City Council Meeting   8/4/2008

Welcome.

Welcome.

Good afternoon.

My name is Thomas Jackson.

I'm a history professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

and I have the good fortune to be a research scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, which is sponsoring the Virginia Festival for the Book and this panel, Stories of the Civil Rights Struggle.

It's my great pleasure and good fortune to introduce three fine scholars this afternoon.

This session is sponsored generously by the Bank of America.

After we hear some short presentations from our scholars, you'll have the opportunity to ask questions.

We have a microphone because this is being broadcast live on TV 10, so I would ask you to reach for the microphone to ask your question and ask it clearly and succinctly because of the shortness of our time.

I'd also like to

To extend special thanks to Nancy Damon for organizing the Virginia Festival for the Book.

All of these amazing volunteers, but we're here today to celebrate three achievements that, as you see, I've bought them all, and I even have a pink Post-it in Hank Klivenoff's book.

Our first speaker will be Risa El-Golobov, author of The Lost Promise of Civil Rights.

Professor of Law and History at the University of Virginia here.

She holds a BA from Harvard, an MA and PhD from Princeton, and a JD from Yale.

She clerked for federal appeals judge Guido Calabresi and for Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Our second... Can you top that?

Yes.

Our second...

Presenter will be Michael Klarman.

Professor Klarman is the James Monroe Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

His book, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality, published by Oxford University Press in 2004, won the Bancroft Prize in 2005.

For those of you who don't know the Bancroft Prize, that's the best American history book.

in our field for that year.

And currently his most recent title, which he is presenting on today, is entitled Unfinished Business, Racial Equality in American History in the Oxford University Press Series on Inalienable Rights.

Our third presenter will be Hank Klivenoff, co-author of The Race Beat, The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of a Nation.

This book won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for History.

The Goldsmith and other awards, perhaps too numerous to list, he's the managing editor for Enterprise at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

He's a native of Alabama and received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis and his MA in journalism from Northwestern University in Illinois.

He's been a reporter for three newspapers in Mississippi, worked at the Boston Globe, then worked as a reporter, national correspondent, and editor for 20 years at the Philadelphia Inquirer, and we'll go in succession as I've introduced them.

I just want to say in a preparatory way, as a scholar, I admire these books, as a citizen,

Richly learned from them.

And just as a person, I've enjoyed them.

Their literary quality is really very high.

Thank you, Tom.

Thank you all for coming.

That's very, that's, I'm honored.

So my book, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights, I want to, we don't have a lot of time, so I basically want to do one thing today, which is try to give you all a new perspective on Brown versus Board of Education.

So this is one of the most famous cases in

American History and in American Constitutional Law.

And we all know Brown as a victory that ended an era of segregation and began an era of desegregation.

And that is all true.

But what I want to offer you today is thinking about Brown as the end of a different kind of era and the beginning of a different kind of era.

And the end of the era is one of experimentation in civil rights, one in which

thoughts about civil rights, ideas about civil rights, civil rights cases were really up for grabs.

And lawyers and activists and workers thought about civil rights in very different terms than we think about them today.

And these ideas about civil rights, the period that the book really covers for the most part, is between the Depression in the 1930s and Brown in 1954.

And in the book, Brown is the end of this era of experimentation.

Brown puts us on one particular kind of civil rights path.

And from the perspective of this era, as I hope to show you, the path that Brown puts us on is ending one part of the racial problem that we had experienced in the United States before Brown, but not the entire thing.

So in order to appreciate Brown in this way, I think first we have to rethink what Jim Crow meant.

So Jim Crow was ultimately a replacement for slavery.

Slavery ended in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.

and the question that a lot of white southerners asked themselves was what was going to replace slavery.

And slavery was essentially a system that did two things.

It regulated people by race.

The only people who were enslaved, for the most part, there were some exceptions with Native Americans early on, but the only people who were enslaved in this country were African Americans.

So slavery was a racial system.

It racially subordinated people.

And it was an economic system.

The whole point of slavery was to extract labor from African Americans at the cheapest cost that it could.

So when slavery ends, what people want to know is how are we going to protect the white race?

How are we going to keep the white race pure and superior?

And two, where are we going to get labor from?

How are we going to continue to extract labor from African Americans?

And so Jim Crow is not just about separate water fountains and separate schools, it's also about

economic subordination and exploitation.

It's about the fact that in the rural South, African Americans mostly did agricultural work that was in oftentimes desperate poverty, that was often at the point of coercion, that was subject to a lot of violence and personal insecurity.

People couldn't protect the crops that they had grown.

because if the landlord took it away from them, the courts were all peopled by white people.

The juries, they didn't sit on juries, the police officers were white.

They had no recourse to law against economic oppression.

And elsewhere in the country, in cities in the south and across the country, there were other kinds of economic exploitation.

industry was segregated.

There were whole kinds of industries that were off limits to African Americans.

Even where they were open to them, they had what they called the 3H work, hot, heavy, and hard.

They were paid less.

They were segregated within workforces.

And they didn't have the kind of economic opportunities that white people had.

So if Jim Crow is a product of both what governments did to segregate, disenfranchise, and exclude, and also what

private institutions, private employers, private landlords, private individuals did in protecting their economic interests as well as their social spheres then we begin to see Brown differently and in fact during the era before Brown lawyers brought cases that challenged all of these aspects of Jim Crow and in the book I particularly focus on the claims that black workers made

partially because I think those claims were at the heart of this intersection of this racial system and this economic system.

And in part because in the 1940s, in the years leading up to Brown, economic claims of black workers were the most promising ones.

They were the ones in the zeitgeist that were having successes and that people thought were going to have the most successes.

And so I talk in the book about letters that African-American agricultural workers and African-American industrial workers wrote

to

There was a federal governmental entity whose job it was to protect civil rights.

And when it was created in 1939, they didn't actually know what civil rights were.

They didn't actually understand.

They didn't know what their mandate was.

And if they thought it was anything, it was actually protecting the rights of workers, New Deal rights of workers from employers.

But World War II starts and race becomes much more salient.

The Roosevelt administration is worried about black morale in the military and in the economy.

and the civil rights section starts taking cases of African Americans and in particular African American workers.

African American workers are at the heart of the work related claims they thought they were created to handle and the new political imperatives that they faced.

So they take cases under the 13th amendment to protect African American industrial workers from the most desperate poverty, the most desperate violence, people writing letters and saying I'm being kept in a chicken coop, I am tied to an iron bed stand.

I work without wages.

I barely get fed.

And the Department of Justice lawyers say, we can do something about this.

And they bring cases on their behalf.

And these cases suggest that the federal government has a responsibility to offer affirmative protection to these workers.

The idea is not that the government should stay off the backs of various people.

The idea coming out of the New Deal is that the government has certain responsibilities and has to protect people's rights in an active way.

and those are the suggestions that the Department of Justice makes in these cases.

The second group of lawyers that I talk about in the book are the NAACP lawyers.

But unlike the cases that you usually hear about on the road to Brown, the education cases that lead up to Brown, I talk about the NAACP's labor cases.

And in fact, during the 1940s, the NAACP took a lot of cases of workers and they suggested that the NAACP was interested in more than just

the formal legal part of segregation of Jim Crow, the part in which states mandate the separation of the races.

The NAACP was also interested in real economic equality and real material change and progress for working class African Americans and in particular they are relatively successful in challenging union exclusion and segregation of African American workers.

So I talk about all these things in the book, and then the question is, well, how do we get to Brown?

Why is it that Brown looks the way it does?

And by the late 1940s and the early 1950s, the NAACP really turns onto the path that eventuates in Brown.

And that path is one in which education is key.

in which the key issue is ending formal, legal, racial segregation rather than dealing with the economic issues, the material issues, the private enforcement of Jim Crow.

And there are reasons I can talk about in the question and answers if you want for why they made this decision, but I'll just mention one of them.

So on the books is the case Plessy versus Ferguson, which I'm sure most of you have heard of, which is in 1896 and says that segregation is constitutional.

And in Plessy, the court had said that if African Americans feel badly because of segregation, it's their own problem.

They're the ones making themselves feel badly.

There's nothing inherently bad.

There's nothing inherently damaging or stigmatizing about segregation.

And the NAACP really wants to prove that that's not true, that there is something inherently stigmatizing and problematic about segregation.

And the only way to prove that is to separate out all the material inequalities.

If the schools are worse, the black schools are worse than the white schools, there's an obvious harm there.

So in order to prove that even going to the same school with the same books and the same nice bathrooms and the same good teachers, there'd still be a problem if the state segregated whites and blacks.

In order to prove that, they have to cull out all of the material questions.

They have to cull out all of the questions of inequality.

and that's what they do.

So when Brown gets to the court and the court decides Brown, the essence of segregation is that the government has thought about people on the basis of race and the problem is stigma.

The NAACP presents evidence about children, school children playing with dolls, black school children playing with dolls and when they're asked questions about these dolls,

and they identify themselves with the black dolls, but they say the white dolls are better and the white dolls are smarter.

And this is evidence of the psychological damage done to African American children by state mandated segregation.

So the iconic image that we get of Jim Crow after Brown is that education is at the center of it and that psychological damage is the key component of it because government thinks about people on the basis of race.

And if that's the case, then material inequality is not as important.

Labor is not as important.

and in fact these things fall off of the table and we start to conceive of civil rights as being the harm of government thinking about people in terms of race.

This is a negative right.

So we then have the right after Brown to have the government not to think about us in racial terms whereas the claims that had been made before Brown was to have the government actually provide us with stuff to increase our equality, to increase our material well-being and you can see

You can see in the way lawyers treat civil rights in case books and in treatises after Brown that ideas about civil rights go from being capacious and including lots of different conceptions, especially these economic conceptions, to really being about the harm of government thinking about race.

And the story doesn't end after Brown.

That's not, it's not that the path is set and you can never deviate from it.

But after that, our imaginations are set.

And what do people want to do when you have a victory?

You want to build on the victory.

And so people do.

And as a result, everybody today, I think, has to struggle against the idea that rights are to the government not thinking about race.

Rights are against the government rather than to the government providing us

with rights.

And as a result, I think that we think we fixed Jim Crow because Jim Crow was this psychological problem of state mandated segregation.

But from the point of view of the workers in the 1940s, Jim Crow was about poverty, it was about violence, it was about personal insecurity and vulnerabilities and we never fixed those problems.

And so when I look around today and I see continuing racial inequality that corresponds to economic inequality,

I don't think that's happenstance for coincidence.

I actually think it's because we only ever dealt with part of Jim Crow.

Thank you, Michael Klarman.

It's a privilege to be on a panel with the author of two such wonderful books.

I've read them both and they really are terrific.

It's also a privilege to be with you here today to celebrate the beginning of another baseball season.

And I was going to talk to you about the book that I wanted to write, which would have been entitled something like Manny being Manny, the saga of a really talented but goofy baseball player.

But it's hard for me to talk about that book because I didn't write it, so I'm going to talk to you a bit instead about Unfinished Business, which I think is probably not as interesting as the baseball book, but at least it's been written, so I have something very concrete to talk about.

The main selling point of the book, I think, is that it was published in October 2007.

which is the same month you may recall that the Red Sox won the World Championship and consummated their baseball dynasty.

More importantly, the same month that the New York Yankees did not win the World Series for yet another year.

So we've been given 10 minutes to talk and I've already squandered a minute or two with my baseball obsession, so I'm going to be pretty quick on the other points.

What I want to do is give you maybe seven discrete points about the history of American race relations and why they changed

over time and then I'll offer just a quick illustration of each and during the question and answer if you want to ask for more illustrations if you're interested in that I'd be happy to talk about that.

If you're not interested in that we can talk about why Manny is such a goofball although I really don't have a very good answer for that.

All right, point number one, racial progress in American history has not been inevitable or ineluctable.

It's something that takes place in fits and starts, and there are actually periods of regression as much as there are periods of progress.

I think there's a conventional narrative that people subscribe to that suggests we have a sort of inevitable march forward toward greater racial equality.

There are lots of times in American history when the story has been one of regression.

I'll just pick the most obvious example.

During Reconstruction, say in 1870, African Americans in the South could vote and turned out at extraordinary rates to vote.

Blacks sat on juries.

Hundreds if not thousands of blacks held office, elective office in the South.

Southern states passed laws.

forbidding race discrimination and public accommodations.

30 years later, African-Americans in the South were almost universally disenfranchised.

You could no longer find blacks serving on juries.

You could no longer find black elected officials.

The number of blacks being annually lynched in the United States was reported to be as high as 100, maybe even higher, during the last years of the 19th century.

So this is a clear instance in which blacks were worse off in 1900

than they had been in 1870.

Second point, actually the second and third points, racial progress has not been primarily a function of white people, quote unquote, doing the right thing.

But rather, point number two, African Americans have had to struggle to fight militantly for all the racial progress that's been made.

And then the third point,

Racial conditions have had to be ripe or opportune in order for progress to be made.

It's not sufficient for African Americans to fight for their rights, but there have to be a set of external conditions that are receptive to racial change.

So as an illustration of the second point I just mentioned,

the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and specifically the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

The 1964 Civil Rights Act was proposed by the Kennedy administration in direct response to the Birmingham Street demonstrations.

It was the police dogs and the fire hoses of Birmingham

that enabled the administration to push through the civil rights bill.

President Kennedy did not have a very appealing record on civil rights before 1963.

President Kennedy did not go on national television to describe civil rights as an issue as old as the scriptures and as clear as the Constitution until after the Birmingham demonstration, until after civil rights militancy by African Americans had put the issue on the map.

