City Council Meeting   3/16/2009

Do you have it?

It's time for the senior historian, who's dated today, to change this to make it like the appeals should be canceled.

So the Planning Commission didn't vote for this because councils should be able to consider more of the dust in the area of the United States.

Maybe councils consider the neighborhood as an economic development or something like that.

I don't know, they've got a sign outside.

He signed up on the wrong sheet.

So he proposed a men list on the contribution district right now.

And then we'll go back later and maybe change the VDR thing, the historical thing.

Who does the first thing find this?

It simplifies our plan.

Do you know anything special for them?

I don't know.

I thought that was good.

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

Thank you.

We're going to start with a series of announcements.

First of all, I'd like to announce that we have overflow seating for those of you who might wish to have an actual seat down in the basement conference room.

You're not obligated to go down there, but if you would like, Mr. Finkel can show you the ways down the hall and down the steps.

We know there's a lot of interest in tonight's proceedings.

Secondly, on Monday, March 25th,

At 2 o'clock, our Registrar of Voters, Sherry Aichata, is holding a candidate training forum for anybody that might be interested in running for one of the local seats that is up for election this year.

It will be 2 o'clock here in the City Council Chambers.

Thank you again, Ms. Aichata, for organizing those sessions.

I have a couple announcements.

Lee Norris and I are involved in a privately funded exploratory trip to Winneba.

Winneba is a village located in Ghana and we're planning the trip the end of April.

There will be a reception this coming Friday by Lighthouse and the Live Arts, what would you call that, the rooftop

Wonderful view of the city.

In any case, Friday, March 20th from 7 to 830, we welcome you to come to the reception to learn more about Winneba.

There will be Canadian food and Canadian music and you'll get a chance to learn about the opportunities we're going to have to travel.

My second announcement is I have my shop Charlottesville button and I just encourage everyone to shop and eat locally and I know

You know, things are different, so I'm drinking my Mac Cafe, and it's okay.

But as you think about shopping Charlottesville, I just want to give a special shout out to people that know that you don't know how to cook.

I mean, you know you don't know how to cook.

And so just a couple times this week, just go buy a restaurant, pick up something to go or treat your family out.

Or if you want to pick up something and put it in a nice dish, you know, they won't know the difference unless you really can't cook and they don't know the difference.

But just encourage everyone to shop Charlotte's Films.

That announcement, did we have Charlotte's for high school students here?

I just wanted to just recognize how well the boys and girls basketball team did.

Great season.

And I just wanted to know that any of the CHS, did you bring a game ball or a t-shirt or a shoe or something?

Thank you, Ms. Edwards.

Any other announcements?

I have, as I mentioned, a series of proclamations to honor local organizations who are doing great work in the community.

Before we get into the proclamations, we have a very brief presentation from our Public Works Department on our natural gas program whose mascot you may know as Flicker the Flame, who is joining us tonight.

Mr. Flicker the Flame.

Flicker the Flame, I'm very pleased to announce received and our public works department received an award of excellence for marketing and tools for branding and logo design.

This is a very special award and we actually have a very brief two minute presentation on the screens in front of you about Flicker the Flame.

I'm David Brown, and welcome to the

Music playing...

A word of excellence.

Thank you.

Next we have a proclamation to honor an upcoming event, which hopefully many of us will be participating in, the festival of the book.

Whereas literacy is crucial to our ability to understand fully what we read, and whereas reading stimulates the creative and intellectual growth of an individual,

And it continues, now therefore I, Dave Norris, Mayor of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby proclaim Wednesday, March 18th through Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 as the 15th Annual Virginia Festival of the Book and encourage community members to participate fully in the wide range of available events and activities.

It's Wednesday through Sunday of this week.

We hope you get caught.

There are over 300 authors for children and adults including Jim Furgen, one of our city employees who's written a great book.

Next, whereas each year during the month of March we formally recognize the American Red Cross Central Virginia Regional Chapter and its essential humanitarian role in Charlottesville, Virginia, we honor the role of the Red Cross's contribution to making Charlottesville a better place.

Everyday Red Cross volunteers and employees carry out the mission by providing essential services to people and their communities with the help of generous donors in Charlottesville.

I put on this jacket, it happened to be from 9-11.

We were the only chapter in the country that were on all three locations from 9-11.

This year we were one of the top three highly performing chapters.

When you cross over into Winchester or Warrington or Lexington or Louisa County you are entering into the area of our chapter.

Whether it's a house fire, whether it's teaching people life-saving skills or whether it's dealing with a

Serviceman overseas who needs a message, your Red Cross is there.

I know that a number of you have been to our point of entry.

We provide you with a lunch.

We get you out in an hour.

We don't ask you for any money at all.

We only want you to learn more about Red Cross and hopefully you'll come over to our chapter and make an appointment and join us and learn a little bit more about what we do.

Another one, whereas last year the Blue Ridge Poison Center responded to more than 27,000 human exposures to poisons in its 53 county service region, including 1,674 in the Charlottesville-Albemarle area, and whereas poisoning is the second leading cause of injury hospitalization and the second leading cause of injury death in Virginia,

Hi, everyone.

So, a quick show of hands.

How many people have 20 or many left over every month to

Waste on something like a trip to the emergency room.

Anyone?

Okay.

Me neither.

So, poisoning, like all injuries, can be prevented.

It's a very costly injury, and if you're interested in tips on how to prevent poisoning for yourself or your loved ones, I bought some tip cards.

I have two kinds, one for older adults and one for childhood poisoning.

I'll distribute them from the back to be less disruptive.

And there's Spanish on the back and English on the front.

Also, inspired by best efforts, sometimes accidents do happen, and so what do you do if you have a poisoning situation in front of you?

The Poison Center is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year.

It's staffed by nurses and doctors with medical toxicology training.

The number is on these refrigerator magnets.

I'll pass them out as well.

It's really confidential, and we'll stay in mind to help you all day long, all night long.

So stay safe.

Thank you.

And last but certainly not least, on our consent agenda tonight are a couple of items relating to the kickoff for our decennial United States Census process.

We're going to be working very hard over the next year to collect lots of good demographic information on our community.

And in conjunction with that, I have a proclamation, whereas the decennial census serves as the basis for the reapportionment of seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and the redrawing of legislative district boundaries in the Virginia General Assembly.

and is the foremost method of gathering information about our nation and our community.

I hope everyone will join us on April 1st in front of City Hall on the plaza as we kick off for the 2010 census.

It's our commitment and the commitment of the committee members to join hands, the logo this year is it's in our hands, to join hands with all of our local partners in the city of Charlottesville to count every single resident in the city of Charlottesville and get all the money that is deserved for the city of Charlottesville in 2010.

Thank you, Ms. Iacchetti.

As always, we ask you to please keep your comments to three minutes, and when you come forward, if you would identify yourself and give your address.

Good evening Mr. Moore and Members of Council.

I'm Linda Seaman, Chairman of the Community Scholarship Program.

I live at 2010 Greenbrier Drive here in the city.

I'm here this evening to provide you with an update on our partnership.

Several members of our board are present this evening.

I'd like to ask them to be recognized.

Also, Council Taliaferro serves on our board.

One of the Charlottesville community scholars wrote to the board that he had a real commitment to social justice and that his life goals include applying academic knowledge and skills to helping people, especially Latinos in the United States.

This Charlottesville high school graduate and third year student at the University of Virginia is studying to become a doctor and he is one of the 32 scholars supported by the community scholarship program.

The Charlottesville Community Scholarship Program is a unique public-private partnership founded in 2001 by City Council to help deserving low and moderate income graduates of Charlottesville, Lane, Burleigh High Schools, the City of Charlottesville employees, and employees of the Charlottesville School Division who wish to get some further education.

Since 2004, when we gave out our first scholarships, we have awarded 32 scholarships to members of the community.

Six have graduated or completed their programs of studies.

For the current academic year, 14 Charlottesville residents received community scholarships.

Seven are first-year students.

Seven are upperclassmen.

Last year, we gave out a total of $12,500 in scholarships.

The scholarship program is unusual and has some very special features.

First of all, it supports recipients throughout their undergraduate education if they reapply annually and maintain an acceptable GPA.

The amount of award increases each year to motivate students and to keep their student loans as low as possible.

Number two, the scholarship is the only one in this community to provide assistance to adults who want to have more education to advance their careers.

We, therefore, are a community workforce development program helping adults to move up.

So far, non-community scholars are working adults who have benefited from our support.

The Community Scholarship Program is a public-private partnership.

Council generously provided funding to begin the program.

Now many, many area citizens have also given generously to our endowment, along with getting grants from foundations.

And let me say that just last week we got notice that we received a community foundation grant.

Last year council committed to matching funds that we raised and I'm here this evening to tell you that despite a very difficult economic downturn we raised over $16,500 from the community and our annual financial statement is in the packet I just gave you.

In the last year, the Community Scholarship Program has moved forward with a lot of new energy.

We have new initiatives that include our first fundraising event called Food for Thought.

Charlottesville restaurants commit a percentage of one evening's receipts to support our program.

We, in turn, work hard to bring patrons to their restaurants so everybody wins.

We have a newsletter that is also in your packet that is now sent to our contributors and friends three times a year.

