City Council Meeting   3/3/2008

Music playing...

P.A.E.

Ms. Edwards?

Here.

Mr. Huja?

Yes.

Mr. Norris?

Here.

Here.

Thank you.

I'd like to move the...

Okay.

I do have a couple of items I'd like to announce.

Tomorrow night, here in this room, we're going to be having the first general public meeting of our McIntire Park Master Plan effort.

It's going to be here at 6.30 PM, and if you can't come down to City Hall and participate in that discussion, you can watch it live on Charlottesville's own TV 10.

This is the first public discussion regarding the future of the west side of McIntire Park now that we've agreed to contract with the YMCA.

and we look forward to citizen input over the coming months as we develop the master plan for the west side of McIntire Park.

Mr. Mayor, Members of the Council, to the community, thank you very much for your warm welcome.

I am delighted to be back here working for the City of Charlottesville in this city.

And as you know, I'll be working with Community Relations and I look forward to working closely with all of you and members of the community to help ensure that we continue to promote open and transparent government here.

with the City of Charlottesville.

I think it's very important to our citizens.

We have hit the ground running.

We have scheduled a lot of meetings over the next month, in a couple of months or so, and people have been universally positive about the efforts in community relations and our commitment to it.

So thank you very much, and thank all the folks in the community as well.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, on this Friday, as part of the first Friday's event on the Downton Mall, the Charlottesville Community Design Center and the city will be celebrating the grand opening of a new space in the Marcus Street parking garage, what used to be the visitor center, has been renovated into both a home for the Community Design Center

and in a city space, a conference room, community meeting room, reception room.

It's a great new space and everyone's invited.

It starts at 5.30 p.m.

Thank you.

Any items for other business?

I have two.

One is I'd like to just spend a few minutes talking about next steps for the Eastern Connector study and progress they're on.

And I'd also like to talk about scheduling a work session in terms of next steps for our water supply plan.

So I'll be bringing those up at the end of the meeting.

Any other items for other business?

Okay, we've got a series of proclamations, awards and recognitions for tonight.

The first has to do with a major event coming up in the city, which we're all very excited about every year.

The Virginia Festival, the book, is a wonderful event for our community.

I'm not going to read all four of these proclamations, but in summary,

Basically, reading stimulates the creative and intellectual growth of an individual and Charlottesville is tops in the nation among book reading households.

And to that end, I'm very proud to proclaim Wednesday, March 26th through Sunday, March 30th, 2008 as the 14th annual Virginia Festival of the Book and encourage community members to participate fully in the wide range of available events and activities.

We hope to see you all there.

The next proclamation, this is in honor of mediation, community mediation.

Mediation provides a cost-effective, confidential alternative to litigation to resolve disputes between individuals, groups, and institutions throughout the city of Charlottesville.

And whereas mediation is globally accepted as a way to creatively approach conflict through personal expression, education, and empowerment,

Now therefore be it resolved that I, Dave Norris, Mayor of the City of Charlottesville, recognize March 2008 as Mediation Month in the City of Charlottesville and call this observance to the attention of all of our citizens.

Is there somebody here to receive this proclamation?

Okay, well, Mediation Month, March 2008.

And then finally, a pair of proclamations regarding health and nutrition in our community.

First of all, whereas the tight quality of amount of food that individuals consume each day plays a vital role in their overall health and physical fitness, and whereas there is a need for continuing nutrition education in a wide scale effort to enhance good eating practices, I therefore recognize the month of March 2008

as National Nutrition Month and encourage all citizens of Charlottesville to join the campaign and become concerned about their nutrition and the nutrition of others in the hope of achieving optimum health for both today and tomorrow.

And to that end, we want to specifically honor registered dieticians.

who use their nutrition expertise to help individuals make unique positive lifestyle changes.

They are advocates for advancing the nutritional status of Americans and people around the world and citizens of Charlottesville and therefore I'm proud to declare March 10th, Monday, March 10th, 2008 as Registered Dietitian Day in the city of Charlottesville and recognize the contributions of registered dietitians to our community.

Your city council vision and the third item from the bottom is America's Healthiest City.

And now, of course, this is the era of good nutrition and that's what we're about.

So if you ever need any help with that in Charlottesville, we are available.

Thank you all very much.

We will now open a portion of Matters by the Public and invite individuals to come forward and offer comments.

We do ask that you keep your comments to three minutes and please, when you come forward, offer your name and your address.

Hi, my name is Tammy Laundrie and I live at 813 Locust Avenue, Apartment C.

I came here for two reasons.

The first I wanted to say I really appreciated the pain and the tears I saw from Holly Edwards last meeting about her friend, Jerry Mitchell.

I do not agree with some of the other comments that I heard from the other counselors.

I felt like his accident and the treatment he received

was being downplayed.

And so I'm coming to ask again for a citizen review board of the Charlottesville police conduct.

The other thing I'm coming here about is my friend Gisela is a Tibetan monk.

And his sister came here and asked for the flag to be hung in memorial

I want to remind everyone that on March the 10th, that is the day that the innocent people of Tibet had to flee their own country because it was seized illegally by China in 1949.

The people were oppressed and so I want us to please think of them and the sacrifice that they made and that they're still doing because they're being

I have a lot to say and not enough time, so forgive me as I scan through what I want to say.

I'm here once again to voice many of the neighbors in Belmont neighborhood and the problems we continue to have with the pavilion noise and to say that it's laudable that there's the new noise ordinance for the other local businesses but that it's laughable that the pavilion continues to be exempt when it continues to cause such disruption in our life.

There's a 75 decibel

Noise limit for the local musicians, in theory it's 95 decibels under the pavilion but as you know musicians like to do it loud and you can't really control the crowd when they scream and so it often goes over that limit.

95 decibels is up close of lawn mower or a tractor or things like that and I would defy any of you to enjoy the peaceful evening in your home.

Living with that and I would urge you to take action.

There should be more trees planted, evergreen trees.

There should be more effort done to contain the noise and to control those limits.

People are still disturbed by it.

Many people have become

Disheartened, disgusted, we've talked about it for a few years and really not much has been done besides some baffling and flaps which if anything also helps the sound of the musicians underneath the tent.

So I'm just still urging you to work for that because we don't have peace in our homes and I'm sure it means a lot of money and revenues to the city

but we give a lot of money in revenues in our taxes.

Those taxes increase every year and yet the quality of our life is decreasing.

My name is Joe Mooney.

I live at 201 Sunset Avenue.

and what I'd like to address tonight is an issue that I raised two weeks ago at this council and that was the newspaper article on the expansion of the airport runway.

What I did, I think mistakenly now, was to wave a copy of the Daily Progress article

and not give you copies at that time so what I've done is printed out the full text.

I think that not giving you the full text led to there being some confusion in the community about the accuracy of my remarks and I would like to just review the fact that after the article came out

I called the executive director of the airport authority to double check the facts because the statement was that there was going to be about $50 million worth of fill needed at the airport.

And as you've heard from me probably too often, I'm a strong advocate of dredging the South Fork of the Rivanna to provide that fill.

So, in talking to Ms. Hutchinson, what I heard was that their engineer had completed a study and it defined a need for 2 million cubic yards of fill at a cost of $44 million by her comment that they would plan to begin in a year

and that was pretty much it.

It seems to me that this matching or pairing, if I may, of the airport and the RWSA is just a very common sense kind of thing to explore.

Questions have come up about whether you can use Phil to build a runway and I think the only people who can answer that are people who do that kind of thing, the dredging experts, people who know

on how material is handled and in a safe way.

So, here's the article for you.

What I would like to do is just read one part of it that I missed last week, and that is on the second page.

An 800-foot extension for the airport's runway is projected to cost 50 million or more, mostly due to the fill needed to level the ground.

Hutchinson said she believes the airport can come up with about 25 million in part through state grants and the FAA.

NIAA discretionary funding is tied up, but the more creative we are, the easier it is to get funding.

Creative.

I think the pairing is a very creative plan.

Hutchinson said the airport might have an easier time going phones if it starts work on the runway.

The airport recently received the FAA's environmental approval for a runway extension, and so that also underlines the advantages of getting an early start, that we prove not only creativity, but we prove seriousness to the FAA and other sources of funding.

Now, I see this, after thinking about it, as not only a win-win situation, how much time do I have?

You're out.

I'm out.

All right.

I can't see the hour glass.

Sorry.

You did fine.

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

At the last city council and school board meetings, we had a moment of silence in honor of the passing of Mitch Vannieris.

He would be missed not only by his immediate family, but by the community as well.

TV, radio, newspaper articles, even his obituary told us many things about his character and life experiences.

One thing I noticed as a constant theme was that Mr. Venieris was frequently a minority opinion of one, himself.

Even if an idea was not readily acceptable to his friends or legislative peers, he persisted in what he believed.

Thank you, Mitch, for your example of persistence in ideas.

I have been speaking with Frederick City Council since 1990, when Reverend Alvin Edwards was mayor.

I have also maintained a constant idea, that is fiscal responsibility.

For example, I think the sister cities is a warm and fuzzy idea but not fiscally responsible.

I shall persist as Mitch did when I clearly see some ideas presented to city council which are wants but not needs.

By the way, the media incorrectly reported that no one spoke at either public hearing on the school budget.

They were wrong.

I did.

Why?

Because it is now budget season.

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of City Council.

My name is Ridge Schuyler and I live at 112 Robinson Woods in the City of Charlottesville.

And this is my third installment in a series discussing the work of the Nature Conservancy in this community and I appreciate you all allowing me to come back.

As you may recall, I last left off with how the Conservancy, working through a scientific process, identified the Rivanna watershed as one of the finest freshwater systems in the southeastern United States.

Tonight, I want to address the overarching threats that face the Rivanna and its health.

But before I do that, I wanted to say that I know from personal experience that there are at least two people other than me who watch these proceedings on TV because I had two people come up to me very excitedly and say, I saw you on television.

And before my head could get too big, they said, and you talk way too fast.

So in an effort to slow down, I've written my remarks, and I'm only going to address one of the two overarching threats that face the Rivanna.

I'll address the other threat next time that we meet.

Working with over three dozen experts over a couple of years, the Nature Conservancy determined that one of the greatest threats facing our watershed is excessive sedimentation.

Sediment is literally choking the life out of our rivers and streams.

To understand the cause of this excessive sedimentation, you need to travel back in time.

Long, long ago, the Rivanna watershed, like the entire Piedmont, was blanketed in forest and our streams and rivers coursed through those forests.

Back then, as the rain fell, it would hit the tops of the trees and slow down.

Then it would hit the understory, the redbuds and the dogwoods and slow further until it hit the leaf litter at the forest floor and then infiltrate into the ground, recharging our groundwater and eventually flowing through seeps and underwater streams into our rivers.

That's what fed the majority of the water in our rivers and streams.

When the watershed was converted from a forested environment to a nonforested environment, there were no longer trees to slow the energy of this water.

there was no longer trees to hold the soil so once we removed the trees what would happen is the rain would fall as it does now on the ground with great speed and velocity and back then it carried not just the water but also the soil down to the lowest areas which are the stream valleys creating a flood plain of what's called unconsolidated soil very erodible soil near the streams

and as we have now hardened the landscape with rooftops and roads what's happening is the water is

falling on the ground, it's not being slowed by the trees, it is racing towards the streams with a force and velocity that those streams were never designed, quote unquote, to handle.

And the effect of that water against that flood plain is to erode the stream banks and the stream bottoms, causing excessive sedimentation that buries the life out of the stream.

To give you an idea of the force of that, wow,

That is a very, you're right Joe, that is a very fast hourglass.

One statistic to leave you with, USDA looked at a 100 foot length of stream and over the course of one year, to see how much it eroded, over the course of one year, because of stream bank erosion, that one stream deposited 500 tons of sediment into the stream from that one source.

Thank you Mr. Schuyler.

J.N.

I'm here to address the noise ordinance that I believe is being voted on this evening and how it's going to impact the businesses that we have on the downtown mall aside from the musicians that are playing on the downtown mall and aside the fact that the pavilion seems to be exempt from this noise ordinance

We have in our city, and I don't know if you're aware, a very flourishing music scene.

It's something that a lot of cities in America would actually like to have themselves.

It's not something that you're just given, it's something that develops.

The music scene that we have in our city, with music happening in various venues all over town, in restaurants, on patios,

at our university and amphitheaters is the backbone by which we can have our larger shows.

I'm an independent music promoter here in Charlottesville and I put on between six to seven shows a week, so I've got a lot of very strong opinions as to our music scene and why it differs from other places in, say, Virginia and the rest of the nation.

