City Council Meeting   11/3/2008

P.S.

P.S.

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

We'll start with the Pledge of Allegiance.

In the fire of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

I'm just going to start as we normally do with some announcements.

The first announcement should come as no news to any of you, I hope, and nobody watching at home, but tomorrow is a very important day in the life of our commonwealth, in the life of our country, and I want to take one last final opportunity to encourage all of you here in the chambers, and especially all of you watching at home, please exercise your democratic responsibility, your democratic

We have the obligation, if you will, in your democratic right to participate in a free and open election tomorrow.

It's vitally important that people do come out and vote and express your preference.

We have some big decisions to make as a country.

We have the presidential race, the vice president, the United States Senate, and the United States Congress.

We are, as you can see behind us,

The Charlottesville Falls Church 2008 Get Out The Vote Challenge.

You may wonder what that's all about.

I made a friendly wager with the mayor of Falls Church.

Some of you may know Falls Church in 2004 at the highest turnout rate of any city in the Commonwealth.

and so we have a friendly way of going with Falls Church and we this year aspire to have the highest turnout of any city in the Commonwealth.

The mayor in Falls Church gracefully took me up on the challenge and we hope you do come out, not because we're going to get a little sass frost tree out of it from Falls Church, but more importantly because

Many people gave their lives, literally gave their lives for our right to vote and it's important that we exercise that right.

The city is doing a number of things tomorrow to try to make the voting process go easier.

We are encouraging people, if you can, to avoid driving to the polls because the parking lots can get congested.

We have made the Charlottesville Transit Service fare free tomorrow.

So you can hop on the bus to the polls.

There is public transportation access to every single one of our, within two blocks of every single one of the polling places.

Carpool, John is offering free rides tomorrow for city residents who are elderly or disabled to the polls.

Call John and arrange a ride.

Walk, ride your bike, however you can.

If you need to drive, then drive.

We encourage people to vote during the mid-morning and mid-afternoon hours, which will be less congested.

Make sure you bring some form of identification.

And last but certainly not least, be patient.

There will be some long lines at certain polls during certain times of the day.

Please be patient.

The lines will proceed.

We're going to have extra city staff on hand tomorrow to make sure the lines go through in an orderly fashion and hopefully get you in and out of the polls as quickly as possible.

Tomorrow from 11 to 3, the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression and Charlottesville's own TV 10 will have a live feed out at the Freedom of Expression monument out on the Mall so anybody can come by and encourage your fellow citizens to vote.

It will be aired live on channel 10 from 11 to 3 tomorrow.

Come by and have your time on camera to encourage your fellow citizens to vote and if you want to put in a pitch for your candidate, you are certainly welcome to do so.

One other announcement, another downtown event.

Thursday, November 6th, which is this Thursday at 2 o'clock, we're going to have the public preview and groundbreaking of the Downtown Mall Restoration Project.

It will be at the 5th Street Crossing, directly outside of City Space.

This is sponsored by the Downtown Business Association and the City of Charlottesville.

Please do come if you are available.

I wanted to make an announcement.

At the last city council meeting, I announced that the interim report cards have come out for all of our children in the city schools.

Since then, the actual report cards have arrived.

So if you haven't seen this in your household, you should start looking for it right now.

When you get the report card, share it with your relatives or three of your neighbors because it really takes the whole village to raise our children.

And I want you to share the report card with your friends and family members and neighbors because I want them to be able to encourage the children when they're making good grades and also encourage our children when they need to make better choices about their grades.

And so I'm going to share this report card.

And the part that I really want you to pay attention to, especially at this point, is the attendance.

Look under the absences and the tardies.

In the service, Dr. Brown.

Last meeting under matters by the public was brought to our attention that our new policy of issuing free passes to high school, to Charlottesville high school kids wasn't being extended to taxpayers who happen to have kids attending either private schools or being homeschooled and that's now being made, is being made available so anyone who has a high school aged child either being homeschooled or in private school they can get a free bus pass

I forgot exactly which department of the city we need to contact.

CTS customer service and they can get an ID.

We do have two items, at least two items that I know of that we're adding to the end of tonight's agenda under other business.

First is an expanded scope of work outline for an expert panel performing a review for the water supply plan.

and secondly is a discussion, hopefully a brief discussion regarding Piedmont Housing Alliance Project on John Street and we'll be hearing more about that at the end of the agenda and the other items to be added to the agenda.

Well I am, I feel blessed tonight to be able to

to honor some of our city employees.

The City of Charlottesville is a major employer in the region and the City of Charlottesville as an employer has consistently been a supporter of our employees' right to participate in the National Guard and the National Reserve and other reserve of our United States military.

We have a number of employees who participate as in the reserve, in the Guard,

and we've been asked by a number of cities all around the country as an initiative of the United States Conference of Mayors who have been asked to as a sort of a model employer, if you will,

our own employees who serve in the Garden Reserve and help protect our country in times of crisis, but act to encourage other employers in our area to likewise support the Garden Reserve.

And so tonight we're going to honor some of our own employees and here to join us are

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

I bring you greetings from our bosses, the Assistant Secretary of Defense, the Honorable Tom Hall, and the National Executive Director, Dr. Gordon Sumner.

The important support of the Garden Reserve, commonly known as ESGR, is privileged to be here tonight

because you, Mr. Mayor, have just recently signed a statement of support as you've mentioned from the National Association of Mayors.

That challenge has been trained down to every city government in the country to sign a statement of support whereby you are pledging that this administration

is supporting their employees who also serve in the Garden Reserve.

These are very, very important employees.

In the words of Winston Churchill, he referred to them as twice the citizens.

They have their military part-time reserve career and they have their civilian career with the city of Charlottesville.

The operations tempo for the Guarding Reserve has changed from a strategic reserve to an operational reserve and you know as well as I do that your own Monticello Guard has been mobilized a couple of times and sent out in part of the global war on tour

In Virginia alone, we have 8,500 known employers who have employees that also serve in the Guarding Reserve.

As a national initiative, we are asking each of these employers to sign a Statement of Support, and again, Mayor Norris has signed one tonight on behalf of

of the City of Charlottesville.

Subsequently, we also have the Chief of Police and the Fire Chief of the City of Charlottesville sign one as well.

You join a very distinguished group of mayors and city councils in the Commonwealth and across this country.

You mentioned tomorrow how important it is to get out and vote.

Every one of you knows that, as you have said, Mayor Norris, that right has been purchased

many, many times over by the many women who serve in our military.

Today, 46% of our military are Brosnan reservists.

And with the support and cooperation of all civilian employers, our endeavors will not be successful in maintaining the appropriate national defense posture that we need to maintain.

So, in a way, mayor and city council members, I'm welcoming you to the Department of Defense because you are playing a distinguished role as well.

So we appreciate that opportunity.

We appreciate you honoring members tonight of your city administration that are also in the Guard and Reserve.

And that's important to do that and to honor these dual citizens and so forth.

We have it framed now.

And on behalf of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, it's my pleasure to present you with this and thank you for your support of the veteran reserve and your employees who serve there.

We will be posting this in the hallway outside the city council chambers.

Our Vice Mayor is going to come down front, Mr. Taliaferro, and as I call the names forward, we have a number, as I said, a number of city employees who currently serve in the garden reserves.

I don't know if they're all here tonight, but we've invited them to be here tonight.

And I also want to say a special word of thanks and acknowledgement to their families, because not just the employees, but it's their whole families that really do sacrifice for all of us.

So we thank the families as well.

In no particular order, we'll start with Ed Early, Quentin King, Steve Walton, David Mosey, Chad Bingler, Scott Parkinson,

Thank you, Mr. Paulson.

We have Josh Samuels, and it was a note here that Mr. Samuels is actually currently on active duty in Iraq, so we send him our best wishes.

Paul Barrett.

Noel Spicer, Mr. Spicer.

Michael Kirkpatrick

Nigel Mason, Jeremy Evans, Bobby Elliott, Bill Kerr, and last but not least, Larry Antonacci.

Did I miss anybody by chance?

I hope not.

Let's give all of them one more round of applause.

We thank you again for your service to our community and to our countries.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Taliaferro.

We will now move into the next portion of our meeting, which is matters by the public.

And as always, we ask that members of the public keep your remarks to three minutes per speaker.

And when you come forward, state your name and your address.

We have a number of people that signed up to speak tonight.

Thank you.

I was here last month to sort of talk about the partner study.

I'm back again and the first thing I'd like to say is in terms of partner study, let me also tell you I'm with Octagon Partners which is in the old Gleason's building on the other side of railroad tracks.

We used to pull the peg study, so the whole process wasn't necessary to my liking, but we're happy with what's come out of the process.

It's taken much longer than we were told it would take, and the reason we got involved in this in the first place is that we're building with Leeson's condominium building, which is a project that by every measure to me seems to be completely in keeping with what the city wants to have happen in the city, which is infra-redevelopment

with a mix of housing, office, and commercial.

The problem that we have, and the reason why we got involved in the city earlier last year is that all the parking on the street is unrestricted which means you can park there all day long.

And that makes sense down Garrett Street, up Garrett Street, on Monticello Avenue, but what we've got right there

I think that there's an area that is surrounded by mixed uses that rely on the ability for parking to turn over once or twice a day but, you know, preferably more.

And I think that's elementary, I think everyone can understand that.

I understand it takes a while to get through a process of apartment setting to make sure that it's done equitably and that, you know, you're not

We're meeting one set of parking and disenfranchising another set of people.

And I don't think you can really argue that we need parking to turn over on our street.

Not the whole street, but 15 spaces.

Whatever the Parker study recommends, we need it.

And we're in support of that.

and I really hope that you are too because we're doing a project that is first asked because we're under construction to eliminate the parking that we had but we're not even doing this project which our city supports without removing the parking so now that we've got more parking we really need the parking to turn over and we came to the city last year or early this year

to try to change this.

And what's happened is that the ability to change every part of the park has been suspended until the park study is complete.

And we totally get doing it as a whole, we totally get moving forward.

But the problem is, it hasn't moved forward.

It's come to you today for review, and it's going to come to you next month, and hopefully it will be approved.

But there's no telling that that's going to happen.

And we, until we get involved in the process, are going to end by the end of summer.

But that's not really my biggest issue.

My biggest issue is once the public study gets complete, we're told that our neighborhood has to wait until the mall renovation is complete because there will be too much interruption.

We're a good 300 feet from the mall on the other side of railroad tracks and several blocks away.

So we just can't understand that something that we need needs to wait until the mall is renovated.

And when you think about it a little bit further, if you were to lose side street parking along the mall during construction, wouldn't you want spaces somewhere else to be able to turn over?

But the spaces on our street from where we were told are going to be unrestricted until the mall is done, which means those spaces can't be used.

And so, that alone is, we need something to happen with this.

We don't think that it should wait until the end of the mall is complete.

We can understand

Let the study move forward in a uniform fashion even though it's been delayed.

But once it's approved, some of these who are out there spend an hour or two at their lunch in some new signs and give us 15 spaces that turn over once or twice in a day, at a minimum.

And that's all I've got to say.

Thank you, Mr. Kelly Colombo.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Councillors.

The Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority and Rivanna-Salvoist Authority, a joint City-County appointment that serves on both authorities, is seeking applications, as Chair Mike Gaffney's term is ending.

I also understand it is the City's turn to choose the nominee and if the County agrees or not, and if the County will agree or not.

We thank Mr. Gaffney for his service, especially since the past two years have been complicated and involved.

It is time for a change.

The citizens, the rate payers, the neighborhoods ask you to choose another person with a more technical perspective of the demands of a future water, sewer and solid waste needs of the joint city-county community.

and my second topic.

The silent majority of water-sewer ratepayers reverse this.

neither the city nor the county included in the water and sewer bills the questionnaire on the future of the South Fork, Rivanna Reservoir the main water supply for the city, county, community the reason it was not included was due to the timing of both cycling unfortunately, the task force only gave citizens 22 days to answer the questionnaire

People who are not online have unknown email addresses out of town, do not get or read local newspapers, but do pay low insured bills or voiceless.

Clearly, the deadline should have been extended until the questionnaire could have been included in the utility bill cycle.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

My name is John Wheeler, 5058th Street Northeast in Charlottesville.

The residents of Charlottesville have been looking on helplessly while the Rivanna, Robert & Sue Authority Board has run amuck with our money.

We are wondering, why is this board off control?

To find out, I've read through the minutes of every council meeting in 2008.

The only resolution involving the Rivanna Board was on June 2nd, and it requested a dredging study.

That resolution has been totally ignored today.

There's nothing else.

I found no resolution of instruction to the city's two representatives on the Rivanna board.

This means either that you're not giving them any direction at all, or that you're doing so privately.

I don't know which possibility is more disturbing.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Thank you, Councillors.

My name is Jack Brown.

I live at 1505 Daley Road.

I also want to thank all of you here tonight in front of me and the Supervisors and the RWSA Board for your hard work and dedication on the water issue over many years.

I come before you to urge you to require RBUSA as quickly as possible to commission the full bathometric studies that any reputable firm will need to produce realistic and reliable cost estimates for dredging the reservoir.

To call for proposers on dredging is the only responsible step that you can take to maintain our infrastructure.