We have a new website, www.CharlottesvilleScholarship.com.

Check us out.

We also have a Facebook group.

You can join us.

We have started an initiative called Program Partners, and those are local businesses that provide unique contacts, financial support, or specialized services to a scholarship program.

Our first two partners are Monticello Media and the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce.

and we're always looking for new partners.

We have revised our bylaws and have a new data management system and so we're revitalizing and streamlining our operations.

Our program has been invited to participate in Art in Action, an afternoon of art and advocacy on the lawn at the university on April 5th.

I hope you'll join us there.

This UVA student activity brings town and gown together and financially supports community organizations.

I want to thank you for this opportunity to report on our progress and our partnership.

We ask that you continue, help us continue our work by once again matching the private funds we raise.

That's a wonderful motivator to citizens in our community to help us raise money for our students and for our workforce.

Thank you, Ms.

Seaman, and thank you to the board members who are here tonight as well.

I'm Bob Fenwick, I live at 901 East Jefferson Street, and I'm here to about save McIntyre.

And I would like the members of the audience who support me in this effort to please stand up.

Ma'am, gentlemen, there's been a recurring theme from several other members of this council.

I'm the only woman that has a website on this issue, I believe, and that's savedmacintire.com.

And I've heard remarks about mis-truths, misstatements, and I would like to know what those are.

Saturday, you had a campaign

You had a campaign event at McIntire Park.

You mentioned those who would divide.

I would like to know to whom you will refer.

Well, I'll make my remarks brief because you have a full schedule, but I will say that you will not decide this issue.

It will be the citizens of Charlottesville who decide this issue.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Randy Page.

I live at 1401 Walford Street.

After buying lunch and presenting ideas for an alternate location for the YMCA to a city councilor, he left me with the words that these are really good ideas and we should look into them.

Please email them to me and I'll pass them on.

They were never passed on after I sent the email and I did not feel that lip service is a viable or sustainable function if you remain an elected official and lip service is what I got.

If you fail in your responsibility to actively seek and consider input from your electorate at all the stages of this important decision, it is certainly a failure to perform your duty and dissent is the only option for those who aren't being heard.

The YMCA is a vision.

It's a vision to serve the underprivileged, the high school, swim team, and area of youths.

Those voting for the YMCA view it as a significant social enhancement, but it is only a vision.

It is a mirage of hope.

There was no empirical support for the project.

Your decisions are predetermined by the correctness of your vision and not by reality.

and this is the same rationale that took us to war.

It will not provide for the clientele you desire to serve.

Just as the ideally located Boys and Girls Club will hopefully impact the egregious middle school dropout rate in the city, a more centrally located Y will better serve and give better service to those in need and McIntyre is not that site.

For such an important project, the process should have been much more slow and open.

There are people watching these proceedings that vote.

I have hundreds of names on petitions for moving the Y to an alternate site.

And the number of people who refused to sign those petitions was amazingly small.

The ride's a good idea, but not in McIntire Park.

The park is not a pie to be cut and distributed for roads or private clubs.

Stratton Saludis, Saludis 704 Grave Street.

On the way down here, before the meeting started, I was speaking to Flicker the Blue Flame, and he told me that he was a little shy, but he had some things he hoped that I would relay to you.

And he wanted me to talk about the parkway, believe it or not.

He said that it would be really bad for the city and in fact we don't owe it to the county and they're trying to pull one over on us.

He said that it would increase traffic downtown and in our residential neighborhoods where we don't want it and it would actually bypass our main retail centers

on Seminole Square and Barracks Road and that would cost us tax revenue.

He said that our central park should not be sacrificed for that.

He also told me, you know I didn't remember this, but he told me that Mr. Taliaferro and Mr. Brown promised as they ran for city council that they would not support the parkway unless the conditions were met.

And he told me that these conditions had not been met.

He said that there was a pond that was deemed

essential to the project, that the stormwater facilities be put in one pond, so that hasn't happened.

He said the replacement parkland is further away, slopier, it's in strips along the road, and he said that in order to get to the proper number, city staff actually told you that they could reprogram some city land that the city already owned as parkland, as some of the replacement parkland.

He didn't think that was very fair.

And most importantly,

The eastern connector is nowhere and that cut through traffic that that was designed to prevent would be coming right through the city, as would the cut through traffic that the 29 bypass would have prevented.

He also told me that your city attorney is looking at a letter our attorney, the Corporation to Preserve McIntyre Park, sent

which says that the city is not in accordance with federal law and he has not gotten back to you about that yet so I hope that you wouldn't act before you know that you are following the law.

And he also said that he would like to see pedestrian oriented development instead of sprawl and hope the money would go there.

And he said that express bus service utilizing 250 could make a great connection between downtown Pantops and the 29 North area

and a bikeway would be a great way to move people north and south without encouraging sprawl.

He told you all that.

I've just been informed that Flickr is a she, actually.

It's not what she told me.

Listen, gender identity issues apparently with the master.

Yes, my name is Barbara Cruikshank and I live on Spring Lake Drive in Earliesville.

and I'm here to talk about the Meadow Creek Parkway.

Meadow Creek Parkway is an example of an archaic 40-year-old idea whose time really came and went.

It's 2009 now and we know that more roads are not the answer to our traffic woes.

We know that parkland is precious and irreplaceable.

We know that an interchange that is 40 feet off the ground will destroy the quiet of what is left of the park

and the nearby neighborhoods.

It will fracture the green space, making it impossible for the deer and the other animals that live at McIntire right now to need to move to a new home, and it will continue to further degrade Meadow Creek.

We've already seen the destruction of quite a few old trees, and now that we know that Charlottesville is a green city, in 2009 we don't want

to lose any more trees at McIntire Park.

Forty years ago, Meadow Creek Parkway was a bad idea, and in 2009, it's really a travesty to lose this green space so close to our city.

Good evening Mr. Mayor and Councillors, Colette Harvard and Robert C. Lee.

Last year I invited you to walk with me through East McIntire Park.

Once you are about a third of the way in, the traffic from 250 is silenced.

You hear the cry of the hawk, the bird songs, and the creek gurgling.

Perhaps you glimpse a flash of a shy fox or the bounding deer.

As you start your journey on the rise of Stonewall, behind this wall is the secret gardens of the former Rock Hill Academy, now the Markup property.

In the daily progress insert of February 25, 2009, there is an article on these secret gardens, and I'm going to directly read through the article, so this will be a quote.

There are stone walls everywhere, beautifully constructed.

Some walls were stone-less on stone, held in place by the wrong perfect fit.

With stone stairways, terraces, boxwoods, and naturalized as well as formal plantings, the gardens there show a colonial revival landscape.

Land on the other side of the grounds is laid out for the enjoyment of nature with stone switchback trails up to a steep hill that rises above the creek to rail the dungeon in Forsythia.

From the hillside, you look out on the edge of McIntire Park, though perhaps in the future you'll look out on the road.

Chris Jensen, who is the Trail Coordinator for the city, is quoted in this article.

And he says, the current plans for the interchange include ramps slashing through the southwest corner of the garden, which will destroy important sections of the garden and bring traffic to the edge of the terrace section.

The Rock Hill Garden is among the most complex residential garden landscapes in all of Charlottesville.

He goes on to say the project included, meaning MacIntyre Road extended, including purchase of replacement parkland well north of Melbourne Road to compensate for the parkland ruined by the road.

The Rock Hill Garden should have been the first priority for purchase and restoration.

Chancellor Cope's the city will reconsider and advocates for a change in the plan.

and the very last thing I want to say is one fleeting glimpse, all that's visible to the outside world of a garden called the Most Important Garden Landscape in Charlottesville.

And if any of you haven't seen this article about these incredible gardens, I'd be really happy to direct it for you.

These gardens are now under the scrutiny of Section 106, Consulting Parties Committee of the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, VROT, the City, and the Citizens Committee members and soon to be discussed by the United States Honor Corps of Engineers Consulting Parties Committee.

Thank you Ms. Hall.

And just to, without taking away from the gist of your comments, I just want to clarify that, that comment by Mr. Ginzik was in, incorrectly attributed to him.

That was actually Daniel Bluestone who made those comments.

So, there was a correction in the next day's paper, but I just wanted to make sure.

We noted that for the record.

Hi, my name is Kabira Wise and I live at 1818 Yorktown Drive and I'm here to speak against the building of the Meadow Creek Parkway and about relocating the Y from McIntire Park.

My house on Yorktown Drive backs up onto Meadow Creek and Greenbrier Park at the western edge along Brandywine.

When I go out my back door and I walk the Greenbrier Park, we go to the far end of Eastern Edge, we come to the railroad tracks, we cross into the pipe, and that's, and there used to be, up until a couple of weeks ago, beautiful little woods back there.

It was private, it was quiet, it was full of wildlife, and those woods are gone.

It's been clear cut.

and that's for the county portion of the Meadow Creek Parkway and the people in my neighborhood are devastated.

People just walk around saying, you know, really, we're really depressed.

It's just been devastating to see this disappear.

So, not only have we lost the state park by walking trail, but if that road gets built, the noise from the parkway is really going to have an unending impact on Greenbrier Park.

The quiet enjoyment of that park is also going to be lost.

It's just not going to be the same.