By shutting down, if this noise ordinance were to shut down because of its decibel levels, the music that we have in our smaller venues, it would erode the larger music scene that we have here.

It would, people would get confused, there wouldn't be as many musicians in town, there wouldn't be a sort of brass ring that we have here in town with Dave Matthews and ATO Records and Red Light Management.

There's a lot of, I'm kind of getting off the point, I'm just trying to be fast, but in order to have the larger shows that we have, we have to have just a sort of backbone of these smaller shows in town.

Because of Dave Matthews, because of the Red Light Management, because of ATO Records, we've got a lot of people that want to become musicians here in town.

Where they get their start are the smaller venues.

They practice, they learn, they learn how to bring their friends out, how to promote, how to begin to name for themselves.

You know, these musicians that larger folks like Red Light Management notice, names like Sparky's Floss, Sons of Bill,

They've all been plucked out of this stable of musicians that we have here in town.

If the noise ordinance were to go into effect, and if it were to shut down places like Miller's, like the T-Bazaar, like Gravity Lounge, like the old Atomic Burrito, like, say, Mano Loco, like OXO that does dance music, like X Lounge that does other dance music, it would stifle the creativity.

It would also take away from tax dollars that would be coming from that late night bar revenue, that alcohol revenue.

I understand that you guys voted four to one last meeting and I guess today maybe you'll be making a decision about it but if you could I would urge you to consider that if you were to pass this noise ordinance it would seriously impede what is growing to be a very large music scene in our town and one last thing places like Seattle, places like Austin, what puts them on the map

is having multiple successes on very different forms of genres of music.

Throughout the years you have, in Austin you have Pearl Jam, all these different bands that came out of Seattle.

Austin has different musicians.

In order to become a place like that, you have to have about six different artists explode from there and go on the national level.

We only have one.

We have Dave Matthews.

If we want to be a place like that, we need to have more out on the national spotlight.

Thank you, sir.

Kevin Lynch.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Councilors.

My name is Kevin Lynch.

I'm here tonight as a member of Citizens for Sustainable Water Supply and I'm sure you know we are very concerned about the excessive cost both economic and environmental of Rivanna's latest water plans.

We advocate taking a phased approach to the Ragon Mountain Dam and making a serious commitment to preserving our existing water resources at South Fork Reservoir.

I'm here to clear up a few misconceptions that I've heard recently.

First of all, our group is not asking Rivanna to do something new and different when we talk about phasing construction of a new Ragon Mountain Dam.

In fact, when council approved the water supply plan in 2006, phasing was a key part of the plan.

And I want to quote from the plan which we approved and which was submitted to the regulators in 2006.

It says, phasing is the ability of an alternative to be implemented in logical and cost-effective increments rather than all at once in order to improve efficiency, conserve resources, and minimize costs, and mitigate impact on customer rate increases.

If the Ragged Mountain alternative

is approved, the first element of the project could be to construct a replacement dam to an initial height that would significantly increase existing yield but that would be short of the ultimate 45 foot increase.

This would accomplish the objectives of eliminating the dam safety issue at Ragon Mountain and provide adequate safe yield at amenable cost for a reasonable initial period.

Construction of the dam's first phase would produce adequate yield to cover

The plan

Not only spreads the cost of our 50 year water needs more equitably, but also gives us greater flexibility to deal with opportunities as they arise.

That's why I voted for the plan.

The situation that we have now with the fill required by the airport should be seen as an opportunity for the community to increase our water supply

much more cheaply than we originally anticipated, not as a threat to the plan.

And there's precedent for reservoir fill being used as airports all around the country.

So this is something that we should explore.

But Rivanna has changed the plan since we approved it in 2006.

Their so-called phasing solution that they presented this fall makes a mockery of the original phasing plan.

It's also much more expensive than they would lead you to believe.

They've made a big deal of how rates will only rise a few percent this year.

And I'd like to remind counsel of a chart that Rivanna showed the public in September.

It shows a debt service load, which increases to $9 million, which is about up here,

At this point, in a period anywhere from four to ten years, depending on which of the phasing plans you adopt, that amounts to a doubling of Rivanna's urban water budget.

Yes, the increase for this year is not very much.

That's because you are here.

We're here.

The problem is what happens when we get to here.

That's where the big money kicks in.

and there's some, I've got further comments that I will leave.

I'll get them out in the three minutes.

But please, you are responsible for water policy, not Rivanna, not their consultants.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Lynch.

Is there anyone else in the public that would like to speak?

Good evening.

I'm Peter Kleeman.

I live at 407 Head Street in the city.

I'd just like to encourage people who are in the audience and listening on television to participate in the Big Read.

I saw in the newspaper the mayor and the

Head of the Board of Supervisors announcing the start of the Big Read and I have a copy of the book.

I took it out of the Jefferson Madison Regional Library.

I know they have purchased a number of extra books anticipating lots of folks reading this.

I first moved to North Carolina in 1970 and sort of experienced some of the cultural change from the time of 1970 to now and I'm sure many people in Charlottesville are still experiencing some of those same cultural changes that are addressed in this book.

I think it's a wonderful idea to have a book

that our community uses as a baseline and a reference for discussing some of the issues that we face, some of the issues that are discussed at city council, board of supervisors, at our state legislature about changing our cultures and integrating our cultures together.

So I have been very impressed by reading this somehow over my 60 years of life.

I have missed this, although I guess it's only been available for 48 years.

But I'm delighted that this was chosen, and I have the opportunity to read it, and I would encourage everybody.

It's a quick read, and mine will be back in the library probably tomorrow.

It's the very last few chapters, so do pick it up and read it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.

Excuse me, I should have said that at the beginning.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to pull this down here.

My name is Allison Ruffner and I reside at 735 Grave Street.

A couple of words or phrases I'd like you all to think of as we talk about a particular ordinance that's going to be voted for tonight.

I want you to think of what this stimulates as a vision in your mind.

Frat house.

Externalities, that's an economics term.

Monkey see, monkey do.

The house, it's two houses from mine, is referred to by other neighbors of mine as the frat house.

And you can imagine how my life has been since the frat house has been the frat house.

And the frat house attracted other people that were monkey sees, monkey dos, to want to do the same thing and move into the same area and also have a frat house.

And it was one of the big attracting factors.

The pavilion, so cool the way it is.

Externalities.

beer cans, noise, drinking and driving, frat houses in neighborhoods close to party zones.

The environment that you create when you do something like the pavilion is relevant.

I'm a classical singer.

I spent about five months singing in Europe last year and I have a fan in Charlottesville who lives three quarters of a mile from where I have my voice lessons and he can hear me when the doors open, the human voice unamplified.

Now imagine what happens in our neighborhoods when we get this, 11 o'clock at night or midnight.

Nobody's saying that the pavilion should go away, but when you have certain kind of events, perhaps that use profanity, that invite certain kinds of bands in, that are catering towards a frat house mentality, you create externalities and you change the entire environment.

Some of us built the Belmont area.

I moved in there 10 years ago and people were like, why do you want to live there?

I said, well, I can afford it, number one.

Because I saw the unique environment that could be created.

And after having built that, which provided all these opportunities for new businesses to build, one big business person comes in and decides that they need to destroy it for their personal profit.

And it doesn't matter that I lose money on the sale of my house if I have to move because of the noise.

It doesn't matter that I can go to sleep in Berlin

More peacefully, a city of 4.5 million than in my own neighborhood in a city this size.

I slept like a baby after I got off stage for two weeks in Berlin.

When you make this vote, these things have to be kept in mind.

We're not saying go away, we're saying bring the volume down.

and the volume does not need to be so loud that people cannot talk within a 50 foot radius of any performing organization.

I'm sorry, I don't believe in that whether you're at Miller's or not.

You're not going to kill music because you turn the volume down.

You'll increase the appreciation.

But also, what goes for the little guy?

People like me.

It goes for the big guy.

We have noise ordinances in my neighborhood and those ordinances were there before you signed the contract.

That's the city's contract.

with us in the residential neighborhood.

So I hope when you vote, you keep that in mind.

Thank you, Ms. Ruffner.

We are now going to move on to the next portion of our meeting, which is responses to matters by the public.

I'm sorry, were you wanting to speak?

OK, I'm sorry.

Were there any counselors that would like to offer any comments?

I have my copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, too.

I just want to put in my plug-in for the big read, and I've been carrying it around with me.

This is a quick read, and it's wonderful if you do get a chance to read it for the first time or, in my case, re-read it.

Secondly, I want to make another comment about the last city council meeting.

The next morning when I turned in WINA, I was pleasantly amused

in hearing my own voice and that my comment about the Sister City was the sound bite that they use.

And I interpret it as, I guess, good natured rubbing, the ribbing.

or just one good one-liner after another.

And I listen to Debbie Inay most mornings because I enjoy the chatter.

But what struck me about it was after the banter about my sister's city comment, they immediately went to the news.

And it was a review of the happenings of the McGowan murder case.

And it was just so different.

It just went from one extreme to the other.

So the reality is

There are a lot of reasons in the city to be sad.

There's a lot of pain that we're still working through, a lot of healing that still needs to take place.

There are a lot of good things that are happening, but the balance is there are a lot of things that we need to do to improve the quality of our lives and to think about the things on a day-to-day basis that affect people.

I like the Sister City idea and my hope is that when we do get to the point where we're able to pursue those relationships, that my hope is that one day we'll have a Sister City in Africa.

I just had this, and it may not happen during my lifetime as a counselor, but I think about how we could celebrate having a

how we can greet people from that country because Africans are a part of the history here.

there were auction blocks where we see Court Square.

We know the stories of slaves building the university and because of the research by Gene Foster we know about the relationships with Thomas Jefferson and how that's become such a meaningful part of Monticello.

So my hope one day is that we will be able to explore the sister city concept in a way that will be fiscally responsible

I just want to respond to Ms. Laundrie.

On the police department issue with the pedestrian accident,

At the last meeting, I don't think council was trying to downplay that at all, and we are in the process of looking at some type of civilian review board, and I guess

The thing that bothered me was the gentleman, I forget his name, when he alluded to the fact that the police department, and I forget his exact words, was corrupt and we needed to have an investigation, etc.

I don't think that's the case at all, and I don't think they are corrupt.

And as I've stated before, I know that the police department does discipline officers,

They have been officers that have been indicted.

There have been a lot of things that happened that people are not aware of because their personnel matters.

I'll make a brief comment.

Regarding the concern that the noise ordinance might stifle the creativity at our smaller venues, I think that's one of the exciting things happening in Charlottesville as a parent of a guitarist.

But a musician, I think it's great to have venues where people can learn about the industry.

And I don't believe that we've erred on the side of being stifling, but if it turns out we have, if some of our regulations are onerous, I trust that people will come to us and tell us where the problems are and help us work with solutions so that people can have

You know, not be overwhelmed every Thursday, Friday, Saturday night by music, but at the same time that we can help those small businesses be successful.

And I'll also, you know, last year, two years ago, I received lots of complaints about the pavilion and got invited to come

regularly, you know, we'd go out and hear where the noise was and talk and I know the pavilion invested in trying to make it less noisy.

Last year, I didn't receive, I don't know if I received any complaints, but certainly if there's types of events that we anticipate being particularly noisy, I hope you'll contact council.

Thank you all.

We're now moving on to appointments to boards and commissions.

Second.

Any discussion?

All in favor indicate your vote.

Absolutely, I agree.

We will now move on to the consent agenda.

We have five items on the consent agenda for tonight.

A is the minutes of February 8th.

Item B is appropriation of $4,148 a grant for a bulletproof vest.

It's the first of two readings.

Item C is an appropriation of $3,606.54.

This is a reimbursement to the Sheriff's Department.

First of two readings.

Item D is a resolution supporting state funding for Buckingham Branch Railroad.

First of one reading.

And item E is an ordinance regarding noise ordinance amendments.

It's the second of two readings.

Okay, so we're going to add at the end of tonight's meeting a discussion on noise ordinance amendments.

Any other changes?

If not, I'll entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda.

So moved.

Second.

Any discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

The next item on our agenda tonight is probably the most important item that we're going to consider all year long.

And this is the first phase, first part of a months-long discussion that we're going to be having about our city budget, which is where we decide how to spend your money.

Tonight we have a presentation by our city manager.

The city staff have been working very diligently over the last few months to put together a budget for our consideration, for your consideration, and I know Mr. O'Connell is going to talk about some of the ways in which we're hoping to engage the public, but I'd like to preempt that by saying we do desire full and active citizen participation in the budget development process in the months ahead.

We're going to do a PowerPoint presentation.

I hope you can see this slide.