As I said, the third point has to do with conditions being right for racial progress.

It's not enough that blacks have demanded their rights.

Conditions have also had to be opportune.

There are a lot of deep-seated political, social, economic forces that have been conducive to racial progress.

I'll just mention one.

which in some ways I think was among the more important.

Historians call this the Great Migration.

It's the movement of five million African Americans from the rural south to the urban north beginning with World War I.

This had important political, economic, and social consequences.

Again, just to be very brief, African Americans were moving from a part of the country where they're almost universally disenfranchised to urban northern industrial centers where not only could they vote but they often were

a block of voters who were competed over by the Democratic and Republican parties.

You can see African Americans starting to exercise significant political clout locally in the 19-teens at the national level, certainly by the 1930s, even more by the 1940s, when Harry Truman in the summer of 1948

issues his famous executive orders desegregating the military, desegregating the federal civil service.

He is, to a significant degree, appealing to black voters in 1948 who hold the fate of the 1948 presidential election in their hands.

In addition, in the North, blacks get access to better education.

Blacks have access to better jobs.

It's possible to develop a black middle class, which has the assets, the leisure time, the education.

to participate in social reform protests.

The North has looser racial mores.

It's possible to set up militant black newspapers like the Chicago Defender.

It's possible to establish branches of a militant black protest organization like the NAACP.

At this point in American history, it would have been impossible in most of the South to have a black newspaper or a militant protest organization like the NAACP.

the environment was simply too rife with violence for this to have taken place in the South.

Fourth point, racial progress is often an unintended consequence of actions that were undertaken for different reasons.

The Civil War is actually a pretty powerful example of this.

As many of you are aware, the North did not initially fight the Civil War to end slavery.

In the summer of 1861, several months into the war,

Congress passed resolutions which defined the objective of the war.

The objective was to preserve the Union, not to end slavery.

It's only because the war wasn't going well and because President Lincoln decided that he needed to try to undermine the South's labor force and perhaps enroll former African-American slaves in the Union military that the objective of the war shifted to include

liberation of African Americans from slavery.

The abolition of slavery, the granting of certain civil and political rights in the 14th and 15th Amendments to African Americans, those were very much unintended consequences of a war that was undertaken for different reasons.

Fifth and relatedly, whites have often had ulterior motives for the racially progressive positions that they have undertaken.

For example, when the Republican Party enfranchised African Americans with the 15th Amendment in 1870, they did so at least as much because they expected, quite rightly, that African Americans would vote for the party of emancipation.

and not for the party of open white supremacy, which the Democratic Party was at the time.

That is, they were not enfranchising blacks predominantly because it was the right thing to do.

They were doing it in large part, not entirely, because they expected to profit from the votes of African Americans.

The last two points I want to make both have to do with the Supreme Court.

I'm a law professor.

Sometimes I don't like to admit it.

I'd prefer to be a historian in another lifetime.

Maybe that's what I'd come back as.

But I get paid by the law school.

I'm a law professor.

So these points have to do with the United States Supreme Court and its role in

racial change over time.

The first point has to do with the fact that the court has not reliably or even more often than not been on the right side of racial change.

That is, the court has been a force for regression at least as much as it has been a force for progress.

And then the last point is whether the court's been on the progressive side or the regressive side, by and large, the court has been reflecting public opinion.

One of the points of the book is the court tends to reflect public opinion more than it actually shapes or influences it.

So point number six, historically the Supreme Court, at least as often as not, has been on the regressive side of racial change.

Before the Civil War, the Supreme Court reliably sided with the interests of slave owners.

In 1842, the court not only upheld the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act, but it also invalidated the laws of northern states

which tried to protect free blacks from kidnapping.

In 1857, in the famous Dred Scott decision, the court said it was unconstitutional for Congress to try to eliminate slavery from federal territories.

And the court also ruled that even free blacks had no rights that white people were bound to respect.

After the Civil War, the court in several prominent cases reversed the convictions of whites who had been convicted of engaging in racial massacres against blacks.

The court also invalidated federal civil rights legislation in 1883.

In a number of cases late in the 19th, early in the 20th century, the court on several occasions upheld racial segregation, upheld various southern state measures for disenfranchising blacks.

In the four decades since the end of the Warren Court, the court more often than not has invalidated affirmative action measures as well as efforts by states to try to promote

African American and Latino representation in legislatures.

Just last summer, the Roberts Court said it was unconstitutional for local school districts to voluntarily use race in an effort to promote racial integration in public schools.

That was, I think, most constitutional historians would agree, an extraordinary perversion of the original understanding of the 14th Amendment by Supreme Court justices who purport to be committed

to an originalist methodology of constitutional interpretation.

The last point if the moderator will give me another minute.

All of these rulings that I've mentioned have generally been supported by public opinion including the rulings that I haven't dwelled on which is the half century from World War I

through the end of the Warren Court when the court more often than not was on the side of progressive racial change.

All the rulings, progressive and regressive, have by and large been in line with what mainstream opinion believed at the time.

Most people don't realize it when the Supreme Court decided Brown versus Board of Education in 1954.

Public opinion polls taken that summer showed that a narrow majority of the country agreed with the Supreme Court's decision.

When the court struck down the white primary during World War II, that was the preferred method of excluding blacks from voting, not allowing them to vote in Democratic Party primaries, which were the only elections that mattered at that point in the South.

When the Supreme Court decided that case, opinion polls showed roughly 70% of the country agreed with the idea of federal intervention to protect the voting rights of Southern African Americans.

Now it's also true that the court's less attractive decisions, cases like Plessy v. Ferguson and Dred Scott, also largely reflected opinion.

I think I'll just mention Dred Scott.

When the court in 1857 said that African Americans had no rights that white people were bound to respect, that's basically a quotation.

I'm not making that up.

That's what the court said.

In 1857, African Americans could vote in only five states in the Union.

Those were five states in New England, which together had 6% of the North's black population and the North had 10% of the country's black population.

In other words, blacks could vote only in those states where there were very, very few blacks living.

Several Northwestern states barred blacks from even migrating into their states.

Blacks were widely excluded from testifying in cases that involved white litigants.

When the Supreme Court said blacks have no rights that whites are bound to respect, it was largely reflecting opinion in the country.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Anyone who can cram all that history into 219 pages is an historian.

I am not a historian.

Au contraire.

And my candle power dims compared to Risa and Michael, and I'm glad to be with you today, and Tom as well, who's been very modest about his own work.

Some of you will hear a little bit of what you heard in a prior session, but I will diverge somewhat for your benefit.

What I found to be, when I first got involved in writing this book, my co-author had been working on it for three years.

He had covered the civil rights movement in the South for the New York Times and before then in North Carolina for the Raleigh paper.

He had written for the Virginian pilot for a while.

and he'd written for his own newspaper where he grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina.

And Gene was a terrific reporter.

He'd gotten back to the South for the New York Times in 1965, which was sort of at the end of it.

And when he started on the book and worked on it for three years, then brought me in on it, he had two opening chapters and said, which do you like?

and having sold shoes for my father as a kid I had always learned don't walk out with one pair and say what do you think you walk out with two and say which do you prefer and so I knew that these were my choices and Gene gave me two openings one of which was

The theme of which was Jackie Robinson as the first running race story in America that the white press was interested in.

And it had some appealing, you know, it had some appeal to me.

I learned a lot.

I went back and reread several books that had been done on it.

The other was an examination of Gunnar Myrdal's role in developing the book, writing the book, An American Dilemma, in the mid-1930s, 1938 to 1944.

And that was totally fascinating to me.

I'd heard of Myrdal, his rather offbeat son.

Jan was popular.

He wrote a book that was popular when I was in college.

I was familiar with Myrdal's daughter, Sissela Bach.

who had written books on her own right, in addition to being married to the president of Harvard, Derek Bok, and there was some familiarity there to me.

And then I read An American Dilemma, and I can't say that I had read it before, and it was extraordinary.

Here's how we got there.

In the mid-1930s, the Carnegie Corporation decides that race is an issue that has to be addressed in a big way in this country.

And first of all, to address it, you have to research it.

You have to know what is, to steal W.J.

Cash's title, The Mind of the South.

What is the current behavior?

How did it get there?

And he found such weird and odd

situations where white doctors would treat black patients but white undertakers would not bury them after they died.

And he sort of probed into these sorts of things.

And through his examination of what he decided was a pathological condition of racism in the South, he came upon some

Hard to believe, he came upon a rather positive outlook about America.

He dug deep enough that he concluded that Americans are essentially good people.

He said there was an American creed, and in short, he said Americans believe in justice and they believe in fair play.

They do not always act that way, and they were frequently misled, and they would be misled for many years after this book came out.

but they were in fact willing to give people a fair break.

And he felt that the situation in the South weren't exposed on a national platform, that the nation would rise up and demand that African Americans be given a fair break.

He looked to see who was going to do it.

He was very impressed by the black press that we heard about earlier.

The black press, the Pittsburgh Courier, the Chicago Defender, the Norfolk Journal and Guide, the Baltimore Afro-American, and many others were doing a stunning job of exposing the raw hand of discrimination.

At the same time, they sometimes exaggerated some things.

They didn't have a whole lot of cachet in white newsrooms.

They didn't sort of shine a light that white newsrooms, mainstream newsrooms felt the need to follow.

But what they were doing and contributing to was a rising anger among black people and in large part the migration that we heard about before from the South was fed and fostered by the black press.

But Murdoch concluded the black press, though it's on the front lines of race discrimination and recording it, will not change America.

They will not have influence in centers of power.

He looked at the Southern press, and in the Southern press he found mostly segregationist editors.

He found some that had some promise.

He certainly liked what he saw coming from Virginia Stavny in the Richmond Times Dispatch.

He had advocated equal teacher pay.

He had advocated

Desegregation of the public transit lines, but there were very few who were of that mind.

Later there would be more.

And in fact, if someone asked earlier, why didn't you make reference to Ralph McGill at the Atlanta Journal, at the Atlanta Constitution?

We do in the book make heavy

use of Ralph McGill.

He was just a wonderful editor and great spokesman for the South, for the Progressive South.

But in 1942, in the course of Myrdal writing this book, even McGill is saying segregation is here forever, it will not fall.

And the issue is of whether or not we're going to be segregated is whether we're going to be humane to people, basically buying into the Plessy argument.

The book, the work that Myrdal did, along with Ralph Bunche and 125 researchers, came out as a book called An American Dilemma in 1944.

It had not an immediate page one impact across America, but it had a more invisible impact.

It landed in the

on the desks of Supreme Court justices and newspaper editors, other academics, and sort of worked its way into the minds of many people, including people such as the judge who struck down the white primary, or actually he was a dissenter, but one of the first to raise the flag against the white primary, Judge Waties Waring in South Carolina, who had read Myrdal.

1944 the book comes out.

He has concluded beyond the race, beyond the idea that there's an American creed that newspapers ultimately are going to make a difference.

It won't be the black press, it won't be the southern press, it will be the northern press.

He says when the northern press, northern reporters come south and report back to northern audiences, northern audiences will be shocked and shaken by what they read.

in the newspapers and they will demand change.

He says on page 48 of this book, which is 1,483 pages, to get publicity, and he means attention, to get publicity is of the highest strategic importance to the Negro people.

And so the race beat tells the story of how it evolved from there.

indeed we look a great deal at the black press we look at the segregationist press and those who are far more enlightened than who evolved from including Ralph McGill and then we look at the impact of the northern press who were represented in the south in large part by southern reporters who themselves went into parts of the south they had not known about though they grew up in it they had grown up in segregationist households and they found themselves with a pen and a pad in their hand

with a press card that took them to the other side of the story and they themselves were shocked and shaken by what they saw and had monumental impact on the kinds of work that people in the north and elsewhere read and they in turn demanded change.

That's an oversimplified version.

and an engrossing story it is.

I'm not going to let anyone pull the plug on this.

There's too much here.

I am going to reserve one question to the moderator because I find this work so compelling.

I'm going to take us back to 1850 when black abolitionist Charles Reason looked at racial slavery in the South.

He looked at

free blacks in the North and the political and the occupational proscriptions against their freedom.

And he said, we need a big abolitionist crusade, not just, quote, to abolish only chattel slavery, but that other kind of slavery, poverty, which for generation after generation dooms and oppressed people to a condition of dependence and pauperism.

1850, Charles Reason.

My question to all of you, are there individuals, because you all study professionals, right?

Race professionals, who saw their

cause their purpose in such expansive and inclusive terms where the interests of the black working class are perhaps as important as any other African Americans.

In other words, did they, well, most crudely put,

You know, who was the visionary who saw racial and economic justice that you could point to?

Why didn't the rest of them see it in such terms?

Well, actually, to all of you, and just, you know, if there's people you've come across who really did see this in more expansive terms and try professionally

I'll go first.

OK.

So the answer is yes.

And I would actually say first, I would reject the professional part of the question and say part of what I try to show in my book is that black workers themselves held onto that expansive vision.

And so part of what I'm trying to recapture is that they knew that what they wanted was all that.

And that often what lawyers did was translate it and tame it and make it into legal claims that were not all that.

But that said, there were some professionals who were broader.

There were a couple of lawyers in the NAACP, Marion Wynn Perry and Prentiss Thomas, who I think were much more in-tuned with black workers and they actually, Prentiss Thomas gets forced out of the NAACP after only being there for a short time.

