure plan or the pedestrian or trail network.

Through the whole 29 corridor, there is a

a plan for both on street bike lanes on the parallel roads for trails where possible.

In some cases we have a network of off-road trails and there's a great idea for the VDOT actually proposed for a what we're calling a downtown trail from around Forest Lakes area right downtown to hook up with the Meadow Creek Parkway as well.

I can provide you the link or maps from those plans but it's a very detailed

Yeah, if you look at the more detailed route plan, there are several of the roads that really need to get done to connect the model and there's others that would be, I mean to connect the sort of longer distance local travel.

There are a few connections that we've diagrammed that could be made but are not really important to make and some of those would be a minor kind of service road between Burke Marr kind of through the properties as they redeveloped over to Commonwealth.

In terms of the hydraulic road having great separation, I have a couple of questions.

And we've had, I would say we had more conversations with folks in the city several years ago.

Several meetings with the 29 North Business Association, which is an offshoot of the Chamber.

I would say, to be fair, it's still kind of up in the air among some of the businesses, whether it's the best idea, but we've had several meetings and

The plan that we came up with is the one that seems to have the least impact on business.

One of the original easy-to-build designs from phase one was actually to offset it from hydraulic, and that would clip a bunch more of the Kmart property.

We rejected that to kind of keep it in the existing right-of-way.

If you look carefully around the surrounding area, you're not going to have no impact.

You're clearly going to have some impact on those four corners.

Most of the businesses on the Four Corners Line hydraulic know that they're actually already impacted right now by existing business travel at peak hours.

You know, the Tiger fuel market can't kind of get in and out of there at rush hour.

The wine warehouse has a sign directing it to kind of go through Koger's parking lot to get around.

So it's already kind of getting hard to travel.

What the model shows is over time if we don't do something there,

that's going to completely get locked up and there will be some impact.

In our meetings with them, though, we committed to two things.

One, the more detailed study of an actual engineering design would actually be the thing that would decide whether hydraulic goes over or under.

Our recommendation is that hydraulic would stay up and 29 would go under.

But as you get into detailed engineering design, that's what would make that call.

The second thing is that VDOT, to move forward, will have to prepare a very detailed plan for maintaining traffic through construction, maintaining access to businesses through construction, or if it's too big of an impact, they have to buy it at a fair assessed market value.

There's a couple of parcels I'm sure that will have to happen with.

The other part of it is that we're pretty sure that to maintain it we need to build the Hillsdale Drive extended first.

Yeah, and again, near is the relative term here because again, we're having the same conversations at national level.

I'm active in national organizations working on transportation funding.

I believe probably Congress will act maybe quicker than our legislature.

If you've noticed, the Senate here in Virginia has a nickel tax and focusing it may not get through the House.

What we're hearing on the national scene is that there will be some action within the next few years.

But more importantly, what we are seeing, the key to that parallel network will require significant public investment, but significant parts of it are going to be and actually are getting built by private developers.

You don't hear from the businesses that are seeing a market opportunity and saying,

That parcel makes sense and I'm going to go ahead and build my customer delivery system as part of it.

So we are seeing, and some of this is more in the county where people are kind of getting ahead of it and frankly they don't want to

lay out their competitive advantage to everybody else.

They want to be, you know, the first kind of little mixed-use parcel that has a little better way to get through it as well.

So we're seeing some of that happen.

In the county, you've seen, you know, again, the road through Holly Meade Town Center is built.

The county is going to require any new major developer to build their segment.

So significant portions of getting the local traffic off the main road will be built by private sector as it redevelops over time.

Those interchanges are the big ticket items and that's going to require significant public investment.

The state is aware of that.

There's no check in the mail.

Thank you all.

I actually had a question.

Oh sure, yeah, thank you.

We got direction from the, it's actually the newspaper the other day said, you know, there's a big argument about the amount of money.

I was at the meeting and I thought there was great consensus on moving forward.

We just haven't decided quite how far.

I would have written the headline, Transit Study on Track.

I want to commend our writer for writing an excellent article.

I know we don't get the right headlines.

But anyway, we've got a tremendous amount of momentum forward.

About the next month and a half, two months, we'll be finishing up the studies, answering most of the questions that you all had.

And I encourage any members of the public to actually go online at tjpdc.org to the Regional Transit Authority pages in the right-hand column.

Thank you.

Thank you very much, Mr. Rube.

I just wanted to introduce the chair, James Ponder.

This committee, I think, is doing some really good work.

I thought I'd mention one or two things.

There's cities all over the world that do sister cities or in most places they call them twinning and I think we have some great successful stories.

The one thing I wanted to mention, not only are we a global world, but we're becoming a global community.

There are 46 languages spoken in the Charlottesville City Schools.

I think that says we're very much a global community.

Council had asked this group to take a good hard look at sister city programs and come back

with some recommendations.

So Mr. Potter and his group are here tonight to make that presentation.

Mr. Potter.

First to introduce the other members of the committee, they were Mr. Huja, who went back when he was a private citizen, Jeannie Cox from the city staff, Zane McDonald,

and Amy Zoback, and then also Dan Rossenweg, who is with SACIM.

The charge of the committee was to look at sister cities.

and to come up for council with both what should the charge be of the committee and then also what should the membership be.

The city has four sister city relationships, one with Bulgaria, and I'm going to just use the countries for ease of speech, one with Bulgaria, one with France, one with Italy, and one with the state of Oregon.

One thing to clear up is that the concept of Sister Cities, or as was said, twinning, is not a liberal concept.

It is a Republican moderate concept.

It was developed by President Eisenhower coming out of the whores of World War II.

The goal of Sister Cities is to develop people-to-people exchanges

where people can see through various cultures and languages how we operate differently.

And I'm just going to pick on a topic you've already discussed tonight, a real easy topic.

It's called street musicians.

In London and Paris, their solution for street musicians is they have to audition.