This may seem to be an odd place to start a budget presentation.

That sounds a little bit loud.

Is that okay?

But today when I was walking on the Mall, I came across at the Free Expression Monument this drawing, and it was literally drawn by some Charlottesville residents.

This isn't something we created.

and it really seemed fitting for tonight and for tonight for a city budget presentation.

As you can see at the bottom it says it was the best of times, it was the worst of times and we'll come back to that theme later but I think it's important as we talk about the budget to look at where we are and where we're heading.

Budgets in these kinds of presentations are usually all about dollars and numbers.

And this one, unfortunately, will be too because that's what it's all about.

But we wanted to stop and think and start differently and ask a couple questions.

What is a budget?

What is the city government all about?

And from my view, and I think this represents the council's view, it's about making positive differences in other people's lives.

It's about the future of our children and our community.

We take your, our taxpayers' dollars very seriously, and I'll spend some time in the next few minutes talking about what the proposed budget that the council is going to consider, what it's all about, and they're over the next month and a half going to be talking about the budget.

We're presenting next year's proposed budget

tonight.

It starts on July 1 and runs through June 30th, which is the city's budget year.

So when we talk about FY09, it is July of 08 to June 30th of 2009.

We're presenting this budget in what I think are pretty challenging times, financially challenging times that all of us are seeing and particularly challenging for government and local government.

This is a budget that's much about the future, I think is about the present.

The local economy has dramatically changed over the past year, and I'll show you some slides that I think will illustrate that.

But the city's financial picture for the moment is an optimistic one, but it's changing.

Our citizens expect quality services, and they expect good value.

It's one of the things that makes Charlottesville what it is, is a good place to live.

This budget is keeping services in place as our citizens know them.

I see no need as your city manager for this year proposing reducing services.

We live within our means, we do, and we have done.

With changing the local housing economy and the impacts on our budgeting, this is the smallest year-to-year budget increase in over 10 years.

A city council guideline was to present a budget 5% or less as an operating budget increase, and we're coming in at 4.21%.

Here's some of the five-year trends that are representative of some increasing demands

So even though we're a community that's had a very small population increase, the demands and the needs continue.

We're a changing community.

And a couple quick examples, construction growth and planning impacts.

Our social services increases that you see here show client workload that reflects a changing demographic within the city.

And the landfill cleanup costs are increasing 329%.

and public safety calls in a couple areas are up over 20%.

So even though our population is staying the same, there are demands that we have.

Here's some financial demands that we have because of changes in the community.

This set is over 10 years.

And here's a couple examples.

The Blue Ridge Juvenile Detention Facility, an increase of 272%.

The jail, an increase of 655%.

and the Comprehensive Services Act, which is for at-risk use, a 511 percent increase.

City Council in November adopted some budget guidelines on which this budget is based.

I'm going to quickly go through these, but there are a couple of key ones that I want to highlight.

One is no tax rate changes.

A second one is budget expenditures, as I said a minute ago, to have a 5 percent target, and we're actually at 4.21 percent.

and an emphasis on council's priorities.

Schools, affordable housing, transit expansion, capital investments and youth programs.

Those were the priorities that we were given to try to look at some new initiatives.

We fully funded the schools request.

We're supporting our employees with a market-driven salary and benefit package and there are limited new things that are being proposed in this budget and I'll go through some of those that are new in just a minute.

This continues an investment in capital projects but on a much smaller scale.

A smaller scale than in the past several years we've made major capital investments but as the economy is slowing we're seeing the need to slow down some of our capital investments.

And you can see there's a series of other guidelines that are shown that we followed in presenting the budget.

I want to go back to a presentation that we made a couple months ago

to City Council and the community about cost savings, efficient government, just to remind you of a few of the things that we've been doing.

It's all about quality services, and I think that's what sets Charlottesville apart from some other places, but yet at a good value.

We've shown documented savings of over $10 million that come as a result of things that the city staff has done.

We did those calculations in preparation for that presentation.

Let me give you a couple of examples.

One was a collection of over $10 million in grants that save local taxpayers.

Here's some other saving examples with a couple of notable big ones that are recurring every year.

We privatized trash and recycling and have improved the service.

The Cope's Out service is much better, particularly in the recycling case.

So far we've saved $1.9 million.

That's a half a million dollars a year.

Another one is energy savings.

We've made a lot of investments to try to reduce our energy consumption.

We see we're saving over $250,000 over the next five years, and there are many others, but the total that we had was over $10 million.

Before we get to the budget, I think it's important to talk about our community's values.

And it's what sets a Charlottesville apart from other places.

A budget should and hopefully reflects the values in this community and the values that City Council has.

The dollars that are behind a budget really are all about what kind of community do we want, what is important to everybody that lives here, and how much money do we spend doing certain things.

And that's the debate that goes on with the budget.

With the city services, we believe that we play a pretty vital and important part as part of the quality of life in our community.

So as we head into this budget discussion, we remind you of the council's vision.

We have it on the wall.

We have it on council agendas.

It gets talked about quite often, but the vision that council has sets the priority for where the new dollars are going.

And as I said a minute ago, there's an emphasis in this budget on support in the schools and the affordable housing initiative that's building on what happened last year, major capital investments, youth programs, and expanded transit.

Shown here is the 10-year budget increase.

I said a few minutes ago this is the lowest increase in 10 years that we're proposing in this budget.

We've made heavy capital investments over the last couple years, especially last year.

As well as last year, we made a major unprecedented commitment to the schools.

As I go through this budget presentation, I think you'll see that we've had to make some changes from the past to deal with where we're going in the future.

So let me give you a couple quick highlights to continue what I've been talking about.

This budget fully supports the school's request, which is in front of the school board right now.

There are no service reductions that are being proposed.

And there are no staff increases in the operating budget that are local taxpayer supported.

There are a number of capital projects that are being proposed for future investment that include Pearl Schools, the downtown mall,

Affordable housing, starting a phase, setting aside the money for a replacement fire station, which by the way has been in a trailer for a number of years.

And here's the proposed expenditure summary.

A third to the schools, which is shown in blue, 25% to public safety, which is shown in yellow, and you can see the rest.

These are our revenue estimates.

About two-thirds are in local taxes, which is shown in red, and the rest are a number of other sources as summarized here.

As I go through the rest of this presentation, I want you to pay attention to that red piece of the pie chart.

It's a major part of our budget of the local taxes, and I think you'll see some trends that have us a bit concerned about where we're heading in the future.

The other thing about this budget is it builds on the recent assessments that were released by the Assessor's Office.

The average residential assessment is a 4% increase, and a third of the properties in Charlottesville, homeowner residential properties, are at zero or less.

So in one way that's really good news for homeowners, but as we go through this presentation I think you'll see the impacts financially on the city.

Now for some details.

The schools are always a high priority.

They represent about a 40%, I mean a 4% increase that's being proposed in the budget for nearly a $40 million contribution to the schools from city taxpayers for next year.

This is a chart that is the city dollars that are percent of the school budget.

And you can see it's over a period of time.

And you can see the trend going upward.

It shows the level of support to the schools over time from the city, especially the past several years.

And you also can see

the level of the state support which I'll show you a little more clearly in this next slide.

You can see the opposite trend.

To set a downward percentage shares by the state in the school budget, that's an 8% reduction of state funding for education and over time our city taxpayers have had to make up the difference out of local tax dollars.

Another major new program is affordable housing.

This emphasizes what was started last year by a major commitment to affordable housing and we're proposing that it continue and with some increased funding.

There are very few Virginia communities that have as aggressive financial support for affordable housing as we do in Charlottesville.

We have tax relief grants of over 1.2 million dollars and there's some proposals to try to

allow that to continue and expand a little bit and our operating budget is proposing 1.4 million dollars to go to affordable housing initiatives.

Now here's the chart to try to show the history of affordable housing and the dollars in it.

There are three sources for the affordable housing program in our initiatives and they've ramped up dramatically as you can see this year and

and we're proposing some changes for next year.

The green bars show the increase in operating budget to the proposed 1.4 million dollars and as part of a five year commitment that was started last year and a major policy commitment on council's part, particularly in the change in economy that we have.

The red bar is a one time surplus that was used this past year to start up this new affordable housing program and some of it is being proposed to be used in the proposed budget.

and the blue bars are Federal Community Development Block Grant funds, CDBG, which you can see is declining.

The next biggest change in the proposed budget is in transit.

With additional transit routes and transit improvements, we're recommending that we spend $380,000 of new money for new expanded transit routes in the city.

to continue to try to improve our transit system and increase the ridership opportunities for our residents.

It's also a major commitment in this budget to youth programs with over $150,000 of new money to be dedicated to new youth recreation programs.

But we're doing this by reallocation of dollars that have been in our budget to pay for the utilities at Smith Pool,

and with the consolidation and the changes that council has approved recommending that those utility savings be reprogrammed to youth programs and youth activities.

And we think it reflects a high priority for our young residents that council has talked about.

These are a couple new things.

They're small dollars, but we think important new programs that we're recommending to council.

One is around respecting diversity.

The second one is around valuing health.

And the third one is an expansion of a summer youth employment experience that was a successful pilot that we're proposing to double.

All of these are new community partnerships that we're proposing.

Here are the details on the capital projects that are planned.

It totals $24.4 million and there are a combination of sources of money including bonds that will pay for this.

and most of the major projects are listed here.

So let me take a minute and typically we don't do this but I think it's important that we start looking ahead.

We spent the last three years as a staff getting ready for an economic downturn and we've done a lot of things, we've made recommendations in almost every budget anticipating that that might happen.

and this is the year that it's beginning to happen.

We're probably a bit fortunate as a local government that it hasn't hit us as hard as what you're seeing around this region and around the state.

But our sense is it's going to get worse before it gets better.

I started with the phrase in the best of times and in the worst of times and I think the future sort of reflects that.

The cycles of the economy and the downturns in the economy are there.

And clearly we're in an economic downturn, particularly in the residential housing market.

If you think about that pie that I showed you a few minutes ago that's almost two-thirds of our budget from local taxes, it's heavily affected by the local housing market and the local economy.

And we're seeing that rapidly slowing down.

And I think in the next couple slides you'll see that slowdown that I'm talking about

and some of our projections for the next couple of years.

The past three years we've made some proposals to council as the tax rate was being reduced.

It's been reduced over 14 cents the last couple of years.

Recommendations have been made to council to try to make some investments in some major capital projects that have been long needed.

They also have created some one-time savings like the energy programs that I talked about earlier.

But this budget begins and I think in the future we're going to have to look even harder at capital investments and slowing those down.

And you'll see as proposed in this budget, we're not suggesting adding any new employees that the local taxpayers are going to be supporting.

Let me give you some trends just to help make the point.

This is a trend in tax assessments.

And I think each one of these you'll see we're seeing dramatic change and probably creating some real concerns for the future.

Tax assessments are down.

These projections show that they're flattening.

As I said a few minutes ago, that's good news for our homeowners.

that it means there are going to be fewer new dollars that are available for future city services.

Those real estate assessments on residential and commercial properties lead to our real estate tax revenues.

And as a result of those projections, the tax revenues will fall off the chart.

You can see this trend.

The future projections even worse down to 1% in two years at the local real estate market continues like it is now.

Business personal property is nearly flat in the future.

You can see from the percentage, and these next couple slides have these right here.

Percentage increase, that's the average, and then our projections out in two and three years.

We're going from an average 5 plus percent growth to 1 percent or less in business personal company.

Another one, and this is maybe one of the ones that's the most sensitive to our local economy besides real estate market, sales tax.

Front neck ejections going from a 4 percent growth average to 1 percent.

This is probably one of the stronger ones, but it's not much movement.

Tourism-related mills and lodging,

Smaller increase projected but it's slowing down from nearly a 7% average to 3.5%.

It's our only major revenue that we're projecting for the future to be greater than a 1% increase.

So here's a summary of all these.

This is the budget year we're in and these are our projections the next two calendar years overall about

are major tax sources in the city and you can see what's happening.

We spent a lot of time through the years talking about city staffing and this chart's going to take a minute to explain but I think it's got a lot of good information in it.

It's a 10 year trend in city staffing.

FTE's is government ease for full-time employees.

Because we have a lot of employees, we may have jobs that are split three, four, five ways or part-time people.

They all total to full-time positions, so we count it that way.

This is shown by who pays it.

The blue is what we call the general fund, but it's the taxpayer supported operating budget and the employees that are there are paid by local taxes.

and this purple here is all kinds of other sources of money that are not local taxpayers supported.

So for example, in the operating budget, the blue part, the number of employees has grown by only three.