Dredging is maintenance.

It amazes me how the public debate has missed this key point.

But even those who should know better, ignore this fact.

I have frequently heard arguments from the highest people in OWSA that we shouldn't judge now because we'll have to judge again in 40 or 50 years.

The notion is the suit will keep coming.

Let's pause a moment and look at that logic.

What it amounts to saying is we should not maintain now because we'll have to maintain again in 40 years.

Would you apply that logic to a city building, to a city road?

We shouldn't paint this building today because we'll have to paint it again in 40 years.

The second flaw here is that in fact we can actually slow the sale and simplify future creation.

Wise public policy and maintenance can accomplish both of those goals.

Of course the third flaw with this logic is that the Ragged Mountain Dam and pipeline will also have a huge maintenance burden.

An un-costed maintenance burden in the current plan, but when you go out and create a new river for Charlottesville, the pipeline, the cost of maintaining all of that mechanical engineering infrastructure will be overwhelming.

The first flaw is that in the end we want to escape a maintenance burden at South Fork.

even if we build the full wagon mountain plan.

We will end up having to buy the box behind door number one and then down the road, as Monty Hall would have it, we'll buy the box behind door number two.

And finally, the fifth flaw here, over time the environmental regulations that will govern verging in any instance, those regulations are only getting more burdensome with every passing decade.

Why not bite this bullet now?

Now tonight you need not sign off again on the overall RWSA plan as if it were still relevant given the cracks and flaws that it develops every month.

Thank you.

Thank you Mr. Brown.

Good evening, Mayor and Councillors.

I'm Gail McIntosh, 9, Guildersley, Wood, Charlottesville, and I am representing the Jefferson Park Barium Neighborhood Association and we are supporting the resolution which I would like to read.

It is hereby resolved that the City Council of Charlottesville, in order to ensure the city tax payers, water and sewer rate payers, are not subject to unnecessary water and sewer rate increases.

to protect the integrity of the city owned ragged mountain and natural area will prohibit

Thank you very much for your consideration.

Thank you Ms. Mactosh.

Hello, I'm Dave Morris, Mayor Morris and Councillors.

Good evening.

My name is Maria Chaple and I live at 1029 Hazel Street and I'm here representing the Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association.

The Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association joins the following neighborhood associations, Fry's Springs, Starr Hill, North Downtown, Jefferson Park Avenue, and the Willam Mills in passing the following resolution that you just heard JPA, but I think it bears repeating.

Resolution.

It is hereby resolved that the City Council of Charlottesville, in order to ensure that the city taxpayers and water rate payers are not subject to unnecessary water rate and tax increases, and to protect the integrity of the city-owned Bragged Mountain Natural Area, will prohibit any excavation, deforestation, or road construction activities related to the proposed Bragged Mountain Dam unless studies clearly demonstrate

that the construction of such a new dam and pipeline is less expensive and less environmentally destructive than dredging the south fork down the reservoir as part of a 50-year community water supply plan.

Thank you very much.

My name is Mary Huey.

My address is 807 Village Road.

Good evening, Councillors, and I just am here to add my voice to the comments that have been made just previously, and to say I'm not representing any large group, but just as an ordinary resident of Charlottesville, I've been trying to follow the Wagon Mountain Dam issue through newspapers and internet blogs and so on.

and I would come increasingly concerned about the nebulousness of the figures that are coming out and I would really, really like to have the council look at some true cost estimates of the entire Ragamont project and also look at figures for dredging.

Good evening.

I plan to vote earlier in the morning.

Good.

And Austin?

I think we're going to do Falls Church.

I'm here this evening.

My name is Richard Collins.

I live at 108 Wilson Court.

All of you know, of course, that there has been a task force crew that's live here at the instigation of the city council resolution concerning the right of supply.

I want to compliment Mayor Norris and Mr. Boyd, the chairman of the board of supervisors, for trying to clarify for that task force exactly what that

Bobby was intended to do.

I won't quote from it extensively, but I do note that it was not intended, say the mayor and the board chair, to reopen the basic parameters for the water supply plan.

And I agree that we should not do that.

And those basic parameters are intact.

That is, we are going to keep the water from within our watershed,

We are going to have a sufficient supply to meet reasonably foreseeable needs.

We're going to deliver in the most economically practicable way, and we're going to be environmentally responsible.

So we are, I think, in a position where once again we depend upon city council as a partner, the senior partner,

of the two parties that created this authority to say we want this pledging study to be completed, to be technically completed and to have it done quickly so we can get on to determine whether these basic parameters can be met in time before any water, drought, emergency might arise.

So I'm here tonight, even though I haven't read the exact language that I understand you'll be addressing, I agree with those who have said, give the city manager and the public works director an immediate resolution as to what you want this task force to do.

And if they do, and I believe they will if you pass this resolution, we will not see it as a city-county issue any longer.

It will be a question of those of us who have joined together, city and county, to find the best possible outcome for this water supply plan.

D.D.

Smith.

D.D.

Smith, 2652 Jefferson Park Circle.

Good evening.

First of all, I'd like to thank you all for your comments at the last meeting, at the end of the last meeting, with your concerns about the rising costs of the water supply plan.

I watched them online and actually watched them several times.

I like them so much.

My comments tonight do have to do with paying for this water supply plan.

And I'd just like to say that I do understand how difficult this all must be for you because it's a very complex issue.

and even thinking about changing course at this point, it just can't be easy.

But the fact is, neither you, nor I, nor the Band of Water and Sewer Authority really have any idea how much this plan is going to cost.

Even after, if and when, actually they can nail down the cost of the dam, that leaves the pipeline, which is just a huge financial question.

only conceptual, so we really have no idea.

So please, I am just asking for the sake of your constituents that you at this point do not give the Rivanna board a blank check, that you do insist that before you commit to this plan that you know exactly, or at least within a reasonable estimate, what it will cost.

and along the same lines, as you proceed with the decision on the water supply plan, I ask that you keep in mind really what part of these plans have to do with benefiting the Shallows for Water customer.

Because in my reading of it, and I've read quite a bit about it, it's really largely a conservation project.

If you do choose to go ahead with this plan, whose primary goal, quite frankly, is river restoration, I would ask that you ask yourselves how best to pay for it.

Because water rates may not be the answer to that.

And that's particularly true in this community where

where half the county who will benefit from this project won't actually pay anything for it.

So I think one of the questions you can ask yourself is would you be willing to raise tax rates to pay for this project?

Would the county be willing to raise tax rates to pay for it?

And if not, really why wouldn't we raise water rates to pay for it?

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Smith.

My name is Betty Mooney and I live here in Charlottesville, Virginia.

And I wish it was Tina Fey tonight, but I'm not.

And I want to thank you all for all the hard work you put into this, listening to us for over a year now about the water supply.

A year ago we came here and thanks to Council Brown at the time as mayor, we were allowed to have a public hearing.

The county residence system now had a public hearing.

And that was actually the first public hearing on the water supply.

and at that public hearing you heard a lot about dredging and I'm very hopeful tonight that you will go forward and ask the dredging surveys finally go through because we can't get any of the information that we're asking for all of the neighborhoods, the citizens who have come forward I have the petitions to give you here from you all standing out at the city market, Mr. Huja many times

this summer saw me at the city market collecting petitions which say, don't do anything at Wagon Mountain until you get the dredging surveys.

And there are 481 names on these petitions and there are actually another 400 somewhere in my house that I hope to find and bring you to another council meeting.

The documents have been stacking up and we're going to have to move, I think.

My husband, I think, is ready to put up a teepee in the backyard.

But I just want to read one more thing

and this is something that Mr. Crutchfield wrote and I think it's very appropriate for all of you to think about as you make your decision tonight.

His whole letter is worth reading but he says, my second reason for suggesting that our community's water supply plan should be revisited is fundamental.

We are very fortunate to have such fine, bright, and dedicated people serving on our City Council Board of Supervisors.

However, the process which they use to analyze and approve critically important issues like this water plan appears to have been flawed.

And I would just say, we have new information now.

I don't necessarily agree with that statement.

But if it has been flawed, let's just forget about it now.

Let's just say there's new information on the dam, there's new information on the pipeline.

We know the route won't work, the cost is unknown, the design is unknown, and as a community, I know all of you have business backgrounds in various aspects.

You couldn't possibly go forward with this.

And so we know it needs to be done tonight, and I hope you do the right thing and get the dredging surveys underway.

Kevin, have you turned that on?

Mr. Mayor and Council Members, my name is Joe Mooney.

I live at 201 Sunset Avenue.

I hope that you'll listen very carefully because you have been attentive to us over the past year and it is something that has struck us that we've been at this for over a year at this point.

But if you listen carefully, I'm going to give you a secret and that is how you can get rid of us.

As our council representatives, you have the opportunity to provide new leadership for the Mountain Water Sewer Authority and that new term for the chairman of that authority begins on January 1st.

We must have an end to the confusion that we have been dealing with, that you have been dealing with, that the community has increasingly become aware of.

We have not seen from RWSA a careful planning process.

We have not seen detailed verifiable cost estimates.

We've not even seen standard contracting processes.

We've not had representation of the rate payers in any verifiable way.

and we have not, and this may be the bottom line that troubles me and many others, we have not had fact based decision making.

I think that we've been pursuing some very laudable ideas but we've been deluded into thinking that since they're good ideas they should be enacted.

What we need is to go back to fact based decision making.

I hope that you insist

on the appointment of a new chairman to that authority.

My name is Randy Mason.

I live at 717 Centana Avenue.

There's a couple of things.

The West Haven projects, a couple of safety issues.

I know it's been cleaned up somewhat.

There's a few safety issues.

Councilman Huja, you saw the shed that's in the basketball area.

It doesn't have the two supports.

It has four, but only two of them are attached.

That's still the same.

And the spike that was sticking out of the six by six for the

in front of a couple houses.

Those are still sticking up by the ground.

It would be nice if someone would go over there and dress up because they were safety issues and I thought they should have been addressed more so than cleaning.

I mean, because it's pretty dangerous.

My next issue is last week, actually a week and a half ago, I was just beside the crosswalk trying to cross the street.

And a silicon used to be a rather woman cross a little bit further up the street.

When I went to step out, he kept on going.

He gave me an eye contact and kept on going.

So, hey, you got her crosswalk and you let me cross.

Well, he pulled over and we had a little discussion.

And one thing led to another, he said, well, he jumped out of the corner and said, well, if I wanted to file a complaint, my name is so-and-so Barnett.

And he was real aggressive with me when he was actually around because I was right there near the crosswalk.

And, you know, we're a big thing talking about pedestrians and crosswalks.

And this is the rest of the quarter mile from the police department.

And he, you know, I said, I have to step back.

I was pretty pissed about it.

I did a little survey and since then seven times police didn't stop while people were at the crosswalk.

They didn't have the lights on like they were going to emergency calls.

Two times, two police men didn't stop.

Twenty-three times people in general didn't stop.

So there's an issue right down the street that needs to be addressed.

But it goes further, the officer and myself, we stopped and he was on the side in the middle of the street.

He had tripped off and there was a lot of traffic.

I said, we're going to be there, fella.

Let's talk on the side.

He said, I'm a policeman.

I don't have to move my vehicle.

You know, he's doing his job.

I said, well, you don't have your flashes on.

You don't have your blue lights on.

You know, this is the busy time of the moment, but he was so aggressive, he talked to me like I was dirt, and I was pretty pissed off because he was at fault.

I mean, you know, he could have easily let me cross the street, and I really had a problem with it.

And I think, you know, I don't know if this is a train thing, you know, to talk to minorities this way, but they need to be retrained.

Another incident concerning my brother happened on the Mall a month prior to this,

I published a report up to him and asked him was he paying him, but he was speaking to a Mr. Jack Royalis who's a local businessman.

I spoke to him today and he said he hasn't seen anything like that the way that police been talking to my brother since the 60s, which led me to believe that some of the tones were unnecessary.

And this is what the young man told me today.

And something's going on here because, you know,

The community, the black community, doesn't have a good rapport with the city police department.

And, you know, I don't know if we can get a group together and just go out and say, I mean, I see police department, they don't even wave.

I mean, you know, how are you going to be afraid of being recognized in the community if you don't wave at people all by and just look, you know?

There has to be a little something different with this.

And I don't know if you can help or not, but I sure would hope you could do something.

But the thing that we're saving, I would truly appreciate if you look into that immediately.

Thank you, Mr. Mason.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of council.

I'm Jack Yellis, thrower on East Market Street.

Hear about the parking study, which is on your agenda number three tonight.

I'm told, I learned today, that it is only advisory, informative, that you're not actually making any policy decisions tonight, which is good, because I think you need a public hearing on it and maybe more than one.

There are very many questions that occurred to me as I was reading the study.

I won't list them all, but two important ones, or three important ones were, why were the residents left out?

The first page of the study says only businesses or consultants, nobody else.

The second question is do we really want a new department or division of parking in a time of economic apocalypse?

The third question is do we want a changeover from case by case decision making to a kind of a zone parking in which certain kinds are prohibited, which would prohibit the kind of invented decision making that's happening for instance in front of the Paramount Theater.