They have set spaces where they can play.

they are permitted and after every hour or two they have to wander to another location as part of their methodology.

Now I'm not advocating tonight that Chief Longo becomes an audition agent, but I'm just providing you another method by which these issues are handled.

Now, what has Sister Cities been to Charlottesville, both in the past and the present?

It has been art exchanges between the city in France and the Daily Art Museum.

It has been an art exchange between the city in Italy and the McGuffey Art Studio.

It has been student exchanges between Italy and Charlottesville.

It has been college student language exchanges

between France and the University of Virginia.

And then it has also been sports exchanges between soccer and going to Italy.

What could it be?

It could be that we expand it more in the languages, which we've heard in the press, be it in French or a city we do not have in Spanish or Chinese.

It could be more art exchanges.

It could be more cultural exchanges.

It could be humanitarian exchanges similar to what Blacksburg has with cities in Nicaragua.

And then also it could be economic exchanges which some sister cities have done, looking at the economy of Charlottesville but then also tourism and how to bring tourism in.

Where to move forward is are there other areas to expand?

Are there other cultures to expand?

Are there other languages to expand?

Most of which were covered in the information we gave you.

There are, for me, four major areas to think about when looking at the proposal.

First off is ownership.

Sister Cities is owned by the city.

And so the question is, you have this property, this Sister City relationship, how do you want to use it?

Do you want to use it just as a nameplate, or do you want to expand upon the relationships?

Next is funding.

The key issue around funding is, as we've already heard, funding is always an issue.

So the question is, how do you maximize limited funding from the city to then maximize citizen involvement

private funding and public activities.

So the issue is how does the city use its property to then develop a much better product.

Next is who from the city needs to be the leadership from education, from the arts, from business and from government to expand those relationships.

And so what I'd like you to think about is when looking at how you would use your resource, how you would use this property that you've created of the four sister cities, or future sister cities,

How do we use it to develop language programs for children?

How do we use it to develop commerce?

How do we use it to expand the arts?

And then since Dan's not here, how do we use it to expand sports opportunities for our youth?

The proposal is that the city continue the sister city relationship.

That we charge a committee that is responsible for the ongoing relationship.

That committee is basically granted the authority to move forward with limited city funding.

It is to create activities, it is to create exchanges, and it is to obtain funding from private sources to move the program forward.

The key thing in Sister Cities is that it goes beyond city government, that it truly is involving the citizens.

because most of the successful programs that are out there, their success is based upon citizen involvement in creating the exchanges and in creating the humanity efforts and expanding the arts.

Thank you.

Any questions?

I'm just trying to make some comments.

I'm a member of this committee,

and most of the meetings, but I want to say that this group of citizens have, for the best community I have worked with for many years.

I think this is an opportunity really

to kind of refine the program.

We have an opportunity now to really develop the entire sister city concept so that it becomes transparent for everyone.

And I think that it's really important because it's important for us to realize that the sun and moon really does exist in other areas other than the city of Charlottesville.

and it's so important to just expand how much we can learn from other cities and other people and in turn what we could offer as well.

I think this provides an opportunity if done well will be something that

private donations and foundations will want to take an opportunity with.

And also, I think it's such an important opportunity for our children.

If this is really done well, the children in our community can learn and expand in so many different ways.

I think a couple of real important points have been made.

One is that it's the issue of ownership, not just being something that's owned by the city.

And I think that's important in both directions, that the entire city feel like they have the opportunity

to participate in both welcoming guests of all types and hopefully expanding the repertoire of what those types are, but being part of the process of welcoming people here as well as the opportunities for perhaps travel.

I think a really cool part of Sister City, as you didn't mention, has been the exchange of gospel choirs.

And I think there's a lot of different things.

It doesn't quite get pigeonholed as easily as people might think.

I think the second aspect, and certainly one I learned firsthand, that we needed to do a better job of was the issue of funding.

But I think that comes out of the issue of ownership.

If we get a group of a committee to feel empowered and feel part of this, I think the issues of being creative with fundraising and making this work for our city are important.

I also think Ms. Edwards has made a really good point, which is the opportunities it gives for our children, our school children, and I think currently just the reality is that there are

a segment of our community who by the time they get out of high school have been to Europe.

They've been to Europe several times.

There's a high level of affluence in some parts of Charlottesville.

But for most of our children that's not an opportunity they've had and I think create an environment where

More and more people can experience what for a lot of people travel to other countries and really getting to meet first hand people that can become a real important turning point in their life, a big part of their life.

I appreciate all the work that you and your committee members did to bring this proposal forward.

I strongly support the proposal.

I think it brings a lot more transparency and ownership to the Sister City program, which I think is what we need.

It helps us to leverage private funding.

As you've said, it doesn't ask us to spend any more public dollars, city dollars, on the program than we do today.

and it brings new leadership and new energy to the Sister City program so I strongly favor the proposal.

One of the things I read in your research had to do with one of the aspects of the Sister City program in Roanoke, Virginia, which I thought was very compelling, which is

that in order for any sister city relationship to be approved they first have to recruit 25 active eager members from the Roanoke community to say we're going to make this thing happen and they have to raise at least $2,500 in pledges and it shows again a strong sense of community ownership and I hope we adopt that or some modified version of that idea and I would also apply that to our current sister cities and to say

You know, if there's any that aren't generating this kind of community ownership, maybe we should revisit them, maybe call them something different.

But anyhow, in general, I strongly support your proposal and I thank you so much for your efforts.

So we're being asked tonight to approve the establishment of a committee, we're not being asked, or a commission, Charlottesville Sister Cities Commission, we're not being asked tonight to name anybody to that commission just yet.

and basically we're being asked to allocate, reallocate existing sister city monies to this commission and ask the commission to come up with a plan for determining methods of administrative support, bylaws, policy resolutions, etc.

Mr. Mayor, will the motion to be adopted?

Absolutely.

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Next up,

And Mr. Michael Spetz, Director of Parks and Recreation, to give us an update on our Parks and Recreation program.