Three over the last 10 years from 504 to 507.

That's the part of the budget that's supported by local property taxes.

This purple bar that's right here is where the real growth has been.

And when people come and talk at budget hearings about the city's staff growth, they're really talking about these areas.

But let me explain to you where they are and who pays for them.

This is 88 positions, you can see from here, over 10 years.

and they all come from these areas.

Social services supported by state and federal dollars.

And I showed you earlier the case loads that are going on and the percentage increases that are going on with the case loads.

The golf courses is supported entirely by golf fees.

No city tax dollars in it.

The transit system, mostly supported by the state and federal government.

The utilities are entirely supported by rates.

and utility fees that are charged to our customers.

And the last one is we have a contract with the schools to provide their maintenance for their buildings and school transportation, and those employee numbers have shifted over to city government and are counted there, but they're fully supported by the school budget.

But I want to go back to this one.

Over 10 years, three new employees in the general fund budget

Here's another big one.

I showed you earlier the state support for the school budget over time and how it's declining and the city's support has had to pick up and increase that.

As you read the newspaper and you listen to the General Assembly discussions and all the budgets that are going on, already we've gotten through the Governor's proposed budget over $200,000 in reductions in state revenues for things like

Police, Streets, Courts, the Jail, recently heard in the last couple of days a $276,000 cut for school construction.

Our belief is that before the General Assembly is over, we're going to be standing here talking about more cuts, but we don't know what they are.

And it's going back and forth as to what those cuts will be, but I suspect that will be an issue that the council has to deal with before we're finished.

Our website is full of budget information.

You can go to it and click this.

Every piece of information that the City Council has, we have on our website.

Any updates that we give to the City Council, we'll put on our website so you can access that 24 hours a day.

If anybody has any questions about the budget, we're glad to sit down and talk to them, give them written information if a computer is not going to work for them.

The mayor mentioned this.

The council's got a heavy set of meetings.

There are eight budget-related meetings over the next month.

A number of these are work sessions and background meetings to help the council understand what's being proposed and to get into level of detail to really look and think about the budget.

But there are a couple important key ones for the public.

You can see from this finger pointer right here

There's a public forum that's scheduled for March the 15th which is an interactive forum that we've done before that I think people in the community enjoy and it gives them an opportunity to talk directly with city council members and that little thing right there doesn't turn.

You get a lot of time to talk.

The other thing that council is receiving in their background is a budget survey that we received in December

Over 600 citizens participating in that budget survey so that information is available to council.

There's a public hearing on March 17th in city council chambers.

It's another hearing on April the 7th and the final council adoption is on April the 15th.

I got one more.

We started this presentation talking about Charlottesville people and I want to end with our residents because that's really what I think the city of Charlottesville and what we do is all about.

And I think it's about being a great place to live, as council's vision says, a great place to live for all our residents.

And hopefully this budget proposal will help continue that.

So thank you.

Council, one and all

Typically, tonight is not the night for much discussion, but if you have questions or directions or information you'd like as we start moving into the work sessions, if you could let us know, you can do that now.

You can let us know later.

We have a work session scheduled for this Friday.

The notebook that you received is set up for each work session, so the first part of the notebook is for the

Excuse me, for the meeting on Thursday, and as we moved to other work sessions, more information in the notebook, and then in the back is a supplement that's a lot of historical trends, which we use some of them tonight, as well as responsive, the specific council questions that come up.

So, there's several of us here that can talk if you have some questions.

If not, we can move on to other business.

I'll offer a comment.

I think it was a good presentation.

I think the city manager and the budget staff should be commended because I think it was their prudence that kept us from having a bigger problem this year like some of our surrounding jurisdictions in particular in terms of conservative forecasting of revenues.

I think you should be commended for that.

I also think that

You've done a good job of pointing out some of the challenges that are ahead of us.

I think that was a somewhat sobering assessment.

Sober to us.

I just had two informational requests.

One is we had done an online survey soliciting information on ideas for smart and efficient government.

Okay, great.

And then secondly, I had asked about a month ago to try to pull together a one-page or two-page compendium of all the major infrastructure projects

you know globally speaking that are on our horizon just so we all have a better sense of all the dollars that are coming down the pike and

I think Leslie, I asked her if I could say this publicly, she's the only person I know that's birthed a baby and a budget at the same time, so congratulations.

Nice job.

Okay, well thank you Ms. Beauregard and Mr. O'Connell and all the staff that worked on the budget and we'll take it from here.

Mr. Mayor and members of council, this is a proposed ordinance being offered tonight on first reading that would abandon

Sanitary sewer and storm water easements that are located on property on 15th Street that is owned by Pavilion Street LLC.

Thank you, Mr. Brown.

There is nobody that signed up to speak.

Is there anybody that would like to speak in the public hearing on this matter?

If not, I will close the public hearing.

Is there any questions or discussion or a motion to approve?

I'll move the ordinance.

Is there a second?

Second.

All right.

That's the first of two readings.

We'll take it up again in our next meeting.

Thank you.

We now have a report, City Economic Market Study.

Mayor and Members of Council, a few weeks ago you received a briefing from Martha Jefferson Hospital.

Steve Bowers walked through the ERA Economic Market Study from the standpoint of the perspective of that report as it's specifically related to that site.

The report, however, includes a tremendous amount of economic data that's extremely useful to the city

and I wanted to take a few minutes tonight to kind of discuss some of that information and why it's so important to us and some of the directions that I think it takes us in the future.

Some people kind of question why a report like this is important.

Well the best example I can give you is in 2000 we received another economic report that was done in conjunction with our Carter studies.

Up until that time, we really had very little housing that was occurring in the city.

In fact, for the past 10 years, we had averaged only 44 housing units a year.

One of the things that came out of that initial economic study was that there was a strong market here for additional residential growth.

And that report kind of brought that to light, and the end results was that

As we started meeting some of the thresholds that made that residential development practical, we started seeing developers and individuals start dealing with housing.

The end result is that in 2006 we hit one of the highest years of residential growth in the city with over 500 new residential units in one year.

And that was compared to the 44 in the previous 10 years.

I just point that out as an example that it was the data in that report which made it prove to various developments and personal people that were dealing with residential development that there was a market here and it was strong and it was feasible.

Up until that time it had been talked about but nothing was really happening.

As Mr. O'Connell said earlier tonight with the budget, we are in an economic downturn

But I think the good news in this report is that where the state and federal governments are experiencing a significant downturn, the downturn in Charlottesville is not as bad and not as bad as it is in other sectors in our state.

This report is meant to define for us the growth potential in different sectors of the economy.

For example, this report deals with residential

retail, hotel, office and research and development.

And in each of those it really tries to present information that supports what the potential of those individual projects might be.

This is a forward looking document and most of the analysis includes looking forward at least four years to 2012.

Economic growth is important to the city because it provides

additional funds for important public improvements and projects, and it also helps spread the tax burden.

Hopefully this report will give us some insight in what that potential is in the future.

It's not only important to us from the standpoint of how we deal with the Martha Jefferson site, all of the uses that were identified and shared with y'all on the Martha Jefferson site are very feasible at other sites in the city.

whether it's the Water Street Lots, Preston Avenue, West Main Street, all of those particular proposed projects are very feasible in other areas of the city.

The market study really helps us a great deal because of the amount of information that's included in it

and our ability to share that with potential developers and business people which helps them make the case for everything from commercial loans to other types of financing that may be available to them as they consider different development options.

It provides us with a strong database.

It helps us make informed decisions about development rather than just hunches or guesses about

where we see the market going.

It also helps the city in determining where to invest resources in order to promote projects which have a substantial return on investment to the city.

For lack of a better terminology, I will just share with you that rather than trying to walk you through the 60 page document, I have included some cliff notes for you that I hope will be helpful and will refer you to specific pages

where I am taking the information from.

I guess some of the major findings or what this report tells us is that Charlottesville is the core of a strong regional economy.

We have very low unemployment.

We have growth in government and the professional services.

But this report provides analysis in much greater detail and in many cases breaks that analysis out by different age groups, lifestyles,

and those types of things which are important as you consider some of the aspects of your housing programs and other types of things that are important to the community.

Charlottesville has really made the transition from a small college town to a mixed-use urban center, and the mixed-use development is the greatest difference that's occurred in the last 10 years in the types of development that's

occurring and it's very practical because it provides for balance.

High soil growth in the city and the county is led by higher income house levels and the report, as I said, really talks about that growth in all age levels.

More condominiums and townhomes were sold in 2006 than in any time in our history.

Women units are in extremely high demand.

That's partly because of the university and younger people that are moving into our community.

The vacancy rate for rental units is extremely low and that's across all the sectors of the rental market.

There's a healthy market for hotels.

The three measures that we use to really measure how effective our hotels are are the average daily rates and the average daily rates in a city.

fluctuate between $118 to $125 a night.

The occupancy rate is 74%, which is many percentage points above the national average.

And the ROF power, which is the amount of revenue generated per unit that's available for rent, is about $87 a night.

And that's extremely high compared to the national market.

I think what that means to us is there is

a market for additional hotel product here.

However, there is a large development in numbers of projects in the county and we need to make sure that we do protect the hotel projects and the efforts that are underway in the city.

It could be that with the development of the University properties on West Main Street for the hospitals that we will see some additional demand for hotels.

Restaurants and

Nightlife in the city is extremely good and it's much above the levels in the county and as you saw one of the major contributors to our budget that is at least maintaining a higher than 1% growth is the meals tax and that's extremely important and those restaurants are very important to our downtown and community.

Last time I checked I think there were about 240 restaurants in the

City and about 60 of those were in the downtown area.

Retail, downtown restaurants and office are okay, but we really need to make sure that we protect that investment because there's a tremendous amount of growth in the county in 29 and we really need to look after those businesses that are here and make sure we keep them successful.

There is little or no Class A office space in the city and that is a gap in our market and we need to concentrate on that.

Research and development businesses are primarily being held by the University of Virginia research parks and county parks.

We really are not able to compete in that market as it relates to the big laboratory type facilities and things like that.

The cost of land in the city is significant and the cost to upfit space for laboratories is high.

Where we can compete are in the small startup businesses that can locate in some of the lower rental cost property in the city and are close to the university.

And I think that's where our economic technology, economic incubator can be very helpful to us.

In the area of residential, we have in the area

an annual demand of 182 units per year of properties for sale and a demand for 597 units of rental property.

That's a significant number.

We will not get all of those.

Some significant part of those will go into the county.

However, we do see a trend where it is important for many of those people and a desire for them to locate close to the city, close to the downtown,

and close to the university.

There is a prime market for senior housing and I think that is something that is extremely important and a lot of the report talks about that.

It is an important part of our economy and it will be growing dramatically, I think some 24,000 new units in the next few years.

Retail from the standpoint of a downtown grocery store is very feasible.

Something in the neighborhood of 15,000 to 53,000 square feet is workable.

We probably will not see some major 100,000 square foot grocery store in the city.

We probably don't have the kind of sites to accommodate that.

But a grocery store is very feasible and we're continuing to get more interest in that type of product in the city.

The other opportunities include drugstores, full and limited service restaurants, and other small retailers.

From a commercial standpoint, we capture over 25% of all of the regional employment.

That means that over the next seven years, we could generate another 600,000 square feet of office space.

And that type of office space could be particularly meaningful to us.

that's about 85,000 square feet a year.

We also see support in the report for professional, scientific and technical services, information and finance, and a lot of health services.

Some of the areas that were not as great from the standpoint of demand were the areas of the hotel if it's tied to a conference center.

In fact, we believe that if we were desirous of having a conference center,

We would probably have to provide some type of government incentive to make that project work.

There are, as I said earlier, about five hotels that we are aware of that are in the pipeline in the county.

Research and development will primarily be in the county, as I said, at the research parks, although there is an opportunity for desk-related type research and development in the city.

How will we use this report?

Well, first of all, we will continue to study it.

There's a huge amount of data in this report, and a lot of it I think could be useful to you all in your deliberations of various types of public policy issues.

It also tells us how to focus our development, and we certainly don't want to spend time and effort on something that's not feasible or doesn't have a demand or a growth component.

tells us how to best use the city's resources to leverage private investment.

And most importantly, it probably tells us those areas where we need to focus our job training and workforce development efforts.

This report is extremely complex.

I wanted to take this opportunity to share with you some of these observations.

I think it is very meaningful.

It will be particularly helpful to me and our staff.

Yeah.

Yes, sir.

Class A office space

is space which would be very high upfit, usually higher ceilings, nice finishes, and most importantly parking on site.

And one of the things that is very important to the city is the parking.