From where I live, the fall into the park, we can hear the train.

If I think I can hear the train, I'm going to be able to hear the traffic on this road as well.

On a number of occasions, I've heard the city say when green spaces were being lost,

that this is privately held land and that there's nothing the city can do about it.

Well, this land that was given to the county and McIntire Park is land that's under the city control and there is something you can do about it.

So, I mean, really, I'm just begging you to save McIntyre Park.

You know, if my park is gone, can't be saved, you know, that McIntyre Park still has all its potential there.

And, you know, the potential is tremendous in the park.

I think that the Tannenfield Gardens and the Eastern Park is a really, really good idea.

I personally would like to see a dog park being integrated into that because world class cities have really cool dog parks.

They've got small dog areas, big dog areas, they've got trails where people can walk with their dogs, run with their dogs, they've got ponds, they've got agility equipment and I think Charlottesville deserves to have something like that.

And the issue of building a Y in the park, while it seemed like a good idea at the time, the more one thinks about it, that that land given up will be regained.

And that having the YMCA where it's easy to get to from the downtown area, if it's not,

It effectively discriminates against the poor city residents who are really the ones who should be best served by the Albemarle MCA.

And I'm not sure about this, but it seemed like the plan for relocating the shelters to accommodate the Y put them awfully close to 250.

And you just can't have parkland next to a road.

It just doesn't work.

The quiet is part of where people go to a park for.

Now 250 is already an issue around McIntyre.

Carl Wise.

Hi, I'm Carl Wise, 1818 Yorktown Drive.

I've heard that.

Mr. Mayor, Council, I'll keep this short.

Please don't build a park.

Please don't sacrifice McIntyre Park.

It could become the gem of Charlottesville.

It could be our central park.

What we need is more pedestrianways.

We need more bikeways.

We need more transportation.

We don't need another roadway.

In essence, I would say save the park.

and relocate the Y.

What Kabir said.

Good evening everyone, thank you so much for hearing us out.

I actually live behind the Covenant School that's directly being affected by this interchange and even just driving here tonight I had to wait five minutes to get a break in traffic and that's with the traffic light at McIntyre Road.

Now if there's no traffic light, there's no incentive for anybody to stop.

There's no way for people who live on Park Street to get on the bypass

people on locusts to go on the bypass.

So you create a domino effect and it just doesn't make any sense.

It's not safe.

And you're talking about putting a roadway up in the air and you're talking about taking out one of our entrances to our little neighborhood.

We're affecting 80 households up there and a school that has 300 students

150 parents driving in.

If you take out one of the roads, it's just going to be impossible to get in and out.

Have an elementary school bus coming through there, playing Mexican standoff every day.

It happens twice a day.

And so I just wanted to say that.

I just still wanted to quote from a recent Newsweek article that just came out on March the 9th.

It says, in general terms, traffic is caused by too much demand for vehicles needing too little supply of roads.

One solution is to increase supply of building more roads.

But that's expensive, and demands from drivers tends to quickly overwhelm the new supply.

Today, engineers acknowledge that building new roads usually makes traffic worse, not better.

and this is a pilot study that was done during the 1990s.

I don't know if you all remember the earthquake that happened in San Francisco where they lost a freeway.

What they discovered after that was that congestion actually decreased rather than increased after the earthquake knocked out the Q freeway.

This British transit engineer named Stephen Atkins said, in a lot of places the traffic was not just displaced, a lot of it disappeared.

In a 1998 study he commissioned, researchers studied 60 cases of road reductions and thought that when roads were closed, drivers took steps to avoid the area.

In economic terms, closing roads raises the perceived cost of the trips because drivers anticipate hassles, reducing demand.

And in New York City, Mayor Bloomberg is actually talking about shutting down sections of Broadway.

Can you imagine?

Ten million lovers trying to navigate around New York City and the mayor wants to shut down all the roads.

And guess what?

People are agreeing with him.

and they have a study, they're saying, the traffic commission for New York City says, I think that 21st century cities are looking at their streets differently.

They're saying, we need a fresh look at how we're getting people around.

And it's more than just pushing as many cars into the city as possible.

Thank you Ms. Warren.

Good evening.

I'm Downing Smith.

I live at 810 Locust Avenue here in the city.

Before I get started, folks have been kind of hauling you guys tonight, so I'd like to pay you a compliment.

I'd like to thank you all for standing up for the citizens of Charlottesville to get good information on whether or not we should be doing dredging.

The reason I wanted to come talk to you was because I'd seen that our water rates were going to go up about 10% even though our usage was going down, and that didn't really make a whole lot of sense to me.

The explanation I was given is, well, they had to raise it because they weren't going to use much revenue then to cover the fixed cost.

So that didn't really decide on me either and then I got a copy of this report that was given to the RSWA board and I looked in here a little bit and one of the things I've been told is that half of the fixed costs were debt service.

Well on page 73, appendix 5, we have debt of about $45 million but the debt service was only roughly $5.6 million.

Then finally on table 1 on page 13 I found debt service and reserve, important word, was 10.6 million.

So essentially what's happening is 5 million dollars a year is being put away on reserve.

Maybe I'm aware of that, I didn't until then.

So we really don't have to raise letter rates contributing to the reserve as discretionary.

So we can just cut back our contribution to the reserve and we don't have to raise letter rates.

The funny thing is

Yeah, I would think this is probably a good idea.

I think we probably should raise water rates.

Surprising.

Eric on the hook said we are going to be spending $56 million for this nutrient removal system that I saw today of $65 million, according to the CEO of the day.

We're going to be spending $37 million on the Metacreek connector.

and we're going to be spending $30 million to dredge and I know you don't agree with me, but we have to dredge because if we don't dredge we can't fill the pipeline.

So, what are we going to do?

Well, we take the $28 million we've sent in the reserve, we dredge.

We've still got $9 million we've got to finance.

And just for these two projects, the nutrient thing and the metacrete connector.

I figured that refinancing that model million is going to raise our debt service about $4.8 million, which basically means our debt service really will be half of our revenues.

We are going to be having able contributions to the reserve, and we are not having a reserve either because we spend it on dredging.

formed 3.375 rate over 20 years.

Which brings me to another conclusion.

I don't think we can afford the diamond pipeline.

That's another 150 million.

That'll increase our debt service another 7.9, almost 8 million dollars.

So that'll bring our total debt to 2.85 million dollars and our debt service to over 18 million dollars.

And that's six and a half times our current debt.

I know there are a lot of simplifying assumptions in this, but there's nothing in there for fixing our weather lines or fixing our sewer lines.

I thought I probably just said that on time so I'll finish up real quickly.

Just like we have to embrace mass transit because you can't solve transportation problems by building new roads, we must embrace conservation, technology and maintenance of our existing resources because we can't afford or solve our road supply problems by building more dams and pipelines.

Mayor, council members, Kevin Lynch, 609 Locust Avenue I'm sure you all and the members of the public are well aware of the current banking debacle which has impacted our economy recently and there are other causes for that banking mess but prominent among them are a lack of oversight by responsible parties and the willingness by too many people to believe in financial projections which were obviously too good to be true now all that's pretty clear in hindsight

What concerns me is that not everybody has learned the lessons of our previous implosion going forward.

Rivanna has just put out their proposed budget for this year and it's important that council and the community understand the fine print before committing to another ill-considered financially reckless scheme.

I've got a couple pages from the budget which I'll give to you and the first thing that you'll notice

is that Rivanna has not prepared a new CIP for this year.

Every other budgeting agency has.

But not Rivanna.

Instead they're using last year's CIP.

In other words, even though Rivanna has known since last September that the Ragman Mountain Dam costs have gone from $37 million to a minimum of $85 million, they don't want to acknowledge that in this year's budget.

Instead they're pretending that the old estimates are still valid and that the dam project is moving forward even though they know full well that they need at least another $45 million at least.

Now Rivanna claims that the dam costs are under review.

So they'll use the old last year's numbers until they get new numbers.

That's a little bit like AIG saying that their asset values are under review.

So they're going to forget everything that's happened in the last year and use last year's valuations.

Now that sounds ludicrous.

But that's what happens when a company or an organization operates with no effective oversight.

Elected officials must take responsibility for the huge costs and risks that will occur if Rivanna does not thoroughly account for the most recent known cost of its troubled water plan before this budget is passed.

It would be irresponsible to pass Rivanna's budget otherwise.

Now ignoring the known cost is only part of Rivanna's financial shenanigans and Downing talked in some length about them as well.

Even ignoring the huge cost overruns of the Ragga Mountain Dam, Rivanna is still planning to incur over a hundred million dollars in debt over the next five years and another hundred million dollars in debt after that.

They've known that.

Within five years they will more than triple their debt.

and ultimately they plan to increase debt to over five times its current level.

That's without the overruns which they know about but won't acknowledge.

And yet, less than a year ago, the chair of Rivanna with the board standing behind him claimed with a straight face that the wholesale water rates would only increase by one percent a year for the next five years.

Now hopefully all the council and the public realizes by now that when someone tells you that you can triple your debt and not pay any more for the next five years, that you had better read the fine print.

And as it happens, the fine print is at the bottom of the second page that I gave you.

where it says the good news is that along with the past several years rate increases the authority has built into the rates roughly 50 to 70 percent of the capacity to fund these debt loads for the next five years.