I just wanted to make a couple comments.

I don't know that Mike knows this is coming.

For a number of years, we didn't have an apartment in Parks and Recreation.

The budget move that we made, thinking it was wise a number of years ago, we eliminated

and the leadership that I think you'll see demonstrated tonight when Mike and Brian Daley talk about their activities.

They put in their hands, I think, an incredible opportunity to make investments over the last few years.

You've heard me say a number of times in good economic terms that's the time to make an investment.

This is one of the best examples.

of what we've done in the last couple of years to try to invest in facilities and programs to put ourselves in a position to better serve the community.

Mike will talk about how this fits with the council's vision, sort of strategically where it's placed us, and talk a lot about partnerships, which is one of the things that we talked about when Mike came, and I think he's done some great efforts in creating new partnerships, coupled with the new set of controversies, you know.

but I think a number of them, you can see that William Freer's presentation.

Well, just very quickly, I think there's two good things about this tonight.

One is that there's going to be no decisions to be made.

Number two, you're not going to have to listen to me talk all night.

I will tag team this with Brian Dailey.

I think that's probably maybe the highlight of the presentation.

Anyway, about two years ago, we brought forward the City Council a needs assessment and that needs assessment was somewhat sticker shock, but it needed to be brought forward, whether it was programs, whether it was services, whether it was facilities, whether it was general maintenance.

we had not been doing a very, very good job.

And two years ago, City Council took some action to kind of allow us and point us in the direction to really take a road of improving facilities, programs, and services.

I'm gonna try and tag team this with Brian.

I'm gonna jump over to the PowerPoint.

But a couple of the first couple of slides are going to talk to what we do as Parks and Recreation.

I think some of that is very much overlooked

Some people take for granted general maintenance, general facility management, programs, services, delivery.

It was amazing the number of people when I came four years ago that didn't realize that Parks and Recreation managed and operated and administrated the city market.

It's amazing to all of the runs and all of the marathons and the Dogwood festivals, Fridays after five, all of that runs through the Parks and Recreation Department.

and facilitates it with all the other city departments to make sure that those events are done very, very well.

At the end of the day, there is a lot that we do, a lot that goes unnoticed, a lot that stays underneath the radar.

It's not all about pools.

It's not all about facilities.

It really comes down to people.

and you'll see in this presentation that we really make an effort to deliver services in four different ways.

The neighborhoods, quadrants of the city, the city as a whole and regionally.

We are, for better or for worse, a regional provider of parks and recreation services and I think some of the partnerships that we've developed over the last couple of years

will definitely help relieve the city taxpayers of some of that burden and put more of the emphasis on county and or partnerships to take on some of that.

So I will turn this over to Brian and you will see a lot of nice pictures, you will see a lot of nice projects, but keep in mind at the end of the day this is really about fulfilling people's dreams.

It's about giving them experiences that they can be positive about and at the end of the day kind of creating smiles.

and you'll also see how we tied this all back into the City Council vision.

Thank you.

Can you hear me?

Is this working?

Excellent.

Thanks, Mike, and thank you to all of you for the opportunity to kind of share our progress over the last two years, where we've been, and kind of walk through a lot of what I believe are some really great successes over the last couple of years, the last 24 months.

Just to kind of review briefly, as Mike indicated, back in December of 2005, we brought forward the results of the Parks and Recreation Needs Assessment and a strategic plan for our department.

which we have been acting upon since that time.

You're also very well aware of the partnerships that we've had with the Boys and Girls Club for the new facility at the Smith pool site.

as well as the partnership with the YMCA for a new facility at McIntyre Park.

We've reallocated some CIP funds at the Bethesda City Council in 2006 to get at some immediate park improvements that were really, really required.

The needs assessment also drove how we developed our capital improvement program for the next five years.

It's been really critical in us having that needs assessment data and that information for us to develop our CIP in a way that's strategic.

And as you all are very well aware, again, the facility model decision was made this past December.

It's a decision to consolidate or enter pools at the Smith site and to eliminate coral as an indoor pool.

One of the direct results of the needs assessment work was the development of park and recreation facility standards for the city.

This matrix represents just a portion of what those facility standards include.

It also includes like playgrounds and holes of golf and miles of trail and so forth.

This represents the Land Act, the land in school parks, neighborhood parks, community parks, regional parks, and total park acreage.

These facility standards are now in the city's comprehensive plan.

and that's a critical element in moving forward in that we can define in our comp plan specifically what our park and recreation facility standards are and speak to where we have deficiencies and where we have surpluses.

This shows that we have a deficiency of 37 acres of parkland, which as you'll see later in the presentation gets us toward a land acquisition issue as a strategic initiative.

I mentioned the reallocation of some CIP money early in 2006.

This blue is actually from the slide presentation from that council meeting, the reallocation of that $500,000.

And it gets directly at the very first objective in our strategic plan, which was to upgrade, enhance, and maintain park and recreation facilities to modern standards.

You'll notice on the bottom left of each of these slides, we've called out specific vision elements of the City Council vision that relate back to the projects that we are working on.

So with that funding, we got started doing some playground replacements.

These two are Berman, Moran and Johnson Elementary schools.

These were completed a little over a year ago.

Each school playground, the components of the playground,

were chosen by the PE teachers, the principals, and other teachers at each elementary school.

We physically gave them a catalog, said pick what you want, we make sure that it fit within the area that they had defined for their playground, and we went ahead and ordered them and got them built.

The third one we did was at Venable Elementary School.

One of the pieces in this playground was actually purchased by the parent-teacher organization, excuse me, two of the pieces there.

We decided to go and do the school playgrounds first because they get the most touches.

The kids are there five days a week, nine months a year.

They get used more than our playgrounds in our parks.

We really wanted to focus and make the school play facilities whole initially.

The next playground we did was at McIntyre Park.

This is behind the concession stand on the active side of the park near the Little League fields.