And we don't have a lot of sites in the city where we can do Class A space.

We have some space that

is real close but really not a whole lot of that that's on the market right now.

We're continuing to get inquiries from primarily financial institutions, some law firms, people like that that would want policy space.

Not a huge volume but a very important segment of their economy.

And what we don't want to see is all of that type of use move out of the city and into the suburbs

Okay, one other question.

Yes, sir, and I think that some of the key areas that you all have discussed, at least in the past, are the partnerships with PVCC, specifically in the case of their nursing program and the efforts that are underway there to help support the health industry.

That's an important thing, whether or not it's senior housing and senior care or hospitals.

I think that's a very important focus point.

for workforce development.

Also in the hospitality industry, it's very clear that this is going to be a successful component of our economics.

However, we really need to work on upward mobility for the people that are working in those institutions so that they can become front desk operators, managers, computer skills, and things like that.

And fortunately, that segment of the community is working with PVCC also to do that.

It is not on a website.

We can make it available there.

You have to put on the website, I think the title of the report is somewhat oriented towards Massachusetts hospitals.

I would do some different title.

We will, yes sir, I agree with that.

It will be economic market studies for the city.

If you can't do the whole report, what are the highlights of it?

If you all recall, some time ago we had a discussion with the technology industry and then we did a report about why it was so important to the city and it is a major economic sector in the city and in the region.

We're the fourth largest technology area in the state and when you consider Northern Virginia and Richmond and Tidewater, that's pretty impressive.

It's some of the higher salaries that are paid in that sector.

It's some of the greatest job opportunities.

The technology incubator was conceived with the idea that we would provide space primarily for the desk related type of technology startup.

We've been working with the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council to establish that over in the area of the basement of the Market Street garage.

I had two quick items.

First of all, I want to second what Mr. Taliaferro just said regarding the need to integrate workforce development.

I think it's vital and what we saw in the budget presentation is that the biggest driver, it certainly seems to me, and I know Mr. Lynch did some research on this not too long ago, the biggest driver in terms of our

I think the biggest growth in recent years has been poverty.

And poverty is very expensive.

And so anything that we can do to help move our low income, our working poor up the ladder through the kind of initiative that Mr. Taliaferro mentioned I think would be great.

Secondly, in terms of channeling economic development, I know this report is focused on Martha Jefferson Hospital, but we spent a lot of money, as you know, not that long ago looking at our corridors, our economic corridors and with our corridor studies, and I think there's some sense in certain quarters that

That effort might have stalled a little bit in the last couple of years in terms of really channeling development in our economic corridors and how do we engage the business community, how do we engage developers in

What kind of incentives do we look at?

What kind of community building initiatives do we look at?

As the report kind of alludes to, there's only so much of particular types of uses we can absorb in any

given year and you can't get ahead of the market.

If you do, you're going to have unsuccessful projects.

I think initially we focused a lot of time and effort on Water Street, the West Main Street corridor.

We did a lot of studies on Cherry and on Preston Avenues and the potential in those particular corridors.

One of them that we worked on was High Street.

And of course the key there is the Motha Jefferson site.

But we also worked on things like River Street.

And all of those areas have seen some activities.

Some of them will see it faster.

The University of Virginia activities will drive a lot what's going on on West Main.

But on the other hand, Council's action also helps with that.

When you approved working with the developer on the corner of Ridge

McIntyre and Fifth, you really have set one of the other bookends to the West Main Street corridor and established that given the right type of design and character of architecture that you could move ahead with those types of projects and I think what that means is West Main Street will start developing from each end like we envisioned probably 10 years ago but the economy has gotten to the point some of the actions y'all have taken with zoning ordinances

and everything are making this much more feasible now.

I think it's probably unrealistic to think every corridor is going to get built out in a real rapid stamp.

For one thing, people have to be willing to sell and develop their land, and that's just not going to happen overnight.

Fortunately, many of our corridors do have some sizable, developable sites, which are very practical.

Others, it's going to take assembling

of a large number of parcels to make something that's practical.

But I think we haven't abandoned the carters or anything.

What's interesting to me is in the timing of the local market and what's going on sort of in the private development community, the university's getting ready to start two huge projects.

The cancer center kicks off on April 11th or something like that, and a children's medical center project that's on West Main Street

on a fairly fast track.

So those are two huge developments that probably, that have been 10 or 12 years in discussion between the West Main Street work that the city talked about and the university 10 or 12 years ago was now finally starting to happen.

But it's sort of the downturn in the economy, so it's kind of interesting when those things happen.

And the figures have to get to a threshold.

Probably the best example is next week they'll be doing the groundbreaking on the downtown mall hotel.

The reason that's feasible now is because there are other statistics on all of our other hotel products are extremely good.

One last question.

We right now and in

I guess the final stages are trying to get the assessment completed on the CPC assets.

That's a key part to how we proceed.

I think the great thing about this study is it gives concrete economic information to developers that would look at that site that we didn't have several months ago.

Next we have a report on neighborhood development services.

For those of you watching at home or in the audience, we've kicked off our last meeting a series of presentations by city departments.

This is an effort to

encourage greater transparency in city government so the citizens know how their tax dollars are being used and how our city government operates and we had an excellent presentation last time by Mike Svetz on Parks and Recreation and this time we have Mr. Jim Tolbert talking about neighborhood development services.

Keep it energy, guys.

I will try to make this relatively painless for you and

and get through these slides as quickly as I can but this is an opportunity to kind of talk about what we do and some of you don't get a chance to see us a lot so you don't really know what we do.

NDS was created in 1999 out of three areas and I think as I was looking at putting this together

the building blocks here.

Two of the divisions in our department came from Chief Taliaferro's department and the foundation was there with the building inspection and property maintenance divisions that were called Building and Life Safety when we came together.

And we didn't take a lot of effort to bring that off and then of course the community development section, Mr. Huja had been operating for a number of years so there was a

a wonderful foundation to start to bring the department together.

We have four divisions and as I said in the memo you got, I don't like to call them divisions.

I think that we try to be more together so we don't want to say we have divisions.

I asked the staff if they would come tonight.

They were scared to death it was going to be like Mike's presentation last time, it would be 11 o'clock.

So they said, let's put some photos in there and they can see who we are.

I put the two ladies that work on our front desk out front because they are the face of our department.

But also to say to you, this is one area where we just are in the process of really making some efficiencies.

We are installing a new permit system

that council enables to go after a couple years ago and we've been developing it for about a year and it will go operational about the first of July.

But the beauty of it is it will help us be much more efficient and it will give the public a much greater access.

If you are a builder and you need an inspection and you got busy and you forgot to call us today, you'll be able to go online and schedule that inspection.

If there's one available for tomorrow, you can get it scheduled without having to call us.

If you are a citizen and you see something happening on your street and there's nobody around to call, you can go online, enter an address, and you'll be able to get status of a permit and know what's happening there.

They do a lot of stuff, tracking building permits, coordinating planning commission meetings, etc.

And they actually issue permits.

They're not just the ladies on the front area.

The first division to talk about is neighborhood planning.

Missy Creasy heads it up, and we have three planners now, and as you know, they're divided by neighborhoods and the areas they serve.

This is a map that shows how we've got all of our folks divided in neighborhoods, but our planners and our engineers, we have two engineers doing plan review, and they pretty much divide along planner lines, but we try to divide it by workload and balance it out.

Their responsibilities are the comprehensive plan.

They're responsible for developing that.

We don't talk about it much, but our staff has developed two award-winning plans in 2001 and 2006.

A lot of communities farm that out and hire consultants at the tune of a couple hundred thousand or better for each one.

We're proud of the fact that we've been able to do it in-house with city staff

and that they've been quite successful.

They handle all the development review process.

We do about 50 to 70 site plans a year.

That doesn't sound like a lot, but when you start looking at the number of reviews that have to happen, it's a tremendous number of them.

Something we do that many cities don't, we have site plan conferences, 22 of them a year, where we take every site plan and invite the public to come in and comment on them.

And they coordinate all of the planning commission work.

We handle all the bonds and bond sign-offs and maintain all those on all of our projects.

That division has our design and preservation planner.

Mary Joy Scala is in that job and since she's been in it for about three years, we've added three historic districts to her purview for review.

So the work is, the economy may be slowing a little as Gary talked about.

The workload in the planning side of the house is not slowing.

We do ADA compliance.

Jim Herndon that many of you know very well is our ADA officer for the city and he works, he reviews every set of building plans, every site plan.

as that's an increasing part of our effort to make sure that there's better and better ADA compliance.

He also handles a lot of complaints and resolves them.

Jim heads up our mapping, and we do a lot of mapping for other agencies in the city, for the public, in addition to the ones we produce for ourselves.

All the 911 mapping is coordinated.

We put a slide in here about the census.

Everybody thinks the census occurs every 10 years and that you do it and you forget about it and you do it again.

It's an ongoing effort.

It's amazing how close we have to work with the Census Bureau these days trying to get the maps right, trying to get them the right information and it's a constant exchange every couple of months in meetings with them.

We do the CBG program and now dealing with much more in the way of housing with the CATEC funds and other dollars, but that's a full-time job.

This is one that's paid for by somebody else.

It's a job that we have, it's a full-time position, but our grants coordinator is paid by HUD and does not cost our local taxpayers.

We have two zoning administration staff.

We have a zoning administrator who has to review every building permit, every CO, interpret the code, review all certificates of occupancy, manages the board of zoning appeals, and also administers the erosion and sediment control program.

But with all those other duties, there's no way that one person's going to do all the E&S work.

We have seven people now certified as E&S administrators or inspectors.

and that's more than what we've been told, more than any other jurisdiction in the Commonwealth.

Just people getting cross-trained and wanting to be cross-trained to be involved.

And then we have our zoning inspector that you asked us to include in the budget a couple of years ago to help monitor what's going on in the neighborhood and also is one of the key people in monitoring the mall and the work there.

Of course, you know about all the boards and commissions that the planners deal with.

Engineering is another of our divisions.

It's sort of behind the scenes, quiet.

We don't see a lot of them.

They do a lot of different things in Charlottesville.

Project design and project management, all the bridges and structures and the bridge inspections, streets, sidewalks, drainage utilities.

They're involved in all the building permit review, a lot of drafting, assigning all the addresses for every address that's assigned in the community, and then again, tremendous amount of development review.

We do a lot of surveying.

Again, another little known is that we do a lot of right-of-way surveying for our citizens.

They'll call and say, I have a question about a tree, whether or not it's on their property, or it's in this right-of-way, street right-of-way.

We don't make them hire a private surveyor.

We go out and locate the right-of-way, and that's a service to the citizens that takes a lot of time, but I think it's a very good one that gives them a lot of good information.

We do, again, drafting and mapping, a lot of CAD work.

Everything in the last 10 years has gotten completely computerized and makes life a lot easier.

We have two people working doing drawings, Jim and Pam Murray, that grew up doing pen and ink and they've had to convert and learn, so that's a major accomplishment for them at their age, as I tell them, to have converted and gotten to

to be as proficient as they are with the mapping.

Traffic engineering is something that's amazing how it's picked up, the number of calls we get for traffic engineering and the things that the traffic engineer does.

Development review, every parking inquiry, and that doesn't sound like much, but it's amazing if you stay in the office and look at the things Jeannie does about every parking place, every change,

Every temporary street closure, somebody wanting to put a dumpster in a parking space comes through that office.

And Jeannie Alexander and our newest Assistant Traffic Engineer, Donovan Branch.

And Jeanette Janažić is our VDOT coordinator and works very closely supporting them when she's not doing VDOT projects.

Again, they do a lot of project design and project management.

We supervise a lot of engineering consultants, but we do some design work on our own.

Railway planning, again, a lot of projects that are in the pipeline now, the JPA bridge, the parkway, the interchange, Hillsdale,

of the Belmont Bridge.

Since we picked up the first cities program, as I mentioned, Jeanette is the VDOT coordinator.

She is paid by VDOT.

Again, not out of our local tax base, but one of our employees that we were able to get funded by another agency so she can manage that project.

And again, we use her to both manage the VDOT projects and supplement and help out where we have need in the traffic engineering area.

And a lot of projects that are going

There, she's also been submitting grants for us, revenue sharing grants, safe routes to schools, working with Chris and Chris Genzic and enhancement grants and the highway safety improvements she's taken on.

We do a lot of engineering inspection, as I said, new construction, bridge inspections, every three years pedestrian hazards inventory, a lot of capital projects management,

A lot of E&S work is getting much more complex.

It's getting much more attention in the community and the rules are ever changing at DEQ and what our responsibilities are.

We spend almost as much time learning as we do.