Marion M. Perry leaves in 1949, she's the main lawyer doing labor issues and they don't replace her and I don't think that's an oversight.

I think she was not quite in step with where the institution was going and I think actually mostly though the lawyers in the Department of Justice were new dealers and they had been thinking about the depression and poverty and economic rights and economic security

And so in taking these cases of agricultural workers, they were trying to shift over those rights, those affirmative rights to governmental protection from the direst poverty to help African Americans.

And I think that's really the way they conceived what they were doing.

Now to be fair, it wasn't quite as expansive though, because part of why they did that is because they were afraid to challenge Plessy head on.

So they thought that challenging segregation was a little too radical at that time, but that they were willing to challenge the economic issues.

At a time that most of the country is committed to supporting white supremacy and slavery, you sort of take the easiest issues first.

If you can't convince people that slavery is wrong,

How are you going to convince them that we ought to have an anti-poverty program to help African Americans?

Remember, in the early part of the 19th century,

Most of the country supports the institution of slavery.

Abolitionists are a fringe element of the northern population.

There are anti-abolitionist mobs.

There's an abolitionist who gets lynched.

The idea that you would be supporting an end to slavery is seen as a radical proposition because it's going to employ all the country in civil war.

And what are these freed slaves going to do?

They're going to come north and they're going to compete

with Irish Americans for low wage jobs and nobody wants them.

The idea that you can embark on an anti-poverty program to help black people when most Americans actually support the idea, if you're going to do anything with black people, you should colonize them to Africa.

That's what most of the anti-slavery people in the North want to do in the 1830s or 1850s.

They'd actually like, if they could, to snap their fingers and have African Americans back in Africa.

I think the answer is it's a lot more radical to try to have an anti-poverty crusade for African Americans than it is to try to end slavery.

I think Martin Luther King discovered the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s.

It was a lot easier to end segregation on the buses.

in Montgomery or in the Birmingham lunch counters than it was to bring an anti-poverty program to the north and try to convince people that you ought to be helping poor African Americans.

You know, it was also, I think it was more than anyone could have handled.

It was just too complex to try to see this as a class problem and it went against all the visceral feelings that white people had to begin with.

Harry Ashmore was one of the great bright light editors of the South.

He had come out of the Piedmont section of North Carolina.

He'd done work in South Carolina.

I'm sorry, Greenville, South Carolina.

He'd come out of it.

He talked about how he'd

Delivered newspapers and he would drive past and through the black section of town every day on his paper route, on his way to get to another place.

And he would see the poverty and the distended bellies and the evidence of pellagra and he would see all these awful conditions in the

you know the mosquito ridden ponds and he would just he says and I would go by it every day and not once was I suffused with anger about this it was just the way of life to see blacks as in their own separate world they were a class unto themselves and I think that when

When whites, as it evolved, when whites sort of suddenly had to deal with the fact that there were some fairly educated blacks, there were some that had college degrees, there were the principals of the schools, there were, everybody, every

Everybody knew somebody in town who was African American and who was quite upright.

That became part of the rationalization that the South never really wanted to deal with.

They never wanted to deal with that gray area that

ultimately would force them to see this as an issue, as an economic issue.

I mean, the African Americans had come out of slavery more skilled, more able, more capable to build the South than many of the white people.

They had built the farms, they had tended to the sheep and to the cattle, they had raised the cotton, they knew how to do everything, they knew how to fix things, and yet when they became

Post-slavery, they were not allowed to be part of the economy.

Do you think that Philip Randolph and the organizing he did during World War II and then some more organizing that spread into the South as part of the civil rights movement may have been the visionary, it wasn't real successful, but there was some of that going on.

I don't think it's off base at all.

I think he was an incredibly important leader.

He was the main organizer of the 1941 March on Washington that led to the creation of Fair Employment Practice Act, which was an executive order that mandated fair employment practices in war industries.

He did an incredible amount of organizing.

For those of you who don't know, he ran the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, which was an all-black union in the American Federation of Labor.

And I think he was incredibly powerful.

He had complicated relationships with the NAACP, and the story of racial civil rights groups and their relationship to labor groups is a really complicated one that changes over time.

that he's a big part of.

And he got no help from the national press, I might add.

I think we had in here that I don't think he was on Page 1 of the New York Times during a long stretch of time when he was organizing that march.

We today marvel at how the internet can be used to

March on Washington, an Emancipation March for Jobs in February 1963, which became the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

Of course, the accent fell on freedom as a more consensus goal at the time.

Another question?

I need some information about the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in the state of Virginia.

Was that mainly in process or brought about by the Anglo-Saxon clubs and John Powell and Walter Ashby Plecker?

Or did the whole population know about that and want that?

I get a little confused when I read something about it.

Some say that the population didn't know anything about it.

My grandmother didn't.

She was sort of stunned.

But then other people say, yes, well, we had to vote for it in the legislature.

So could you give me a little bit of information about that, please?

I don't know the answer.

It's just the statute that provides the one drop rule defining African Americans.

Is anyone with one drop of blood?

Right.

I don't know anything specifically about the background of the legislation.

I don't think it would have been particularly controversial in any of the southern states.

They were progressively defining black people as being anyone.

It used to be a quadroon, then an octoroon, one black grandparent, one black great-grandparent, then one drop of blood.

and the society was becoming more and more fixated on the idea of completely separating the races.

If you had a referendum in Virginia in 1924, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was overwhelmingly supported, but I don't know that it didn't pass the legislature without most people being aware of it.

It wouldn't have been very controversial had it been on the ballot.

This is the same year that Congress passes legislation excluding people, immigrants, from the country based on race.

1924 is the year that you have the national origins immigration law that completely excludes people of Asian ancestry entirely from immigrating and tries to exclude Russian and Polish Jews, Italian Catholics, restricting them to very minimal numbers.

The whole country in the 1920s is pretty much fixated on this question of race, so I don't think this is something that would be smuggled through the legislature, but it may very well be that most people just didn't pay any attention to it because it seemed obvious to them.

Any Virginia historians in the house?

I'll just go first from where I sit in a newspaper office.

I think it's so atomized right now that one doesn't get a sense of movement.

And there's so many ethnic groups right now that are just on the run and laying low as state after state after state pass their

There are laws that are taking away assumed rights that immigrants who are not here legally have taken on.

I think that no one really wants to get out there.

I'm sometimes astonished.

You know, I look at just among journalists, every four years, the African American journalists, the Latino journalists, the Asian journalists, Native American journalists and gay and lesbian journalists all have one big annual meeting.

they all meet and they all have their own conventions you know three years in a row and then they all come together in a big unity conference and I think the record will show that every four years it gets smaller and smaller that there's less and less the power that they feel like they have is less and less now of course they're in the news business when newspaper business many of them and

It's a great question.

Obviously, as the country becomes more racially diverse, it's hard to believe that doesn't have an effect on people's racial attitudes.

California is no longer majority white.

The country will no longer be majority white by the middle of the 21st century.

That's a huge, huge change from a country that was still pretty openly committed to white supremacy less than 100 years ago.

The South was still openly committed to white supremacy 50 years ago, so those are going to have huge changes.

Those changes are going to have huge effects.

In the short term, it's really complicated because one message that I think many people convey is you see other racial minority groups like Asians, especially Japanese, Chinese, doing very well, and you turn that on its head and say, well, why can't African Americans accomplish the same thing, right?

You go to any major university.

You see large, huge numbers of Asian American students.

They do very well economically, and people say, well, what's wrong with African Americans?

In that way, I think it's kind of insidious, right?

You have this proliferation of minority racial groups.

Some of them do much better, and that's then used against the other groups, which I think have very different histories.

I mean, you know, the history of slavery, the history of lynching, the history of segregation I think is distinctive among different groups.

The other thing that's quite striking is that some racial groups assimilate much more quickly, and again, it's kind of stunning if you look at it, the number of Latinos and Asian

Americans has exploded in the last couple of decades.

Their assimilation rates are dramatically higher than African-Americans.

So social scientists look at two factors primarily to gauge assimilation rates.

They look at racial intermarriage, and they look at residential integration.

And what you find is much, much higher rates of interracial marriage and racial integration among either Latinos or Asian-Americans.

So 50% of Japanese women today

marry Caucasians, but only 6% of African American women.

The most affluent African Americans are more residentially segregated in Los Angeles than the poorest Latino Americans.

And I think that really tells you something quite extraordinary, right?

Other racial groups, other ethnic groups get assimilated, get integrated.

The one constant over time is African Americans don't.

Residential segregation is as pervasive today for African Americans as it was 50 years ago.

There's a difference.

The different racial groups are different.

At the same time, if you're looking for inspiring precursors or pioneers in the field of multiracial coalition building, look no further than the different working class organizations, especially the interracial unions.

Starting in the 1880s with railroad workers in the southwest, black, Latino,

White workers.

In the 1930s, cannery workers on the West Coast, Mexican, Jewish, and African American again.

There are examples, especially in the 1930s and 40s, which is kind of a parallel movement to this legal movement.

We call it civil rights unionism.

In the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions, there was a lot of race bridging on the basis of class interests and on the basis of a certain conception of Americanism that married civil rights and workers' rights.

You could look at the food, tobacco, and agricultural workers in Winston-Salem.

A great book on that.

And you can ask us more later.

But I think we can see this tradition, which is in fact why Martin Luther King went to Memphis to support civil rights unionism, why he was organizing a Poor People's March on Washington of Native Americans, Blacks, Latinos, white Appalachians.

The dream of building such a coalition

to transform America from the bottom, fragile, rare, often suppressed, often afflicted by these racial ethnic conflicts and misunderstandings.

But there, and I think you can see it in the Service Employees International Union now, the Justice for Janitors campaign in the southwest San Antonio and Miami and Los Angeles, not yet in Charlottesville.

Another question, please.

Okay, this is really utopian.

That was what I was going to say.

That's a great question.

I would do what they do.

I would probably work on the Obama campaign too, but if it weren't an election year and he weren't running.

I would probably do something having to do, I mean when I went to law school my vision of my career was that I would be a public interest lawyer and a historian at the same time.

It's not, you can't do those two things at the same time.

So I wrote a book that I hope will have some kind of an impact on the way people think about social justice but in my other world I would be a public defender or I would be working on prison issues.

I think

I think the fact that we imprison so many people in this nation, so many of them racial minorities, is hugely problematic and is just infused with the kinds of subordination that I talk about in the book.

and that's definitely one place where I could see myself going.

There are a lot of local issues of environmental justice out there as well and I think I might go and become

Schooled in Environmental Law and approached these conjoined issues of social justice and our relationships to the biosphere through these communities that bear the burden of our trash and waste.

So that's my idealism.

Perhaps there's still time.

I've been very concerned with the issue of universal health care.

And in talking to a German doctor who was talking to me about universal health care, he said that it took his being in this country for about six months before he could get it through his head that health care was a privilege and not a right.

And thinking of rights, that brings me to the civil rights consideration.

And I'm wondering of the panel, do they see any potential in the future for a case being brought

in the basis of blacks being especially unprotected in healthcare.

Do you see any potential for a case being brought with the argument that the civil rights of blacks are being denied to the extent that they are so very unevenly offered the advantages of the health system?

And there again we come up to the argument

Is it a right or a privilege?

But I'm just interested how you might think that would bear on this.

Healthcare.

Disparate interest.

I think there could be cases brought, but I don't think that they would be successful.

There was a moment during the Warren Court era that Mike could talk to as well in which the court really flirted with the idea that there were constitutional protections for poor people.

but it was a moment and it flitted past with the Nixon victory and his appointment to the court of a number of very conservative justices that the possibility I think eclipsed was eclipsed.

So I actually think

It's unlikely to be successful in part because courts are very wary of getting involved in wealth redistribution, in part because a lot of Americans are very wary about getting involved in wealth redistribution, and in part because of the thesis of my book that we tend to think today that rights are something negative, that we have rights to the government not doing bad things to us.

I agree with that completely.

I think that the other half of what you were asking is, is it constitutionally significant that African Americans disproportionately are disadvantaged by something?

The same court that evolved this constitutional doctrine saying there's no right to welfare, there's no right to decent housing,

implicitly there's no right to health care also came up with a rule that said when the government does things that on its face is not about race the fact that it has a disproportionate impact and its consequences is constitutionally irrelevant so that's why we have a constitutional rule that says we're gonna throw people in jail for a much longer period of time if they deal crack cocaine

Thank you.

Yeah.

Great.

Another question.

I have two questions and I'd like you to answer either one.

How's that?

Give you choices.

One is what is your next book, if that's on the agenda?

One would hope that the answer to your questions would be the same.

I hadn't thought about it in those terms, but I do think that the book that I'm planning to write really interests me.

And it's about vagrancy in the 1950s and the 1960s.

So in the United States, we imported vagrancy laws that came from medieval England.

When we came over, colonists passed them.

that basically said it's a crime to be idle and poor.

It's a crime to be on the streets and look suspicious.

And these statutes had lots of variations in them.

It's a crime to be a palm reader.

It's a crime to masquerade.

There were all these kinds of things that were holdovers from Elizabethan England.

But basically, they go unchallenged for hundreds of years.

And starting in the 1950s, they start to look suspicious.

And they start to look suspicious because

They are used to regulate all kinds of people who look somehow undesirable.

Civil rights demonstrators, poor people, hippies, Vietnam War protesters.