The most recent playground we completed and it just was completed in the last three weeks.

the courtyard playground at Clark Elementary School.

Again, these features were chosen by the PE teacher, the principal, and their preschool program, and the components chosen and designed were specifically for younger age groups, very small kids, and designed with a lot of physical fitness in mind.

You can see that kind of rope sort of climber apparatus is designed to get these kids moving.

and our next playground will be at Fifeville Park.

That's a 3D rendering of what it will look like.

We will be building that in-house with our staff in the first part of March.

We looked at all of our basketball and tennis court renovation requirements that were needed across the system and went through last year the process of renovating a whole bunch of courts with reasphalting, recolor coding, and new basketball goals.

We had a pair of Burley Moran Elementary School at Northeast Park.

At Fifeville Park, we actually widened this court at Fifeville slightly so that the full three-point arc could be painted on the court.

Previously, the line went to the edge of the court and stopped.

And then the battery of four tennis courts at Tonsil Park were also redone last year.

The last court improvement, and this is very recent, we have relamped the tennis court lights at Penn Park on the front four courts that are closest to Penn Park Road.

The previous light fixtures broadcast light on every direction on the compass, including straight up in the air.

And they did not meet the lighting ordinance.

These new fixtures, while these pictures are a little dark, the new fixtures focus the light directly down onto the court.

and it's actually kind of a green technology developed by Musco Sports Lighting.

The technology is such that if you are 25 to 50 feet off of the court the only ambient light is between one and three foot candles and that means if you had three candles a foot from your face that's how much light you would see.

Those are the lighting measurements that are used in the industry.

We're currently in the process of making sure that all of those tests, the testing is done and the foot candler ratings are accurate before we energize these lights for play.

We also had

The restroom at Penn Park was renovated and expanded to include the construction of a concession stand for the Central Little League.

The upper left picture shows what was the existing restroom and the canopy on the front of the building has been pulled out.

The lower picture shows the concession stand windows that face the Little League field.

Central Little League actually had their field day this past Saturday and I was in town and ran over and talked to them and they were in the process of moving stuff into the concession stand.

They're very, very excited.

They've already painted Central Little League on the inside of the concession stand, so they're very, very excited.

Also, we're doing some work at Tomsley Park on the rec center, replacing some of the downspouts and the gutters and doing some painting there.

In April of last year, after

Almost, I think, over $9,000 of donations.

The Linda Peacock Memorial Garden was dedicated.

The garden was designed by our landscape manager, John Mann, in our Parks and Recreation Department, and the installation work was done by our very capable horticulture team.

Very, very well received and a very lovely spot.

Most recent improvements is the installation of a spray ground at Greenleaf Park.

What you see in these pictures are the spray ground when it was commissioned, when we actually turned the water on for the very first time.

We didn't have the opportunity to open this facility last fall due to the drought restrictions, but we are very much anticipating opening it up this spring.

We did turn it on for a neighborhood meeting back in the fall for a brief time to get folks' appetite wetted, no pun intended.

and folks are very, very excited.

This project was done, it was contracted out, but the features that you see in the spray ground, the mushroom, the red tower where water shoots out in three directions and the spray jets that come up out of the ground were actually chosen by the folks in the Greenleaf neighborhood.

And we did not violate the drought restrictions in filling it.

We took water, actually truck water from McIntire Park wading pool and put it in the reservoir at Greenleaf so we didn't violate the drought restrictions.

As you all know, very well also, the completion of the major renovations at McGuffey Park this past November.

Major thanks to the Friends of McGuffey Park who raised almost over $250,000 toward this project.

Very well received, it's a very popular spot and quite a transformation in addition to our system.

Moving from some of the things that we've done into some of the things that are currently going on, the major park renovation at Meade Park, which is the replacement of Honesty Pool, currently in the process of finalizing the master plan for the park, which will show

where the new family aquatic center will be, how the rest of the park will be treated, what will be open play, what will be trails, playgrounds, etc., what will also be a resource protection area for the stream that bisects the property.

We had a meeting with the Warren Mills neighborhood last week just to kind of talk through some concepts about what

Family Aquatic Center really means, what kind of facilities people would like to see in it, and we expect a conceptual master plan draft back from our contractor, Kimley Horne and Associates, later this week.

Kimley Horne and their partner, Councilman Hunsecker,

are two of the leaders in outdoor swimming pool construction in the country and have built hundreds and hundreds of swimming pools all over the place so we feel very lucky to have them on our team.

This is the draft schedule for the project where we would commence construction hopefully later this summer with the goal to open the new facility on Memorial Day of 2009.

This is an aerial view, kind of rough schematic of the potential configuration of the new Smith Aquatic Center.

That's what's shown in blue.

This is at the Buford School site.

And in purple, they outline the footprint of the Boys and Girls Club as a result of our partnership with them.

We are currently in negotiations with an architectural firm to begin the process of doing the Smith Pool.

Those negotiations are ongoing.

and this is our target preliminary schedule at this point to have the new facility open in April 2010.

Forest Hills Park, we did a master plan which I'll touch on here in a little bit about a year and a half ago through the Community Design Center that called out how we would reconfigure the park to take advantage of the natural viewshed of the park to retrain all the mature hardwood to reconfigure the basketball courts

and do some other natural resource management.

The renovation portion of this project, after talking with folks in the neighborhood who desire to not really have the park be out of service in the busy times of the year, we're looking at a construction window later into the fall and into the winter.

We actually have our first kickoff meeting with our contractor, our engineering firm, this coming Tuesday to get this project started.

One of the other things that we've been doing is building trails and in June of 2006 on National Trails Day of 2006 and then again in June of 2007 on National Trails Day, we worked with our Havana Trail Foundation to construct over two and a half miles of new trails in McIntire Park.

The kind of upper portion of the park was completed in 2006 and the lower portion on the south side east part of the railroad track was done in 2007.