Now I understand that people like the business owner like Mr. Barabie have very pressing and urgent concerns and they should be addressed as quickly as possible, but I think we need to take the time to have a public hearing on this so you can hear all the voices and not just from one segment of the community.

Thank you, Mr. Yellup.

It's too late to sign up.

Well, we had 10 people away, so unfortunately, feel free to contact us at other times.

There will be another opportunity at the end of the meeting.

We do need to move on with the meeting.

This will be a comment of

We have a supply system in the plan.

There have been a number of concerns raised, but I think the city council is going to address many of those concerns, at least by asking to do the studies which are necessary to make a research for the city as well.

I'll just comment on the water supply issue also.

I'll make a few comments.

I mean, I share the concerns about the rising cost of the dam.

I like the expanded scope that Mr. Connell is proposing for us to look at, have some experts come in and look in a bigger way about the cost issues that are before us.

I am concerned a little bit about the resolution that's come before us only because its language says that

it tells us not to support any dam construction unless studies show that construction of the dam is less expensive and less destructive than dredging and you know, at least from everything I know, it's not a choice between one or the other because just dredging doesn't give enough water so dredging has to be combined with some other alternative in order to meet the needs of the water supply plant I do know that there's a thoughtful proposal by the proponents

of dredging over building the dam to combine some other elements that either weren't considered or were considered and rejected, such as using

Beaver Creek, using some other water supply sources, but just dredging doesn't do it.

So I think to the degree that this resolution says dredging versus dam building, I think it's a little, it's not a yes or no question.

If it was yes or no, I think we would have had more detailed cough estimates on dredging, it would have made sense to, but I think the cost estimates weren't done in more detail because there's not enough water just by dredging.

But now that the cost is going up on the dam, I do think we need to look more carefully into all these things.

I'd also have to say to Ms.

Swift, it's the first time I've heard the water supply plan call primarily a river restoration plan.

That's a new concept that that was what we were doing with this.

It certainly wasn't, it seemed to me, a benefit to restore flow to the Mormon's River.

It didn't seem to me a purpose of the plan.

I'd also just like to address the comments of Mr. Mason.

Mr. Mason stated that black people in Charlottesville don't have a good rapport with the police department.

And I'm probably not in a position to be able to comment completely on that or leave it to other people.

I know that Ms. Edwards has proposed that we really have some positive

I do think what's clear is that Mr. Mason does not have a good rapport with the police department.

I think Mr. Mason in my time at city council has been here on

I've got seven occasions to complain about the police department.

Eight.

Eight.

Okay, thank you.

Personally, I think we have, we're the top-notch and very responsive police department and I wanted to say, you know, that the issue with public comment on personal bank features like this is you hear one side of an issue.

You don't really hear any other circumstances.

Just to segue that I have had discussions with Chief Longo about the historically struggle that there has been with African American communities not only in Charlottesville but across the nation with the police and the image that he gave which was quite true is that when Rosa Parks decided not to give up her seat

The image that was seen across the nation was two white officers that escorted her off that bus.

And historically, there's been a struggle.

So, with that said, I think there is a place for having useful and productive conversations about

about race relations in our community.

And I think that it's time that it happens in a way that everybody can benefit from it.

Second comment I wanted to make about the water supply discussions that we're having.

We're able to have a little bit more toward the end of the meeting when we discuss in depth

some ideas and visions that the city manager has developed for us.

But I wanted to comment about Collette Hall's concern about the survey.

It was an attempt to get the survey within the

the bill, but because of the billing cycle, we weren't able to do that.

That would have been the best case scenario.

But I think that every effort was made to make sure that the survey got to as many people as possible.

And I think everybody in the task force also took a similar individual responsibility in making sure that that happened.

But I did make a comment at the public hearing.

I did make an extra effort to make sure that some of our neighbors that live in Riverside Public Housing Site and over at South First Street and over at West St. had a chance to participate in the survey and I did make a special effort to go over to the Quilting Group in Crescent Halls to make sure that they had a chance to participate as well and to get information

And so I found that there is a need to make sure that the entire community is aware of the things that we're discussing and it's not just a small circle of people that have the information.

And I think also regarding the parking study, it seems that whenever we embark on any kind of

studying the city.

It's almost as if we get an idea to move forward on something like dog years before things actually happen.

But within that deliberate process, good things do happen.

so I'm also going to continue to be patient and I think that having a public hearing of some sort which will kind of lengthen the process also but to have an opportunity for not only the businesses but the commuters and the pedestrians and the people that just live in that neighborhood but don't necessarily have a business might want to have

I want to also acknowledge Dr. Brown's comments when citizens come forward with complaints about a specific city department.

It puts that department at a bit of a disadvantage because it can't come forward and talk about any citizen that has had an issue with that department.

We do have a new forum.

Ms. Edwards talked about creating forums for productive dialogue on race relations.

We do have a new forum to do just that with regard to the police department, which is our Citizens Advisory Panel, which was created in large part to promote and sustain that kind of dialogue about how to improve the relations with the city police department, with our community.

And we look forward to some productive conversations in that regard.

and I do want to say I appreciate Mr. Mason reminding us about a couple of the safety issues that have not been addressed and I hope either Mr. O'Connell or myself as the city representative on the Housing Authority Board tomorrow morning will follow up with Housing Authority on those two, so thank you.

Okay, we're now going to move to our regular business agenda.

As always, the first item on our agenda is the consent agenda.

Oh yes, thank you, Dr. Barton.

Second.

Any discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Thank you.

Congratulations.

On our consent agenda tonight, we have a number of items.

Item A is approving minutes of October 6, 9 and 17.

Item B is an appropriation of $18,000 highway safety grant, first of two readings.

item C is an appropriation of $7,118 regional jail grant, first of two readings.

Item D is an appropriation of $17,998 Justice Assistance Grant, first of two readings.

Item E is an appropriation of $8,428.52 Sheriff's Office reimbursement for extra additions, first of two readings.

Item F is an appropriation of $2,785 additional transit grant funds, first of two readings.

Item G is a resolution of $22,707, allocation of funds for teen pregnancy program to teen site in Jefferson area CHIP, first of two readings.

Item H is a resolution allocation of up to $750 from the council reserve to John for transportation for elderly and disabled city residents to the polls, first of one reading.

Item I is a resolution regarding tennis court lighting at Towe Park, first of one reading.

Item J is an ordinance designating 212 Rosser Avenue, otherwise known as Holy Temple Church, as an individually protected historic property, second of two readings.

Item K is an ordinance prohibiting extended idling, 15 minutes, by private buses, second of two readings.

Item L is an ordinance zoning update of mixed use district matrix, first of two readings.

Item M is an ordinance regarding zoning and street trees and public right-of-way, the first of two readings.

Item N is an ordinance zoning regarding theaters and mixed-use districts, first of two meetings.

Item O is water conservation ordinance amendments, second of two readings.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to point out I vote yes on all items except item O, the Water Conservation Ordinance Amendments.

As I expressed last time at our meeting, my concern about this is whereas this does tighten up

Moving to the warning stage, restrictions on use of water by hotels and laundry towels and stuff like that.

It also, I think, loosens restrictions on planting, putting inside, on watering,

things during the drive and for that reason I think it may be after further discussion I feel that the economic benefit to landscaping companies and home builders would be worth this but at this point it seems to me that this allows more water to be used at a time where we're really trying to get homeowners to the city to use less so I don't know on that item.

Thank you.

The applicant is appearing a decision of the BAR from their September meeting this year.

The BAR voted to deny demolition of 110 Tanner House Street Northwest.

It's a contributing structure in the West Main Street ABC district.

Historically known as the Moon Henderson House, it was constructed between 1883 and 1893.

It's a brick, two-story, three-day, simple, vernacular Virginia I house.

And the house is currently vacant.

The property originally was owned and built by the Moon family, an African American family.

They had a sawn rail on this property during the 1890s and also owned a wooden pole business.

The West Main Street ABC district was put in place in 1996, and then in 1997 there was actually a similar request, not the same owner, different owner at that time, from the one that owns it now.

And then in 1999,

That same owner came back and there was a renewed request to demolish the building and put in a parking lot and the BAR had a preliminary discussion that discouraged him so as far as I could tell the records indicate that it didn't proceed any further than that.

So that's the background.

The alternative is if you agree with the BRI's decision to deny the demolition, the applicant may then make appeal to Circuit Court and in addition to that right of appeal, he may also, there's a provision in the state code

and then our local zoning ordinance allows him to offer the property for sale for a year and if no one comes forward with a bona fide offer to buy it at a fair market price and preserve it and restore it, then he has the right to demolish it under the state code.

So that's an additional right.

If you agree with the appellant and then you would overturn the DAI decision, that would be the end of the process.

He could just then demolish it.

The staff recommendation, this building is between 115 and 125 years old.

It's structurally sound and that's according to the applicant.

He did not question that.

It's a brick dwelling.

It's one of the few remaining historic structures on West Main Street.

That district has had a lot of demolitions over the years, so it's an important building because it's one of the few remaining structures in that area.

And the applicant's reason given for demolition was that he needs to renovate it and he cannot financially justify that.

The BAR recommended unanimously 6-0 to the neither at best and I would mention that it's important to note they have to go through demolition criteria when they make that kind of decision and that's outlined in the BAR staff report that you have a copy of.

Any questions for Ms. Scallop before we invite the appellant forward?

Thank you.

Bill Chapman, Appellant, I couldn't find a whole lot to disagree with with the DAL decision.

It seemed that their guidelines were such that if it was a contributing structure in a historic district, which it is, and it was structurally sound, which it seems to be in terms of the shell, then they deny the request.

And I didn't really disagree with any of that.

We had most of our meetings for making suggestions on what I should do because I told them the sad story of this house and the condition it's in.

Most of it was around me waiting until the under the roof building gets developed and the neighborhood improves.

Then I can renovate my building to be office space or retail space for perhaps the residents.

And that was, again, that was my plan.

I've been doing that happily since 2003 when I got it waiting.

Fortunately, people sort of break into the house a lot.

The real dish is made out of plywood, so you can just peel it back and go in there.

We also boarded up some windows, things like that.

The city actually took a stab at boarding up some windows.

The only thing we boarded up with

by definition you have to be able to remove it and because of this location it's not visible from any occupied business or house at night and so if you wanted to go back there and spend four hours removing the barriers you could so every time you get in there you see new evidence of huge piles of cigarette butts, wine bottles, sleeping bags, things like that it was also

Condemned.

I worked with the police to try to get it, to vote oneself.

I think they called the code official and the code official condemned it.

That's just kind of sped up my process.

I was happy to just keep it as is for a few more years, but it seems like my hand's being forced now.

I did do sort of a feasibility study, which I supplied to you on converting it to a office retail use.

Looks like it's $320,000.

expense, I did a little pro forma there even if I could get a bank loan for that kind of project, which I don't think I could, I'd lose money regardless of my investment in the building, I'd lose money just borrowing from the renovations so it seems financially unfeasible so my argument is really that even though it's structurally sound, it's financially unsound

I think it's an unsafe situation to fix.

2003, under the previous owner, there was a tenant living there, single elderly woman.

But I was pretty uncomfortable with the condition of the house, which

I gave some pictures of that and they want to take on being a landlord, so I requested that he not remain her lease.

All in any detail I have the general sense that the previous owner might have requested that because he built in some other property in the neighborhood but outside the district which he had demolished.

Any other questions for Mr. Chapman?

Thank you very much.

And now we'll hear from Representative of the Board of Architectural Review.

That would be the chairman, but he's not available tonight, so I'd be happy to answer any questions.

I'm sorry to say the minutes aren't available, but it was a pretty straightforward hearing on the BA.

Okay, thank you.

It bothers me to see a situation which I view as being sort of demolition by neglect.

In other words, allowing a piece of property to become uninhabitable in order to justify tearing it down.

And that's what I think has happened here.

And I think, you know, especially considering it was habitable several years ago, it's now become uninhabitable.

You know, it's just, I don't think that's exactly

I think the process is kind of as it's been described today.

I think the process is A, that the B.A.R.

followed its rules and this was an appropriate decision based on their rules.

I think B, it probably would cost a lot of money to fix it up in order to have it be a business.

But on the other hand, it was a functioning leading code rental place and it's been allowed to not do that.

I find it unfortunate that in our community the vestiges of the African-American community have either been bricked over in the downtown hall or even washed away when you think about the hydraulic wheels community

Rivanna Reservoir is now.

So I'd like to think that having a home that was part of that heritage and that era will still be considered valuable to us.

Because I actually had to go by there and actually walk around and get another idea of what the house looked like and where it was.

And it is a historic treasure.

I basically agree with the two speakers before with the council people.

There is a structural design and structure, there is a history of our community which we should try to preserve and I understand the economic hardship but I think

As John mentioned, it's part of, you know, making a success.

And if we deny that in the profitable market for one year, somebody else wants to buy it and sell it, then it could be saved in the market.

That option is there.

Well, you know, I certainly sympathize with the financial burden it places on the applicant and that does cause me some concern.

But at the same time, I would like to see the structure preserved because I think it is an important part of the city's history.

And, you know, one of the things that's happened in the past, we've lost a lot of structures because they have been torn down.