We use interns a lot.

That's one thing that we've been able to do in the budget.

And the bottom line where it's important, they're a money saver.

We are able to use educated master degree candidates, second year masters in a lot of cases, folks for virtually nothing on the payroll.

We pay them living wage and that's about it.

And we get a tremendous amount of really professional work out of them.

The other division, the next division we have is building code enforcement.

And the three folks here that are the team that we have for building code work are absolutely incredible, I think.

I've worked in several communities, and if you've got a building official and inspectors that have a tremendous amount of integrity and work hard, you're way ahead of the game.

And I build an official I would put up against anybody that I've ever worked with.

Tom is amazing.

And in an old community,

Buildings as old as this, the ability to work with the community and get things done.

We put together these, we put them together just to show you all the inspections that they do.

Just as you take one building, simple building permit, they have a footing inspection.

They have a framing inspection that they have to do.

Mechanical rough-in, plumbing rough-in, electrical rough-in,

Electrical Service Inspection, Water and Sewer Lateral Inspections, Insulation, and then the Exterior and Final Inspections.

Unlike a lot of communities, all three of our folks are cross-trained and do all inspections, so we're able to get a lot more done bang for the buck than otherwise we might.

Ten years ago, this is what we were inspecting pretty much.

It was a typical single family house that would be permitted and that's what we were, the vast majority of the work that we were seeing.

That began to change and while this is a single family house, even the complexity of the single family houses

has changed.

This is one of the energy efficient lung houses that's been built in Belmont.

And just the complexity of the systems is so much different than the past.

And then we started seeing buildings that were multi-story, much more commercial, and much more complex inspections.

We've got building permits are in the process for two nine-story buildings with a third, we think, in the next 30 days.

Those will be the first that we've done for nine-story buildings.

That's going to be a lot of a different animal for our guys.

This is just a slide we've increased in the last few years.

This is data from 2006.

We did 135 million dollars worth of permit value in the year 2000.

It was right at 35 million.

Our inspections have gone up by almost 3,000 inspections.

Our permit numbers are staying about the same, but the complexity again of the inspections

are what are really up.

And then the final division we have are property maintenance and code enforcement.

We have four folks who work in there and I say four, it's really three and a half.

Patricia Carrington on the bottom right there also spends half her time on the front desk helping out on the busiest days for permits and inspections.

Corey Jordan at the bottom is our UVA inspector.

If you recall, UVA came to us complaining about property maintenance adjacent to the university.

We went back and said, we'll be glad to hire somebody if you pay for them.

And Corey has just been renewed last year for another five years, that contract with UVA.

So that's been quite successful.

Again, these folks are divided up into areas that they're responsible for.

and then they have a lot of responsibilities, vegetation, trash, vehicles, graffiti, the property maintenance code, housing code enforcement, vacant properties, spot light ordinance,

Our inspections here, as you can see, this is just a chart if you look at the blue line shows the number of inspections.

We've gone from right around in 1999, 4,000 to, they were hoping last year to hit 10,000 but with some illness we didn't quite get there, a little over 9,000 property maintenance inspections.

We are proactive in our enforcement.

We don't wait on phone calls.

We go out looking for the violations.

Again, it's a quality of life issue, looking for ways to improve quality of life and making sure the broken window syndrome doesn't occur in Charlottesville.

If you don't get out and see some of the things that we get to see in enforcement, it's amazing what you find in Charlottesville sometimes.

These are trash violations, of course.

and some of these same people would call you and say we're picking on them because they've got a little trash piled up in the backyard.

This is one we have fun with, the sofas outdoors.

Inoperative vehicles are another one.

Vehicles that don't have current tags or inspections on them are not allowed to be out from under cover.

Overgrown vegetation,

vegetation hanging over the sidewalks.

You may recall that just a couple years ago, council decided that property owners were responsible for the maintenance between the sidewalk and the curb, and we get a lot of calls about violations where people have not picked up on that and are not maintaining.

Graffiti is one we started dealing with about six years ago.

We don't get any money in return for this, but I think that these folks have had a tremendous impact working with the police department

removal of graffiti throughout the communities, particularly in the downtown.

And then housing code violations, both interior, and we're not able to go into houses without permission or a warrant to check, but we do occasionally get asked in and it's deplorable some of the things that we find that our citizens are living in.

Dangerous electrical,

We had one tragic death in the Prospect area, I believe it was, a couple of years ago with a railing.

Tom Elliott has become one of the leaders in our state and really in the south on writing and dealing with deck railings and we find a lot of unsafe railings and try to get those corrected.

Tom has written about it and has been written up about the work he's done.

But it's a program where every time we get a chance we try to check those because they are so dangerous.

Just examples of a lot of the types of problems that we get.

We started keeping up with vacant housing and having it registered.

We had over 100 when we first started this.

We're down to somewhere

around 50 now where people just board them up and don't want to do anything with them.

At least we can keep up with them and try to keep a handle on what's happening and try to encourage the property owners to improve them.

And then the spotlight ordinance was probably the single biggest thing that we were given four or five years ago to be able to take a house.

In the past, if you had a house that you wanted to board up, as long as it was safe, it could sit there forever and always.

We had one house that had been boarded for 28 years.

and nothing happened to it and we couldn't deal with it and the neighbors complaining.

The spotlight ordinance allows us to declare the spotlight, go through the Planning Commission and we can then have it torn down or we can take it and use it or make another use of it.

We haven't had to come to the Planning Commission and City Council but twice I don't think.

We've written a lot more letters than that and these are just some examples of what's changed when folks were notified that they had a spotlight and we were going to

to be requiring improvements.

I think you can be proud of having been one of the first cities in the Commonwealth to adopt that ordinance and the improvement it's made.

And then we challenge ourselves to continue to look for ways to bring you ordinances to give us more authority to deal with situations

We continue to look for innovative ways to deal with property problems and permitting and all those sorts of things.

Well thank you Mr. Tolbert for the insightful presentation and I thank your staff.

You have many wonderful employees that I've gotten to know so I should be very proud.

Any questions or comments for Mr. Tolbert?

One of the issues that

that I hear about time to time is the issue of too many people living in a house, especially in the university area.

When it's brought to our attention, yes sir, we do, if we can.

The code is that a family or no more than four unrelated

and that's some caveats, but can live together.

We have quite a few, particularly in the university area, of grandfathered properties where there were more than that living we have documented, and they're non-conforming.

As long as they don't have a two-year gap in having those numbers, they can stay that way, but we review them.

We actually, every once in a while, are able to get from the university their list of addresses for where their students live,

run that, take that database and just look for multiple addresses and anytime we find more than four people at the same place we look to compare it.

It just depends on when they're in the sharing mood.

The university is, I'm not sure where it ever comes from, but sometimes we can get it and sometimes we can't.

And I will say, right now we've got a great working relationship with our off-ground housing office through Mr. Jordan's efforts on that program, and I think we've been able to build a lot more working relationship, but it's also very tough.

If you get into April and we find that there

Five students living somewhere to have one evicted at that point is difficult.

Can you just give us an update on where you are in filling two positions that I think we all agree are pretty vital.

One was the assistant traffic engineer positions.

She started today.

Yes, sir.

Wonderful.

The Diamond Branch that I mentioned.

Great, I'm sure Jeannie's very happy.

Yes, Jeannie is thrilled.

We actually, with the departure of, excuse me, of Ms. Kilroy, are actually looking at a combination housing planner CDBG person right now with more responsibilities and getting them more

an experienced person for that one job to do both.

Really kind of sitting back and watching the economy a little bit to see where we go.

We're going to try to structure it that way.

Okay.

Trying to relate that to the budget.

Any vacancy that we have from here on out, we've been extremely aggressive with the department to look at reorganization.

And can they do things to do without that position?

Can they combine it with something else?

Can they do things to save money is the bottom line.

Our goal is that over the next 16 months or however much we have between now and July 1 of 2009 that every vacancy we have we make it an opportunity to try to look at cost savings.

So it's going to slow things down.

I mean, Jim has been through this exercise the last few days of the challenge to, with this vacancy, how can you look at your department?

We're going to require everybody to do that.

Thank you.

I'll pass it along to them.

I've threatened to change their title to Director of First Impressions.

Thank you very much, Mr. Toler.

Thank you all.

you

and David Brown.

Music playing...

D.C.

Mr. Taliaferro?

Exactly, that's exactly right.

We'll do this fairly briefly.

But beginning in May of 2000, the city and the county worked out a 10-year fire services agreement that

was amended in 2003 to include joint dispatching.

The ten years had a three-year termination notice, which is the year that we're in, and about two weeks ago I received a letter that came after a phone call from Bob Tucker, who's the county executive, that the county board had an interest

in extending the contract not only to 2010 but another three years which it provides for.

So in reality that would be an extension of six years from where we are right now.

This is one of those agreements that I think is absolute win-win.

It's good for the city, it's good for the county, and it's good for our residents.

It takes advantage of what is one of the best fire departments in the world.

And I don't say that just because the former chief is sitting here.

It is.

It's internationally accredited, etc.

It's an extremely good fire department.

And it matches that with some needs that Albemarle County has.

And if we're creative about it, we can make this last even longer than the next six years.

So I have a letter that came from Mr. Tucker.

making a request to extend this to 2013.

We had a couple discussions, we did some financial analysis, which our intuition was this is a good deal and the financial analysis says it's a good deal for the city financially.

And I think it helps Albemarle County at a time where

The economy for both of us is struggling and gives us the ability to provide good fire service together and continue what we've been doing for a long time.

But I hope it opens up some opportunities for some other things.

We've looked at this and don't see any downsides to it.

Annually it's about $600,000.

We had a consolidation study that

was done to try to look at how can the city and the county work better together.

On fire service, they put a value on it for Almore County of over $2 million.

If they had to fund fully out of their own budget or with their staff or whatever, it had that much value.

It's a good deal for them too.

I sent Mr. Tucker a letter on February 25th which he's passed on to their board expressing an interest and extending the agreement and that we would put the resolution in front of city council tonight.

Our hope is that if you would approve that the county board would take it up fairly quickly and we might have a formal agreement.

So I'll stop there, see what questions you might have.

But this has worked well.

We've been at it for seven years.

And I think this is one of those things that probably, with all the challenges that I talked about earlier, this is a great opportunity to do something together.

And by the way, Chief Warner, does he have a stress factor?

He's like hobbling around and they tell him not to come tonight.

It would have been here.

Any questions?

So it's been moved and seconded.

I did have one question.

The agreement required a three-year notice.

We've been planning for I guess the last two years for that possibility that it might expire and we've been showing the money in the budget but we've been dedicating it to one time

capital kind of expenses that relate to the fire department, in particular to help and pay for some fire equipment, engines and ladder trucks that we've had to replace so that the city budget doesn't have to pay for it, this money pays for it.

So, on the one hand you're right and the other hand we sort of anticipated it coming.

The fire station we have phased in the capital budget over three years and it will be funded by bonds which are 20 year bonds so I probably, I mean I'm talking out loud here, I probably would say initially

Well, the other side of it is we've got debt and lease purchase kinds of things on fire equipment that's already underway.

Okay.

The resolution has been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion, not indicate your vote?

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Connell and thank you, Mr. Webb.

We give our best to Chief Warner.

I wanted to have more discussion about the noise ordinance.

I wanted to hear more from the other counselors about what their thoughts were regarding the contract we have with the pavilion, understanding that the pavilion has kind of occasional scheduled events and that the pavilion is a very important partner in the city.

But I know there are other businesses that are feeling that that feeling is treated equitably.

And I want our smaller businesses and restaurants to feel as if they're also important partners in the city.

And when I thought about

Yeah, I think it might be helpful if the city manager could maybe elaborate a little bit about the two different noise levels and why that exists.

and I guess the other issue is with the noise level on the mall itself with some of the places that have outside dining areas and one of the things that I've heard from some restaurant owners is that they get a lot of complaints from people that are eating outside in the summer months because of the loud music.

They say that non-amplified music is not a big problem, but then when they get the drums and all those sorts of things.

So there's really several issues with it, I guess, really.

We sent you some information that the city attorney prepared, and I'll start this, but you're welcome to jump in, Mr. Brown.

He outlined, I think, three areas, and I think is a good place to have a discussion.

One is, even though the pavilion agreement, which we can spend a lot of time talking about how we got to that, has many decibels in it, we monitor every one of the pavilion events

with a noise meter.

I wish I'd brought the chart tonight and I just absolutely forgot it, but there were under 70 decibels for every concert last year.

We monitor it not only to record that level, but we monitor it to make sure that if it starts getting too loud, which 70 seems to be about the point, to talk to their management to get them to crank it down.