African American nonconformists and all of a sudden these people are making claims to personhood, they're making claims to inclusion in our American society and all of a sudden a lot more of them have counsel, have lawyers to help them make these claims in court for a variety of reasons and so my book is going to be about how something that's a legitimate form of regulation where the police just get to tell anybody on the street you can't do what you're doing comes to be unacceptable and why it is and how it happens and how the laws change such that

Well, I know what I want to write about, but it would have to be a play, I think.

and I don't know how to write

There's a moment in here we talk about how Ralph McGill, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, would on long weekends, and many of them, join

Harry Golden, the editor of the Carolina Israelite, a gadfly, you know, who had become sort of popular in the 60s, was a welcome guest at the Kennedy White House when he wrote, you know, Only in America and For Two Cents Plain.

And the two of them would meet Carl Sandburg at his farm.

and then they would write each other letters about what they discussed and then I have letters that were written about them by others and I guess I could write a book but I just don't think it would be nearly as interesting as a stage three person play in which they sort of become the vessels through which the world is not only reflected and discussed but

I have this nasty baseball obsession.

So if I could write any book I wanted, it's actually, I hope to do this one day, but I don't think I can justify it while I'm getting paid by a law school.

So it would be comparing the process of racial desegregation in baseball and in education.

And they're actually not only great stories to tell, but they're really interesting analytical insights about why, for example, desegregation works so much better in Major League Baseball than it does in public schools.

One reason is there's a clear economic incentive when Branch Rickey desegregates the Brooklyn Dodgers.

He understands that thousands of African Americans will come to watch his team.

They take four-hour train trips across Missouri to go watch black players play in St. Louis.

And he also understands that he will corner the market in black talent, which is what the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants do, which is why they're the best teams in the National League in the 1950s.

Also, it's interesting to think about why, for example, black managers are never hired.

Literally, the first black manager is 1975.

Even today, there are only four black managers in Major League Baseball.

I think the reason is you can demonstrate objectively what your talents are as a player.

Everybody can know what Jackie Robinson's

batting averages but nobody's ever been able to figure out what the value added is of a major league manager so the stereotypes take hold and you don't have any black managers because of these stereotypes that they can't do the job.

So a lot of interesting points about why it takes place and why desegregation works better.

Baseball is also a dictatorship so that the players, the white players on the Brooklyn Dodgers who didn't want to play with Jackie Robinson

were told you play with him or you will never play another game and this is back in the era of the reserve clause where if you didn't play for the team that had your contract that was the end of your career.

So actually baseball was desegregated partly because the dictator said we want you to desegregate.

American society is a democracy so when

The Supreme Court said we're going to desegregate the schools, white southerners got to vote and they voted for people who would not force desegregation on them including President Eisenhower who ran a kind of southern strategy looking for the votes of white southerners in 1952 and 1956.

That's what I would do if I didn't have any

Gilt feelings about thinking maybe a law professor shouldn't do that.

My next book is about backlash, which is what happens when you win in the Supreme Court, but your cause actually is disadvantaged.

Sometimes winning is losing.

So I just give you two examples, which I think in some ways are the most powerful.

I'm almost completely convinced that we would be further toward abolishing the death penalty

if the Supreme Court in 1972 had not come close to saying the death penalty is unconstitutional.

If you look at public opinion polls, you will see an extraordinary increase in public support for the death penalty within the six months of the Supreme Court threatening to take it away.

And the modern example of that, which I think is almost as compelling as the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage,

which I think almost surely benefited the Republican Party in 2004 and might well have re-elected George Bush.

It may be that that issue more than anything determined the outcome in Ohio where there was a referendum on same-sex marriage.

Do people know what I'm talking about?

The Massachusetts Supreme Court in November 2003 said there is a constitutional right for gays and lesbians to get married.

Thank you.

Are there any agents in the audience?

Thank you.

I've been informed that we're running out of time.

But my first book was, if I might plug it, From Civil Rights to Human Rights, Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Economic Justice.

And I'm here at the Virginia Foundation working on a book.

simply entitled, Jobs and Freedom, the Negro Revolution of 1963, where I want to incorporate all actors from top to bottom and get a sense of just how plastic a moment in American history this was.

Unfortunately, our broadcast is over.

Our questions do not have to end, am I correct?

But please, please stay and continue to ask questions.

I don't know when we need to give up the room, but we have another program at 6.

and David Brown.

Bird flu, pandemic, avian influenza.

What is Virginia doing to prevent it?

Those are all good questions, and having the right answers can help us all be better prepared in case there is a flu outbreak.

The Virginia Department of Health has developed this video to help you understand the pandemic issue and to help you prepare for any possibility should it arise.

Right now there's no need to panic.

Virginia's public health officials are keeping a close eye on the situation and will keep you informed of any developments.

We're all working diligently to assure the health and safety of all the citizens of the Commonwealth.

But government alone cannot protect you from a pandemic.

Every Virginian needs to be prepared.

That's why we've made this video, so you can learn important information about keeping yourself, your family, and your community safe.

H5N1.

That's the strain of a flu virus that's commonly called bird flu or avian influenza.

By the end of 2005, the bird flu had sickened and killed birds in Asia and Europe and had also affected over 130 people in Asia.

Fortunately, it is not easy to spread from person to person.

But if that changes, it could set off a worldwide outbreak or pandemic.

A pandemic could have widespread social and economic impacts.

So, what can you do?

The simple answer is to educate yourself and your family and stay informed.

Flu and influenza are the same thing.

It's just that flu is a short little nickname that we've given to the disease that's called influenza.

Influenza comes around every year.

Here in Virginia we expect to see it anytime between November and March.

Influenza is a serious disease.

It makes you feel really sick and it's a disease that makes you feel like you just can't get out of bed.

The symptoms are a fever and with the fever you'll have a cough, a sore throat, body aches, muscle aches and really feel tired and some people can develop a more severe form of the disease and have to go to the hospital for pneumonia.

So tell me, how do you catch it?

You catch the flu by breathing in droplets that come out when someone with the disease coughs or sneezes.

There are different strains of the flu virus and once you've caught a particular strain, you can't get sick from that strain again, but you can get sick from a new strain.

What's meant by new strains?

The flu virus changes forms from year to year.

It can change a little bit or it can change a lot.

When it changes a lot, it means there's a new strain out there that's never been seen before, and no one's immune, and that can lead to a pandemic.

What exactly do you mean by pandemic?

A pandemic is a worldwide epidemic.

That brings us to the bird flu, also known as avian influenza.

In late 2003, Asian countries started seeing large numbers of chickens and other birds dying of a severe flu-like illness.

More recently, new cases have been reported in many parts of Asia and parts of Europe.

At first, this new strain of flu was only seen in birds.

Then, a few humans living and working in close contact with these birds caught it.

So far, half of those people who have contracted the bird flu have died from it.

This has caused scientists to be concerned about its potential impact if it does develop into a pandemic.

The good news is that it doesn't spread easily from person to person, which would be required for a pandemic to begin.

Yes, definitely.

We're concerned about the current situation because it meets two of the three criteria that are necessary for a pandemic to occur.

One is that we have a new strain of the flu virus that's never been seen before, and two is that this strain of the virus is causing severe illness and death.

We're fortunate that the third criterion is missing, and that is that this strain of the flu virus is not easy to spread from person to person.

But flu viruses are good at changing, and if the bird flu virus changes to a form that's easier to spread from person to person,

It's important to remember there is no certainty that this bird flu will become a pandemic.

Even if a pandemic does not develop from this strain, scientists believe that it is not a question of if we will have a pandemic, but when.

There were three pandemics in the 20th century.

The last truly devastating pandemic was in 1918.

Between 20 and 40 million people around the world died.

If a pandemic occurred, it would have a great impact on our society.

No one could say for sure how many people would get sick and die, but any pandemic could cause severe damage to our country.

In Virginia, the predictions are just as serious.

This year's vaccine does not protect against the avian flu.

Each year, scientists develop a vaccine based on the influenza strains expected to be circulating during the upcoming flu season.

It takes an extremely long time, at least several months, to produce a vaccine.

Tamiflu will not cure influenza.

It will, if taken early enough in the infection, reduce symptoms up to as long as one day.

But quite frankly, there won't be enough Tamiflu for everyone during a pandemic.

So should I go get some Tamiflu for my family?

VDH agrees with the CDC.

Individuals should not stockpile Tamiflu.

The supply is very limited.

Deciding who will receive the limited supply of vaccine or medications is one of the most difficult decisions to be made.

The Virginia Department of Health will follow federal recommendations.

These focus on protecting health care workers who provide direct patient care as well as people at highest risk of complications and death.

I'm pretty healthy and I'm relatively young so I'm probably pretty far down that list.

There are a few easy steps that can help keep a virus from spreading.

Wash your hands regularly and carry hand sanitizers to use when soap and water are not available.

Cover your mouth when coughing or sneezing.

Avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth and stay at home when you are sick.

Also, keep sick children home from school and daycare.

Personal protective equipment is used by health care professionals in the direct care of sick individuals.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Virginia Department of Health don't recommend the use of masks in the general community.

Schools, businesses, offices and communities should instruct students and employees to stay home if they are sick.

Businesses could be forced to shut temporarily because too many workers are out sick.

Business will also feel the effect of fewer people out shopping or doing their usual activities.

During a pandemic, public health officials will look at ways to slow the spread of infection.

For example, limiting large gatherings such as concerts and sporting events, encouraging telecommuting, closures or snow days put into effect, or possibly closing schools.

Could people actually be quarantined?

Isolation and quarantine might be used during early stages to try to control the spread of infection.

Keep in mind that isolation means separating people who are ill from those who are not, and this is a good idea in any case.

Quarantine, however, means separating people who are not yet ill but have been exposed to the virus.

What has the government been doing to prepare?

In 2005, the United States Department of Health and Human Services and President George W. Bush issued a federal plan to prepare for and respond to pandemic influenza.

The nationwide strategies will be woven into our local, regional and state response efforts.

This will help assure that government, public and private responders will have consistent guidance in dealing with a pandemic.

Keep in mind we don't know for sure when a pandemic may strike.

Although public concerns about pandemic flu came to light in 2005,

Public health officials have been planning for pandemic flu for many years.

In early 2005, the Virginia Department of Health created the Pandemic Flu Advisory Committee.

This group includes representatives from public health, the health care and mental health community, state and local government, law enforcement,

First responders, legal advisors, ethics experts, faith-based programs, community leaders, university experts, utilities, schools and businesses.

They meet regularly to discuss the issues and revise our response plan.

VDH is also working to get the word out through meetings with community groups and through public messages like this video.

We believe preparedness rests not only on the shoulders of government, but also on all residents.

It's been many decades since we've seen the devastating impact an infectious disease can have on society.

We need to realize that this type of event can still occur.

You can visit the Virginia Department of Health website or the federal pandemic flu site.

Remember, at this point there is no pandemic.

There's no reason to be alarmed, but there are many reasons to educate yourself and get prepared.

We want to help you understand the situation and get the facts straight.

The Virginia Department of Health will continue to provide important information to newspapers, radio and TV as soon as it's available.

We will regularly update our website and print materials to provide you with the latest information.

The best thing you can do to protect yourself is to learn as much as you can and plan for threats in your area.

We're here to help.

If you have any questions, please contact your local health department or the VDH Pandemic Flu Information Center.

We call this meeting to order.

Here.

Here.

Thank you.

Thank you Ms. Edwards.

Any other announcements?

Okay, we'll now move on to awards and recognitions.

It's my distinct pleasure tonight to honor a group of folks who work for the city and work for the community, the SWAT team for our Charlottesville Police Department.

And we have with us here, Sergeant Tia Durette, who I'd like to invite forward.

The SWAT team recently was honored and received the regional SWAT team award.

It was a very

I understand a very challenging competition over 20 teams from throughout the state and even beyond who came together and our team did a great job, came in first place which showed the professionalism and the training and the dedication of our SWAT team members to their jobs and to this community and I know the SWAT team has also been instrumental in a couple of recent high profile cases with a woman who had barricaded herself in her home and most recently over this past weekend

with regard to an investigation of a very unfortunate homicide here in Charlottesville.

Homicide, I mean, they don't really do some sales.

Some of their positions.

Joe Phillips, SWAT head.

Justin Young, operator.

Grant Fields, team operator.

They're very modest people.

Each one of these

SWAT team members wear multiple hats in our police department.

This is not their only duty and responsibility yet.

Sixteen hours a month they train, they train very hard.

It's the kind of resource when you need them and by the grace of God we don't need them often, but when we do it's a resource that is just remarkable and adds so much value to our police department and our community.

So we owe them a lot of gratitude for the work that they do and particularly

Thank you Chief.

Thank you again to each of you for your service.

We're now going to move on to matters by the public.

We will accept comment for three minutes each and please when you come forward state your name and give your address.

hmm, swap teams later

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Councillors.

Colette Hall, 101 Robertson Lane.

Mr. Mayor, on the Consent Agenda, Item R, Ordinance Zoning Amendment Regarding Compliance Enforcement, which is Section 34 to 81 of Article 1 of Chapter 34 of the Charlottesville City Code.

I'm requesting that a counselor or the city attorney explain the change in this ordinance and how this will affect individual property rights.

The second item, Jim Tolbert, Director of NDS, at one time spoke about an ordinance where large trucks and super buses will not be allowed to continually run generating exhaust and noise while parked on Market Street

behind the Paramount.

This morning, when an 18-wheeler unloading into the Paramount and one superbus parked, both had their engines on.

Why does a truck need to be on during unloading?

About an hour later, two superbuses, so therefore a total of three buses, all running their engines, replaced the truck.