I have to say I've been in Parks and Recreation for over 20 years and the experience on National Trails Day in 2006 of being able within literally two and a half hours to have two and a half miles of trail built by volunteers was just one of the best days of my career.

Very, very exciting.

As our agency mission is kind of a dual one, we're not just about facilities and programs, we're also about natural resource management, preservation and conservation.

We've done a number of natural resource management projects over the last couple of years and wanted to call out some of those.

Our demonstration rain garden at Greenleaf Park, dedicated May 2006, that is John Manor, landscape manager, giving it the ceremonial first sprinkle.

Our staff, Parks and Recreation staff built both of these facilities actually.

We built a biofilter at Penn Park at our shop, at the maintenance shop that was done in conjunction with a fuel depot project where we replaced our fuel tanks and did some other stormwater management and the biofilter also was a result of that.

Back in April of a year ago, we had a very big day where we did three things all at once.

We had an Arbor Day tree planting, we received the Tree City USA award, and we dedicated our new Shanks Greenway Park and Trail.

The kids you see in the picture there on your right are from the Living Education Center, which actually has adopted Shanks Greenway and Shanks Branch

from a maintenance and cleanliness perspective and they helped us out in cutting the ribbon.

The construction of the facility there at Shanks Greenway, both the trails and all of the planting beds and all the installation of all the plant material was done in-house by our Parks and Recreation staff.

We've been busy on a number of fronts.

We had an invasive species assessment completed back in the middle of last year and what this study did was looked at all of our parks and school grounds and other areas in the city where we know, well we have maintenance responsibility first and foremost, but secondly where we know we have problems with invasive plant species, whether they be kudzu, climbing vines like porcelain berry or English ivy, honeysuckle, or invasive trees like amanthus mimosa.

The diagram you see here is actually of Meadow Creek Gardens.

The bypass kind of going up and down on the left hand side of the photo, that's the Old English Inn.

The area in red was an area of high priority where we had the highest level of infestation.

So that's the way the study kind of called out where we could begin to attack this problem.

This area has actually been addressed by staff this past fall where we went in and cleaned out a whole bunch of invasive stuff and began to regenerate that area with native species.

On the right is a picture of the tree canopy in Charlottesville which leads to our next item here is the urban forest management plan.

One of the results of our needs assessment comprehensive plan work

was the need to define what is the tree canopy goal for the city.

And it is actually stated in the comprehensive plan that the goal is to have a 40% tree canopy cover citywide.

We're currently, if these measurements are correct, at about 32 to 33% total tree canopy coverage.

This picture, the green, represents the tree canopy coverage.

This work was done by UVA and the Center for Environmental Negotiation a little over a year ago with some class work.

and we've taken that and moved forward with an actual urban forest management plan which defines specifically how we're going to manage the urban forest, what other legal avenues there are for us, what are preservation policies that are needed and that document is currently in the hands of the Citizens Committee on Environmental Sustainability for their review as well as others for their review.

One of the steps in that plan is to do an actual physical tree inventory.

We're looking at doing that for all parks, schools and city properties and selected right-of-ways like Preston Avenue, JPA, Emmett Street, those streets where we have a neutral ground in the center that we know is ours.

And that is out to bid right now.

We expect those bids back in the first part of March to get that work done and expect that inventory completion to be done later in July.

Quite a big step.

Last year in February, a little less than a year ago, our department received the E4 designation from the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality for Environmental Excellence and it is the highest designation that the department awards for environmental excellence and we're actually the very first public agency in the Commonwealth to receive the E4 designation.

The next project is this stream restoration along Meadow Creek, a partnership with the Nature Conservancy, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

This is a major effort to restore close to two miles of stream along the Meadow Creek as well as place under conservation easement the lands within Greenbrier Park

and the other city properties that are on the upstream side of this and the left-hand side of that photo.

This project is being completely funded by the Virginia Aquatic Resources Trust Fund to the tune of over $3 million and is a major, major step in both our environmental efforts and our natural resource management efforts.

I'm very looking forward to this.

We've also been busy doing park master planning.

We saw this slide earlier when we talked about the renovations at Forest Hills.

This park master planning was completed in the winter of 2007 with significant community involvement both from the neighborhood, Buford School, and through the Community Design Center.

At the request of a couple of folks in the Starr Hill neighborhood,

who had this little park there that didn't really have anything in it or have a plan for it.

We sat down with them last year and worked through a master plan for Starr Hill Park, had a sign constructed and placed in the park and you see just a very basic master plan with a small trail and a playground and some landscaping that came out of what the neighborhood desired for that facility.

And that plan was developed in-house with our staff.

Our most recent park master plan is Reeves Park.

This master plan is actually complete and we'll go to our Parks and Recreation Advisory Board tomorrow night.

This is an excellent example in my view of the perfect level of planning for a neighborhood slash community park.

It's not too indicative, it's not too precise, it allows for staff to

tweak the plan slightly to make sure that it works functionally and that the park behaves in the manner it's designed We also are just about to embark on the master planning for the northern slash western

half of McIntire Park north of the railroad tracks with the primary purpose of that effort to site where the YMCA facility will go in McIntire Park.

But it also gives us another opportunity to call out in a master plan those areas of the park that we want to be permanently preserved, particularly the riparian buffers and the forest on the north side of this photo.

The area for the Y decision is within the green outlined area.

Our next master plan will be Azalea Park.

That will be the fall of this year.

There's some significant opportunities here to look at active athletic field development, community gardening, as well as some natural resource protection along Morse Creek through that riparian buffer as well as some stormwater management improvements.

We've also been hard at work.

Our trail planner, park and trail planner, Chris Gensick has been incredibly busy.

doing a tremendous amount of GIS work, mapping our trails, planning, doing a host of efforts on the planning side, acquiring easements for future trails.

And these maps kind of call out some of the work that he's done, a citywide map on your right, a specific Penn Park nature trail map in the center, and then the Rivanna Trail from Riverview Park up to Dartown.