Now what that means in plain English is for the past seven years Rivanna has been substantially overcharging for water.

so that they've now built up a 30 million dollar cash reserve out of every dollar that Rivanna gets from the rate payer approximately 25 cents goes into the slush fund now 30 million dollars in cash is a lot of money as Danny said you could dredge the reservoir for that money but it's not enough to make much of a dent in Rivanna's 200 million dollar spending plans

But what Rivanna can do with $30 million is hide the true cost of the massive debt service that they're about to undertake.

And they can hide that for the next five years, and that's pretty much what they say in their document.

So the true cost won't be apparent until it's too late and the projects are underway.

That might be good news for Rivanna, but not for the ratepayers.

Now over a year ago, council told Gary O'Connell that it wanted to see the impacts of the cost of this massive plan

on city water rates throughout the life of the plant, not just for the next five years.

And Gary said this was March of last year.

The information will be available within a month.

Well, where is it?

Have you seen it?

We haven't seen it.

This is a document that Rivanna put out over a year ago, a year and a half ago.

That's showing their estimated debt service.

A year ago, we made a copy of that and we didn't change it except for putting this little sign on there.

You are here.

You're down here.

This is Rivanna's plan.

Now we're here.

Thank you very much.

Richard Will.

My name is Richard Roy.

I live at 1813 Meadowbrook Heights Road.

I like that.

I haven't seen that before.

I'm going to return to McIntyre Park for just a second.

Since so many people have spoken before me, I only really have two additional points to make.

I have not been fighting this issue for 30 years like some of the people in the room, so I'm a fresh face and that's part of the point.

to know that there are people who have only been here a few years, my wife and I among them, who find this fairly appalling in part having grown up in Northern California in an area not unlike this and having watched it been paved over for ends very similar to what are being sort of expressed for this project in the park.

I don't actually remember any cases there when an existing city park was actually used for a new road.

But a lot of other green space was, and that's my second point, which is that green space also relates to quality of life and eventually to property values.

And we live in this area that will be affected and we're very concerned about that.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, Councilors, my name is John Thompson, I live at 1504 Grove Road and I'm here today on behalf of our neighborhood and other citizens of the city, the majority of whom I believe feel that traffic is the worst problem facing our community and that more roads through the city is not the solution to this issue but the problem.

Until a couple of weeks ago, we enjoyed walking and hiking the trails behind Charlottesville High School stadium.

Well, you can't do that anymore.

If you haven't been over there, please take a look.

The woods have been ripped out, and the trail is closed.

And there's some talk that another trail may open in the very future, but I question who's going to want to go there when you're walking up against a highway.

It's just going to turn into a place of refuse to collect.

So now we have another piece of this parkway, as you know, coming through the city and through our park.

And there's talk of building an arboretum there.

Again, I question, who's going to want to go to this arboretum?

We already have 250 on one side.

We're going to corner it now by putting another highway on the other side, on another side.

And that hallway would go right over what could potentially be one of the most beautiful places in this whole area.

There's a bubbling stream there, old trees.

It's a beautiful piece of bottom line.

Why not just pave it over and have done with it?

Really, let's put a parking lot there.

I just don't know who's going to want to go there.

I grew up in Raleigh when it was a town about the size Charlottesville is now.

And it has since sprawled out in all directions.

But I'll tell you one thing they got right was they put a belt line around that city to preserve some of the places of refuge in the city.

I don't know where our belt line is.

I don't know who we're going to stand up and say, I'm nice enough.

We've had it.

We're not going to take this anymore.

We're not going to wait for roads to come into us.

We're going to be proactive and do something.

You know, do we want to turn to Atlanta where roads are coming and major highways right into the city?

You know, the city fathers there now regret that they let that happen, but there's nothing they can do about it.

Do we want to turn to Fairfax?

My wife grew up there and that was a nice little town.

It's not a town now, it's just a series of roads on their way to somewhere else.

You know, 30 years from now, when people are looking back and they're trying to figure out how they got where they are,

Are they going to be proud of what we did?

Or are they going to shake their heads and say, what were those guns thinking of?

Are we going to honor the greatest benefactor the city has ever had?

Are we going to prove ourselves worthy of him?

I think we can.

I think we'll do the right thing.

I hope that you take this into consideration and listen to all these voices here today.

We're very concerned.

Good evening, members of council.

My name is Kirk Krueger.

I'm the president and chairman of YMCA.

Although I have a cut on my forehead and a black eye, let me assure you that the other guy, which was my car door, looks a lot better than I do.

I'm here to support tonight Mayor Norris' plan for a comprehensive study of the recreational field space in the city and the county.

This plan dovetails very nicely with a report you'll hear later on this evening from Brian Dailey, your Parks and Recs director, to streamline the process for master planning for all the city parks.

We believe, as Mr. Dailey does, that the process should be more consistent and more inclusive.

and as the Y we may have been the unintended target and certainly the unjustified target for the softball community as a result of that past process.

Let me assure you that softball and the Y can consist together in McIntire Park and there will be lots of synergies between the two groups.

We will attract a lot of people who have not had the opportunity to come to the park or a reason to come to the park and who will not be able to enjoy both an indoor and outdoor recreational experience at the park.

We are sensitive to the environmental and the green space issues associated with the park.

and we look forward to working with the city and city staff to build a facility that will complement and add to what is clearly one of the premier parks in the city.

The Y is immediately adjacent to the bypass that's in the location that we have proposed.

It is not the prettiest green space in the park and it's certainly not the pretty green space that is currently occupied by Softball Fields or the Golf Course which are really the premier green spaces in the park.

We hope that our opponents will open their hearts and minds to the family and youth that will be served by the Y, and its programs that promote our core values of caring, honesty, respect, and responsibility.

Our opponents are asking for inclusiveness in the process, and it's right for them to do so.

We're asking for inclusiveness in the park.

Thank you, Mr. Krieger.

That concludes – go ahead.

Who would like to start?

I'll start.

I just have one comment I'd like to respond to, and that's a comment by my friend Randy Page, who I met with last summer to talk about his ideas for locating the Y. Randy had some ideas I hadn't heard before.

I listened to his ideas.

I wasn't sure if I'd agree with all of them, but I did tell him that if he sent them to me electronically, I would forward them to the rest of city council.

through the miracles of modern technology I was able to look at my email sitting here so I could tell you exactly when I sent them and I discovered I did not send them and so for that I'd like to publicly apologize.

Yes, I want to comment on the parkway.

I guess last week I went to the rally that they had

in reference to the softball fields and also the parkway.

Frankly, I'm trying to keep an open mind on it.

Originally, I did vote for it.

That does not say that I might not change my mind.

I'm going to take a look at it.

I hear a lot of my neighbors talking about it, I might be afraid to go out of my house.

But anyway, in all seriousness, I am trying to keep an open mind on it, and I do realize that originally, I guess I, you know, I view this as like a three-legged stool, that originally we started out, we were going to have the Parkway, we were going to have an Eastern Connector, and we were going to have a North Grounds Connector.

The North Grounds connector was built, I guess you'd call it, I had a connector.

The University, I think, got tired of waiting and went ahead and had the Eastern connector.

I don't think that's going to happen.

So, I am going to give some serious consideration to it.

Thank you, Mr. Taliaferro.

I just want to make a couple of comments.

Okay, a couple other comments.

I'd like to make eloquent comments by Colette Hall and just say that the Rock Hill Academy is an interesting part of our history and it's part of the conversation we have about integration and segregation because that's the academy that was opened by the white resistance movement that wanted to have a private school for their children during their time so that's a very

Thank you, Ms. Edwards.

Mr. Huja?

I just wanted to make a couple of quick comments.

Somebody did mention an event that I had on Saturday.

I understand Seville Tomorrow is going to be airing the podcast for that event.

Politics aside, I hope everybody has a chance to listen to that podcast and hear what the

many speakers from the softball community and the YMCA and the soccer community and the sports and social club community and other community organizations said about the importance of working together and working together to meet the recreational needs of all of our citizens.

I think it was an excellent event.

I'm very proud of the spirit of that conversation.

And again, I appreciate all those speakers who consistently

and passionately raised the issue of Meadow Creek Parkway.

The first item on our business agenda is a consent agenda, an army consent agenda.

We have a number of items.

Item A is minutes of February 5th and 17th.

Item B is a resolution amending Jefferson School partners, Charlottesville Economic Development Authority Agreement, first of one meeting.

Item C is an ordinance zoning amendment requirement for affordable housing development seeking special use permit or rezoning, second of two readings.

Item D is an ordinance adding historic conservation overlay district designation to zoning ordinance, second of two readings.

Item E is an ordinance conveyance of Elliott Avenue lot to Habitat for Humanity, second of two readings.

Item F is an ordinance, zoning ordinance, amendments related to bed and breakfast establishments, second of two readings.

Item G is an appropriation of $73,483, law enforcement grant, first of two readings.

Item H is an appropriation of $11,500, reimbursement from Piedmont housing rights, first of two readings.

Item I is an appropriation of $31,070, domestic violence coordinator grant, first of two readings.