And I think we were pretty successful.

We also saw a trend in the chart that the first one or two concerts last year were a little bit higher than that.

They were like at 71 or 72, and by them working with the different bands, and part of it has to do with Scott and Lou Combs to get that down more like 67.

The operator, it's a city.

facility leased that is paid for by the operator spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on sound baffling so on and so forth it was as much to keep the sound inside of there as possible and a lot of other things plus the completion of the transit center our sense was that we were much more successful last year

I checked with the police department with the economic development office.

I was a little disappointed to hear that some people had concerns because we didn't hear that at all last year, but we're going to follow up on it.

So that's one issue.

May I ask a question on the first one?

Okay.

Is it ten years?

That's something like that.

Other questions about that?

And there could be ways that you try to match the times.

I think that's another issue that people have.

The other is performers on the mall.

And I think Jim can tell you, you jump up here if I'm not covering this, we get more complaints about that than anything.

And it's exactly, you know, the amplified music and people sitting right next to somebody that's trying to enter outdoors.

It affects a few of the residents downtown, but I think it's more of people coming in and trying to enjoy the mall.

And a small box that's like this that's sitting right next to you is pretty loud.

So our sense was, and this actually got started for two reasons.

That was one, and the second one was the police were looking for another tool that when they got complaints out in the community that

They could use this noise meter to try to deal with things.

It got brought up at the last meeting.

I don't know what a couple discussions I've had with different counselors about, well, didn't all these issues get resolved?

And we gave you the list that was in the package the last time.

They all got resolved by working with the merchants and whatever.

What didn't happen that we didn't talk about is they didn't get resolved that night.

They might drag on for a couple nights or a couple weeks.

So we saw this as one more tool.

You can take each piece of this and do it or not do it.

We're just telling you these are areas where we had concerns and we were trying to be proactive about a solution that would work and we secondly wanted to do it without, and we're not bringing you this because there are complaints that are going on.

I had a question on amplified music.

Most of them are like battery powered or something.

And some of them are drums.

They get four or five drums that are going like crazy.

So the rules on restaurants and small performing venues I assume would fall into that category.

The ones that experienced downtown, which had been in effect for a couple years, is that right?

Six or seven years, yes.

Six or seven years, that would apply to Miller's, Gravity Lounge, places like that.

Were there complaints from the owners of those businesses about that this was

No sir, actually we've had some of those owners come in because they have restaurants and be in favor of this, just like Mr.

But I understand he was also in favor of this because it was regulating the outdoor musicians.

Right, that's what I'm saying.

I'm trying to talk through the issues of trying to anticipate whether what we're imposing city-wide

As one who has a little bit of experience in going to some of those places, as you know, I think that the general rule is if the doors are shut, nobody's had a problem.

Even the, you know, and I live right across, I mean, 60 feet from Miller's.

And if Miller's kept their door closed, there was never a problem.

And we, I don't think the police have really had any serious complaints on the mall in the last two or three years.

because everybody has learned to adhere to that.

I think the same thing in these other venues.

The only thing that you might want to do that was discussed as a fairness is that where those areas, not in the mall, but the other restaurants, has changed that to 11 o'clock.

I don't think it matters.

I think as long as there's some control there, if that's a fairness issue, I think it would be very easy to amend it to change those to 11.

But I don't see it hurting them.

If they play by the rules, I don't think this is going

have a negative impact.

And generally, is the experience on the downtown mall that enforcement was complaint driven?

Yes, sir, absolutely.

So it's not something that we would go around to inspect to see whether they were following rules.

Right, and in talking to Chief Longo and Lieutenant Pleasance and the mall officers and other officers,

Their intent would be to have the meter and tell people, you're violating the ordinance, will you please turn it down?

And stand there until they turned it down and they'd say, okay, that's good.

And then if they didn't comply, then they've got a tool to be able to use it.

But they don't want to arrest somebody for, or ticket them for this.

I just was going to add that the moral officer stopped me in the hallway last week and

I was surprised at this but he said this is a great tool for me because I go up to people and they ignore it because they know I don't have the enforcement ability.

This would give them the ability in a conversation to get it toned down.

Let me just add, since last meeting I have gotten at least three calls from people saying this is a good tool for neighborhoods also.

So I think

Yeah, I guess my preference would be to change them all to 11.

And I don't know, would that cause a major issue?

Would that work?

Right, because then we don't get it to street musicians.

Section 16-11 on page 6 of the ordinance.

That's the provision that is new that imposes a decibel level of 75

If that was changed to 11, then it would make it an even deal with the pavilion.

Isn't that what it does, reading this, Mr. Brown?

I don't see where reading this that it says the downtown business district, I mean, where would the rest, do the restaurants fall under the downtown section or under the restaurant sections?

Well, it could be both.

I mean, under section 16-10, that's any noise generated in the downtown business district.

regardless of the source, regardless of whether it's from a restaurant, from a street performer, or some other business.

And that's the 75 decibels any day, any time.

Outside of the downtown business district, it applies to restaurants, but only between the hours, as proposed, between 10 and 6.

It will be more consistent as Julian is mentioning if we change to 11th.

No, I mean I talk to the police and they don't have a problem with it either.

But then you have a different standard for the downtown restaurants than you do for restaurants.

I mean again it's all day pretty much.

And so is there a way to craft it?

Well, they're not concerned about it, I don't think.

I've not had a warning.

I think the difference is the restaurants on the downtown mall

are vitally interested in regulating the amplified outdoor noise and therefore are willing to accept a little more restricted time.

Would that be a way of putting it?

You might also see this as putting the downtown performing venues at a disadvantage.

We haven't had issues.

I struggled with this and putting it together.

I think that's absolutely true.

And I'd be the first to come back to you.

If we see we've got a problem with downtown, we'll come back and say, we were wrong, let's fix it.

I'll second that.

and I think as you pointed out, Dr. Brown, if it doesn't work, we can go back and halt it.

There would need to be a vote on Dr. Brown's proposed amendment.

It's been motion to amend section 1611 to change to 11 o'clock and it's been seconded.

Any further discussion, please indicate your vote.

It's been moved and seconded on first reading so now you can just have a vote.

Please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

We now will open it up again to matters by the public.

Is there anybody from the public who would like to come and speak?

It did not help, okay.

You told me not to have the music that too loud and

I think I only had two complaints that I addressed at that time.

The only thing I'm worried about is whether or not the DB reader will be enforced when the doors are closed and if whether or not the music goes above 75 when the doors are closed.

From what I understand, it was 30 feet away from the building and if they sit there with the meter and read more than 75, what's going to happen there?

The doors are closed.

Okay.

Yeah, what, I mean, I hope in terms of

Your concerns you described of there being a flourishing music scene and not having undue burdens on that.

I hope if you feel like there's a way we can improve this and that you'll come to it.

I will.

I definitely will.

Just so you know, a lot of the music that I put on, it starts at 10.30 and ends at around 1.30.

So if changing it at 11 o'clock might, in fact, I might slip into that ordinance and mess it up.

But if that's the case, I'll go to the owners and I'll ask them, do you want to continue to do music if the police have come by regularly and have asked us to shut it down?

I know that one of the places that I promote for Mona Loco is worried because they have their music strictly on the patio.

So with them,

you know I might just have to pull the plug on that place because it might just be a little too loud being that it's outside it's after 10 30 and it's on the downtown mall but places like Miller's and I'll be working with Orbit soon too and I'm wondering about that Outback Lodge I don't know if they're too worried about it since they're kind of outside of a residential area

We'll now move on with other business.

I had two issues that I would like to address, one of which had to do in terms of process on the next phase of our Eastern Connector study.

and I've asked Mr. Colbert if you would just give us a brief update on where we are.

What am I putting you on the spot here?

A brief update.

Well, I'm thinking I'm not sure when the next steering committee is.

I had my pack and I didn't pick it up and bring it.

There will be another steering committee meeting.

I think that the dilemma that came up and the concern of the city staff that are on the committee is that the consultant, for whatever reason, last week submitted a report and showed some alternatives that he suggested be a part of the report and be studied.

If you remember, the Eastern Connector objectives were to find a way to move traffic from 29 North and Pantops back and forth primarily to each other without going through the center of Charlottesville.

The alternatives that the consultant recommended were A to widen the free bridge, B to widen 250 to hydraulic, C to build the bridge that's been talked about that we thought we had killed from Rose's area over to High Street,

and Dee to build a bridge to tie into River Road at Smith, each of which does nothing but carry traffic through the city of Charlottesville.

We were concerned that those just completely ignored and took the focus off of what the real study was supposed to look at, and while they might be something that we might want to look at, I can't imagine why, but that we might want to look at in the future for,

Traffic improvements that they were not, you know, should not have been the scope of the Eastern Connector.

And we felt like it would be important that it was important to bring to your attention and that Council voice that and get the thing back on track and focus.

You know, there may not be an alternative that accomplishes what the goal of the Eastern Connector is, a feasible alternative.

And so we need to know that.

We're bringing this to your attention so that you know if you... That's why I sit in front of you.

So the question really is A, do we send them back to the drawing board and say we need you to look, re-examine the alignments that actually fulfill the goals of the study.

B is we accept the recommendations and move on.

Or C, we

I mean, C is we say the Eastern Connector is no longer a viable traffic project and we move on to other projects.

So, and maybe there's a D and an E and F, I don't know, but I'd like to hear how, we put together a letter that basically is an option A, which basically says go back to the drawing board.

We're about to send it out and I sort of had second thoughts about it because I have sort of developed my own opinion about the Eastern Connector as a viable transportation investment, but I wanted to get Council's feedback on where Council would like to proceed.

Well, I think we need to state the fact that

We don't want another road coming through the city.

I think that defeats the whole purpose of building connector roads.

And we have enough issues now with traffic coming through the city, not only in that area of the city, other areas of the city.

And I think we need to take another look at this.

I guess I kind of wonder how this all transpired and how it happened and how it got changed.

Kesha, I think that honestly the consultant has run up against the same law that most people have.

I think our traffic engineer would tell you that if you look at the numbers, the Eastern Connector probably is, could have a place as the most important road that could be built to relieve traffic in Charlottesville, but there's nowhere to put it.

And it just is not a, you know, the county has allowed development to occur over the last 20, 25 years essentially in every feasible place

that we put it in, it's without condemning a lot of houses, which is not going to happen.

I think they just, they run into, we know there's a problem.

There's not a place to put the Eastern Connector.

That's not very good for us.

I think the mayor's comments on

If there isn't a feasible alignment, that's the information that should come back, not to find some other solution.

I thought the initial indications were that there were some alignments that had some feasibility, and I'd like to see what happened to that.

I thought the preliminary reports did appear that there were

a couple tracks you know to you know connect in the profit road or connect in you know that there were some that seemed not unreasonable I'd like to have some you know flushing out of that information so I personally like to see us send this letter saying you know pointing out that this is not where the report was to go but but to get it as objective as

and the answer is to what is the feasibility.

I think the real lack of feasibility comes from the fact that

Two years ago, we felt like the chances of finding the money to do this didn't look great.

Well, now the chances of finding money look much worse than they did two years ago just because the state continues to be unwilling to do anything to fund transportation.

In fact, the articles recently in the paper indicate that the state is really looking for localities to come up with money.

Well, this would be a big-ticket item

And it's going to add itself to a long list of big ticket items.

I think that's the more problematic issue.

I guess I'm also wondering if this isn't going to happen.

This is saying when one door closes, a window opens someplace else.

If there's a window of opportunity to start looking at and thinking about alternative forms of transportation and really being creative about getting people out of their cars and really being radical about how that can be different and thinking about

I couldn't agree more with the comments just expressed by Ms. Edwards.

My strong feeling is that the next major transportation investment in our region should not be another huge swath of very expensive asphalt that we're not going to have the money to build anyway, and there's no political will to build anyway.

And let's use this as an opportunity to leverage the kind of investment that Ms. Edwards just described, which is figuring out how to get more people off the roads.

and so I wouldn't want to see us waste a whole, sorry, use a whole lot more of our resources figuring out how to plan a road that's never going to be built but if we do have an opportunity, my personal opinion, if we do have an opportunity here to leverage additional support for alternative transportation, that's the direction I'd like to see us head in

Just one more comment that in the next few years the traffic, East West traffic is going to be more than double and it's going through the city of Charlottesville not through, it's mostly county traffic and I think

If you don't do anything, you may be right that there may not be money to do anything physical.

All right.

Thank you.

Can I address one thing?

Please, go ahead.