This is just a sampling of the maps that have been created.

The ones that have been created are up on our website for your viewing pleasure.

and very well done.

We've also not just been building stuff or planning stuff, we took a very hard look at our operation internally and look at how we perform maintenance.

One of our significant lines of business is mowing grass and one of our largest crews is our turf crew that's responsible for mowing and aerification in our turf program.

One of the first things we did after I arrived was to use GIS to actually measure where we mow in our parks and to get a sense of how much acreage is out there and what are we actually mowing.

It turns out there's close to 200 acres of mowing throughout the city that we perform.

Half of it is in parks.

The other half is in schools and or on right-of-ways You can see the picture on the left shows Lee Park and McGuffey Off Center, McGuffey Park The darker shaded area on the top left is actually a flowerbed, that's the Kraw Memorial Garden We've mapped all of those as well The top right picture represents the Belmont Bridge with the railroad tracks running left to right

All of that area under the bridge and along the tracks and up and down Levy Avenue and Sixth Street are areas where we also mow.

Bottom right corner is the flower beds at the corner of Avon and Monticello Avenue.

What this work did was allow us to say, we know how much we're mowing, we know how many staff people we have, where can we gain some efficiencies, not only just

Do we change our routes?

Do we look at different frequencies?

And which we did.

We came up with three different classes of mowing.

Class A mowed, areas that would get mowed on a weekly basis, primarily those areas downtown in our athletic fields.

Other areas of our approach system where we will mow on a Class B basis or every 10 to 14 days.

And then Class C, those we would get at maybe once a month or maybe once every six weeks.

Areas in

This was a sea change for our staff who had been essentially running the same mowing schedules for probably 15 years.

and doing the exact same thing again and again.

It also freed up time for us to do a couple of things.

The Oakwood Cemetery property, it's about 17 acres, had previously been mowed via a contractor.

The efficiency improvements that we were able to gain through adjusting our routes, also buying some bigger mowing equipment, allowed us to bring Oakwood Cemetery back in house to the tune of savings of about $25,000 annually.

We did that without increasing the position count.

or expanding hours or paying more overtime.

We just got more efficient with how we were doing things and were able to take on more work.

Not only at Oakwood, but along for trails, along maintenance along our trails and for athletic field maintenance increased dragging and prepping and doing some more turf work on our athletic fields and bringing those standards up as well.

Just to touch on a few small issues as it relates to programming.

Our fishing fair, which for many years had been held up at Mint Springs Park in Crozet last year with a partnership with the county, was held over at Darden Town, and very, very successful.

They stocked the pond with trout, kids had a blast, and the participation rate tripled through that effort in partnering with the county and bringing it closer to town.

Tremendously successful volunteer program continued to grow in the last year.

Our outreach coordinator Susan Place just does a fantastic job of garnering volunteers from all across the city, from all walks of life, from all across the business spectrum and the education spectrum to get tremendous number of projects done.

Over 240 in the last year alone with over 3800 volunteer hours donated.

The National Volunteer Foundation

gives you an estimate of about $17 an hour is what a volunteer hour is worth.

That equates to over $65,000 in work that was donated to the city just last year alone.

One very exciting thing that's coming down the pike is we're successful in getting a group of AmeriCorps volunteers to Charlottesville.

There will be 11 folks coming here as a team beginning on the 10th of March and going through the middle of April.

They'll be here for six weeks.

and they will be working primarily and focused on invasive species, eradication, removal, that sorts of things.

It goes back to our invasive species assessment.

A big feather in our cap to get those folks here.

We're looking forward to that tremendously.

This was a new program, brainchild of our program supervisor Erica Sims last year.

She's an avid kayaker and put together this kid float event where kids in our summer camp program actually spend a day on the Rivanna River in canoes and kayaks as you can see.

Very, very successful.

Kids had a blast.

Many of these kids had, A, never been in a boat, never had a life preserver on,

and many of them had never seen the Rivanna River.

It was just really just a neat program which we're going to continue this year.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention our therapeutic recreation program which is just fantastic.

This is some pictures from the VSA Art Awards reception this past January at the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center which is just a great event.

One of the many, many good things our therapeutic program does.

Yeah, just very quickly, we're not about to rest on our laurels in addition to obviously the major capital improvements that we're going to be undertaking with construction of new pools, renovations of parks.

There are a couple of major issues we need to deal with and some of it is going to be regional efforts, some of it's going to be issues that we deal with on our own.

Athletic field allocation policy, as you all are aware,

The region is growing and the variety of sports that have now become very specialized and very competitive, whether it be youth sports or adult sports, are going to continue to create pressure for the facilities and fields, whether that's ball diamonds or whether it's rectangular fields.

That is going to continue in the future.

We need to work very, very closely with the county over the next year to make sure that we create an athletic field allocation policy that is equitable, is fair, and has some guidelines to it.

The days of us having a greater supply than we do demand are over.

and we're not going back anytime soon.

Departmental policies will continue to update the special event policy.

Our business practices continue to improve.

We will be launching online registration this coming spring and summer.

provided we can get the credit card issues worked out with the treasurer's office.

But that is currently in process and another enhancement that we will be able to offer to residents.

And of course we need to continue to work on land use where opportunities exist, whether it be through developers or whether it be on our own, any opportunities we can to have land

either donated to us and or dropped into conservation easements will go a long way.

Another major departmental policy that I believe is going to come on council's agenda is revenue development.

With the opening of new facilities we need to kind of look at how we are going to charge people for these and of course it has everything to do with what we charge our residents versus non-residents.

That's where it will begin, but it's not just about facilities, it's shelters, it's programs, it's services.

And we need to be fair to our residents while making sure that non-residents have an opportunity to participate, but at rates that are

to be determined by city council in the direction they provide.

Wildlife conflict may not seem like a big deal in the urban area, but we run into conflict all the time.