Item J is a resolution of $10,000 reallocation from council reserved for 2010 census activities, first of one reading.

Item K is a resolution appointing Sherry Iacetta as chairperson of the Census Committee, first of one reading.

Item L is a resolution initiating zoning text amendment for signed provisions, first of one reading.

and item M is an ordinance re-adopting zoning map, first of two meetings.

Are there any items councillors would like to remove from the consent agenda or is there a motion to... Mr. Mayor, I would like to request removal of item D from the agenda.

Okay, we will take up item D, ordinance adding historic conservation overlay district designation to zoning ordinance.

We will take that up at the end of our agenda tonight.

Any other items to be removed or

Second.

Any further discussion, please indicate your vote.

Thank you very much.

Okay, the main item on our agenda tonight, as in every year, it is the main order of business.

The most important order of business that we do as a city council each year is to review and approve our city budget.

And we have with us tonight, we're going to be hearing two presentations, first from our partners with the Charlottesville City Schools.

We're going to be doing a presentation on the school's budget.

the proposed budget and secondly a presentation by our city manager on the proposed city 2010 budget.

After that we will have a public hearing, two public hearings, first on the annual tax levy and secondly a public hearing on the budget itself.

So we're going to start by welcoming to the chambers tonight Ms. Rosa Adkins, the Superintendent of the Shasta City Schools, Ed Gillespie, Finance Director of the City Schools,

It feels uncomfortable.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Council and Mr. City Manager.

Thank you so much for having us here tonight to present our budget to you.

Before I start with the presentation of the budget, I'd like to acknowledge and thank our city council for the support that you have given our city schools over the years, the dedication that you have shown in numerous ways to educating the young people in our city and making sure that we

Realize our mission, personal, academic success for all.

Thank you for your support.

When we started the school, the development of the budget, there was a lot going on in our city and in our nation.

We had to not only look at the economic climate, we had to look at what was going on in our capital, around our nation with the election, and then we had to come back and focus on what our core mission is, and that's educating our young people.

and bringing together all of those dynamics to make sure that we use the events that were going on in our community to inspire us, to motivate us, to focus on what was in the best interest of the young people in Charlottesville City, the education of our young people.

The development of the budget started in November, holding stakeholder meetings from November throughout February.

There were over 26 different meetings held throughout the city of Charlottesville to gather input from various stakeholders, be it internal stakeholders and external stakeholders, to make sure that we heard voices, a variety of voices, in the development of the budget.

We did not take lightly the fact of the economic conditions that we were facing.

We also realized that during the process of developing the budget that in January, on January 8th, we were going to have released the MGT efficiency review of the major operations in our school division.

So we used from November up to January to hear from stakeholders to hear what was the priority list that they had as to where we needed to concentrate in our budget.

After the MDT report, we received the report and then put the report to the side for a while knowing that we needed to have additional public comment, public input prior to acting on any of the recommendations in the report and continued with our public comment, our meetings to get input from staff members, from our community parents, PTO and various other constituents in the development of the budget.

As we got input, I asked every department head in our school division to come to the table and not only to make recommendations on how we can continue to enhance programs, but also to make recommendations on

how we could be more efficient in each department.

We asked our schools and our school leaders to also come to the table and bring suggestions on how they could be more efficient at the building level.

So we made it clear to every department that there would have to be adjustments in each department.

What we will do now is present to you four major categories of how we looked at the budget and the changes that we are proposing in this budget.

We looked at maintaining a competitive position.

We realized that throughout our region, there are about 16 school divisions in Region 5.

And that geographically, the school divisions are relatively close together.

And that when we have potential employees, that those employees have a choice to come to Charlottesville City or to perhaps go to one of the neighboring school divisions.

We have to make our school division attractive to employees by maintaining salaries that are competitive to the surrounding school divisions.

We realize that in our community we have a diverse population.

We have students that span from the students who are most academically endowed, but they can compete on any level.

We offer at our high school

multiple advanced placement courses, and we have students and families that come into our school division from outside of our school zone because of the quality of the programs that we have in Charlottesville City.

We also have students in our school division that require additional help, support, and services in order to achieve the minimum requirements.

We know that our teachers work long and hard.

All of our employees are extremely dedicated and put in numerous hours in order to meet the challenges that we face on a daily basis.

Salary considerations was one of the priorities that we had in this budget to make sure that we, even in a small way, say thank you to our employees for the contributions that they have made to the success of our school division.

Mr. Gillespie will go over the percentage of salary adjustment that we are proposing in this budget that we may maintain

high quality staff members and be able to attract additional high quality staff members into our school division.

Health insurance costs, each year we look at what our claim experiences have been and our healthcare provider gives us a percentage of healthcare cost increases.

This year the healthcare cost increases

average between 8 and 12%, but because we've had favorable health claim experiences over a number of years, we were able to go into our health care fund balance to offset some of the premium increases and not have to pass those on to our employees.

As we looked at, and later we'll talk about our staffing formula, as we looked at applying our staffing formula to make determinations as to how we would allocate teachers to our schools.

We realized that in some areas we would need to decrease the number of teacher allocations we had.

Therefore, we wanted to put in a retirement incentive so that in the areas where we did decrease the number of teachers,

at the schools that we would be able to absorb some of the positions, some of the teachers.

We would decrease the number of positions and we would be able to absorb the personnel in other positions that were vacated through retirement.

So we put in a retirement incentive not to encourage our employees to retire, but to say to our employees, if you make the decision to retire,

Here is a way of saying thank you for your dedicated service to our school division.

And those employees who left our school division or who have indicated they will be leaving our school division, we will be putting teachers in those positions so that we will not have to actually release any employees.

Mr. Gillespie will go over those details in just a moment.

As we looked at where we could make adjustments in our school division, the NGT report, when that was issued, one of the areas of concern in our community was that there was not a recommendation to make adjustments, personnel adjustments and staffing adjustments at our central office.

We accepted that recommendation as we accepted all of the recommendations, or that lack of a recommendation.

as we accepted all the recommendations from the MGT review.

However,

As we looked at how we could be more efficient and more effective in our central office, we made the decision that we could do a realignment of responsibilities in four different areas and realize some cost savings as a result of that realignment.

So we have recommended a decrease of 4.1 positions at the central office level.

The first position is a professional development facilitator.

In our budget this year, we have two professional development facilitators.

One position has been filled, the other position has been vacant since the beginning of the school year.

Realizing that we were in slow economic times, we made the conscious decision at the beginning of the school year not to fill the position.

to leave it vacant so that we would have some flexibility should we need to respond to any revenue shortfall.

As a result, we are recommending that in the 10 budget that we eliminate the professional development facilitator, one of those positions.

We also had in this budget volunteer coordinator a 0.5 position.

Again, that position was left unfilled to give us flexibility to respond to any revenue shortfall that we might have during the 09 budget.

So we're recommending that in the 10 budget that we eliminate that 0.5 volunteer coordinator position.

Career and Technical Education Coordinator.

At our high school, we have a .6 position that oversees our Career and Technical Education program.

We will realign those responsibilities to another staff member and eliminate that position.

Our Instructional Media Services Coordinator is a position that's housed at Charlottesville High School, works with our media personnel at all of our schools throughout the school division.

Again, the responsibilities for that position will be reassigned, realigned to another staff member and we would recommend eliminating the Media Services Coordinator position.

We had a wonderful program in our school division, the CLASS program that services our students from first grade from kindergarten all the way through seventh grade.

The program is an after school program and at some schools it's a morning program.

It services our students from approximately 3 a.m. until about 6 o'clock in the evenings and in the mornings from 730

until 8 or even 8.30 in the mornings depending on the needs at the particular school.

That program is staffed by a director and under the division level director position and under that position there is a site director at each of the schools and under the site director position

There are several team positions at each school.

We are recommending that we eliminate the class coordinator position.

So that's a division of a position, the class coordinator position, and reassign those responsibilities again to another staff member.

In the elimination of the class coordinator position, we are not recommending that we make any changes to the program.

The services that we currently offer to our students and to our families will remain with no decrease in the level nor the duration of the services.

And we would even move to continue to build on that program and enhance the program.

The only change recommended in that program is the elimination of the coordinated position and the reassignment of those responsibilities to another staff member.

In our instructional support area, we are recommending that we add support in several different areas.

In our ESL, English as a Second Language program, we have increased our student population.

This year, we have gained 44 students in that program.

For the past several years, we have increased the number of teachers in that program, and we find that this year,

We're continuing to grow in student populations so that would necessitate that we add an additional teacher for next year.

So adding an ESL teacher as support.

At Johnson Elementary School, we currently have a preschool social worker.

That particular position is grant funded.

It has been at the school for approximately three years now and the grant will be running out this year.

We have worked with the Department of Social Services, and we would recommend that we maintain this position with the Department of Social Services paying 50% of the cost and the school division paying 50% of the cost to keep the services at Johnson-Albany School.

Two years ago, we started a pilot three-year-old program located at Clark Elementary School.

And early indications are that the students who have moved from the three-year-old program into our four-year-old program, their developmental level is beyond the students who have never had a three-year-old experience, a preschool experience.

We would like to expand that three-year-old program and add another teacher and an instructional assistant.