I concur.

I think the state code spells out a fair process for balancing the community's interest in historic preservation with the owner's interest and need for a financially viable ownership position.

So if we were indeed to deny the demolition,

Mr. Chapman could offer to sell the property and to somebody who was willing to restore it and if he gets no takers then he at that point would be able to demolish it or renew his demolition request and sensing a consensus on council

The action before us is to uphold the Board of Architectural Review recommendation or decision.

Is there a motion to also move?

So is there any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ms. Keller.

Next item on our agenda is a report on the parking study that several speakers referenced earlier.

And as has been stated, we are not being asked to take action tonight on this parking study, but rather we are getting a status report on this study.

And we have a PowerPoint presentation, I believe.

That is correct.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Now that we've destroyed the voting challenge, I'm going to start with a parking study.

I'll keep this PowerPoint fairly brief, but just to give you a little history of the parking study, we did start this, actually started about a year ago, and engaged the firm of Martin Alexa Bison to help us look at several issues related to parking.

Three or four pieces of this.

One of them was the parking exempt zone.

There had been some discussion about whether or not it was still viable and something that we ought to continue to use.

It's been in place for a number of years.

Planning Commission and some of you had questioned whether or not it was still a viable part of our zoning ordinance.

Number two was to look at the on-street use of parking spaces, particularly as we are talking about delivery, loading, but also our handicapped spaces and the use of the other spaces, one, two hour, 30 minute, 15 minute.

And then thirdly, look at the management enforcement of the system, so those are

are the three main pieces of the study that we began to address.

The first thing that the consultants did was do an inventory and utilization analysis and these borrowed slides from the consultant, I'll have to write one here.

The slides are very difficult to see, but just to show you the boundaries, this is the mall itself, Market, Jefferson High, we went up to High, came down to 10th, and we also extended to pick up the area across from ACAC on Monticello, up to Ridge, and we also looked at Park and Exempt Zone, we looked at West Main Street in the corner.

These are studies, again, to look at the number of parking places.

They walked in, they counted them, they catalogued what was there.

Go ahead.

They looked at on-street parking and, go ahead, drop-off ADA spaces, and in between and counted how many we had.

The interesting numbers that we came up with, I think, that 981 total on-street parking places and 5,000 off-street, and there's a

private off street and public off street and the ones we really can deal with are the public off street of 2142 but when counted there's almost 6000 total parking spaces in this downtown area.

We found some interesting things with occupancy.

In the area, you can see the general numbers of them.

This is total parking that are occupied and unoccupied.

All day long it looks like we've got quite a number of vacant spaces.

Go ahead.

These are scattered, these are all the off street parking occupancies and you can see even the Water Street garage has times when it has pretty significant vacancies and yet not so much in the Market Street garage but they're scattered around, some of them look like they have no occupancy in these private lots but they're one or two cars but they do have some occupancy

The important thing they found with this slide is that this is the line that is the maximum desirable occupancy to be efficient.

The consultants tell us that 85% occupancy is where you need to be.

And what we found is, in particular with our two-hour spaces, we're significantly above that, but we're also above it for a large part of the day with all of our time spaces.

because of certain factors our occupancies are higher than they need to be for on-street parking.

Our loading space occupancy is well below the line and they're underutilized on the average but that doesn't mean that times are convenient but that they are underutilized.

One of the things that we've talked about is what happens with a two hour shuffle.

During the counts that they did, during the course of the day, 1,094 vehicles used the two hour spaces.

They found that, how did these go?

199 were probably overstayers based on the count, just about a little bit.

They overstayed, they may have been there two hours and 20 minutes or two hours and 30 minutes, but there were roughly 200 that overstayed.

78 were major overstayers, they may have been there all day long and 51 of them were ones that they could definitely tell because every time they get a walk around town they move, they're the two hour shuffle.

They're employees who are going out every two hours and moving their cars somewhere else.

Otherwise, that total number, a large number of those could have been $2.00 shufflers, but they may have written that smaller number.

Again, this is the 85th line here.

What this points out to us is that without these shufflers and the major overstayers, our occupancy is well below 85%, but when you factor in those numbers of the major overstayers and the shufflers, we are only within the 8 to 10 AM hour, we're over a desirable occupancy.

So we're developing a one stream parking plan and let me say that these are the slides that the consultant brought to our last steering committee meeting.

We have had a small steering committee that's been working with us consisting of downtown businesses and a representative from the North Downtown Neighborhood Association.

We've had a few meetings with them and they saw these and when I tell you the recommendations they're a little bit different than what you see on the slide because the committee asked us to step back from some things.

The consultants made recommendations, recommended changes to parking to maintain free on-street parking.

They actually suggested, number two, that we go to paid on-street parking, meaning new medium system on-street.

The steering committee said, however, given the economic times, the concerns by businesses trying to stay in business, they recommended we back off of that and that we hold the plan in place but that we not implement it now that we've come back maybe in a couple of years and review it.

So the recommendation to the consultant was to go with a paid system.

The committee asked that we not do that and we agreed to recommend to you that we don't go to a paid system but we change the management in a free system.

Conceptually what they looked at was three zones, a core zone right around the mall, Market to Water and then Ridge, McIntyre to 7th Street and then an inner zone

which goes to High Street and then everything on the outside as an outer zone.

In that core zone, generally speaking, they're recommending we have one hour parking, ratings parking and ADA parking and some other specialized spaces we're talking about.

In the inner zone, generally these would be two hour spaces and some one hour spaces and in the outer zone, those would be a few two hours but basically unrestricted spaces.

In the core area, the recommendation provides for additional loading spaces before 11 a.m.

In general concept, what this plan proposes is that we utilize the south side of market, the north side of water, for most of our delivery and loading.

And a lot of that occurred prior to 11 a.m.

But after 11, we're doing some of those spaces generally available for delivery all day long.

On the side streets we recommend that we take the loading and delivery off these side streets except for trucks that would be comparable to a FedEx or UPS, smaller ones.

One of these farms we get complaints about now in the downtown are the tractor trailers that pull onto the dead end side streets and have to back out.

and we would eliminate their ability to load there but to compensate we would give them spaces on market and water but also on the two street crossings, 2nd and 4th where we can drive straight across.

After 11 o'clock again, those spaces would convert to, principally one-hour spaces, a large number of them.

The permeate control, the side street spaces, we would have a permeate system where each business got a number of permeates and they could either provide them to their delivery people or their customers and they would be timed deliveries but only people utilizing those permeates could park in those spaces on the dead-end side streets We would basically eliminate any general parking on the dead-end side streets before 11am

and then we also recommend that we convert all the 15 minute, 1 hour and 2 hour spaces to 1 hour spaces.

The recommendation of the consultants is that we focus the in and out, quick in and out, and have enough spaces for people to get down in the mall, during their lunch hour, to come do quick shopping on the street.

But that if you're going to stay longer than an hour, that you park in one of the parking garages.

And there's validation by almost every business to compensate for the first two hours.

So this system is designed to get turnover, allow people quickly to get in and out, and by changing to one hour, we feel like we can do that.

They recommended and the committee agreed that essentially a 15 minute space is a ticket for a ticket.

That you can't do much business in 15 minutes and so they recommended we just get rid of those all together.

This is just mapping of that.

Again, they wash out in the slides, so go ahead.

Essentially, the current area on this side would be loading of the market on the north side of water and permanent loading on the side streets.

We're all recommending that we create about 12 motorcycle-slash-vespa spaces on the side streets, six in each of two locations, that would be free all day to encourage people to ride those things that don't use as much gas down and to protect them and get them off the brakes.

What we ended up with in this, we actually gained from 119 to 132 total spaces.

As you can see, the existing spaces were at 33, we were loading at all times.

We would go to 23 of those.

We actually would create a few loading and drop offs after 6 in front of live arts and by the movie theater where people can pull over, drop off and just move on.

We would have 33 that were loading to 11 a.m. and then one hour after that, eight that were loading by permit all the time, and six that were loading by permit again early in the day.

We would maintain the same number of ADA spaces we have, and then the big change is we'd go to 29 more than one hours and we'd lose all the two hours that we had, which were 19 of those in the core area.

Essentially we'd pick up

from 119 to 132 and the number of spaces that are convenient for customers actually increases and the delivery spaces overall increase but for all they're on they decrease.

Here you can see this graphically.

Before 11 a.m. there would be 59 customer parking spaces and 73 loading spaces.

After 11 a.m. there would be 98 customer parking and 34 loading spaces.

Parking management is the other area we looked at.

The committee believes, we believe that we need to do proactive management of parking to have what we want to happen.

We're now recommending again the on-street fees.

We do think that we can use parking enforcement individuals as an ambassador for downtown, that we ought to adopt the 85% occupancy target and monitor and try to stay within that.

And again, they would not go to the meters, but they did keep that in the balance.

One of the other suggestions was that parking is currently the traffic engineering department, not the management, not the enforcement, but the decision making role and the committee recommended, the consultants recommended that we actually take it out of the police department which they concur with and put it under the traffic engineering function where you had coordination of the decision making with the enforcement and we'll get to the recommendation in a minute for specifics of that.

The parking in Zim Zone, again going through that, as I said it was in downtown West Main in the corner.

It was adopted in 1976.

The concept was to allow for the highest and best use of land and parking to occur in the garages.

However, we've had changes in the downtown.

We're developing more.

And the real reality is that many of the institutions are not running money for projects that don't provide parking.

So the recommendation is, even though it's not causing any problems, that we

that we change and eliminate the parking exempt zone that we replace it with a system that has minimum parking standards that we don't use a suburban standard but we use essentially half of what if you were developing an island 29 you would have to do to provide parking but that you would do after you are required to provide some and that we have

There's alternatives for providing your own site.

There were incentivized employer participation and traffic demand management to work on that program.

And we carefully looked at our permanent parking zones to make sure we don't have a negative impact by moving people out through any of this.

And some of the recommendations basically are, what we want to do is, we have a meeting on November 14th, we're having in the downtown, we're inviting the general public, all the business people to come.

We've got a meeting on November 18th, so we'll have two to try to provide ample opportunities, the same meetings, but two opportunities for people to come.

And we were going to suggest that on December 1st when we come back to you, we have a public hearing after we've had the chance to get this out to more and more people.

But we're going to recommend that if that point is an action plan that you approve a set of recommendations that would restrict the delivery by tractor trailer to Water and Market Street and the crossings at 2nd and 4th and that after 11am these vehicles be restricted to Water and Market only

that we create a temporary delivery pack with a permanent system for the businesses on the side streets that we maintain the same number of handicapped spaces that we convert the 30 and 2-hour spaces to 1-hour that we convert the approximately 15 spaces around ACAC and Gleason's from all the way to 2-hour parking that's the request that Mr. Dockery has been making with the ACAC folks

and we created 12 bus per slash motorcycle spaces where we would allow all day parking and days for free.

We initiated a zoning text amendment for the Planning Commission action that would eliminate the parking exempt zone and require parking at a suggested rate of one space for a residential unit and 50% of the non-residential requirements that are currently in place.

that the developer would have the option to meet the requirement of their own site within a thousand feet of the property as you can do in a suburban location.

Or we would develop a new system that would require the developer to pay whatever the dollar amount is to terminal around to pay into a fund that would go towards building the next garage.

that you direct city manager in the budget process to move parking enforcement to NDS and set that up as part of the budget which would not be any new positions, it would be simply moving and we think given some new technologies that we've discovered through this process we can actually reduce a number of people and turn several of them into Marlowe ambassadors, business ambassadors as a function where they're out and friendly and we can go into all the detail you want to about that but there's some

community of systems that are being used that really increase the efficiency of parking folks and take away the confrontational aspects.

And that you direct staff to evaluate and choose a location for the next parking garage and develop a financing plan for that, looking towards the future five or six years out when we would have to build, but we need to start thinking now.

Again, we're not asking you to do any of this tonight, we're just saying those are the things that we think we want to tee up for and we want to take these recommendations to the meeting of the public

for the next two weeks and in public hearing in December.

I'll be glad to answer any questions.

Sorry about your sign there, Mr. Mayor.

Sorry about your sign there.

Mr. Tolbert, Mr. Yalit earlier in the evening said, you know, asked the question, is this the right time to be creating a whole new city department?

And I think I understand from your presentation you're not talking about new employees, new expenses.

That's correct.

Okay.

I just wanted to clarify that.

It was a good question.

Well, you mean when the things were being first, when the study was done.

When the study was done.

Actually, it was roughly from 8 o'clock in the morning until noon, and then from noon to about 6, I believe, is when they surveyed.

Okay.

And I will add that they were not looking at normal business operations.

One of the reasons the study was delayed a little bit is we waited until after the cafes were open in the spring and we had nice warm days so we could get a general feel for a regular normal day.

I'm just wondering with the spaces, did that include

I know in previous presentations our parking policy has been described as very generous compared to a lot of communities.

And I think that's because we have so much of our parking as free.

And I guess it makes me think, my behavior, parking when I come downtown, I'm an expert on free parking, although I'm not going to share any of my secrets.

It doesn't seem to me that the cost, assuming it's not exorbitant, is why I choose to park on street.