I've been reluctant to do this, and unfortunately I have coffee with Kevin Munstey, and I've not talked to Joe and Betty Mooney, but I just want to put a perspective to the airport, and I, luckily or unluckily, sit on both boards.

I'm on Rivanna and the airport authority, I think as Bob Tucker and I have that honor.

The discussion at the airport is about, and the newspaper article which did not address this, I thought the reporter left out an important segment, was the strategic long-term plan that if the airport is looking to the future, it's got to extend the runway.

And we're talking about 20 or 25 years.

There is no money in the next five years to do that.

So just to put a perspective to it, it is a great idea.

Our board has talked with our director to talk to Rivanna to look at how, you know, what are the issues of trying to use the sediment out of the reservoir, etc., etc., but we're talking about something this long term, if it's possible, and if it gets funded, which is a whole other

We've been talking about transportation funding cuts.

One of the things that happens is airports getting that mixed too.

But I think just to put a perspective to it, you've got that that I and Judy Neal and I have talked about, I mean, and talked with Tom, and I think there needs to be a discussion about how do we address the settlement in the reservoir, but I don't think all the work that's been done says it is a relief

to not move forward on the Ragon Mountain project.

But I think it's important you not mix the two together.

You know, I would say the airport is just that.

I guess one of the things that

What concerns me a little about it is, and it's been mentioned by numerous people, is we got people to look at it that build dams, not people that do dredging, I think is the way it was put by several individuals in it.

I don't disagree with that except this side of it.

I was on the board when we were in the last drought and we actively went out and talked to operators that make their living coming in and dredging reservoirs all over the country.

It's when, before Tom Frederick was here.

And not only was it extremely expensive, this is when everybody in the community was saying, it's dry, you can put equipment in there and you can easily go in and dredge if you remember that environment.

But one of the big issues was the permitting process.

We spent nine months trying to get a permit from the Army Corps of Engineers to be able to do that.

And by the time that we were starting to have discussions with them, the reservoir started filling back up, so it made it not as feasible.

But that whole permitting process, we've been seven years trying to get a permit to do something.

And you just have to keep that perspective there.

Is it 14, David and Kevin?

If I can just clarify, my goal in bringing this up under other business wasn't necessarily to reopen the discussion here tonight about how to proceed in terms of the plan.

I'm really more interested, from a process standpoint, as Mr. Lynch said, when we adopted

the plan unanimously.

We've now gotten the permit.

We're moving forward on the plan.

We're not talking about revisiting the plan, but an essential component of the plan was how do we phase it in?

What's the next steps?

How do we implement the plan?

And I think we really owe it to the citizens and the taxpayers and the utility payers to get some more of the information out there and to address it and talk about the alternatives, but I'm not interested in

We've got our permit.

We're moving forward now.

And so I'd just like to see if there's interest on part of council to have.

In May we're going to be asked to approve the utility budget which includes a substantial amount of funding for this plan.

And I think in advance of that we owe it to ourselves and owe it to the taxpayers.

to get some more information on the table about what the alternatives are in terms of phasing in the plan, and perhaps just as important, the cost allocation strategy and how it's going to impact utility bills, and not just in the next two and three years, but in the next 10 and 20 years.

So again, just to clarify, I'm not talking about reopening the discussion about whether this is a good plan.

We're doing what we said we were going to do,

We were ready to come tonight to start a discussion.

The next meeting is our plan to, since this is a negotiation, to initially present it to you in closed session and then have public discussions out of that in terms of the cost allocation.

I think a work session is great.

I don't think my comments earlier

because I think there's a lot of information out there that needs to be discussed and shared.

And the sooner the better, probably.

I think with the budget coming, it's going to be hard to get a date, but we probably ought to work on it now.

Yeah.

That's what I wanted to know.

If we could have a work session, I wanted to make sure we had a product to discuss being what the status of those are.

I think the missing ingredient in all the discussions about dredging the reservoir has been representation from either citizens or officials from Albemarle County, because I think that it may be city-owned property, but it's in the middle of Albemarle County.

Dredging in any form, whether it's by involving a pipe or involving trucks is going to dramatically affect, I would think, citizens of Albemarle County who live near the reservoir and I would like to encourage

the discussion to broaden beyond city council chambers and city residents to involve members of Albemarle County in, you know, is there a role for dredging to add to the water supply or to

or to just maintain the health or recreational health of the reservoir.

Just to follow up on Dr. Brown's comments, this is a city and county water plan, not just a city plan.

It's just, I mean, but here it gets more complicated.

It's actually the service authority that's late payers.

The county board actually has no decision from here on in unless it's a land use kind of thing in terms of the plan, but you've got the city of Charlottesville City Council, the county board from a policy perspective, the Almore County Service Authority, and the Rivanna Water and Service.

If you really want to have the discussion to get everybody in the room, that makes it complicated and difficult, but

I think we should just have our own work session, get clear on what the issues and impacts are on city residents and then figure out how to discuss this jointly.

Okay, so we'll move forward with having our own work session, and I'll work with the city manager on putting together the agenda.

Sure.

The other issue, if we have time, I'd like for you to, and you can think about this, entertain talking about sewer, in terms of the big system stuff, just for a quick discussion, because it has more financial impact than water.

I don't think, I'm not, I think for the purposes of this we'll say.

Why does the two of you work this out?

We will.

I hear you want to focus on water.

I mean we actually didn't talk about sewer as well, but maybe not at the same time.

Now just one.

I'm going to pass out this for a couple reasons.

Krista Ridawal took a lead.

This is a new DML program.

They're trying to challenge people around the state.

I was involved with it to some extent, but we actually, this is called Virginia Go Green.

It's a challenge among localities.

We actually have filled this out and we think we're going to get the highest number of points.

And I give it to you, it's a great framework to look at what we're doing relative to

other communities, it might be something the committee can take a look at.

But if you think it makes sense, we'd like to go ahead and get your permission to formally apply for it.

Do you need a resolution?

No.

To probably do what?

Okay.

What the Virginia Municipal League that represents cities around the state

has been working on a program they're calling Go Green, which is an effort to try to create an interest in local governments being more sustainable.

And they've come up with a couple things that are a challenge that is a point system to look at each community to fill out that has things like government policy adoption, energy efficiency, green buildings, etcetera.

There are about 10 or 15 categories.

There's a series of regional forums that are going to be involved and then there's an actual application and submission to would you qualify for this Go Green Virginia or not.

And then there would be recognitions at the municipal league conferences in October.

So it's a couple steps to it.

Absolutely.

I just want to make one more comment.

Please.

I want to go back to the previous issue.

I'm just not quite sure, maybe you can explain to me after the meeting, but if it is a city and county work system, why are we not talking to them?

It's not actually a county water system, it's owned by the Albemarle County Service Authority.

They're two partners, City of Cody.

Right, and that's who the negotiation would be with.

The debate about the phasing is what are you phasing?

It is a phased approach.

And isn't ultimately, though, the phasing will be decided by the Rivanna board?

Ultimately.

And so that means that there will be input from the county board of supervisors to their representatives, to the Rivanna board, because the five members of the Rivanna board will decide the phasing.

At the direction of the

So partly it's us determining what kind of direction we want to give to our representatives on the books.

Right, right.

Okay, any other business?

Okay.

Retreat things.

Dr. Brown?

I think I voted for November.

Meeting is adjourned.

talked about in the same way that diabetes is talked about.

Okay, I said I wasn't going to pontificate, and then I pontificate.

What I'm going to do is read the introduction.

Hopefully, that may be it.

Maybe we'll have questions.

If not, I'll read another section of the book, okay?

Introduction.

One of life's perplexing challenges is that most of us have an awfully hard time not doing all kinds of stupid things we know will make us unhappy.

We eat too much.

We lose our temper too often.

We're addicted to all sorts of stimulating stuff.

We tell too many fibs.

In my days as a poster child for screw-ups, I binged on alcohol, took too many pills, and had a samurai sword for a tongue when I got angry.

And I lied to myself a lot.

Of course, we've tried to stop doing whatever it is that makes us feel bad.

We've sworn to change our ways, and maybe we did for a while.

Yet the urge to screw up always comes back, as though we human beings are compelled to chip away at our peace of mind with some kind of self-destructive behavior.

There are already plenty of books dealing with how to stop smoking, overeating, shopping like there's no tomorrow with whatever the specific screwy habit is that plagues you.

This book is emphatically not one of those.

Instead, this book is about dealing with the screwy urge behind the habit.

It lays out a practical application of classic recovery principles, making them accessible to anybody who's doing something they'd like to stop.

In case you can't tell, I talk with my hands, so you'll just have to put up with that.

Defining the problem.

I define self-destructive behavior as any habit that leeches the joy out of life.

We don't begin life with any such habits.

Remember all those long, pleasant childhood days?

For a lot of us they were comparatively uncomplicated and happy.

Life was about playing, eating, sleeping and hugging.

The hardest thing we faced on an interpersonal level was sharing our toys.

We somehow just got the business of living.

However, when adolescence reared its confusing head, we began to notice our families weren't perfect and the world was a complicated place that didn't revolve around our specific needs.

No wonder that by the time we grew up, we had emotional baggage.

I remember one of the first times I realized I lost the magic straightforwardness of childhood.

My first job was as a teacher's aide in a pilot head start class that was the prototype for the entire program.

I was Miss Hagee in those days.

Miss Hagee to my students, a couple of dozen African energy elves, most of whom seemed never to have had physical access to a white person before.

They clanged on me like a jungle gym and patted my hair and it was...

I just, I was so happy.

It was there I met Patricia the Great.

Patricia was four years old and all sass.

She's still one of my role models.

It could be noon on a blazing hot Carolina summer day, but Patricia didn't care how hot it was.

She'd hop on one of the few head start tricycles and get down on the playground, her legs pumping up those three wheels round and round while she shouted barefoot and danced her own music from the waist up.

I would watch her from the shade and feel this hunger to be Patricia to once again have an uncomplicated connection between my healthy impulses and a healthy output I didn't want to slog through life feeling quietly desperate I didn't want to have to make a choice between feeling conflicted or not feeling much at all

I was not completely unself-aware, even back then in my untherapized, untherapized, when you make up words you get in trouble when you try to read them, untherapized 19 year old state.

I knew those healthy straightforward impulses were still inside me.

The problem seemed to be that the link between those impulses and my actions had somehow broken down.

I can see now that after a certain age I needed some kind of spiritual connection to maintain the link.

But at 19 I still confused arrogance with independence and believed that if there were a higher power I was she.

I believed I could think my way out of any mess I got into.

By the time I met Patricia the Great, I'd already begun doing things I was uncomfortable with.

I was obsessing about food.

Hello, I'm a woman living in America.

Skipping class and smoking.

In other words, I'd begun developing coping habits that didn't cope with a thing and would become problems themselves over the next couple of decades.

It was one of those coping mechanisms that eventually landed me in a 12-step program.

People in such programs don't lecture or criticize.

Instead, they communicate their experience, strengths and hopes with each other.

They tell their stories in the hopes of helping other people.

In this book I tell the story of how I reconnected with my inner Patricia the Great, how as an adult I rediscovered a child's intuitive ability to connect with something beyond myself that people commonly refer to as God, and thus rediscovered my ability to be straightforward with myself and the world.

You may call it God, I call her Alice.

I should say that in case we read some more.

I reject the notion that being grown up means we are condemned to go through life feeling uncomfortable with ourselves, intending to do the right thing, wanting to do the healthy thing, but instead ending up doing something that's not quite either.

You will want to read this book if you share my hunger to stop acting in ways that bring you discomfort.

compel you to be dishonest or cause outright despair.

In other words, read this book if you'd like to feel more at peace with being who you are in the world as it actually is.

The 12 Steps for the Rest of Us.

The 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous are a proven way for those of us who keep screwing up to develop a healthy thinking and living process.

I came to the 12 steps through an addiction, but you certainly don't have to be an addict to benefit from using them.

In my case, alcohol and drug abuse were simply the two stupid habits, among many other stupid habits, that forced me to work the 12 steps.

Looking back, I'm absolutely positive that giving my tendency to screw up in so many other creative ways, developing those substance abuse problems was the best thing that could have happened to me.

Without a couple of addictions to manage, I would have been too independent, or should I say stubborn, to follow 12 suggestions from anyone about anything.

A 12-step program recognizes substance abuse as not only a physical dependency, but also as a disease of the mind that leads to off-kilter thoughts and emotions.

In my experience, addiction certainly gave an urgency to the situation, but I found that the same quiet consistency of approach works equally well in dealing with any self-destructive thinking that leads to any behavior that's making me feel less than peaceful.