And whether it's geese, whether it's beaver, whether it's deer, we have to have a policy in place that deals with the natural environment.

in a very man-made environment.

Land acquisition, I touched on.

Agency accreditation, this would be the ultimate.

For us to become accredited, it would be one of maybe 100 or so in the entire nation.

that are accredited agencies and only three in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

And as police and fire know, it's a very rigorous process to go through, but at the same time it's very, very rewarding and really indicative of doing best practices and managing your system.

We're going to continue to further our local non-profits, environmental community.

Brian touched on the people end of things that Susan provides through our outreach program and corporate sponsorships.

We have a lot of room to grow in order to get the corporate community involved in some of the special events and programmings that we do.

Through the development of a 501C3, Friends of Charlottesville area Parks and Recreation, we will have a fundraising arm that will allow us an opportunity to tap

and any opportunities we have similar to what happened with the Friends of McGuffey Park to create those kind of revenue development opportunities, spread the wealth, create private-public partnerships and in turn, again, any opportunities we can to relieve taxpayers of the burden of footing the bill for everything that we do, we look forward to doing that.

That is the end of the presentation.

I do want to make sure you recognize the department has undergone a major change over the last couple of years not just in terms of being brought together but in terms of really how we approach serving the residents of Charlottesville as well as the greater Charlottesville community.

We look to continue in the upcoming budget process and in coming years opportunities to

Thank you, Mr. Spence.

I appreciate the very informative presentation, Mr. Daly.

I have three or four comments I'd like to share.

First, I'm pleased that you are doing tree inventory, and I hope that the inventory which builds the data system which will be matchable to our GIS system so that

I also would encourage you to increase the tree canopy to 40% as opposed to an ongoing tree planting program on a regular basis instead of just hitting this.

And I'd also encourage responding for that.

Of course.

I would like to encourage you that some communities have

and three citizens can donate trees to city to be planted.

We are going to explore that possibility also as it goes to trees.

Another comment I have is next to no requisition.

I feel that we do need to acquire land in the city for more space of reputation and for

I can say that the three tree issues that you addressed are very much called out in the urban forest management plan.

and a lot of the detail associated with that is yet to be developed.

I just have one question.

I like the presentation.

I appreciate the update.

And I know you'll be back again with updates in the future.

I'd like to hear more.

I heard today about what you do.

I want to hear more about who you impact.

I'd like to hear some

I'd like to hear stories about the children and the adults that you serve.

We are in the process of finalizing an annual report that will call out, I think, in really succinct fashion, some of those numbers.

In particular, the kids and the adults, the number of kids that we have go swimming, the number of kids that are involved in our summer camp programs.

I'd like to thank you for the presentation.

It went on for a long time, but it was worth it.

I think people need to know that we tend to get these things piecemeal, so we hear what you're doing here, what you're doing there, and I think to really get a big view of the overall department is really, you've done a lot and I think you've done a great job since you've been here.

I just have a few brief comments.

You talk about the lights at Penn Park tennis courts that was in response to us getting some lights that were really bright.

But it made me wonder

about what the status of our lights in general are.

Are most of the lights that the city owns compliant with our dark-sized ordinance, or did they predate it and therefore they really don't?

It's my understanding that according to the ordinance that there is a sports lighting waiver, but that still has to be approved administratively.

Our first attempt at really addressing the lighting ordinances with the Penn Park tennis court lights, we feel that that will provide a really, really good example of how sport lighting can be done in the future.

reduced some of the issues at Tonsler Park as well, which is another major kind of residential yet community park in relation to our tennis courts and since we did that back in

I want to say early 2006 we've been able to reduce the complaints and reduce the glare and the spill.

The only other really major area from a park perspective that we deal with sport lighting that we oversee is McIntyre Park.

And I think as McIntyre Park Master Plan becomes developed over the next two to three months, obviously the face of that park and how it ends up being used

and improved in the future athletic field lighting.

I'd like to see us make sure we're as progressive as we can be.

I realize that one of the areas where there's a lot of sports lighting is actually county property, which is at Washington Park or Burley, baseball field.

Second thing is, you talk a bunch about mowing and how much mowing there is to do.

I'd hope to be some thought to try to figure out are there alternatives to grass that needs to be mowed?

Are there places where you can not have to mow?

Places that aren't

We actually have addressed that issue very specifically, particularly in riparian areas.

Traditionally our staff would mow right up next to the stream.

Agreed and we are

In our thinking strategically, not only to kind of reduce the amount of work and free up resources that can be leveraged elsewhere, but to accomplish those environmental initiatives by using grasses like liriope along these strips that are very low maintenance, that are green.

We had a presentation in the last year from ACT, the Alternative Transportation Group, where they suggested a solution to bicyclists wanting to come into the city on Olensburg Road that we give thought to allowing bicyclists to enter Zalia Park and have an improved trail to get up to Monte Vista Avenue.

and I think that's a good idea.

I just want to thank you all for the presentation and I am glad to learn that you're seeking accreditation.

I know it's a lot of hard work, but at the same time it's a big deal when you get it and I think that will really be great.

I have three or four more comments and I will just highlight a few other issues which led to the presentation and a few missions.

I am really interested in managing the farmers' market, that you find a permanent location for the farmers' market, which is a great asset to the city.

There are a lot of cultural and art programs in the community and I would like to see those strengthen even more if possible.

I know you run quite a few programs.

Third, I also appreciate your new strategies to

We will have construction and maintenance which you will introduce in this presentation which will allow you to pay a lot of dividends if you can do work yourself.

It will be cheaper if you can do it in a similar quality also.

You mentioned, you did not mention this a lot to my favorite programs, therapeutic integration, that one.

But that is what it does, what it does in this community.

and lastly the most admired program which flowers the streets.

I'll just add my two cents which I agree with Hamid's made by my peers.