I don't think I'm metered anywhere to choose me.

I think it's a convenience of being able to find a spot and not have to go into a garage and come back out to a garage and perhaps if it's a busy time of day you have to wait in line getting out of the garage.

And so for no reason, I don't really understand the logic of not recouping

through some fees for people, you know, that's what most committees do, and if consumers, if it didn't seem to be a big burden on consumers, why wouldn't we do that?

I think the culture here is free parking and there's been that history.

We felt like a metered system would work.

And it's really a management system when there are ways to do it and make it easy on folks.

The recommendation of the committee was that we not implement it immediately, that we not abandon the idea, that we see what a more proactive enforcement and education program will do.

Again, eliminating the two-hour shuttles could very well free up spaces and changing to one hour where you could find a lot more opportunity for that free space.

With the ticketing system we have now, we can easily pay for the operations and the enforcement and we actually put some money into the CIP out of that or can.

But we would not be opposed if you went to meters to do that.

If we went to meters, how much revenue would we get?

The consultant estimate, because we pulled and didn't get into it in complete detail, was roughly $700,000 a year worth of fines and enforcement.

And millimeters?

Excuse me, meters and fines, I'm sorry, meters and fines together.

We did an hour.

I think we should look into that.

I really don't see that people are going to decide not to shop downtown because it's going to cost them a dollar or two dollars to be in that space.

What we would do is take a parking place and strike it, the other perpendicular, and sign it so that it's... And how many spaces would a parking spot have?

We believe that the parking spot made a little bit more six.

And finally a pet peeve of mine which I've communicated to you a couple times has been the fact that even at night there's the tour bus spots across from Lee Park and it always makes me wonder, you never see a tour bus there after 6 p.m. Why aren't those spots made available in the evenings?

Is there some way we can go ahead and do that?

We can do anything if you want to steal.

I'd like to see some discussion on that.

Thank you.

I think this is a good study.

I think there's a lot of improvements with this in terms of both access for the merchants and more spots during the day for

If I can throw out a, just a, one of the issues you raised, just to give you an idea of what we're thinking about with enforcement, is that there's some cities running our state and some that are going to a camera enforcement system, where you mount a camera and it goes, as you are a bomb, it takes a photograph of the license plate.

hooks into D&D records and you ride by, if it's an hour space, you ride by an hour and ten minutes later, it re-photographs and if it sees the same tang under there, it deems to what you know that you've got somebody that's overstating.

You press a button to verify and if it is, you press another button and it doesn't do anything.

You just ride on it.

When you get back to the office, you download it and it sends a ticket in the mail so you don't have that confrontation that you get in the street sometimes.

What we also want to do is that the first one to go is we like the university and send a letter to the person.

It's a very nice letter.

It says thank you so much for shopping in downtown Charlottesville.

We hope you enjoyed yourself.

You've spent a lot of money.

However, you overstayed next time.

If you do this, this will not be a thank you letter.

It will be a take it.

had great success in several cities where they're working on them.

The beauty of it is it's about two-thirds more efficient than the person going out marking tires and riding tickets.

So we can reduce the people and really put them out there.

I'll make another comment on that and ask another question.

The other questions I have is looking at the proposed map of spaces and kind of addressing the issue involving Monticello and Garrett is I notice that it's proposed one hour spaces sort of on the entirety of the block that goes from 2nd Street

That was actually an overreaction by the consultant to the concern they heard and the recommendation that we would bring back to you actually is to only do 15 and those will be closer to 2nd Street.

So that was also looking at picking up some additional spaces by doing angle parking on the south side of Garrett there so that we would actually not have a net loss of the all day parking which is really important to somebody downtown.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I have raised many recommendations that are given in this report.

There are some questions that I have raised just for deliberation in future terms.

One of us is to our partner in this case.

Is there any reason why people come here to learn how to make a plan?

We only allow them to go for lunch, usually.

I'm just wondering what would be a useful exercise for you to encourage your businesses by just not having enough time.

I know many people who are too stern in the parking spaces, but I have noticed more and more that there are fewer and fewer people who are

So as one concern, that is my concern.

My other concern is that

And I want to consider, I agree with you, you have so much spaces to rest for a motorcycle, so I can spend as many words as time passes by.

As to parking in the same zone, the reason it was established was because it refers to

Demarche was to get parking, one of the historic buildings to get parking, and so there was a attempt to avoid that destruction.

Again, when I think about it, maybe it's probably more of a talent in the research to be able to say that or not, but it is something which could be concerned, because if you're trying to say a historic building with no

I think the idea of the same contribution for parking, for reconstruction, would be useful for a garage or something like that, it would be helpful.

By this point, the stupid system was used to

Again, I just want to say that my family has a limited parking.

It sounds good, my health is good, but the previous experience I have and the part I used to have is more credit than mine because of the rest of the revenue.

If that were to be the decision of council, we want to look at a couple of the systems that have meters where you have one bank of meters

They're tied to a space, they take credit cards so that there's better opportunity.

You don't have to have the exact change to go in and that sort of thing to make them convenient.

If I could interrupt, you know, I was just in New York and we had that system.

What else did I need to do in order for you to get a ticket?

I understand.

I guess also then I kind of agree with what Mr. Huja says.

An hour is kind of a short period of time on one hand too.

However, I guess meters would take care of the people who do the two hour shuttle because they mustn't feed the meter every time.

So that would kind of

And you can meter and restrict the number of weekly times somebody can stay in there also.

Well, I think that they did look at that and they felt like that we're making steps but we're

We are a long way away from being substantial enough to

to really have a positive impact on that.

But it reduces our need in the future for more than what we can do with demand management.

One of the things we had the biggest discussion about with the committee was our employee parking.

There's a lot of people that work downtown that work after hours or normal hours that can't afford, unless they make waitresses and retail employees, to pay to park.

And so that's one of the reasons we wanted to maintain

as many of the all-day free spaces as we could on the periphery.

And then we even had some schemes to maybe look towards some partnerships and maybe talk about how we route the trolley, for instance, maybe move it to be able to pick up some of those.

We haven't had those discussions with CTS yet, but to look for opportunities to provide just outside of downtown some places for the employees to park that would be safe and accessible for them when they got off at night.

I'm happy to hear you say that, that was the one issue, one of the issues with the parking study that gives me the most pause is the fact that we are, we say we want to crack down on the two hour shuffle and the reason that people are doing the two hour shuffle is because they're not getting paid parking, they're not making very much money and to pay for parking in the parking garage is essentially in many cases a 25 or 30 or 40 percent tax on their hourly wage and so

I would actually like to see some of the measures you're talking about implemented before we do this crackdown on the two hour shuffle.

So anything you can do to hasten some of those potential ideas.

I like the idea if the trolley can be a way to find some parking where we can encourage downtown employees to park and hop on the trolley.

One of my long term pet peeves about parking downtown has to do with parking around Friendship Court, formerly Garrett Square.

It wasn't really addressed in this traffic study per se.

but after 9pm at night you cannot park there and I understand that was a decision made by the police department upon a request of the former property owners of Garrett Square who wanted to crack down on loitering at night and I'm wondering if we can get the current property owners of Furniture Court to go on record as saying they don't mind opening up that parking to me it's discriminatory but it's also self-defeating because that particular town right now

there's a lot of people that are willing to park down there at night to take advantage of all the restaurants and bars and things that are attracting customers to that part of town and we're shooting ourselves in the foot by closing off dozens, my guess is, many parking spaces that can be utilized by those customers and I hope that can be

Too far ago I've had some discussions about that, and we're still talking about it, but I think we've got some, we still have some concerns in some of the places, but might be willing to recommend that some of those be converted to one hour, two hour, and be able to either run quite possibly.

I have it on good record that the current owners do not share the objection, at least in formal record that the current owners do not share the same concerns that the former owners did so hopefully that can be factored in.

Daugherty, Daugherty raised a very good question which is why wait on some of these changes until the law project is done and why would not the changes that he in particular suggested not be done earlier rather than later because they will help with some of the issues that are really caused by the law project.

Yes sir, we feel like that we're going to have so much disruption to parking when we're doing the mob project.

We're lay down areas, we're just the traffic, the fact that the hotels already got us impacted.

That, yes they're across the tracks, but that's an area where people go to to park and a lot of the employees are going to die a day, their building is under construction, there's no, you know,

Yes, they've got the few properties there that have opened, but the major parking that took their lot is still under construction and will be.

We just felt like it was not good to make a change right now with all that that was going on and would like to hold off on that.

We went through our process that we instituted a few years ago where when they asked about that about two years ago, a year and a half ago, we posted that entire blog with signs that said we're going to change it from our day to two hours.

I've never seen a response to it like we got from the people that use it that do not make any changes here.

That's the reason we felt like we really needed to do this comprehensively all at once.

We're going to be finished way before they're finished with a construction project and all the things happening there.

And I know what they've got from existing businesses, but there's also some access issues and where the drives are and the access and how we can physically do it.

As we look at it, if we're able to pick up, as we hope, the same number of spaces, we won't have a net loss, we might be able to come back and so we can go and do it.

We wouldn't even need to come back to it.

Thank you.

And a question about this new parking garage.

Okay.

Because I understand there's some parking garages downtown that are probably the ones that are essentially empty at night because they're used by employees during the day and if there's a way to, it seems like if there's a way to

partner with those employers might be a way to, at least in the short term, solve some of the capacity issues.

And then I love the idea about the, with the public exam zone, the changes that are being explored there.

My question is, in terms of

When we ask a developer to include a certain number of parking units or contribute funds for the parking garage, will there be a lag time allowed between when those contributions would be made up front by the developer and when

We're in a very unique position right now because we have space available in the registry garage.

But if we implemented a policy act, and again we can't require them to contribute, but it would just be if they don't want to build it, it's cheaper for them to give it.

that we could accumulate some of those funds if we're going in and moving towards a garage.

We can preserve some of that in the Water Street garage, that demand now.

If we were filling the Water Street garage, we couldn't do that.

We couldn't offer that kind of... We wouldn't give them a lag time then.

That's what I'm saying because we've got the available space to accommodate their need now.

Okay.

I agree with Dr. Brown on the change of the two of us spots across from Nate Park and I also like the one free ticket idea.

I'm not convinced about meters but I certainly am happy to see that dry balloon floated and see what kind of reaction it gets.

That's all I have.

Any other questions or comments?

Thank you very much.

The next item on our agenda is an update on the Regional Transit Authority.

We have already, in concept, approved legislative initiatives whereby the City and the County would go to Richmond in the coming session of the General Assembly and ask for labeling legislation that would allow the City and the County to create a Regional Transit Authority governance structure to expand our public transportation system.

and this is apart from the legislative initiative that we're also pursuing regarding funding for transportation projects in our region.

We asked our city attorney once they had some actual legislation that was ready for our review to bring it back.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

Members of Council, you do have a copy of the draft legislation that Mayor Morris mentioned in your notebook tonight.

This was done by my office and the County Attorney's Office under the direction of the Regional Transit Authority Working Group.

That group includes Mayor Morris and Councilor Huja as members.

I have outlined in your agenda memo probably the four or five

One of the most significant points about this, as Mayor Morris mentioned, this particular legislation does not provide any new funding mechanism for transit in the city, county, or in the region.

This is merely the enabling legislation that allows for the creation of a regional transit authority.

It is what I would describe generally in nature.

There are a lot of specifics in terms of funding, in terms of voting procedures that would be the subject of a service or operational agreement that would be negotiated between the city and the county.

That agreement would come to you contemporaneous

with an ordinance or resolution that would create the authority should this legislation pass.

So this legislation would allow us to create an authority if it was passed, but it doesn't create an authority.

That's correct.

And my only concern about this authority, but I think it's something we can address when we come to it, is that

Until such time as the city and the county are on a level playing field in terms of how much money is being spent, that's currently spending a lot more money on TTS than the county does, I think we should have a differential in terms of voting.

I will also say that if it does not appear that we're going to get funding authority for transportation projects to include funding for this regional transit authority and B, if it does not appear that Albemarle County is going to be able to provide significantly increased financial support for the

transit authority.

Any further questions or comments?

We don't have a resolution for us, but I would like to have the Council go on record in support of this legislation if Councils are willing to do so and to let in and entertain a motion in support of this recommendation.

Any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

The second piece of legislation regarding transportation funding will be coming back to Council I believe either later this month or early in December once that legislation's been drafted and we'll have the same kind of conversation then about and go on record then either in support or in opposition to that legislation.

Okay, next item on our agenda.

Mr. Mayor and members of council, we've developed following the city council retreat a work plan that tried to

work from the items that council came up with, your priorities and some specific actions.

I guess the first thing I should start with, this is all in the context of the city council vision, which is in the back of every one of our agendas.

There's also copies on the wall and it's in a number of places on our website and other

City Information.

But out of your retreat, I won't go through this in any detail, but there's an report that talks about the process that you meet for the prioritizing of areas.

And with cancer looking at seven priority areas that you want to look at in the next year, the first few of those, there is already an order of the votes for the priorities.

Now the first one was for affordable housing, the second one was to repair aging infrastructure, the third was for workforce development, fourth for race relations, fourth for greater city, the sixth for economic development and the seventh for transportation.