Certainly placing the program at Clark would have benefits, but we can also see benefits of placing this three-year-old program at another school within the Charlottesville City Schools Division.

World Languages Program.

Last year we were very fortunate that our board approved a World Language Program at the elementary school level.

We know that in order to be competitive throughout the world that we must have our students bilingual

and that the best way, research has shown that the best way to help students become bilingual is to start a language program at the elementary school level as opposed to waiting until middle or high school to introduce a language.

We started a world language Spanish program at the kindergarten and first grade level during this school year and that has been extremely popular with our

our students, our teachers, and our families.

And we would recommend that we expand that program to the second grade next year so we would need to add another teacher in the World Language Program.

We have in our school division several employees who are nationally board certified.

We have one teacher, we have a speech pathologist and social workers who have the national board certification.

In many school divisions there is a small supplement that is paid to an employee who receives the certification.

It's recognized throughout the nation and it's something that we would

want many of our employees to gain.

So we would recommend that we pay a $1,000 supplement to each of our employees who had that certification.

Currently we have about 12 employees.

We would recommend about $15,000 for this supplement and give us a little flexibility in case additional certifications come on board.

As I said earlier, each year as we're developing the budget, we have a staffing formula that has been approved by our school board that we apply to determine how we allocate our personnel to each of the school buildings.

We apply a staffing formula in our general education programs and then we look at special education and how the services are delivered at each school in order to make determinations about the allocation

Teacher allocation in the schools.

Mr. Gillespie will go over with you how the formula has been applied to each of our schools and the changes that we are recommending at each of our schools, grades K through 12.

We'll also review with you contract services.

Several of our services, transportation, our maintenance, are services that we subcontract with the city and they provide a number of services and we are going to realize some savings in several of those areas.

So we'll go over the specifics of that in just a moment.

This is our third year in a five-year strategic plan.

Next year would be the fourth year and it is recommended that during the fourth year a strategic plan be updated.

We thought that during next year, because we have the MGT efficiency review report and there are several recommendations in that report, after we've gone through community dialogue and the board has made decisions on which of those

Recommendations to implement it would be an ideal time to update the strategic plan.

So there is a provision for updating the strategic plan.

Okay, first, much like the city budget, the school system budget is divided into two main budgets that fund general operations.

The first is the general fund.

The general fund is by far the largest.

It's about $55 million of the approximately $68 million total budget of the school division.

The other 13 million is in what's referred to as special revenue funds.

Special revenue funds are largely those activities such as grants or other support programs that by and large are funded by sources that are restricted as to their use, so we account for those in a separate fund.

The general fund is the most unrestricted.

It's where the city of Charlottesville's appropriation goes and it's the dollars that the school board has the most call in terms of how those dollars are used and by far, again, the largest of the two funds.

So the changes that are being shown here, all the numbers you'll see here are changes from the current budget and I'm going to start with the general fund, the $55 million fund and then turn later to the special revenue fund and then bring that all together.

In the proposal, currently the vast majority of staff in the school division are paid on pay tables.

The way that works is as a staff person, once a person is hired, as they progress year by year in terms of experience in the school system, they move up a step on the pay table.

Moving up a step is approximately one and a half percent.

That's an average.

It varies a little bit depending on the positions.

So in this proposal, we're proposing that all staff who are eligible, if you're at top of scale and you have quite a few staff who are at top of scale, they will get no increase.

But for those that are eligible, for those that aren't on top of scale, we're proposing to allow everyone to move forward step, which is an average again of approximately one and a half percent.

In addition to that, for just teachers and instructional assistants, we're proposing an additional one percent so that teachers in our age, regardless of their position on the step, are assured an increase of at least one percent.

The number of 300,000 is lower than it would appear if it had been displayed at GRSS.

We are fortunate in this year that we had a higher than average turnover in staff positions and we waited to hire people in at a lower level of pay than those that left and that helped us offset the total cost of the salary increase that's being proposed.

Again, Dr. Atkins referred to the health insurance increase.

We're not passing any of these costs on to employees.

In negotiations with the carrier, again, as she mentioned, they were proposing 8 to 10 percent.

We're going to go up 5 percent and we're going to allow the fund owners to absorb the remaining and we'll keep an eye on that.

We went self-funded about six or seven years ago and we've been a recipient of some very good claims experience that allowed us to build up the fund.

The purpose for doing that, of course, is to smooth out increases and to allow us to do just what we're doing in a time like this, which is to not pass costs on to employees and allow that fund to offset the next year or so's costs.

And we'll keep an eye on that as claims experience.

As claims actually come in, we watch that on a quarterly basis.

The retirement incentive, the $300,000 of savings is an estimate based on a number of 20 people taking advantage of that incentive with an average savings and salaries of $15,000 with benefits.

The division level staffing that Dr. Atkins went over, 4.1 positions a savings of $278,000.

You see the 3.1 out of the general fund, those are expenditure savings, the 1 which is the class position out of the special revenue fund.

You'll see where we pick up those savings on the revenue side because again the special revenue fund is a separate set of accounts.

and what we do in some cases, as in the case of the CLASH program, the general fund will make a transfer of revenues out and we account for those revenues on the special revenue fund side.

So I hope that makes sense.

We'll come to that when I do the revenue side.

The ESL teacher and the preschool social worker.

We were, of course, a lot of folks have been hearing about the stimulus, the potential for stimulus monies to come.

The school division is expecting about 1.3 million in Title I, about 1.1 million in Title VI, which is special ed funds.

At the time the budget was passed, and really even to today, the details of that package have not been released to us, but we felt certain enough in the Title funds that we would be getting more that we went ahead and programmed in

these two positions so that we weren't putting ourselves at risk of supplanting by having first approved it in the general fund and then having to turn around and try and take advantage of federal dollars to fund those positions.

So we were proposing to use those stimulus funds.

It looks like that's going to be the case.

So we should not have to go back and revisit those two positions.

The world languages teacher expanding that program, one average 65,000.

The three-year-old program, teacher in IA.

and the supplement for the national board certification.

Back to the teacher pay table.

We've, over the last 10 years, the four school divisions you see here, Charlottesville, Louisa, Albemarle, and Livanna have risen as the top in terms of pay for teachers.

They're also in our immediate area and represent, this represents the highest level of the competitive group.

10 years ago we were at the lower end of this scale and we've done a lot for the teacher pay table over the last 10 years.

It's been the focus and continues to be the focus.

It's one of the reasons that we were looking at doing something for that teacher scale even in this economic environment.

If you can reduce, as you'll see later, the overall budget's actually going to go down by about 2.5%, almost $2 million in total, about $1.4 million in the general fund.

It's important that if you can, to take advantage of an opportunity to make sure that you stay competitive, particularly where your most valuable resource is.

Like any entity, people is 80% of the budget, and the most important staff in our budget, of course, are teachers and instructional assistants and those that perform direct services.

You can see here that the green bar there is Charlottesville, the yellow is Albemarle, the blue line is Louisa, and the pink is Fluvanna.

Fluvanna uses a stair step where you stay at the same pay grade for a few years, then you bump up, stay a few years, bump up, and so on.

You can see that pattern as it goes up.

Obviously right about step 15, Fluvanna leaps ahead, and then at the top everybody kind of comes back together again.

lots of debate and strategy around what is the best structure in terms of pay grades at each step at each level to try and position yourselves in a way not just to pay teachers in the door but once you get in that middle grade they're trying to retain them and even make sure that throughout their career you're offering a competitive wage.

Flugana obviously there in the middle has taken a leap above the rest of that group but I think

Probably some of the other expenses that that county incurs are at a lesser degree and so they're able to put their dollars there in that way.

Still feel pretty good about that.

We've come a long way.

We're in the middle top and middle of that pack and we'd like to stay there.

Applying the staffing formulas.

Walker Buford staffed at an average of 16 and a quarter to one.

Walker, that would require, what we do each year is we run with moment projections.

We use what's called a cohort survival method.

It's a statistical method that uses the most recent data most heavily and looks at what is the best guess of populations by cohort from kindergarten to first to second, how many of each of those cohorts move through the system.

We take that information, run it through a statistical model first and then take into consideration any other factors that we're aware of.

either politically or economically or both in neighborhoods, anything that we may be aware of that we think might impact that.

Based on that methodology, in the sixteen and a quarter to one at Walker and Buford, we have Walker losing five positions and Buford losing two and a half.

Part of the Walker reduction is related to a smaller than average cohort that has been moving through the system.

A fourth grader is moving in and a somewhat large cohort of

6th graders moving out.

So some of that is just a, we've got a kind of a small boulder that's been working its way through.

Clark is staffed at 17 to 1.

Under their enrollment projections, they don't lose any teaching positions, but they do lose three special education, I'm sorry, instructional assistant positions.

Two of those positions are actually due to enrollment not coming in as strong as we thought

K-1 and 2 at Clark this year.

And typically what we do is once we've made a commitment to a position to someone in it, we don't remove that position during the year, but we adjust for it in the following year.

So two of those positions is really from an overstaffing because of a somewhat smaller enrollment at K-1 and 2 at Clark.

Greenbrier 20-1, this is one teaching position and one instructional assistant.

Jackson Vya,

Due to an increase primarily in K-1 and 2, we'll pick up one instructional assistant.