The city developed a green vision statement.

They put a green roof on City Hall.

They built the LEED certified transit center building plus several other measures.

Yet these vehicles negatively affect Market Street, Central Library entrance and LEED Park with exhaust fumes and noise.

My last point.

I just paid our homeowners insurance annual premium.

The insurance company appraised our house and land one-third less, which is approximately $150,000 less, than the city assesses its worth.

Our reputable insurance company tells us that the house is not worth what the city assesses.

So we will expect a significant drop in our 2009 assessment due to the fall in housing market values.

and I think many other homeowners will as well.

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Good evening, Council.

I am here to speak as a cheerleader to tell you that the ordinance T

is well worth your time and effort tonight to limit truck traffic on Old Lynchburg Road, the residential park that goes from Azalea Park to Jefferson Park Avenue.

When you identify Old Lynchburg Road, it needs to be identified in three segments.

You have Old Lynchburg Road that runs in front of Mosby Mountain and Biscuit Run.

That's a two-lane country road.

Then you have Old Lynchburg Road, four lanes that's connected to Fifth Street Extended.

That's the wide portion.

And then you have two cut-throughs over to the residential portion from that wide portion to the very narrow Old Lynchburg Road residential portion that from Azalea Park to JPA is still a city street of a minimum of 25 miles per hour.

which is well earned and anybody that speeds on that street earns their speeding ticket.

And then we have these huge trucks that have found that if they come off of 64, they go to Old Lynchburg Road.

Which part?

Well, somehow they're finding the residential end.

and we are still narrow.

We still have no sidewalks.

We have an open drainage ditch.

We still have a family park and a family swimming pool at the other end.

And we now have increased pedestrians trying to get to the bus stop and into town.

And we have increased bicyclists who are trying to get up Old Lynchburg Road safely.

Now if you've never seen a huge 18-wheeler coming up Old Lynchburg Road, narrow as it is, with all the challenges that we currently have along our residential street, I welcome all of you to connect with my kitchen calendar.

I will walk it with you.

We will walk from Azalea Park up to JPA, and then we will envision that 18-wheeler trying to make a turn.

at the corner of JPA and OLR.

It's not done easily and it jams that intersection and when they cross over that double yellow line, it throws everybody who has this rude awakening of someone coming around those five blind curves, where do you go to move your vehicle, your bicycle, or your pedestrian feet off safely to avoid being hit?

So I applaud you.

Thank you, Ms. Chase.

Good evening, Council.

I am Pastor William Coles, Pastor of the Living Church of God in Christ.

and I'm founder and president of the African American Male Forum, located 1717A Allied Lane in the city of Charlottesville.

The purpose of this report to council is to bring awareness of the forum and its activities, to bring awareness of the issues of African American males in the city as it relates to crime and crime prevention, to gain support of the council for the forum, the loving church and its efforts.

I founded the African American Male Forum in 2007 to address the issues

that affect African American males.

In 2007, the forum assisted in stopping violent youth attacks that were occurring in the downtown area.

This incident helped galvanize our first priority, reducing the incarceration rate of African American males.

And we believe that crime is down currently partly due to our efforts of encouraging African Americans to stay out of criminal activity.

We could also see through research that there was a correlation between being idle, the level of education, or lack thereof, and involvement in criminal activity.

Therefore, we funded a plan to address two main determinants, education and organized summer activities.

The lack or insufficiency of which influences incidences of involvement in criminal activity by African American youth in the city of Charlottesville.

The plan involved a two-phased approach.

Phase 1 focused on the performance of African-American youth in the Southfield school system.

Phase 2, which is focused on involving African-American youth in organized summer activities.

In the summer of 2007, we had a Father and Son Day at Berlin Middle School to inform and educate the African-American community as to the issues that we face in regards to the plight of African-American males in our community and how this negatively affects our community and the overall quality of life in Charlottesville for all.

The attendance was good so we followed up with a family day on July the 13th this year and the focus was on getting the word out and organizing families for the upcoming school year.

It also produced positive results.

Additionally, we're going door to door, planning rallies in targeted neighborhoods, trying to reach as many families as we can to implement our plan and recruit males and support for those males.

The data pertaining to African American male academic performance in our school system is nebulous.

It's hidden in the overall school performance of the African American student body.

The majority of the students on the other side of the achievement gap are African American.

The majority of those are African American males.

The majority of the dropouts of the African American student body are African American males.

This is manifested in the underemployment, unemployment, and the crime statistics.

People who commit crimes should be subject to the system.

However, commitment of a crime means that harm to someone or damage to a loss of property has occurred.

Therefore, the effort of the forum is to get in front of the problem of crime committed by African-American males and keep them from committing crimes in the first place.

Thank you for your time.

I'm Howell Bowen.

I'm the Director and Officer of the Locust Hill Graveyard Foundation, and I'm speaking also on behalf of the Homefront Chapter of the Releasing Clark Heritage and Trail Heritage Foundation, all of which are 501c3 charitable organizations.

In 1932, it was authorized for a bust of Meriwether Lewis to be placed in the old hall in the Capitol in Richmond.

And now 76 years later, these two organizations have taken upon themselves to bring this about.

We are 97% complete on our fundraising.

The bust is going to conclusion right now.

They will be given to the state of Virginia and the dedication will be on the 18th of August of this year, which is Maryweather Lewis's birthday.

And we would like for the city council to express an interest or an uninterest in the concept of having a commemorative memorial on the downtown mall.

This memorial would be a piece of Georgia granite, gray granite, with a slanted front

It would have two plaques on it, one on the front, one on the back.

The front plaque would contain a bas-relief of the bust placed in the old hall, a commemorative inscription, and a portion of a tribute to Meriwether Lewis written by Thomas Jefferson in 1813.

The back plaque would recognize the project sculptor, as well as the major patrons who made the project possible.

In the handout that I gave you, there's a digital illustration of the two plaques.

And then the last page shows you

The dimensions which shows that it would be about 40 inches high, 22 inches wide, 19.3 inches deep at the bottom and 6 inches deep at the top.

This would be a gift to the city from the Locust Hill graveyard foundation and from the home front chapter if you all have an interest in entertaining Hammany Memorial of this type on the mall.

Thank you.

Good evening, Council.

My name is Joshua Baer.

I work for the Hope Community Center at 341 11th Street, Northwest.

And I would first like to say, Councilman Brown, I commend you on your dedication of riding your bike.

I passed you on the way here.

It was 98 degrees, and you were in a shirt and tie, riding your bike, keeping our city green.

So I appreciate that, sir.

To update you on our work with the homeless here in Charlottesville, it's been six weeks.

In that six-week time,

are working cohesively with TJAC, Thomas Jefferson Area Coalition for the Homeless, picking people up three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays, allowing them to take showers for the homeless here in Charlottesville and the working poor.

This is the only place that they have for a public facility to take showers, so we're offering that to them.

There is not another agency in Charlottesville who is offering that service.

I also have been out setting up

some tent villages in our green spaces so that our homeless have a place to stay.

Thirty-five days ago, we did not have the funds.

Since then, someone has come and given me the funds to do that.

So I wanted to update you in our process of taking care of the poor citizens of your community.

Thank you for the opportunity for allowing me to do that.

We are also actively seeking a piece of property here for a shelter.

The possibility of that in the future, the population's growing.

Is it possible here in Charlottesville to find that piece of property?

We're working with Mr. Tolbert and zoning to see if it's possible.

So just to let you know, to update you, this is what we're doing.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

The next speaker, I cannot read the name, but resides at Woods Edge in Albemarle County.

I wanted to speak on... Well, are you with this person?

Oh, okay, that's fine.

Annie Cortland.

Okay, thank you.

Come on forward.

Okay, come on, Mr. Hall.

That's fine.

When the chicks were down, they come forward, they chickened out.

And why did they do that?

You can't imagine how nervous they are when they approach the bench.

What I would like to do is stand over here.

I understand that I'll still be seen.

and I can look at the audience as well as the council.

I think that's appropriate because I think it's offensive to have my back to the audience.

First of all, I'd like to say that I am one of them.

I'm recovering and actually being cured of bipolar disorder and at one point in my life I was grossly psychotic.

People have said that I am totally drained

and cannot believe that I'll be fully recovered in a couple of months or so, maybe two months.

It's on my schedule and it's on God's schedule.

Right here, I'm taking Depakote, 500 milligrams each evening.

Still doing that.

When these run out,

I'm going to switch 250 milligrams.

This is all I have left.

My hand is being forced because Region 10 will not move this according to my plan.

In 2007, I went to try to patch things up with my family.

They conspired behind my back because they thought he needs help.

So therefore, they got together with some crack doctors.

There are some black professionals at Region 10, by the way.

They have taken me and TDO'd me, ECO'd me, a total of eight times.

This has taken a lot of time out of my life.

They forced you to take very potent medications, either by injection or by valve.

These are very harmful drugs.

They do permanent damage to your body.

I had two cataracts in my eyes.

I have some heart damage that's been done to me.

I think that I am overcoming the damage that stopped being permanent to my heart.

However, I have not overcome the damage that has been done to my eyes.

This is malpractice.

Now in Kansas, they have a place called Osoave State Hospital, where I was taken after 43 days on supermax.

Supermax security where all the rapists and murderers and killers

I once took on, I was so angry, there's a guy that I refer to as Andre the Giant.

Well, let me tell you about rescue halls.

Rescue halls are very important.

First one being in Booker T. Washington Park.

Here's UVA property.

It's all in a red V. It's based on education.

We can get tax exempt status for our rescue hall underneath the park, maintain a green top roof.

We can put fonts, shower fonts, talk about taking care of homeless people.

We can shower five people at a time on the male side, five people at a time on the female side.

Mr. Hall, I'm going to have to cut you off there, but please feel free to come back.

He helped me determine the location of this first part.

I think people need to hear this.

Mr. Hall, I welcome you if you'd like to stay for the end of the meeting and you can speak again at the end of the meeting.

I understand, but we do have a...

Okay, thank you, Mr. Hall.

Ms. Cortland, would you like to speak?

No, okay.

My name is Raymond Mason, I live at 717 Cincinnati Avenue, and I'm here about the police advisory committee.

I think it's a good idea, something that the city needs, but I have a few reservations.

The fact that they won't really have any authority or any strength, that concerns me.

Back sometime ago, the same department violated over 150 rights of black males in this town with the DNA situation.

Seems like there needs to be a check and balance system or somebody needs to be held accountable or somebody can hold the department accountable.

I know this is a good step in the right direction, but like I said, I still feel that

It would be a lot better if the panel could make decisions and actually, if disciplinary action was needed, they could take action.

They could talk to the chief and they could come to some terms.

I mean, it'd be good and bad.

The chief might want to suspend you and take a day's pay.

The board might just want to suspend you for a day for something, this, that, or something.

But I just feel like

without any strength I mean basically they'd just be talking to themselves and I would hope that you would consider that what I've said and maybe you know reconsider and let it you know look into it a little more and see what you know what benefits or what faults it would have but I just feel like I think the chief could still function as a chief with that board it's like the partner shouldn't have doesn't have anything to hide so it shouldn't be a problem

Like I say, it'd be good for the right hand to know what the left hand is doing and vice versa, but I mean, I just don't see, you know, a board not having any authority.

Thank you.

That's the last person that signed up to speak.

Is there anybody else?

Ms.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and City Councilors.

I'm Karen Waters, the Executive Director of the Quality Community Council, here on a couple of items of business today.

First of all, I wanted to say a quick thank you so much for your support of our urban farm out at Sixth and Monticello.

We are, this season, up to nearly 100 volunteers.

We had 110 at the close of last season, and we are at, I think it's something like 85 this season.

And so we just want to say thank you very much for your support of that project.

We've got our rainwater system up and going.

Mr. O'Connell, I have an award for you on my desk from last week.

So we will be back with a fuller report on that, but I wanted to just put that on the radar screen.

Also wanted to say a quick thank you for your continued support of the African American Cultural Arts Festival, realizing that we're asking council to go a little bit above and beyond there.

and we just want to say again thank you so much for supporting it which is now in its 18th year.

The main reason I'm here tonight though is to speak about the senseless killings that we're seeing of young men in our community.

We were very hurt and disappointed to see such a violent act happen so close to such a happy place as our farm and I am here on behalf of the Magruder family and they've asked me to read a statement

To whom it may concern, we've written these few words with the express reason to appeal to the children of Charlottesville to stop committing these awful crimes of hate and violence against each other.

They need to understand that not only are they destroying families that have to live on with the loss of their loved ones, they also destroy their own families who live with the guilt of knowing that their child committed such an act.

It goes without saying that the persons who are responsible for our family member has created a huge emptiness in our family.

No matter what happened between Joshua and the suspects, Joshua did not deserve to be gunned down.

While Joshua is no longer here, we just hope that this is the last of a senseless killing.

We do not want revenge.

We only want to see that someone is held responsible and accountable for their behavior, the Magruder family.

I just want to add to this that I'm pleased to be wrapping up a term on the board of the housing authority and one of the first acts that we did as a commissioner was to pass a trespassing policy which we were requested to do by the police department.

We were told that this was the tool that they needed to help make public housing safer.

Sadly the

There was nothing done about the trespassing that was happening at Sixth Street.

I would much prefer to see this young man in trouble for trespassing than dead.

So I ask that council would give the police department the resources that they need to be able to do the work that needs to be done, as well as to support the community organizations that are doing the work that's necessary to help end this assault on our African American men.