So we took those seven priority areas and from the discussion that the council had at the retreat and specific suggestions of things that you wanted to see developed,

who developed a template that followed the discussion that we had around each initiative, an outcome, and a current status of this report would come to you.

I'm suggesting quarterly, any specific actions in this area would be from an attorney so that the department or the responsible person would be.

There's 16 of those initiatives that are leading the council's priorities.

Two for affordable housing.

Most of those about affordable housing, we're addressing housing work session and the distribution of the affordable housing funds that have been set aside in the budget, but we will continue to report that out.

There are several about diversity initiatives within city government trying to attract greater diversity.

With employment within the city, we have some specific actions.

Most of those will be led by Human Resources Department.

There's a community diversity initiative that we've been out of meetings and Mayor Norris has been involved with us with our employers to try to attract greater members of professional people of color and the number of employers that are involved in that initiative, including a team of Coomers.

And as we talked about earlier, a plan that's working at improving race relations in Charlottesville and we have some research that's going on

and towards having a community dialogue on rice by next summer.

There were two items around the Green City initiatives primarily focused on trees, tree canopy and tree planting program.

As you know we have an urban forestry program that's underway that will be completed by January.

There's fields that were made available.

and within the budget.

So the tree inventory will be completed by the end of the year.

We'll take advantage of that and tree cleanings in the spring.

And there's some other pieces of that that will be coming to Council.

Two workforce development initiatives.

We're looking at trying to create additional training opportunities for the local workforce.

A streamline development process which we've already had in front of Council that came from the retreat.

the co-changers that would look at the site plan administration and number of activities and it's always part of the planning commission for their review and recommendations back.

Prior to public transportation we just talked about one of those and that's the opportunity for legislation for original transit authority.

Second involves improvements to our transit system

and some efforts and initiatives that we're going to try to look at, probably subject to what the budget looks like.

And the last item was repair of the infrastructure, both from an assessment and a thoroughness standpoint.

We invested in making capital improvement recommendations for council that would include utilities as well.

Those would be cumulative.

and December with Kiesl, considering we premiere those next April.

So those are the items that we are working on in the retreat.

I have two comments.

I think this basically reflects our discussions that were approved in

and Sophia Marrow.

But two areas which I have, I guess, cultural concern.

First, we are into the green city.

At 100 trains per year, we are going to be here for over 100 years to get to 40%.

So I think we are going to, now we are going to have more effort in that direction than just 100 trains.

I think with both of those, the trees are based on the money that's been made available in the budget with a careful plan as to where they should go and trying to look at the community across the city.

It's an ongoing program.

It's an effort to try to have an annual program where we're planting more trees than we're putting in strategic places across the city.

The transit improvements are currently the offending issue.

We've had some discussions about some possible improvements, but any route or increasing headways is somewhere in the order of $350,000 unless we eliminate a route or some other kind of cost-reliant transit or within city government.

Any other comments or questions, suggestions?

I think one item that would help serve two of the goals in terms of diversity and economic development is

I'd like to get a report from our Economic Development Office on initiatives to promote minority business development in the city and what's currently being done and are there ideas for building on what's being done now.

I know it's a tight budget time, but I'd like to see how we can get a little bit more creative in that regard.

And secondly,

Well, the outcome goals under workforce development, one of which is effort to employ local workforce as part of the law refurbishment and city projects.

I agree with that goal wholeheartedly, particularly as it relates to other city projects.

The law refurbishment, as I mentioned a couple months ago, is a drop in the buck compared to the law of infrastructure improvements and investments we're about to make in the next decade or two decades.

And I'd like to see us

go well beyond thinking about how we can not only engage young people or residents in a law project but on a policy level as a matter of practice how do we

I would just like to broaden the actions piece on that one and then also the actions piece under

That's true.

In regards to workforce development, I'd like to see

I'm involved with the One Stop to see how we can integrate the services that are to be provided under One Move.

See how our residents are really benefiting from that because I believe that the center here is also the premier for the state in terms of what government can envision.

So, in addition to that, also what

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. O'Connor.

Thank you.

Next item on our agenda,

is a resolution regarding housing policies and priorities and reallocation of affordable housing funds.

This came out of a work session that we had a couple weeks ago where we hashed out some potential or proposed changes to policies and priorities that our Housing Advisory Committee came forward with.

Thank you.

Actually, we have two resolutions, but we'll get to that in a second.

As Mayor indicated, this is work that grew out of the Housing Advisory Committee and then you had a work session on October 9th to discuss these suggested revisions to the policies and you have the three policies we consolidated from four to three under request.

The first one is objectives for use of affordable housing funds and criteria priorities for aware of those funds.

The second is incentives the city can provide for development with affordable housing units.

and the third is criteria for really mixed use incentive funds out of the strategic investment funds as a revolving loan.

So those three are revised per your instructions and I'll be glad to answer any questions but don't intend to go through them in detail like we did at the work session.

The other, and again you have two resolutions tonight, the first resolution would adopt each of those three policies to be city policy.

It also

addresses one other issue that we didn't get a chance to really talk about the work session.

It was on the agenda, but we didn't get to it.

And that's to really reconfirm the membership and the housing advisory committee and also to clear up some things that have been matters of confusion.

The resolution would state that all terms of membership will be two years because right now they don't know how long they're serving.

They're just kind of there indefinitely.

They said they'd like to know if there was some time limit there.

If they could be reappointed, we wouldn't have any restriction on that.

But beginning January 1st, and all the members that are currently serving would actually start as if it was their first term there.

The co-op that members are appointed by you and nobody else and serve at your pleasure.

that the role of the committee is as in the charge that you originally gave them and if they want to make a change in the charge then they need to bring that back and suggest it to you and let you change their charge.

There's been some discussion that they want to change their charge and it's great to recommend a change in their responsibilities but the intent is that they're doing what you want them to do.

And then we reconfirmed the membership of the Housing Advisory Committee as listed in the resolution.

What's happened is that over time they have invited people to join them that you didn't originally put on there and it's gotten to be some gray area.

and we thought that we might as well clear that up.

Two in particular, you originally created a far or region 10, not region, far or QCC slot and we now have members from both organizations that are functioning.

Also we had a representative of the pre-enterprise forum who doesn't work there anymore so she can't represent them but she's been an active member and we're recommending that you put her on there as a citizens member.

What we recommend is that the committee be re-established with the positions of city council, planning commission, car, a developer, neighborhood association, a banker, school board, the executive directors of AHIP, VHA, Habitat and Housing Authority, a representative for Enterprise Forum,

Thar, Region 10, QCC, Albemarle County, UVA-Offgrounds, which is somebody that's been added, not by you, but they've added them, the committee's added them to the group, a representative impact, which didn't exist when you did this, a representative job which has been added by the committee, and then another citizen member.

And that basically the people that are serving those positions would serve, but the positions are what you put point over them as citizen members, and so the resolution

just confirms that.

That's the first resolution.

The second resolution does the other thing that you ask at the meeting, and that is to allocate some of the $1.4 million that you set aside for the Housing Improvement Fund or Housing Fund, $100,000 of it to the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority for the completion of its master plan redevelopment.

and the resolution notes that 25,000 of that is earmarked for the use of FAR for resident outreach, capacity building, leadership development to ensure that the residents have an opportunity to participate.

Our recommendation is that that go to the housing authority and they be responsible for administering and keeping up with that and it being their contract and we just make sure that through their contract that they provide that opportunity and those funds too far.

And the other issue directed that

You would allocate $50,000 for the hiring of a housing planner, but that we not fill that position for the time being as we go through the budget process, but that we do go ahead, and the resolution would say this, but our intent would be that we use CDG funds and hire an intern to go out and do all the data research that you've asked for and the housing committee's asked for, but that we don't create a long-term permanent type position right now while we're evaluating what's happening

through our positions in city government as we prepare the budget.

But this would set those dollars aside for use should we decide to come back and do well in the future.

I'd be happy to answer any questions.

Page 3 or 4 under Policy 1, I'm about the seventh bullet down, it says

Recipients of funds must be city residents and there's not a boat that says employed in the city for at least five years.

I think we need to put the word or between those two just to clarify.

Right.

They don't have to be employed for five years in the city.

Right.

If they're a city resident.

Good point.

And then policy two, it looks like there's a word missing in the title, which is not a major deal, but under incentives the city can provide to

I don't know.

I'm concerned that since very many

Delia Ferreira Hasebi, Olga Ocali, and I think if Olga Ocali wants to do it, you have to pay the rent money.

And maybe the cost of it raises that, but at least I have some concerns about that.

Second, if you are going to hire a housekeeper, why do you have to pay the money inside right now?

The idea was to make sure that we did not allocate it for something else and that we left it there so that if we decide that it makes sense within the budget, overall budget development, that it's not gone by the time we get ready to use it.

You can come back later and make a decision

Where am I?

One more follow up Mr. Mayor about the task force.

It seems there are a ton of people in the task force.

I don't know, I've been, I've worked with many task forces and there are a ton of people on how productive the task force could be.

You have, you have been a member of the committee, so I don't know how it has worked so far.

I think it has worked very well for me.

And I would like to see some citizen members on the task force, because it seems like they are all, I don't know how to say politely,

all the agencies who are ready to resume and also the task force.

Maybe this is, there is very good expertise to the task force.

Do you have suggestions of specific groups that you would like to remove from?

You have at least four references right now.

I have a question here.

Actually, the groups and individuals are filling those at the current time.

We've had difficulty with the realtor and the banker position all along, but those might be two that are vacant now.

Of course those people are citizens also.

We might say Charlottesville citizen resident who actually was employed by one of those organizations, we might be able to get that way.

Okay, so we'll add citizen at large memberships and let council make those appointments.

Okay.

Can I ask a question?

So, listed under

As additional members, those were the ones that weren't in the original approved composition of the committee?

That's correct, yes sir.

But on the other hand, there are people currently serving in some of those positions.

So the committee itself solicited Ron White, Becky Hawes and Chris Murray, is that right?

Well, I need to clarify something.

It was never, the committee has never said that, for instance, Warren White or impact us on our official members of the committee.

They've invited folks to come to the committee meetings to help contribute to the dialogue, but the committee never said

But it's very awkward and it has been when they sit around the table and they participate in discussions and somebody wants to vote and then they kind of...

Right, so we need to clarify who has a vote.

That's what's happened, yes.

Yeah, and I was assuming there was, I mean I think it's a good idea.

No, they're not.

and Impact has never expressed interest in being a voting member.

I'd like to address a couple of the issues Mr. Huja brought up.

One is I don't have any problems with our policies allowing our affordable housing funds to be used in the urban ring of Albemarle County.

I think it's kind of silly in some ways to see a need, see an opportunity and not invest in it.

I think it's a good use of our funds.

It's not like we're investing in a shopping center for Albemarle County or something like that.

The second

I do agree that I think it was a full part in our work session not to recognize the city having a hiring freeze and really trying to

to be cognizant of the financial environment at the same time for us to be recommending a new position and so I would agree that we should hold off on that.

I like the idea of trying to see if we can't start the work being done with an intern and I think we should, if it ever comes back before us, it should be a very conscious decision and recommendation from staff that the time is appropriate to move ahead with a plan or to slide someone into that position because it's a better use of

And I agree with that as well.

And I also agree that we still need the information.

I just don't want the plan to put that on hold to decrease the urgency of the importance of affordable housing.

This is not anything that we want to solve.

any time soon it's going to be an ongoing process.

I just had a question.

Well, Dr. Bryant actually took the lead on that when he was mayor in creating that committee.

I don't know at the time that we necessarily thought of it as a standing committee, which is maybe why we didn't have terms and all that, but I think the idea is now we recognize the value in having it as a standing committee.

Is there a motion to approve?

Let's start with the resolution regarding the composition of the Housing Advisory Committee and it's amended to include we'll remove Albemarle County and MPAC as voting members and add the possibility of additional at-large members as determined by council.

Is there a motion to approve that resolution?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

Please indicate your vote.

Secondly, we have a resolution regarding the allocation of $1.4 million dollars.

Yes, the resolution includes funding, although the position will not be filled prior to January 1 in order to enable an adequate review of budget needs.

And the resolution did include more than

The resolution that created the membership also included the three policies.

I just wanted clarification on the last one.

Who made the motion?

It was in stereo.

Okay, so thank you for clarifying.

I mean, you're adopting the full resolution as amended.

We adopted the full resolution as amended.

Regarding the composition housing advisory committee, it did include the three priorities.

Thank you.

And the second resolution relates to allocation of $100,000 out of the $144 million that's already in the budget, $100,000 to the Housing Authority for their master plan, and $50,000 for a housing planner.

And again, that would be determined, the final dispensation of that would be determined based on review of budgetary needs.

I move the resolution.

Second.

Thank you.

The middle button.

Thank you very much.

No.

We do have a couple of items of other business.

Just a moment of clarification to my voice so that I can make sure that this is going in stone.

Thank you.

Some people at home

This, in essence, boils down to desire on the part of a number of counselors and staff members for more information on the water supply alternatives, particularly relating to costs.

Can I say one thing just in context?

Yes.

Just to be a reminder, what's important to you is a proposal that would go to the

River and Water and Soil Authority Board.