Johnson, down one instructional assistant.

Special education staffing is largely done based on individual education plans and other direct special education needs and the needs of particular children.

Although we have moved to an inclusion model which complicates that simplistic, this is all based directly on an individual child.

But we do evaluate special education positions in light of projected involvement similar to students in general education and we make adjustments accordingly.

Going forward we see an elimination of three teaching positions, K-3-6, 1-7-12, and instructional assistance for K-3-6 and 2-7-12.

Under contracts and miscellaneous services, really our hats off to, we contract quite a few of these services with the city, particularly major facilities transportation and really our hats off to those folks and they're to be congratulated on how well they've managed not just the budgets

but they've also always been willing to adjust in ways that are thoughtful and they've always really been coming to the table and helping us out.

In ways that aren't too severe in terms of the services that they provide they seem to be able to do this.

It's been very well run.

Most of these, much of these savings are from

Small adjustments in staffing as well as savings that are being realized in utilities and fuel and that type of operating costs.

Comprehensive Services Act.

This is sort of my poster child for those kinds of costs that you incur.

You feel like you can't control them very well, but you know they're providing good services.

I know the city has been impacted by this one as well.

Ten years ago, this was a $90,000 item for the school system, and we thought it was significant then.

Now it's about $800,000.

And that's just over 10 years.

I know folks have done everything they can.

It feels like everyone's trying to control costs there all the time.

I know it's a complicated structure there.

But I think, if nothing else, it indicates the severe need of some of the children that we serve within the city of Charlottesville.

Again, this has just changed us.

This is not the total amount.

The total contract amount this year is projected to be about $800,000.

Bokehead, CATEC, a small adjustment in some of the services there.

We're out to some savings.

Piedmont Regional Programs, an enrollment-based special education program.

It's a regional program that many school districts share the service provision of various types of services.

We are seeing a somewhat small decline in the number of children participating in the prep programs, so we realize some cost savings there.

We also incur some costs directly and we bill those back to prep.

So it's kind of money in, money out deal.

So when we get to the revenue side again, you'll see where we lose some revenues on the bill back due to the reduction of costs on this side, the expense side.

Strategic plan update.

We put a $25,000 placeholder here.

We haven't bid anything out.

We're not sure the exact cost, but we want to put something in place to acknowledge that we are going to go through a process to update the strategic plan.

Alternative Education, we had on the table a proposal to look at alternative learning options and an alternative learning center, and given the economic environment that was unfolding and the facilities issues we were facing, the school board decided it was really not a good time to be taking that on at this moment.

We have also used those dollars we were planning on doing something this year, and it's allowed us to help balance the budget this year in the face of declining state revenues, and we're going to go ahead and reprogram those into the budget in 2010.

to help balance the budget.

World Languages Program, that was the first year.

The World Languages Program that we're now expanding started in the current year serving children in K-1.

We had $25,000 in there for furniture and materials and other start-up costs.

We can go ahead and reprogram those in now that the program is up and running.

Legal fees, this just squares us up to an average of what we've been incurring in legal fees.

It's an item that we just watch as we go along just to make sure that we're budgeting adequately, given what every level of usage is going on.

The three-year-old program expansion, this is the operating side of that.

Most of that 58.8 is transportation and the rest is small amount of barriers for operating including some furniture to equip that classroom.

And out of the 53 million some small other changes that affect all the other call centers.

We also thought it a good idea to put in a contingency reserve given the dynamics that are currently going on in the economy.

It's obviously impossible to predict.

We didn't want to set up a situation

where if the economic conditions worsened and state funding came in even lower, including city funding coming in lower, that we would all have to start doubling up on the city in terms of having to react to that.

We're going to put a contingency reserve in here to allow us to react, hopefully, it won't get worse than that if it does, that we'll be able to react to any additional shortfalls without having to come to the city.

So total expense changes were down $1.4 million.

Turn into the revenue picture.

City of Charlottesville, again, this is the General Fund, proposing $30,291,212.

The General Fund, the city's portion of the General Fund represents 70.4% of the General Fund.

It's an increase of $509,681, up about 1.28%.

And here's where we pick up the savings from the reduction at CLAS.

Again, this is a transfer of money out to the CLAS program.

By reducing that transfer, it's a pickup on the revenue side of $75,676.

This, of course, is the one that got all the moves.

The state budget, $15,119,000.

It's about 27% of the general fund budget and a decrease of almost $2 million at about 12%.

It's a huge reduction.

I went back as much data as I could find and couldn't find the year in which that had ever happened before.

Again, this is a general fund, so federal is a very small portion of the general fund.

Federal government doesn't give you anything without strings attached, so you find very little money accounted for in the general fund, which again is those dollars that are least restricted as to use and that the school board has the most control over.

And then fees and other, most of that decrease of $20,000, $21,000 is again related to the prep program.

We bill back some of the services that are incurred by the school division since we're reducing overall levels of expenditures.

We also have a slight decrease in the amount of money that we're able to bill back.

Total revenue decrease of $1.4 million, about 2.5% to the general fund.

So the good news from the general fund's point of view, I suppose, is that we were able to implement a small increase for the teachers and IAs.

We were able to balance the budget in spite of a two and a half percent decrease in the overall level of the general fund.

Turning out the other $13 million again is about $55 million on the general fund, about $13 million on the special revenue fund.

Special revenue fund is broken into three components.

The first of those are support programs, school nutrition, adult education, the after school program, text media or textbooks, our tech replacement fund which replaces primarily desktops and laptop computers along with some consumables related to the

Smartboards that are in most of our classrooms now, and the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center.

The dollar amounts you see here represent the total amount that is budgeted for each of those operations, so under the support program heading about $3.5 million of that $13 million.

We then have state sponsored programs.

These are programs that are really operated by the state, but the school system operates as a fiscal conduit because each of these programs serves children in each of those facilities.

So we really act as a fiscal conduit for these programs and therefore they're referred to a state sponsored hospital program in the Blue Ridge Detention Center, about 2.9 of the 13 million.

and everything else is grants.

I didn't list them all here, but I wanted to hit the major ones.

Your federal title grants are obviously the biggest.

The Title I and Title VI-B, those are our largest, and those are the two that are slated to provide additional money under the federal stimulus plan.

This represents our current level of funding and does not represent any of the additional amount that's likely to be had in our way.

other title programs, about 428,000.

Then we have the Teaching American History and a variety of other federal grants.

Under the state, there's really three buildings.

VPSA Technology, the technology grant.

It's been around for a while.

We really use it under the Tech Replacement Fund to help offset local costs of replacing and maintaining computers and peripherals.

It's since been used under the testing initiative to go on to online testing.

We started with the high school building up, the capability with laptops and carts

to be able to do online testing, and we've since worked all the way through the documentaries, and that's been the primary focus of that particular grant over the last several years.

21st Century Grant and the Virginia Preschool Initiative.

We've had about 30 other grants averaging, I don't know, averaging less than 60,000 or so to make up the other 1.7 million.

Again, I just wanted to hit the major grants.

So to bring it all together, the general fund, just under $55 million.

It's a decrease of 2.5% over $1,421,472.

Special revenue fund, $13,297,724, a decrease of just over $100,000, or 0.75%.

For a total operating budget of $68,272,479.

Overall, it's a decrease of $1,521,595, or down 2.18%.

because it's a lot of fun to do charts and graphs.

You get total revenues.

Now this is total, so before the other slide where I was saying you have 70% of the general fund, overall budget which now includes special revenue funds, city funding of 59%, state 28.4%, federal 8.6 and fees and other 4%.

Expenditures again were like almost every service entity.

75 plus percent is made up of personnel services and benefits and then operating costs.

In our case, the operating cost figure in terms of supplies and materials and paper and pens and so on is actually much smaller than that.

About 80 percent of that number is actually made up of the contract services, maintenance facilities, transportation and so on that we actually contract out so they show up as an operating cost rather than embedded in the personnel figure.

Like the city itself, the state requires that all expenditures be reported under certain functional categories.

In our cases, the functional categories that apply are shown here.

Instruction maintenance, admin attendance and health, pupil transportation, nutrition and non-instruction, and technology.

And you can see how this lays out.

And again, this is total budget.

And that concludes our presentation.

I guess I will add that, again, we do have dollar amounts under this federal stimulus money.

What we don't have are the specific restrictions and requirements that are going to be coming along with that.

Since it's federal money, you know it's going to have restrictions.

It's just the way that works.

The Title I and Title VI, we're already familiar with those programs.

I don't imagine those will have restrictions beyond what you are currently familiar with.

The third pot of money under the stimulus plans is the fiscal stabilization fund.

And we've been told that that's going to be about $852,000 for the school system.

But again, that's the one that's the most unknown.

We know it's federal money.

We know it's going to be on a reimbursement basis, which makes it basically a grant.

So if it comes on a reimbursement basis, that tells you that what they're going to do is tell you exactly how it is you're going to spend it.

We have some information about the kinds of things, but we don't have enough to be able to actually act on that, so that's just to give you numbers.

Thank you both very much for a very informative presentation and I know it's the product of many months of hard work by yourselves and the fellow staff and school board and I appreciate all the hard work that went into that presentation.