Thank you, Ms. Myers.

Is there anybody else that would like to speak?

Mr. Shayan.

Thank you all for coming here tonight.

Zachary Sheahan, 701 East High Street, also Executive Director of the Alliance for Community Choice and Transportation.

I'm just coming out here tonight in support and gratefulness for your work with the Safer School Projects that you've been awarded and that you're helping with matching funds to make happen.

I think it's great that you put in the staff time and putting in the matching funds that are necessary.

Thank you, Mr. Chaim.

Anybody else like to speak?

We will now close matters by the public.

Dr. Brown?

I'll speak first.

It's hard not to be affected by the death of someone in our community.

I was a soccer coach.

for the young man who was killed and his brother and I.

Good kid.

We do whatever we can to try to make sure the police do have the tools necessary.

I think some things are really hard to prevent.

But it's also not just a police issue.

And I think our work session on poverty will help go some way to helping address some of the factors that underlie that.

I just want to make a few other comments.

to Ms. Hall, I want to make sure she realized, she's probably aware that the city has a policy about not idling our own vehicles and I think the General Assembly just gave us the authority to regulate commercial vehicles, I'm not positive about that and if that's the case I hope we'll pursue it and if it's not exactly the case I hope we'll

I wanted to thank Pastor Coles for the work he's doing with the African American Male Forum.

I mean, I think nothing speaks to how important it is in the events of this weekend.

And finally, I wanted to, I encouraged Mr. Bowen to come forward to city council so he could get a sense of where council is on his generous offer of a monument.

My personal opinion, however, is that we've been talking a lot about the importance of not trying to change the mall too quickly.

And so even though I think it's a very generous offer, and they put a lot of work into it, I'm not sure I would support a monument on the mall.

And I would encourage this all to kind of give him a sense, because in my conversations, that's what I think he was looking for, was some sense of whether this is something to pursue or something to move on from.

I want to make a comment on Mr. Bowne's proposal for a monument.

I think the idea of having a monument is a good idea.

I am not sure if the wall is the right place for it.

There is a market street where Mr. Lewis had a historical collection to that site.

and I think if we were going to have it, it would be good to have it someplace which has some connection to the actual events.

And when he came back, I think it was on Market Street, where that location is.

I would agree with Mr. Huja on Mr. Bowen's proposal and I would like to go ahead and pursue that and of course I think we need to talk with Mr. Bowen too and see how he feels about that rather than on the mall so he'd be interested in doing it on Market Street.

I'm sorry, I can't hear everything that you're saying.

I'm sorry, I was just saying that we need to talk to you too.

I don't know whether your group would be interested in doing it on Market Street.

I think your original proposal was for the mall

Okay.

Mr. Bauman, thank you for the generous offer of the gift and I also have concerns about the location being the mall and I also would like to get more feedback from

and other people that live in and around the mall to see what their thoughts and ideas might be about such a great contribution.

To Pastor Coles and Joshua Baer, thanks again for coming forward to reminding us of the work that's done in the community and the work that continues to need to be done.

and my condolences to the Magruder family.

It frames things differently because there's so much work that we need to do as an entire community that it makes some of the discussions that we have

and some of the decisions that we made seem so out of place.

We have to get back in touch with what's important and what we value.

But we seem to miss that until there's a loss in the community.

I want us all to take advantage of this moment, to decide what we all can do, what we all can do,

to create a sense of community in every neighborhood.

I think it's kind of timely that we're talking about our police force, the renovation of the mall, the needs of the homeless, the programs that are needed for African-American males.

It's all connected in our community.

But we have to make it.

Thank you, Ms. Edwards.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

I do also extend sympathies to the Magruder family.

It's a very saddening episode in the life of our community.

We will be talking later in the meeting about the police department.

I know that's one piece of the puzzle that we need to look at and many other pieces to this puzzle.

I share the sentiments expressed by Mr. Huja and Dr. Brown and Mr. Taliaferro about the location of the monument.

I do appreciate the gesture and I think there's probably

a good place for it to be found but I'm not sure when we're talking about simplifying them all and decluttering them all if we want to also be talking about adding another monument to the mall but I think we can work together to find a good home for it.

I do want to also extend appreciation to Josh Baer for the work that you continue to do on behalf of the homeless and I'm glad to hear that you've had some funding to be able to continue to reach out and serve their needs

Mr. Mayor, members of council, the

A proposed amendment is to city code section 34-81C and that code provision currently provides that in terms of zoning, property does not become a non-conforming use if a portion of the property is either purchased or condemned by either the federal, state or local government.

In other words, if the condemnation of property brings the property below the size allowed by the zoning ordinance, what our ordinance says is that property doesn't become non-conforming.

The property owner is not punished by that.

The proposed amendment merely adds one word, which is the word acquisition.

And the effect of that is that if a portion of a site is acquired by the government by any means and not just by purchase or condemnation, then the property does not become nonconforming.

It is still conforming under our zoning ordinance.

So to respond to this specific question,

to the extent that it affects private property rights at all, I think it's fairly characterized as an additional protection to private property rights.

We're now going to move on to appointments to city boards and commissions.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to move the following appointments to the Charlottesville Albemarle Regional Transportation Plan Advisory Committee, John Schroeder,

Is there a second?

I'll second it Any discussion?

Please indicate your vote

and I would note for the record as Ms.

Waters said when she came forward she is wrapping up her term and has decided not to reapply for the Housing Authority Board and we want to publicly thank her for her service to that board.

We are also going to be doing interviews for the Planning Commission the week of August 4th and the applications for that are open until August 4th.

and we have a couple of other boards.

We're extending deadlines for the Charlottesville Albemarle Commission on Children and Families.

We still have a couple of vacancies there to fill and also the Social Services Advisory Board.

Thank you again.

Ms.

Waters, we just publicly thank you when you're out in the hallway for your service to the Housing Authority Board.

We'll now move on to our consent agenda.

We have a lengthy consent agenda tonight.

Item A is the minutes of July 7th.

Item B is an appropriation of $16,230, State Criminal Alien Assistance Program grant, second of two readings.

Item C is an appropriation of $244,789, a transit grant, second of two readings.

Item D is an appropriation of $30,000 Homeland Security Grant, second to two readings.

Item E is an appropriation of $5,750 Boys and Girls Club Reimbursement, first to two readings.

Item F is an appropriation of $11,000 Police Department Foundation Grant, first to two readings.

Item G is an appropriation of $9,500 Fire Programs Grant, first to two readings.

Item H is an appropriation of $5,000 Arts Challenge Grant, first to two readings.

Item I is an appropriation of $88,522, a donation for enhanced police coverage, first of two readings.

Item J, an appropriation of $182,500, adult drug treatment court grant, first of two readings.

Item K is an appropriation of $328,280, safe routes to school grant, first of two readings.

Item L is a resolution authorizing safe routes to school grant, first of one reading.

Item M, a resolution authorizing transfer funds from Council Reserve for African American Festival, first of one reading.

Item N is a resolution and license agreement for encroachment of eaves and building onto East Main Street and Third Street Southeast Downtown Mall, first of one reading.

Item O is an ordinance renewing the Sprint franchise agreement, second of two readings.

Item P, ordinance renewing Intellos franchise agreement, second of two readings.

Item Q, an ordinance renewing Martha Jefferson Hospital franchise agreement, second of two readings.

Item R, zoning amendment regarding compliance and enforcement, second of two readings.

Item S, an ordinance establishing criteria for affordability with respect to imposition of water and sewer connection fees, second of two readings.

and finally, item T, an ordinance prohibiting truck travel on Old Lynchburg Road, first of two readings.

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Motion carries.

Thank you very much.

On the published agenda for our meeting tonight, we had an ordinance and a public hearing regarding the lease of 200 Second Street Northeast of the Historical Society as the first two readings.

We have removed that from the agenda tonight to allow for some further discussions with the tenant.

So we will now move forward to item three in our agenda, public hearing and resolution, downtown mall restoration,

We have a resolution, the first of one reading, and here to present is Mr. Jim Tolbert.

Turn around this way and try to talk to see if I can see everybody that's here.

I'm going to try to go through this fairly quickly, Council, because a lot of it is stuff you've already seen, but it's confirming a lot of the things that you asked us to do and decisions that have been made since the last meeting.

Why do we need to do this?

One of the models is over 30 years old, and we've determined that many of the physical improvements are failing.

According to the law engineering report of the late 90s, the motor is deteriorated underneath the bricks and between the bricks, and many of the bricks are cracked and broken and unusable.

Electrical systems serving the lights is in very poor condition and the lights are worn and do not meet dark sky or energy efficiency standards.

We've had several claims that people have filed and we've had to pay that have resulted in a lot of money for injuries sustained from trips and falls.

The fountains are essentially inoperable.

The water that is in them is water we have to bring in by truck and put in them and then run them through the motors and so there's issues there.

These are some examples of the bricks and I think if you walk 10 feet down the mall, you can see this at any point, any place.

They're missing bricks, bricks that are heaving and cracked bricks.

The lights, as I said, the lights are, they look fine if you walk and look at them in these pictures, but if you go down there any given night, there may be an entire block that's out and they do not meet all the dark skies or any energy efficiency standards.

The fountains, this was a good day.

The fountains were working.

and we've got some issues with trees but very limited and this is one in particular that needs to be replaced.

The tree grates, we have tree grates that have become black plywood and others where the trees are being girdled by the bricks and the grates exist.

Additionally, why would we want to do this?

The mall is a very important part of the tax base.

There's over 2 million square feet of residential retail entertainment and office space, over 223 million in assessed value in the downtown area, hundreds of businesses, 50 plus restaurants, and it's a key generator of meals and sales tax and a destination for many folks.

According to the law report, the slab underneath the bricks is in good condition.

The problem is the mortar, and when that was done in the late 90s, 10 to 15% of the bricks were cracked and unusable at that time.

and we know it's gotten worse.

We've been through a lengthy process to get here.

Actually these slides started in 2007, but I'll go back to even 2002, 2003 when Wallace, Roberts and Todd did the master plan.

There was a lot of public process and a plan that they did, but since October when we engaged MMM shortly after we engaged them,

We've had a number of public meetings, presentations to the BAR, a business impact study, key stakeholder meetings, and then community meetings and alternatives.

All that culminating in a meeting on June 30th, a meeting that was attended by well over 100 people.

I had a sign-in sheet with 128 names on it, and I know there were a lot of people that never did sign in, so it was very well attended.

Also, we're in the process of launching the Block Captain internal communication system now.

and our marketing planning with the downtown merchants.

Out of this process came several statements that were made.

One is to preserve the historic halprin design to the maximum extent possible.

There was concern expressed at that last meeting about the cost and that those speaking urged the council to either reuse existing brick and simply repair and repoint or if new brick was necessary to use the 4x12 brick and put it in a mortar setting.

There was a lot of feeling, a lot of issues that came out of that meeting.

that were based on that.

The design we haven't changed since the last meeting except in our recommendations that we'll get to in a minute we're recommending that the section you see here essentially from Old Preston to Water Street not be done at this time because it is the newest, it was not part of the original Halperin design and we can save substantial dollars and get within our budget.

It will help us greatly get within the budget by not doing this at this time.

Old Preston to Water.

Again, no changes here.

We've taken out everything that was added, replacing the lights, the bricks, leaving the trees with no changes.

Second West to First Street.

Again, the same approach with no new improvements.

Typical mall section is what it looks like now.

This is what it would continue to look like.

First to Second East.

Again, the same approach, no changes.

Central Place, the one thing I would point out is that four trees shown here, of course, two of those are currently down.

The other two are very diseased, it would come out there.

Those are the only two trees that we propose to take out at this time.

Again, Central Place will look like Central Place does.

Third east to 4th Street, no changes here.

There were some additional bans proposed in some places.

Those have all come out.

Same thing in 4th Street east to 5th Street east.

Again, repairing the fountains, no new fountains though.

Fifth to sixth, again the same thing, the play area that we talked about in this area.

is not in the plan at this time but would be preserved and discussed further for possible later implementation.

Design elements, again, renovate the central place fountain, renovate the current fountains, the other smaller fountains, the light, retain the existing light fixtures, retain the existing steel planters and actually add more, use the same bench we have there,

The bench is not, of course, the original bench.

Those were replaced back five or six years ago, but we would add more of those.

We've gone to a trash can and recycling can that are much better on our folks that are emptying them's backs and those we would keep and add more.

The direction we heard from the council at the June 16th meeting included several things.

One is do not widen the west end at Water Street.

Do not add new fountains.

Use the existing lights, but comply with dark skies and use LED lights.

No permanent cafe enclosures, no newspaper box corrals, no Sister City Plaza, no additional public art.

Do not alter the tree pattern.

Yes to Wi-Fi, yes to the use of granite.

Add drinking fountains.

No playground for now, but study for future possibility and to conditionally use the 4x12 bricks, but at that point do additional study on the 4x12 bricks.

Other cost savings since that time that we've recommended, the first one I mentioned to you, which is the removal of all the work between the Omni and the Ice Park from Old Preston to Water Street, would save us roughly a half million dollars.

Removal of the new areas of granite banding, and then we're saying replace 20% fewer new flower pots, bike racks, and benches.

That doesn't mean don't replace them or remove them.

We had numbers in there for new items of those additional items,

and what we're recommending is that we take 20% of those off.

Again, this is to help us get within the budget.

Other cost-saving changes, only three trees would be removed.

One of those is the willow stump in front of the Virginia National Bank.