It also needs approval from the Baltimore County Service Authority and from the Baltimore County Board of Supervisors.

Both of them had meetings this week and I hope was, depending on where the council is tonight, that at least there could be a discussion this week about what you see in front of you.

Right.

and hopefully the partners coming along with it or there's some twerking or fine tuning that would allow it to go forward, but just to get with that content.

So the objective of this proposal is to provide an expert review of the major elements of the local community water supply plan within the context of approved permits by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, and also within the local objectives of providing the 50-year water supply needs from within the locally controlled watershed area with enhancement of the in-stream flow in the Mormons River.

Further, with respect to well reviews, energy efficiency and options for renewable energy will be considered more practicable and consistent with the context of the approved permits.

Item number one, appoint a board of consultants, a minimum of three senior executive level professional engineers who are nationally recognized experts in the field of water resources, having a significant number of years of experience within a wide range of projects of varying complexity.

This group would be charged with assisting RWSA in the development of scope of work and hiring criteria for individual technical studies as outlined below.

B.

Meet with regulatory agencies to understand the context of approved permits and the feasibility and consequences of modifications C. Provide quality control review of all individual technical studies except that the Rag and Mountain Dam design review team of experts may be organized independent of the board of consultants at the option of RWSA D. Prepare final recommendations to RWSA in a written report

This proposal calls for the initiation of a number of individual technical studies.

A, Water Conservation.

RWSA will retain a form to define how water is being used by customers in the city and Albemarle County Service Authority, review conservation programs and incentives, and review rate structure to include more aggressive conservation and efficiency measures.

This is in keeping with the council resolution calling for the same.

This firm will be charged with developing and evaluating multiple alternatives for structural measures that can firmly assure additional water conservation and achieve a significant water use reduction per capita.

Our terminals will be summarized in technical memorandum for review by the board of consultants and then presented to the public in a community meeting with public input.

Item B, a future 50-year water demand calculation.

The Board of Consultants will be charged with viewing demand projections for the community water supply plan and make judgment on the reasonableness of the approach.

RWSA will supply historical demand data updated to 2008.

Methodology will be long-term trimmed and other parameters defined by regulatory agency.

regulatory agencies and AWWA standard practices.

Reviewing will also consider decisions from a water conservation study I referenced a moment ago.

The demand needs of the county and the city will be determined independently when combined.

Item C, dredging feasibility study.

Assuming if the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir Stewardship Task Force recommends dredging as a means of maintaining the reservoir

IWSA and that decision, those recommendations will be coming I believe by the end of this year.

IWSA will retain an engineering firm with specialization and proven experience in dredging operations to evaluate dredging of the South Fork reservoir.

The objective and scope of the desired dredging will be based on the local agency's approval of recommendations from the task force.

This may include reviewing background data, updating the bathymetric survey, updating settlement sampling and evaluation of basic characteristics, identifying wetlands and other areas that would be restricted by regulatory agencies,

calculating probable value in the settlement that will be removed, identifying goals of neighboring property owners, recommending acceptable judging methods, identifying and evaluating disposal sites, including the airport site and quarry site, and adhering local firms and construction dirt hauling and quarrying businesses to include DDR and bluish sand.

Determine feasibility of development at any reservoir flow bay area to more efficiently capture future sediment after initial operation.

Develop estimated project costs for the initial dredging operation that includes RWSA administration and quality control, and order of magnitude cost estimates and current dollars for future dredging can remove additional sediment that settles in the reservoir after the initial dredging operation.

Item D, Wagon Mountain Dam design review.

IWSA will retain a team of dam experts from multiple firms to review geotechnical data, preliminary design, and foundation design for the proposed new dam and I-64 embankment.

This is something IWSA has already agreed to do, by the way.

This review will follow the draft RFP scope dated October 27, 2008.

Significant focus will be on improving the value, lowest possible cost of the project through a foundation design.

We will also consider revisions to the dam orientation, existing lower dam location, and alternative core wall design.

A report will be prepared listing technical decisions and providing an updated project cost estimate for a new ragged mountain dam with sufficient storage to meet 50-year demand.

In addition, the team will determine the extent to which the height of this proposed dam could be lowered to reduce total storage volume by an amount equivalent to the volume restored in South Fork by initial dredging operation and will estimate how much of the cost of the dam is saved by the lower height.

This will permit a comparison of benefits to cost when the savings are compared to the cost estimate for the initial dredging operation.

The team for comparison purposes will also develop an updated cost estimate and current dollars to simply make required dam safety improvements to the existing Raggy Mountain dams with low supply increase.

Item B, Pipeline to Ragon Mountain.

RWS-A will retain a firm to review the conceptual design for a pipeline from the South Fork reservoir to fill the Ragon Mountain reservoir.

It will develop a separate alternative to replace the Sugar Hollow Pipeline.

This will include a review of Gannett Fleming's determination of pipe size and required water storage to meet the 18.7 MgD safe yield in an attempt to identify if the storage in the proposed expanded Ragon Mountain reservoir can be reduced.

This will also include field reconnaissance of both alternative pipeline routes.

A project cost estimate will be prepared for each alternative based upon an equivalent water rate transfer capacity at each location and include recommended pipe size and necessary modifications at each location to provide an intake capable of providing the transfer capacity.

The study also includes a review of water plant data for each source, South Fork, Rivanna, and Sugar Hollow, in consideration of economical measures for addressing the sediment and the water transferred to Wagon Mountain.

I have, let me start off, I have one question under item one, appoint board of consultants and we'll come down to C where we talk about providing quality control review of studies, et cetera, et cetera.

The question I have is that the Ragon Mountain Dam design review team of experts may be organized independent of the board of consultants at the option of right-line award and sewer authority.

If someone could just elaborate on what the thinking of that was, Mr. O'Connell.

Well, in essence, let me really step back one second.

The idea for a panel of experts came about because of the increased, significant increased cost estimates that came out of the most recent ones for the dam.

And the notion that you're bringing in a panel of experts is one that's still around the country to try and look at.

I think in the end they're going to be looking it all out, but there's a desire I think on some of the other boards that the Dan design piece continue to move forward since those are questions and issues that are at the

There's already an RFP that's been written.

I think you've got to copy that.

But that's part of the thinking here, is to try to keep that moving forward and step back and look at each one of these pieces.

If I could follow up on Mr. Taliaferro's question.

I think it's implied in here but maybe it needs to be stated explicitly that work on the Wagon Mountain Dam would not proceed until these other studies are completed.

I think that's the spirit of this resolution or these proposals.

We understand that the study on the dam needs to, you know, in terms of evaluating the cost estimates.

I think that's everybody's intent, but I think it makes sense to put something in there that would say that maybe there's a sense at the end that until all, you know, there was a full review of each one of these studies,

The plan will not go forward.

There's a timing issue in all of this that we don't know.

I don't know how long any of these studies are really going to take.

There's also a cost aspect.

There's some guesstimates of what some of the costs will be, but until we start talking to firms, they're one or two things that we think the staffs can do to try to provide the information to avoid having to spend money on outside firms.

You know, this is more of a concept and approach of how to take it forward and then the details about time and cost and the coordination of all the different pieces are going to be out there.

The original notion was this panel being placed by January.

It was probably going to take 30, 45 days to get the scope of work out to be able to engage people to get them in places where they can start doing some work.

And then each one of these technical studies would be

and the other staff to get that information done to us.

I'm pretty pleased to see this, looking at the whole situation in the meantime, I think it would be really useful if we could jump into it with foot and both feet.

It's a lot of information.

I think it points out how complex this whole thing is.

I guess what I was thinking about was how some of these things are asking a review team to come in and look over the shoulder of Janet Fleming or anyone else who's done work to be able to say, yeah, we agree with this or no, we don't.

But some of the other pieces of this are not that.

Some of the other pieces are new work.

and I guess so I was just trying to kind of which is a different thing we're asking someone to come in and do what I was particularly reading about was it says we'll review the conceptual design for a pipeline from site 4 but I think that's something people really want to see happen is to see whether you know are the numbers we've gotten there

What do other people think of the numbers?

Is it just too hard to predict?

Or is this a good start?

Is this pretty firm?

Whatever it is.

And we'll develop a separate alternative to replace the sugar hollow pipeline.

That seems like new work.

But I'm not sure about that.

Now, we need to tell you there is that you would have upgraded cost

and if it takes some additional work to get to that.

The replacement of the sugar hollow pipeline.

Are there things in here where we're asking an engineer to do a new study?

I think there is some new study that needs to be done.

I don't think, for instance, when you mentioned the Sugar Hollow Pipeline, we're not necessarily asking for thorough engineering analysis, which could cost several hundred thousand dollars, but what we want is either this firm or this team to come in and look at the data that we have in hand about the condition of the Sugar Hollow Pipeline and

and also comments and give us an updated, a more concrete estimate.

I know it's a contradiction in terms, but a more concrete estimate on what it would cost to replace that pipeline.

I think it's important to bring in an outside firm to look at this because there's a lot of issues and a lot of people in the community really question the changing costs for this project and it causes a lot of concern.

It's a hard issue to understand and I think we need to step back and look at it and get somebody to look at what's been done before too because we spent a lot of money as a consultant.

I mean, it delves into details, but I think this is a good idea.

My specific concerns involve the dam and the cost and to look at the pipeline to make sure the costs are met or not, but I think the community as a whole, you know, there's been a lot of criticism, you know, some fair, some I think unfair, but regardless, I think the community is very concerned about whether we're moving forward in a responsible fashion.

It is a lot of information and the way I try to wrap it around my brain is to use a medical model and this is, I like this because it is a holistic approach in looking at all the variables we need to consider and also it is like a second opinion based on the initial diagnosis of they wanted too much money and so

Based on that it was just, it created an opportunity to look at the bigger picture again.

And some of the notes that I had was I thought that the water conservation and the dredging feasibility study and the Ragged Mountain Dam design review, I felt all those things needed to be done anyway.

whether or not we were having a discussion about a water supply plan.

Those things need to be done.

And then I wondered about the 50-year water demand calculations and also the pipeline.

This gives us a chance to be examined, some of those decisions that we made.

And as I even thought about how those things are being examined,

I agree with the comments that have been made.

I'm particularly pleased to see the emphasis on a more holistic and more comprehensive look at water conservation measures.

I think that's going to prove quite beneficial in the long run among these other studies.

Miss Smith made a comment earlier about this being a river restoration project.

And while I agree with Dr. Brown that it's not a river restoration project, it's accomplishing many other goals, but when it comes down to it,

I think the biggest difference fundamentally between the adopted water supply plan and the alternative set forth by the Citizens for Sustainable Water Supply

is how much are we willing to invest in river restoration because if we were to say that our, and I'm not saying we are, I'm saying if we were to say that our goal is simply to increase in-stream flow of the Mormon's River versus restoring quote-unquote natural in-stream flow of the Mormon's River

who would have a much cheaper plane and a much simpler plane with the knowledge that we now have about what dredging might cost versus the knowledge we thought we had a year ago about what dredging might cost.

So to me, one of the most valuable pieces, if not the most valuable piece of information to come out of all this research will be the cost inferential, the true cost inferential as best we can estimate.

between what it will take to restore quote-unquote natural stream flow to the moments versus enhanced in-stream flow or increased in-stream flow and then are we willing to incur that cost.

That would be one very interesting piece of information among many others and so I fairly concur with these proposals and thank you again Mr. O'Connell and I hope that our county counterparts will concur that this information will be beneficial to have and we can move forward with a more enriched and informed public conversation.

Even though we don't have a resolution for us, I think, again, it would be good for us to go on record in support of these proposals, so if somebody would like to make a motion to...

endorsed this document.

Mr. Huja has moved.

Does anyone have the language of that?

Yeah, without a language of that, we're not proceeding with the construction and TAY's studies are concluded.

Thank you.

It's been moved and seconded and amended as amended.

In further discussion, please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

I'm going to try, this actually gets complicated as it should be just starting to be.

Still Armstrong's head in, we'll quickly go through because there will be four or five iterations to this.

This is involving six units to be constructed on.

John Street comes out of the original agreement in 2002 aimed at city residents that are unoccupied and originally appointed for the unit.

There were agreements made in 2005.

I won't go through all of them, but one of them was that the affordable unit would be at 80% of their annual income.

I should take one step back.

Part of what the original proposal did is the city financed the bulk of the purchase of the lots, which was at $11,500 to be paid back as each property was sold.

There was another amendment in 2006 that our units

had to be resignably employed unless otherwise approved by the city manager.

Then there was an amendment this summer that you might recall that only the initial purchaser must be for homeowner occupancy.

They're now six units.

One's been sold at the market rate.

Five are in the market.

Two of them I think they have the possibility of

of interested parties but greater than that 80% of AMI.

We agree that the agreements that council previously approved would eliminate the residency requirement in market rate units.

The question that's in front of you that

have not been able to work through and it's actually included in your housing policy which we're pointing to is that the two affordable units pay at 80% of AMI.

PHA wants to use the VHDA limits which would raise it to a $73,000 income for a family of three.

So the question that's in front of you is do you want to create some exception for most two affordable units

to allow PHA to sell those at a higher median income.