The one area that I don't think you adequately addressed in your report had to do with the recreation programs that you all offer in the neighborhoods, at the neighborhood level, which for many residents is their most direct interaction with your department and frankly for many it's their most direct interaction with the city of Charlottesville and it's an area of your operations which as you know is highly regarded and I hope that

you know in the future that we can make it even clearer that we are not only committed to maintaining the neighborhood based recreation enrichment programs that we have now but actually actively working to expand them because I know we made a decision

in talking about our aquatic and recreation facilities.

The very first thing on that list back when we were over at the Herman Key Center was how do we get more money into our neighborhood programs?

And then when we talked about consolidating our pools, using those savings,

We appreciate you bringing that up.

I think a very good example of the improvements in the summer program that we've been able to make in going from 293 kids

to serving close to 625.

That 293 was in 2005 to serving over 625 kids last summer.

And that was in partnership with the schools as well as then really reaching out to middle school and teens.

That's a really good example of some of the improvements we've been able to make.

Well, I want to add to those who spoke out in commending you for your leadership, both of you, for the department and for the city and doing great things, and I look forward to even more success in the years ahead.

I think we may have to recognize the chair of the department committee.

Oh, yes.

Mr. Jennifer McKeever is an advisory board member.

and she gets a board member of the week for sticking it through.

I think it's very, very important to recognize the team of the Parks and Recreation Department.

It is not a one or two person job, it is hundreds of people involved day in and day out trying to improve people's lives.

And we're very, very fortunate to have a great team as part of the department, whether it be within Parks, Recreation, Golf, or even the major custodial efforts that we undertake on the mall, which of course, recycling will be one of them coming this spring.

Thank you very much.

The last item on our regular agenda tonight is a resolution regarding authorization of application for VDOT revenue sharing funds.

It just requires one reading.

We're here to request City Council pass the resolution for the revenue sharing grant application that we're submitting to Virginia Department of Transportation.

It is a grant application where Locality submits a dollar and VDOT will match it for a dollar up to a million dollars, 50 million statewide.

It's to either advance smaller projects to completion or to help further

close a budget gap on other projects in the six-year improvement plan.

We have three of those, Belmont Bridge, Route 250 Interchange Project at McIntire Road, and also Hillsdale Drive extended.

We have been working with the steering committee pretty closely with the Route 250 Interchange Project at McIntire Road, and it's very important to the community that pedestrian and bicycle facilities are included in the project.

We currently have the budget at $29,645,000.

Any questions?

So it would be in our CIP budget?

Would this be a new allocation?

I mean I think it's helpful to know as we move forward what we would be sacrificing in order to fund this, should we be awarded these funds, but I know you're not asking us to make that decision tonight, you just want... Just to move forward with the grant application and once we hear back from VDOT, then moving forward with that.

Comments, questions, motion?

So moved.

Second.

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

We will now open our meeting up to one last round of matters by the public.

Is there anybody from the public who would like to speak?

We'll now have a very brief discussion of other business.

I sent this out Friday.

I guess I have the luck of the draw.

It's not midnight.

I just want to put this in front of you.

I don't know if you had a chance to look at it.

There are probably a lot of additions.

Could you hand out the glasses?

I can make it bigger.

I'm actually struggling with it, sitting here looking at it myself.

A couple things I wanted to mention.

This is a planning and scheduling document.

Ideally, it would have all the issues of any significance that would be making their way to city council over the next six to eight months.

And going through it over the last couple days, there's some issues that aren't on here that we need to add.

And I don't know that we need to do this tonight.

Can we also let you know that you may not want to be on that?

And there's a few that I would put in that category and there are others that you're not going to have a choice.

You probably have to take them up.

There are two areas that are not on here that

Traditionally done, one is work sessions.

You have the budget work sessions that basically consume much of your time in March.

I would like to suggest that you consider a work session on affordable housing in the April-May time frame.

I think there's an email going around today about the council retreat on April 11th.

But in terms of your scheduling and our scheduling, the more lead time we can get, the better.

The other thing, and I think you'll see this, it gets to be pretty front loaded.

We can have meetings where there's a huge amount of items on there and so we're trying to use this to help balance

things out better, so any input, any ideas that you can give us.

And the other one I wanted to mention, and it was I think in the enthusiasm of trying to show you all the different things.

We've been asked to try to look at, as time permits, some departmental presentations on program areas, showing what we're doing, the impacts that we're having, efficiencies that we're doing.

And so I'd like some feedback on that as you think about it.

Probably the one big area that I think is missing from this list that will occupy a lot of your time is the utility rate report, which will come to you in May.

Some of this information gets covered in the

and the budget presentations but the bulk of the utilities budgets and information come with that rate report and I mention that one because we're looking at anywhere of 130 to 150 million dollars to be considered between what Rivanna is taking up and what the city's taking up so it's a major, major issue.

So I'll stop with that but if you've got things tonight or anything later on and we'll

try to reflect that in future ones of these.

The idea would be that we get this to you on a regular basis from here on out and it becomes a rolling list.

Two comments.

First, I think, like tonight's presentation by Parks and Recreation,

presentations like this for the other departments will be helpful and I think they will require more than 15 minutes for some of them because they are so complex like tonight.

I have not studied this very carefully but one item which stands out which we could probably discuss now given our many situations

We talked about, I think it was before, the fear for transit study.

I don't know if you're interested in that.

Well, there's some information with the background information that we're going to give council when you get the budget.

But honestly, it's an easy one to implement.

It's really an issue of do you have half a million dollars to dedicate to it.

So I think, I guess I would look at that as a budget issue.

I'll check tomorrow to make sure that there's enough staff work that gets submitted with the package of information that you get.

But our intent was that that would get discussed during the budget process.

I just mentioned that I'd be interested in hearing some reports from what the departments are doing.

I think it would be helpful if it could be presented in a format of

I just want to second that comment.

I know it's too late for this year's budget, but for next year's budget I hope we can really emphasize that point, which is the importance of integrating information on outcomes and what are we getting out of the dollars that we're spending.