The other two are the red maples that I showed you in front of the hotel.

We are proposing to keep the plan that we put in place

to do plantings on park properties so that when we have to replace trees we have some trees that are of a suitable size and not two inch caliper to use when the time comes.

Second Street had been added in the budget that we had and that's being worked out with the developer of the Charlottesville Hotel to coordinate with them and they don't actually do that work so it's taken out of this project.

Brick issues, the ever-moving target.

And I would like to recognize Brandy Schafer from the Brick Association who has come just to visit and watch us here, but she's been a great help on the phone with her engineers.

They've taught me a lot about bricks in the last couple of weeks and some things that our engineers already were talking about but essentially they recommended that when our original brick, our model was constructed the bricks were dry packed and they said don't do that again.

That is not the way to do it in dry packed mortar.

Essentially they said 4x12 or 4x8 is not as stable in sand as laid in mortar but that either application will work.

They said that the 4x12 in sand, they can't find anybody either that's tried it, and so it's an engineering theory that it might not be as stable, but again, there's no practical application that says it won't.

For long-term maintenance and ease of access to underlying utilities at brick-laden sand, it's much easier to use and has advantages.

This is a computer drawing of what

the difference it would be on the mall.

The mortared on the left, the sand set on the right to show you the difference and we are proposing the sand set 4x12's at this point.

The mall crossings, these are some of Halprin's notes.

We thought that that piece right there was really interesting given the debate that we've been through in the past.

But he recognized that there was a potential for vehicular crossings on the Mall.

As you know, we've got two, 2nd and 4th, and what we're suggesting here is that the existing slab we've removed, lowered and strengthened, that we use the 4x8 pavers, and again we've talked to the BAR informally about this, they haven't voted on it, but the BAR feels strongly that the mall crossings are not part of the original part of the mall and that we ought to distinguish them as well as the side streets in some way, and so we're recommending here that we use the 4x8 pavers.

and of course we would use the ADA warning surfaces that would allow pedestrians as they come up to know that there's a crossing there.

The brick, we've got to get formal approval once you decide what you want to do.

And again, we're recommending 4 by 12 laden sand.

That's the direction they would like us to go.

The runnels, the drainage runnels on the marl, we're recommending keep those as they are.

The reason for that is that we've learned that you need a hard edge for sand set bricks to butt up against.

The runnels will provide that.

They would be repaired and remortared and

and used essentially exactly as they are.

The final water fountain design needs to go to the BAR.

A tree-grade design that allows us to replace those lovely black plywood pieces with something that's more appropriate and can grow and be easily opened up as the trees grow and would meet ADA standards.

Cost Phasing and Schedule.

Again, we hired Barton Mallo as our construction manager.

This schedule to do it all in the first of the year anticipates that we will complete construction documents in October of 2008 and that we will start really after, if you vote to approve tonight, that we would start acquiring things and moving forward with the project because there's a lot of things that need to happen before we start actual

Real hard construction in January of 2009.

This is the original cost estimate that we were working off of three weeks ago.

And I don't know if you can see that number.

Council has had it in their packet of 9.1 million.

And we've been talking 7.5 million all along using the WRT numbers from back in 2002.

This is a very detailed cost estimate.

Bart Mello has gone through it with our engineers and has

really looked at how we can cut it.

It was a million six over budget.

These are some of the changes.

This is a detailed report, a log that they go through, and they've looked at ways that they can reduce the budget.

They also looked at, because we've been asked, what happens if you lay the brick and mortar instead of sand set?

They estimate it's a million plus dollars added to the budget and it stretches a project out to an additional 18 to 24 months more than likely to do that.

and the other question was what if we reuse the existing brick and tuck point it and that's another half a million dollars and the same length of time on top of the schedule that we have.

So they've gone through and revised the budget as you can see we're down to $7,471,000 at this point.

This does allow us some contingency, all of our management costs, all those things to get in so we are below the seven and a half

We're still massaging that, but we did get it below the seven and a half that we have discussed consistently.

We do have a phasing plan that's not completely finalized until we meet with the downtown businesses.

But essentially, what Bart Mallow is talking about doing is working in four places at any given time, doing demolition in four places and then moving in immediately with the reconstruction crews and keeping them moving from time to time.

One question that's come up

It's what if you hit something unknown, what does it do to the schedule?

They feel like by having four crews here that they can pull a crew in the area where there is a problem, get in and work on it, have them working on one of the other areas and not miss a beat and keep going.

Where if they were just working one crew in one area, you ran into a problem, you might have to pull them off while you brought subs in.

So this schedule anticipates that we would be finished, a very detailed schedule.

It anticipates, like I say, starting next week with some items, but it has us completing

by the first week of May.

So we're essentially on the schedule that we've talked about consistently and they feel confident again if we get started that we can meet that schedule.

We've also been looking at maintenance.

We brought our Parks and Rec department in to talk with us about how we build these things so that they can be easily and efficiently maintained.

They've developed a very detailed maintenance schedule and are still working through that, but we want you to know that that's not something we've forgotten about and they're part of the team as we attempt to get through the maintenance.

We also have a communications and marketing plan.

We've identified working with the DBAC block captains, and they actually had their first meeting, I believe.

I get them confused about the block captains versus the marketing, but the block captains had their first meeting last week and have started working through.

They're going to be the primary point of communication that we use as we go through the process.

So if we have issues, if they have concerns, those people will be the ones working with us.

We're having a construction marketing plan that's in development and again, here we're trying to develop a plan of how we can get the word out that the mall is still open for business and do everything we can to promote the mall and work with the businesses to do that.

Again, on the recommendation of Beth Meyers, we will be assembling a design assistance committee that's going to help with all those remaining design issues and any change orders that come up if we have design issues to advise us, advise the BAR as we move forward.

The recommendation tonight is essentially to recommend that we formalize those things that you said before, including do not complete the West End to Water Street, which is one of the ones we've added, no new fountains, use existing lights, no permanent cafe enclosures, no newspaper box corrals, no Sister City Plaza, no additional public art, do not alter the tree pattern, only removing the two red maples and one stump,

including Wi-Fi, using Granite, and I would say that we're back in 30 years ago reviewing that and trying to see how we can do that cost-effectively.

That may be something we have to sacrifice, but we're trying not to at this point, not do the play area and use bricks that are 4 by 12 set in sand.

I noticed that you had a plaza on western land not being repaired.

We would do everything that was part of the original.

Any questions?

Mr. Tolbert, I know former counselor Lynch suggested we explore more cost-effective ways of installing Wi-Fi downtown.

We're doing that.

We wanted to keep the figure that we had for now because we haven't resolved that issue, but we're looking at that.

We're looking at actually not going, as he suggested, below ground, but it will involve some of the private property owners, but I don't think that's going to be an issue.

Thank you Mr. Tolbert.

We've had a number of people sign up to speak at the public hearing and again please keep your comments to three minutes.

and our city council, city staff.

I came here to deliver a petition on behalf of the downtown businesses and the business association in support of this project.

I'd like to read it into the record and hand it to you.

As you know, we've been supporting this project from the very beginning and this is, we hope, our last opportunity to do that.

Dear city council, we the undersigned are in support of the city's downtown pedestrian mall project.

We are aware that the voices of support often go unheard.

We would like to remind council those voices and more are still in support of this project.

We understand that this is an expensive project and there are many competing budget requests for funding worthwhile projects.

We believe that this project should have priority by serving the entire community by revitalizing the downtown mall, which has served as a major economic engine for the city.

We strongly believe that this considerable investment will provide an excellent return to the city and our community over many years.

As members of the downtown business community and downtown businesses, we compliment the city on their efforts to address our concerns about the disruption of business activity and negative impact it may cause.

We urge you to pursue this project as expeditiously as possible during the most advantageous season to minimize this disruption and to follow all best construction management practices as you proceed.

and this is signed by numerous downtown businesses.

In addition, I'd like to just make one quick comment which is that I have been involved with this project since the very beginning of the WRT effort and truly I have never seen a project have this much review and this much support, this much involvement in the community.

I believe what you have ended up with is a really remarkable effort on behalf of city staff and the construction teams and the design teams.

Good evening Mr. Mayor, council members.

I would just like to read my statement into the record for you please.

Council members,

We are appealing to the good business sense of our council to approve the monies needed for this small project.

It is our plea that the council will determine it is best to get the work done in a reasonable length of time and as soon as possible.

Providing the necessary attention to the mall and supporting the restoration of the major economic engine of our community is imperative to be able to maintain the tax base of merchants who will in turn support the social programs

without any tax base.

The future economic health of this pedestrian mall depends upon the merchants staying here and doing well.

We as business owners see every day the empty stores with more to come possibly, some being empty far too long.

The seedy condition of the mall is noticed more by our visitors than it is by those of us who love it and are willing to overlook a few blemishes.

The cost of this venture will be considerably less now than it will be in the future.

The possibility of accident increases as we refuse to take care of the problems and address the needs.

Lawsuits are expensive, as you well know, as well as the negative public relations they bring.

We seem to have a good plan

responsible people in position to make it happen and to manage the construction progress, a plan to work together, business owners, property owners, the city, residents, all to ensure an effective and efficient information sharing.

The monies are there to do this and we implore you to see the need to do it now.

Thank you, Ms. Perkins.

Jim Perkins, 420 East Main Street.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council members.

You'll be relieved to know that I did not bring my laptop tonight.

I wanted to make some comments, not as a business owner downtown, but as a citizen of this community.

For 33 years, I've been involved with Charlottesville.

For 28 of those years, I have worked in jobs that are in Charlottesville, not in the county, but in the city itself.

I come to you with some comments and thanks for your attention to this matter and your help.

The comments that I bring are ones that I've acquired over those decades, really decades of exposure to this downtown mall in particular.

I'm proud to be here.

I'm proud to be a business owner, but I'm also proud to serve in other capacities.

I'm a retired member of the faculty of the University of Virginia.

I'm a member of the Charlottesville Rotary Club and on its board of directors.

I'm the chairman of the service project committee, and we intend to support

and keep service going for this beautiful community which we all serve.

I bring to you some comments that I've received over the decades about the deterioration and the continued deterioration of the mall itself.

I've had, as I said, many people coming that I worked with professionally and personally bringing them down to the mall.

You can see the deterioration of the bricks.

It is in bad need of repair and all the things that Mr. Tolbert has outlined and that you have approved really, really needs to be done and approved.

I was embarrassed just about six weeks ago when a visitor from out of town, an artist, a friend of ours came and we were taking the couple down to lunch at Hamilton's and as we walked down the mall,

This person reached down, you saw that brick that was out of the one?

There was a brick exactly like that that she reached down, put back in place.

It is truly something that needs to be done now.

I applaud your efforts.

I really appreciate your planning and the efforts that's gone into this and would appreciate your support for approving this project.

Thank you, Mr. Perkins.

Raymond Mason.

My name is Beth Meyer.

I live at 2000 Thompson Road.

The first thing I want to do is express my thanks to council and to staff for their careful listening and leading over the last two months.

I do think there's a big difference between stakeholder meetings and surveys and thoughtful discussion among people with differences so that compromises can be reached.

and compromises that have to do with understanding the malls, many attributes and roles in this city.

It is an economic center of our city, but one of the reasons it is, is that it's

Individual businesses gather around a public space.

It's a social space, a place where people can sit and walk whether they can afford to buy something or not.

And in addition to that, it's a cultural and historic treasure designed by a significant American landscape architect.

So it's an economic center, but it's a social space and a historic treasure.

Second point I want to mention is I want to thank the city for considering the scope change and reducing the extent of the renovations so that what is done is done better and done well.

and I think that eliminating the omni end and the side streets will allow there to be a focus on the 1970s section that needs repair and will allow for other important new uses to potentially happen on the side streets and the western end later with future renovations like children's play areas, art, memorials, etc.

Third quick point, I want to agree with the general decision to move with the 4x12 brick, and I know there's been an incredible amount of discussion about something so minute, but I want to underscore the fact that every other brick walk in the city and the campus is a small brick, and it's that larger brick that differentiates this project from not only the adjacent buildings, but other projects.

I had an email today from Larry Halpern's assistant, Dean Mullins,

asking me to convey his preference for this alternative to the group and also his thanks for the consideration of his project over the last month.

Final quick point, thanks to the city for creating this design assistance committee to assist the staff and the consultants over the next couple of months, members of Preservation Piedmont, private design firms,

Members of the university faculty are willing to assist in this effort and we look forward to hearing more about this proposal as the success of the renovation depends on the details.

If you really want to do the right thing, let's have a serpentine wall to pull bricks from the downtown wall.

Let's honor Thomas Jefferson with a silver finger.

Here's what we do with bricks.

We throw away the ones that are damaged and destroyed and we look to the future.

and get out of this worship of Thomas Jefferson.

It's the same thing on the lawn.

Everybody's wondering, how do we refurbish this thing and do it in a Thomas Jefferson way?

We have much better material sciences.

We have people there at the university in engineering and material sciences.

They can give you the answers, just ask.

Make it cost effective.

Build a life on a jet board.

Build them all like a jet force.

Make it thick concrete.

Make it last for a very long time.

Look to the future.

Look to the long haul.

And then, what do you do for beauty?

I've seen Broadway's in concrete out of Kansas City.

They have a travel effect.

Beautiful pebbles.

Pebbles that look like sand, except they're a little larger.

A little smaller than pea gravel.

You could use white rock.

I would suggest one color.

So like looking at a beach.

Maybe in Hawaii, something like that.