And I should add, they have a bank loan instead of the 1st of December that becomes a part of this whole issue as well.

So, I hope that quickly gives you the issues.

You've got all the different agreements and incentives here, but it focuses on do you want to change the policy about the any proceeding AMI

on these two affordable units or not, or consider a way to do that.

Would you like to let him add something?

Sure, come on board.

Briefly, I know.

The biological clocks, I think, are catching up.

I know these with me, as far as it's 11 o'clock as of three or four days ago.

I was trying to hand this off to you if you'd like, but first I'd like to say is the John Street, I'd like to take a few minutes here.

We make all decisions of Piedmont Housing Alliance collectively and individually as executive director and as the board.

We do the mission test.

the sociology test, the political test, and the financial test.

John Street, part of this project, was put on as an add-on as a phase four to the Page Street project to eliminate the parking issues or to create parking where there was none at the end of Page Street.

That's why you have boarded up houses sitting there.

And so we took it on as a challenge to go ahead and say, how do we get off street parking where there were two parking spaces before?

and three boarded up houses or three boarded up units and a couple lots.

How do we create eight parking spaces off street?

And the way we decided to try to do that when you went to the end of John Street, where there was a vacant city lot, now we've realized after $75,000 of engineering and about a half million dollars of site work, we've now realized that the city never could develop that property.

And so we were, from a mission test perspective, we started off with one affordable unit originally.

Really, really, we were trying to be the affordable side of this.

The original first three phases were 31 units that were primarily affordable.

Two-thirds of those were affordable.

So, what we did was we attempted to say, how do we create off-street parking?

And we asked the city where there was an old alligator that had 50 years of growth on it.

We partnered with Old Dominion to try to get them to move a telephone pole or two We tried to take an old city lot that was pretty antiquated and had antiquated infrastructure underneath it and attempted to build these six townhouses and originally it was a run affordable unit and then since that took about two or three years of engineering work and so forth and delays when we came back to city council to ask for

an extension of the purchase of that lot for $75,000 more at Karolati at the time, so we'd like to do two photo units on that now.

So that's how we got from one to two.

And having said that, we've had it, we've finished it, we've built it, we started marketing last March to try to market these units to the open market.

The idea was four would be a market rate and two were photo.

Well, you all know what's going on in the real estate market.

We've turned away a couple of offers over the last six months of people that did not reside in the city, and then on the affordability of the two units, we've had a couple of city employees come to us, but one was a firefighter, and he, with his overtime, made I think about three or four thousand more than he could under the current guidelines, and the other one was a city employee.

Well, here we are in our construction loan, we got up

extended till December 1st and we haven't sold anything else.

And so from the political test this has been a failure for me.

I mean when you start looking at Starr Hill, Hinton Avenue, Fifeville, Page Street, those are all very successful things.

But from political capital, I've spent my political capital on this project.

And you know, with the 10 million dollar project the friendship court was less complex.

in this $1.8 million project we have here today.

And so I apologize for the inconvenience of the city council.

And I'm just asking to say, can you give us some flexibility, because we'd like to, you know, sell some property, move on to our other projects.

We have $15 million worth of housing, specific projects, and ask for your consideration.

The VHDA guidelines is their first-time home ownership program, which we've used throughout the city.

and we're asking you to adopt that.

One of the things I think you've struggled with, I know Mr. Huja has over his 30-year career is when you do the AMR of Charlottesville, you do have the college students' income in there as well.

When we look at what VHDA does, and since they look at the state as a whole and they use complex models, they really look at the market, their incomes are a little bit higher, they're a little bit broader because they recognize the high-cost areas like Northern Virginia,

here, Tidewater, etc.

So it doesn't preclude us from our mission.

We have 115 units right now that we're working on for rental.

But this particular part of it we're asking you to consider it so we can kind of move on with it and get on with those other rental projects we have on our pipeline.

So I do apologize for the inconvenience.

I feel like a failure.

But at the same time, we'll make it up in other areas.

The city is not putting any dollars of your housing funds in this project whatsoever.

As we did, we said when you only finance the city land, and so we're taking that down as we pay off units.

The premium it costs on this is about $100,000 or $105,000 to get it construction ready.

That's what it costs us.

And that was about $50,000 more per unit than we ever anticipated.

And for six units,

That's $600,000.

The good news is you've got off-street parking, three new townhouses, an additional $20,000 a year to the city for tax revenues on these particular units.

It'll be two or four years based on VHDA's first-time home ownership program standards.

If we can get it, you know, if we can find somebody that will do it, the thing we do is, part of what we do at Page Street, we make money on the market rate units to help us buy down the cost of the affordable units.

But we're now, you know, we want to sell one market rate unit, we're discounting our market rate units by about $10,000 each now, so that's

$30,000 more dollars we don't have to help buy down the affordable units.

And so we're concerned that we're kind of a little bit in a financial handcuffs here.

Yes, ma'am.

I don't want three.

You want me to get one of these?

Yes, sir.

I personally guarantee in the next two years I'll find two more units somewhere else.

Any other questions?

How about 30 parking spaces around Friendship Court?

This is where, first of all, as a distributor here, I have two solar panels, but I'm not to be paid.

I'm visiting a city, so I'm going to acknowledge it again.

Again, the city has three house of friends on this phone line, because we still have a further housing.

Dr. Biden?

Well, I think because these houses are not funded with our housing funds when we do have the income constrictions, they're still going to be affordable based on the VHA criteria.

Bob, just on a segue, I wanted to thank you for your advocacy as far as keeping your task force in place.

Mr. Connolly, do you need a motion on this?

Yeah, I need a motion because it's in a contract, so if you could make a motion to change the guidelines to the first time home buyer program of AHDA.

So moved.

For your discussion, please indicate a vote.

This will be for the two units.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

I will not be here again on John Street.

I promise.

Mr. Brown, I promise.

One other question.

They're market-right and there's no city dollars in it, so

I'm also going to take official action on that request as well.

So I don't think we need to act on that if it's already in the law.

We all concur with that if we have any questions.

Make sure that we don't worry about it.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Any other business?

Good evening, I'm Peter Kleeman.

I live at 407 Hedge Street in the city.

And in the spirit of holistic and comprehensive thinking that has been brought up today here, I'd like to talk a little bit about the transportation, the variety of transportation issues that were on your agenda.

There was some discussion about parking, parking study, and about transit, and also about providing access to the polls, etc., using local transit and other opportunities for

moving people in and out of downtown and other parts of the city.

In listening to the report I did not have the opportunity to read the parking study but I would like to make a recommendation that perhaps instead of thinking of parking as being a unique element that is studied independent of all these other transit and other transportation opportunities including some of the discussion about

I think a more balanced and comprehensive approach to looking at accessibility to downtown would make sense to me and hopefully to you.

I live on Head Street as I mentioned which is just one block north of High Street and between High Street and my house on Head Street there's a very large capital investment going in that's a large parking garage that I don't believe was even considered in the parking study.

Now I know that that was a large number of spaces, some of which were going to be available to the public during certain periods of the day or the week, and that a number of those spaces were going to be reserved for city vehicles, and I know there's a move to reduce the number of city vehicles that are in use, but

I know I got a note from Jeannie Alexander about a year, year and a half ago about the number of city vehicles parked right in that target downtown area and I think the number was somewhere between 20 and 30.

So my hunch is that many of those vehicles will be garaged in this new garage outside of that area.

I think the arbitrary boundary of saying High Street, which I think was the northern boundary of this sort of steady area, only a half a block further north from that is a very large parking garage under construction and certain flexibilities in what kind of vehicles would be

Thank you Mr. Kleeman.

Thank you for sticking it out

New ordinance about ticketing motor coaches.

The city of Charlottesville has an idling policy which was implemented July 31, 2007.

It's policy 100-12 which addresses some things that are missing from this ordinance.

Things having to do with providing safety to passengers in extreme weather.

The day I moved to Charlottesville it was 105 degrees.

15 minutes of idling and motor coach is not safe for some of our passengers.

We're also, we're the 82nd largest limousine and bus company in the United States, UVA's the largest vendor.

We provide service to a lot of schools in the area, Charlottesville schools, and we peak the transportation section of the policy, addresses warmth, the best in colder weather.

in this area.

Heat in hotter weather is important.

So I'd like for you to take a look at the ordinance, take a look at the safety issues, take a look at the Charlottesville policy and consider an amendment for weather on that.

It also addresses

We call them bus captains.

Whenever the bus captain has a concern about restarting the vehicle in a timely manner, or in our case, if we're not absolutely sure when the passengers are coming out, maybe they give us a range, a half hour range or something like that.

So I'd encourage you to reconsider that.

Nobody likes to be stuck behind a stinky bus, but I want to talk about buses for just a second.

River running on blended fuels, ultra-low sulfur or diesel fuel, bio-diesel fuel, the best example, motor coaches are part of America's Energy Solution.

The best example for environmental stewardship applies to all motor coaches on the road today

fuel efficiency compared to other transportation sectors.

My approach is currently about 184 passenger miles per gallon.

You can compare that with the next most efficient sector which is rail at 86 passenger miles per gallon or transit buses at 32 passenger miles per gallon.

I would also say lastly, being that we are a minority business enterprise, state certified,

and provide over 50 to 70% above living wage, we'd like to have the opportunity to communicate reference to the Regional Transit Authority and possibly some of these parking problems you've been talking about and that's what I'd like to say.

Thank you very much.

Can you be sure you leave your contact information, Ms. Cox?

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Betty Mooney and I live at 201 Sunset Avenue and I appreciate that you are looking at this water supply issue with new eyes, I hope, but I would like to make sure that I clearly understand what this draft or what you voted on.

I wish that we could have seen this before your discussion tonight, but maybe that wasn't possible.

But I want to be clear about it because there are hundreds and hundreds of people that you've gotten petitions from now and neighborhood associations that have weighed in that want to see the dredging surveys done before anything else moves forward.

And I believe that's what I heard you say tonight.

But I want to point out one of the problems I see in what you voted on already.

This was written by the Sierra Club.

They said the female group of the Sierra Club takes the position of a technical study of the cost and feasibility of dredging the Rivanna Reservoir to restore water storage capacity should be completed before any steps are taken to implement the currently adopted plan.

Now that's what I heard you all say you wanted to happen tonight.

But here's the problem.

Ronald Livia, it says, this is from the Sierra Club, represents the Sierra Club on the Stewardship Task Force, which if you look on your draft for discussion under C, you have dredging and feasibility study.

Here's the problem.

Five members of the task force, including one, have indicated they believe that maintenance of long-term water storage capacity of the reservoir should be a recommendation of the task force.

Other members have asserted that discussions of dredging to restore full water storage capacity with the Rivanna Reservoir do not fall within the charge of the task force.

They are committed to the adopted water supply plan which calls for a new dam at the Ragged Mountain Reservoir.

So the problem is, you have here on page 1C,

the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir Stewardship Task Force recommends dredging and here the Seattle Club is telling you that the 13-member task force only five of those members support

maintenance of long-term water storage capacity.

So if you're saying that you're only going to get your dredging studies done if the South Fork recommends it, then you're not being clear about what you just told us.

You told us tonight that you're going to get those studies done because you need the studies and the surveys done to compare

to the RWSA proposal for the dam and the pipeline.

On page two, it gets even more confusing because under the D item, under Ragged Mountain Dam Design Review, you say, in addition, the team will determine the extent to which the height of this proposed dam could be layered to reduce total storage volume by an amount equivalent to the volume of storage and self-work by an initial dredging operation.

and then you go on.

So you have to have the dredging surveys in order to even make that comparison.

So I just want to understand you clearly that this council is on record and is voting to say those dredging surveys will happen, which is the resolution you see from the neighborhoods, before anything is done to go forward with the dam or the pipeline.

So I just want to make absolutely certain because I'm going to report back to all the neighborhoods and we have to go to more neighborhoods next month who want to join into the resolution and if this uncertainty remains, it's really not good for all of us.

So I think that the Sierra Club sees the problem.

We only have five members of the task force, including one, who will even see water storage capacity as part of the task force with what they would recommend.

But tonight you're saying, under D, if the South Fork recommends dredgings.

So here's the problem.

Anyways, I hope you can clear that for me.

Thank you, Ms. May.

Good evening, Councilors.

My name is Kevin Lynch.

I live at 609 Kochis Avenue.

I think Betty Mooney made some very good points just now.

Another thing I want to point out about the scope of work, I do think that this is certainly an improvement in the Council's position over where it has been.

And one of the things that you call for is the appointment of a board of consultants who would look at all aspects of this.

I think it's important that those consultants are accountable to you, the City Council,

and the Board of Supervisors rather than Rivanna and picking up on Counselor Edwards' analogy about a doctor.

If you go to a doctor with a sore throat and the doctor says, I think we need to take your appendix out and it's going to cost you $223 million, you don't say to that doctor, here's $30,000, why don't you go get a second opinion on that?

You get a second opinion for yourself.

I think that's what's missing here because the advice that you've been getting from the board, from your representatives on the board, quite frankly, has been bad advice and a lot of misinformation has come from the board, from your representatives on the board.

You need to take some ownership of information that's going to be developed.