Or some other beautiful beach.

You'd stand and travel along.

Make it beautiful.

If you'd like to really make it beautiful, you could have flats, bronze flats.

Those things are being seen out of Monticello and the cemetery out there.

That's what Dan Jordan, okay.

Now, a loogie, a lady by the name of Loogie is in charge of the cemetery out there.

I'm not making contact with her.

And they have done that.

Your time is up, Mr. Hall.

Thank you.

The next speaker is Maria Chaple.

Is there anybody else that would like to speak on this topic?

Thank you, Ms. Arrogance.

Mr. Hall?

Hi, Daniel Bluestone, 501 Park Hill.

I want to just remind quickly the council of a few really exciting stories we've had in Charlottesville in the last year.

One is the Nimmo House on Hartmans Mill Road where contractor after contractor told the Cary family

The only thing we can do for you is to tear down this house and build a new house.

And the council as you recall refused the demolition permit.

They got connected with

they got connected with a contractor who was more sympathetic and said we can save this house, we can work with it and now they've ended up with an award winning project where they were going to build that new house for their daughter and instead their daughter moved into their house and they moved into this handsome newly renovated house, less expensive

Better done.

Jefferson scholars, our argument was, and you went along with it, you thought it was good, it sounded reasonable, why tear down a building that can be refurbished for $200 a square foot and build a building that's going to cost $500 a square foot?

Why not go with the rehabilitation?

And I think that when I hear Jim Tolbert tell you that

10 to 15% of the bricks on the mall are in bad shape.

I look at that and I say 85% of those bricks are in pretty good shape.

How is it that we've gotten to the place where long deferred and overdue maintenance gets replaced with a hugely expensive other way of treating the problem, which is to tear everything out and start over again new.

I think what you could do

is to decide that this is going to be a labor intensive project instead of a capital intensive project.

Hire masons from our community, train masons to work slowly from one end of the mall, repointing those bricks where they need to be repaired, flipping them over and reusing them.

I just don't understand how it is that we've again found ourselves in the position where we're just going to say, to hell with it, we'll do the most expensive thing

and forget the incredible qualities of that mall that can easily be recycled and reused and I think that that's what you ought to be thinking about.

Why not hang on to the 85% of the bricks just as an economic way and I don't trust the one number, the one consultant that you've had that says well that'll cost $500,000.

Go to a bunch of masons, go to people in your community and say

What can you do to help us keep around this mall to make it safer and to take care of the long deferred maintenance problem?

Thank you for indulging me again here in Waters, 1014 St. Charles Avenue.

Whichever way council goes with this bricking project on the mall, I would just encourage you, what I saw this week and what I've heard from the people in the community who were

really distraught over the shooting.

It's easier to get a gun than it is to get a job in this community.

And so I would encourage you to do whatever you can to build on perhaps what Mr. Bluestone is saying and find a way that we can have local people do the work, local masons, and if we can even find a way to build in some sort of apprenticeship so that some of these young people who are resorting to violence in the neighborhoods because they have no hope

Some of the homeless and some of these felons are able to do some of this work.

Good evening.

I'm Peter Kleeman.

I live at 407 Hedge Street in the city.

Before I make comments on this, I want to thank you for having confidence in me and appointing me to the PVCC advisory board.

I thank you very much for that.

On the issue of the mall, I've been a downtown, north downtown resident.

I live just a few blocks north of the mall since 1984.

I am on the mall almost every day now, and I've spent a great deal of time on the mall.

It's not a new thing that there have been maintenance needs on the mall and over the last 10, 15, 20 years there's been concern about issues on the mall and

I'm not sure that they have been well considered and responded to.

But there's been very little talk about maintenance of the future mall.

If this mall is going to be totally replaced, it's all been about capital costs and I think it would be very interesting to look at what the life cycle cost estimates are for the new project and compare those among the mortar joint solution and the sand placed solution.

because there may be differences in capital costs that could be overwhelmed by differences in anticipated maintenance.

Certainly in the areas of where there's vehicular traffic or as there's other maintenance traffic on the mall, we've seen and I've shared with you some photographs of damage in some of the other sand placed

also I've gotten a certain imprinting of the mall in my memory over the 24 years I've been near the mall

And in many cases in historic preservation that I've witnessed, I'm not a landscape architect or a historic preservationist, but including some of the original fabric in the solution for any kind of changes that are taking place is often a very appealing aesthetic, at least to me.

and if we do have 85% of those bricks available, I think that we could certainly have some major sections of the mall redone as the original.

If not, certainly my preference would be that that might be 100% of the re-bricking, but if it's not going to be 100%, I don't think it should be 0% either.

I think there are some sections of the mall that could really do well by having the original fabric reintroduced and maintained and it gives you the opportunity to have that historical connection to the original mall.

If it's going to be broken up into sections, you could identify one or more sections that could have that original mortared joint look.

And it would be someplace I think that people might find appealing.

It would be interesting to see how other people would respond to that kind of aesthetic.

Thank you, Mr. Kleeman.

Anybody else?

Yes, sir.

I see.

I'm George Benfront, owner of Sips Wine and Champagne Bar.

I recently moved to Charlottesville to take on being a businessman on the downtown mall.

But my history goes back to 1986 coming here when my daughter first attended the University of Virginia and we bought a townhouse in the city of Charlottesville at that time.

Over the years there have been many great memories on the downtown mall.

I unfortunately lost a wife to cancer and when I met another lovely woman, she first met my daughter at the Omni Hotel for brunch on the downtown mall.

A wonderful memory.

Had 10 years I've had season tickets for UVA football games, beating FSU and celebrating the mall.

Great memory.

And I've really enjoyed this as a tourist, and now as a resident, and now as a business person.

This mall has lots to offer for the future.

Thank you, Mr. Benford.

Anybody else?

Going once.

OK, we'll close the public hearing.

And we have before us a resolution before council for consideration tonight.

And basically, the resolution reads, whereas the city council has determined it necessary to rehabilitate the infrastructure of the downtown mall,

and whereas City Council has reviewed the plans prepared by MMM Engineering and whereas City Council has made several key decisions in authorizing this project to move forward.

Now therefore be it resolved by the City Council of the City of Charlottesville that the following design decisions are made.

Do not complete the West End Water Street.

No new fountains.

Use existing lights.

Comply with dark skies and use LED lights.

No permanent cafe enclosures.

No newspaper box corrals.

No Sister City Plaza.

No additional public art.

Do not alter tree patterns.

Nothing but two red maples and one stump to be removed.

Yes to Wi-Fi.

Yes to use of granite, but no new banding.

Yes, add drinking fountains.

No play area for children.

Study for future possibility.

Be it further resolved that the City Council, the City of Charlottesville instructs the design team to use 4x12 brick pavers that are set in sand.

Council has determined that this is the optimum method for brick installation in light of the maintenance plan proposed by City Parks and Recreation and in an effort to honor the Lawrence Halperin design.

I would like to talk about resolution also, but before I would like to make general comments.

Resolution itself seems fine, except it will serve all what we are not going to do as to what we are going to do.

It is all negative and it seems very depressing to me to have, after spending several and a half million dollars, to have such a depressing resolution.

As many people have pointed out already, that

Downtown Mall is a treasure in many ways.

It is the heart of our community and I think the renovation of this mall is really long overdue and I think it is another approach we have come to I think which is trying to preserve the character and design as it was originally done.

I think the more I am keeping with what needs to be done and I support those kind of things.

I have a number of questions which I wanted to raise and maybe Mr. Torbert can respond to them.

For the idea of using 4x12 brake in the crossings, I'm not quite clear whether we're still using 4x12 brakes in crossings or not.

I'm sorry?

The intent is to use 4x8.

Well, I think that, are we going to use more than regular crossings?

No sir, please say and say that.

It is still part of the mall, it always was part of the mall, at least which was on the main street.

I would really like to see it, if you break brakes, you can always replace it in sand.

If you are going to do it in sand, it will not be that difficult to replace it.

So that is one comment I have, I guess.

We're still trying to make a determination off that.

It will not be destroyed or thrown away.

There has been some interest from folks in purchasing the brick.

There's a lot of interest people might want it in their yards.

We can use it, we can grind it and use it for trails in the city and other parks.

What we'd like to do is

is talk to our procurement folks and have a little bit more discussion about the best way to dispose of it and we can come back to you with a plan for that in the future.

We haven't made a decision at this point.

Our biggest concern about trying to provide it for people to purchase is the management of that, where you keep it, where you store it, who handles the purchase and all, but there seems to be a lot of interest in that

We're talking about old bricks.

If you look at the central place front, the brick there was the original brick under the mall, before the mall was built, when we dug up, so that brick still is

from previous generations.

So I hope in your renovation of Fountain you will not get rid of those bricks because they are the original bricks which came when we were breaking up the street.

Those bricks, the original street used to be Brick Street.

So that I hope you will not destroy by mistake.

A lot of it's going to depend on, quite frankly, to do this in four months, how we get it up.

If we pick up brick by brick, we won't be finished taking them up in four months.

Again we want to keep some in stock for the future using runnels and repairs.

And I wanted to ask that question again to you.

Last, the plaza at the western end in front of Albany, not in front of Albany but in the western sub-plates, that plaza was an old plaza and I would hope that you would

be able to renovate that also as part of it.

So, there is only general comments I wanted to make and I would wait for the resolution until everybody else has a chance to talk.

I do have one comment.

I would love to see a newspaper grouped together because I think we look quite hideous in the East.

and I think it could be improved.

It really distracts from the downtown more.

I understand there is a need for freedom of press and I think we should still have that.

I am not opposed to that.

I don't know if they're hideous, I think they're tacky, for lack of a better term, but I don't know what we can do with them.

I don't like the idea of corral in them particularly, but I do think they're a little bit of an eyesore, I think, to some extent.

I don't think they add much to the character for them all.

That's what we've been told by a lot of the designers.

I just think it's kind of interesting.

Well, I got a call early this morning.

suggesting that I not vote for this because it has not created a true sense of economic justice for all parts of the city.

And I read again through the entire packet

And one of the comments that was most interesting from the survey was this, the good, the bad, the ugly is what makes the mall successful.

You can't separate them.

The bad is the mall is a result of the economic decisions that were made after the Vinegar Hill

It was all part of the economic plan of the city to provide more transportation and commerce and all the other good things that can come from an economic district.

So I'd like to believe that

The renovation and rehab of the mall will also create an opportunity to renovate and rehab the economic opportunities within the city.

If you're seeing four work crews and Cairn Waters made it clear that it's easier to get guns than jobs in this city, that maybe we need to change that balance of power.

and provide true employment opportunities with this to include the homeless and our felons and the opportunity to partner with PVCC to make sure that people are getting trained for sustainable careers.

I also think that in terms of reviewing the bad, the Vinegar Hill,

and the entire culture that created the decision at that time that it's important for me to acknowledge now that the downtown mall needs to be renovated because I want the same acknowledgement of the public housing renovations that need to be rehabbed as well.

The same intent and the same level of intention that has gone to

The bricks that provide the commerce should be the same level of intention that provide the bricks for the housing in the places that people call homes.

And if the mall needs to be redeveloped, then it's time for the public housing sites to be redeveloped.

They all came around the same era.

That was the bad.

The ugly

is the money.

We're not ever going to get over how much money we're spending on this.

The other ugly is just the idea of the mall being renovated.

Four different crews all over the winter.

And you know what happens when we get one snowflake here?

If we get two at a time,

it's going to shut down everything.

So there has to be a real clear plan as to what's going to happen with inclement weather.

The good is that it really, truly provides an opportunity to enhance our economic district and create revenue for social programs that we do value

I've heard more people talking about the homeless than I ever have within the city.

And it's come from different parts of the community now.

And even at the last public meeting we had, I think Raymond Mason said it eloquently when he said people might be homeless, but they're not cityless.

And we need to honor our public space and honor it in a way that

Everyone, truly everyone benefits.

As far as the newspaper corrals,

You know, I'll go along with that.

I'll explore if that needs to be revisited.

But as we do that, I like to make sure that our friends that put the Daily Progress in and Seaville and The Hook and New Real Estate and the other newspapers are part of that conversation too, to make sure that we're not making a decision that's not going to continue to make those papers as accessible.

As far as the

The brick design, there's someone in Crescent Halls that I serve and she's blind.

In the mall such as it is now, I couldn't have her meet me for lunch in a Rapture because of the way the bricks are, she would really be at risk.

for hurting yourself.

So what's going to be important for me is that it's designed well so that everyone can really appreciate them all, even if they can't see it.

So I'm not going to try hard to be eloquent.

I'm just going to randomly offer a few comments.

One comment I have is, you know, I attended

Sustainability meeting, the Akeley meeting, and the impression I got, but it's not tremendously informed, is that LED street lights are not that great at the moment, and that they illuminate the color of the light and how much they cost, that it's a technology that will probably be there in a few years, but it might not be there yet, and I just think we, so I'll just encourage us to make sure that

whatever we do biting wise is what we want to do even though I'd love to see them be LED lights.

That was based on a conversation with a guy from Ann Arbor who's actually I think they've done a lot with that and I think he's like the national expert on it.

It does seem to me sort of that we kind of made a decision

to replace the brick some years ago.

As a result of that, it's been a while since we've done any repointing of the existing bricks.

Is that somewhat accurate that we started planning that this was the direction we would go?

A massive amount, a number of years.

We do emergency work all the time.

I don't think we've done any of the last, any major work in terms of the big section right down the line.