I also failed to acknowledge that we have with us tonight also several of our school board members, Ned Mickey as the chair of the school board, Juan Diego Wade, Leah Puryear, Lizelle Daubert and

Oh, Collette Blunt in the back, yes.

Collette Blunt.

Thank you all for being here as well.

And we're now going to open it up to questions from council members.

Yeah, I'll start off.

You all talked about 1.5 and 2.5 salary increases, and I really didn't understand who was getting the 1.5 and the 2.5.

Yeah, go ahead.

The way it works, the 2.5 is for teachers and structural assistants only.

Okay, and that represents, again, the way it works for the school system is almost all staff are on what we call pay totals.

And if you hire them and you have about three years of experience, so you go on step three, each year that you stay with the system in the acknowledgement of an additional year of service and additional year of experience, you move up one step on that pay total.

That step equals about a percent and a half.

So what we're proposing for just teachers and IAs is allow that step plus an additional one percent.

So the average of that would be about two and a half percent just for teachers and IAs.

For all the other stuff, those that are eligible for the stuff, and many aren't, because we're at the top of the scale, it would be whatever stuff is available to them.

Okay.

The other comment I'll make is about the class program, which I know you all probably heard a lot about.

I've got more calls than emails on that program than anything else.

I'll be glad to.

I think initially many of the concerns that we received about the CLASS program is that we were eliminating the program and that is very far from the reality of the situation.

We are eliminating one position in the program with no decrease in the services that we'll offer our students and our families.

As we look at becoming more efficient in our school division, I think we hear often from

various constituents that they want to see efficiency.

And the reality of being more efficient is that oftentimes you have to eliminate some of the positions that you have and realign the responsibilities.

and it's certainly not any kind of negative comment on the current coordinator who's done a fine job.

The program we just feel is overstaffed for the size of system that we have and for the number of students and that we feel that just efficiency wise we can handle it through an existing coordinator who has other duties but she has had some duties taken off her so that she can take on these class coordinator

I'm here today to talk to you about some of the programs that we're working on.

I guess it's $450,000 or something like that and it funds 25 of the $100,000 of this position and we're taking back the part that we funded out of the general fund and leaving in the program $25,000 and so with that money there's a number of possibilities of ways that the program can improve through curriculum enhancements, through field trips, through

and possibly sponsoring more children who can't afford the program right now.

There's potential for charging less money in the future than we would have had to otherwise.

So I feel confident that we have two board members who have kids in the class program and they are comfortable that we're able to do this and not only maintain the current program but to continue the program.

And it's really not about

It's about efficiency and we as representatives on the board and the division feel that it is our duty to try to run the division as efficiently as possible and so this is an area where we looked and we believe that we can realize an efficiency.

and we're confident we can realize an efficiency.

And it's not that we couldn't find money elsewhere in the budget.

We have a contingency point of $260,000 or something that if we thought we needed this position, we could find the money to fund it out of some other priority and move money around.

That's not the issue.

One other question I have is the Alternative School Program.

I know you all had a $176,000 approximate savings.

I'll do that one.

Last year we factored into the budget about $175,000 to look at facilities.

Currently, with our alternative program, we lease a facility off of Henry Avenue.

We pay approximately $70,000 a year on that lease that we have.

The lease was about to expire.

and we knew we needed to look for another facility and the $175,000 was to do a facility review to see where we could actually house that program.

Rather than investing in that review last year, we were able to speak with the owner of the property on Henry Avenue and they had extended the lease.

We recognized that in looking at another facility, it would not only cost us

for alternative school program.

We staff that similar to what we staff at the high school, depending on the number of students that we have.

We have to have a science teacher, math teacher, all of the four core content areas.

We need those teachers there, and those teachers provide services to the number of students.

When we have students that reach teacher ratio that's beyond what we have at the high school,

It's kind of an unusual situation in that kids are feeding into there unlike the beginning of a school year where you divide up the kids you have.

This is a program where more and more kids over the course of the year may be put into the program.

Okay.

Sure.

It's a small ratio.

And what we would say also is that we not only have the Henry Avenue Alternative Program, but we have expanded our offerings and we now have alternative learning options.

We have a pretty impressive program called WALK.

where we look at students who are not on track for graduation and this entire effort is to impact our graduation rate.

Dr. Moran, Superintendent in Albemarle County and I meet on a regular basis and we talk about the opportunities that we have in order to collaborate.

Of course, we collaborate with our career and technical education program, the CATEC program.

We have a large collaboration there.

We also collaborate in some of our professional development opportunities.

When we have a particular presenter to come in, we will have staff from both of the school divisions.

So we constantly look for opportunities to collaborate.

We send students to the Murray School.

Albemarle County allows us to have several spaces in that school.

And in turn, we allow Albemarle to have

in our alternative education program.

We have a program called ISAP, ISAEP.

That particular program, we've over a number of years collaborated with that program.

Post our high school program, we also collaborate in that area.

On the purchasing side, we also collaborate with them for service purchases.

And we also explore along with the city the idea of combining them to health insurance to see what the feasibility of that was.

So we're looking at that kind of stuff very often.

In the case of the health insurance, it turned out that each of the entities was of a sufficient size that there wouldn't be any additional efficiencies going from it.

I have a question about the pay raises.

Are there any supports or pay raises for teachers?

I have no problem with that.

The 1.5% that everyone will get who's eligible are those that aren't already the top of scale.

So those that are eligible for STEP will move up to STEP.

That average is about a percent and a half.

That won't apply to everybody because some people are already top of scale.

For the teachers and instructional assistants, in addition to the STEP, if they're eligible, they'll get an additional one percent.

So if you have a teacher that's at top of scale, ordinarily they wouldn't get anything, but they will be assured of getting at least one percent.

And so in a custodian nutrition staff, they're on a step scale that after a certain number of years, each year, there's an expectation.

There's a chart you can look at that says that after this number of years, you expect to get this amount of money.

And so what the current proposed budget is doing is allowing that expectation to take place next year, that they will move up the expected step on the scale.

One question I'd like to get to is about the environment.

Well, that's a question that gets to something I'd love to be able to do, which is to spend locally as much as possible.

What we run into is we have to be compliant with the Virginia Public Procurement Act, and if we know that the expenditures that we're incurring exceed a certain dollar amount, we have to bid that item out.

Once you bid it out, especially for something like a good, it's pure low cost wins the bid.

It's very difficult, unlike a

I'm like a service where you're asking someone to come in and give you a proposal and you can kind of negotiate around what it is that you want.

When you're strictly, you can define what it is that the item is and you know you're going to exceed a certain dollar amount.

You've got to bid it out.

Could you have a contract at that point?

Thank you.

I just had, just one question.

I'm intrigued by the division contingency reserve.

Is that a figure that you generally have every year?

We, having a contingency reserve, I think this is only the second, maybe the third time in the last ten years, that we've actually specifically set aside a line item dollar amount as a reserve, as a contingency for potential future reductions.

So no, it's not something that we typically do.

We do put in the budget dollars that represent about two to sometimes three teaching positions that are unallocated at the moment, but we stay pretty firm on using those dollars only for, you might get a child that has a particular special ed need that requires a one-on-one, that's very often what happens, so you have to pick up a position.

The enrollment comes in higher than you expect in a certain area.

As we were developing this budget we were cautioned from the state and several times that there was a real possibility that as we go into budget 10

2010, that there was a possibility that we would still incur some additional revenue shortfall.

The contingency fund we put in place, we did not want to earmark all of the dollars in the budget so that the board would have some flexibility and ability to be able to respond to any additional shortfalls that we might have once we open school in the fall.

We have made some recommendations to the board should we not have to use

the contingency fund to respond to revenue shortfall.

So things are still in flux from you know obviously you all and our other funding sources and the stimulus money and for instance we funded we're planning to fund the new ESL teacher and the halftime preschool teacher out of stimulus money but right now we don't know whether we're really going to be able to do that and so if it turned out we couldn't do that we would need somewhere to go for those funds and so that's the

I also wanted to make a comment about the class program because we did receive so many emails and phone calls about it and along the way I learned a lot about the two entities that we are, the city council and the school board, even the legal ramifications and guidelines between the two and also

Just to say I think it's important for council not to micromanage the school budget and I do respectfully ask that during one of our city council school board lunches that we can have an evaluation, some kind of work session or follow up on the class program that could be one of the agenda items that we have during the course of the school year.

I would tell council that last week we had two very productive meetings with our employees in the class program and with our parents in the class program.

We talked about what works in the program and how we'd like to see the program grow.

Just a couple quick questions and a couple comments.

Okay.

And the number, roughly $300,000 for increased salaries, does that include the cost of benefits that occur because of the increase in the salaries?

I have a couple of comments.

I'd like to start by just pointing out, just for the people here or people on TV, as Chancellor Edwards said, we don't have a say in the details of the budget, and we've got plenty on our plate.

Fortunately, we have a really talented superintendent.

We have a great school board, and I think the system is in good hands, and it's evidenced by a lot of the success we've been having since you arrived.

but nonetheless we have an interest and I think our interest is kind of reflects what we hear from people and what people are saying and so for example we do get a lot of emails in the class program and I think that you're doing exactly what people want you want a thoughtful analysis on how can you actually save some money and still produce a quality program and that almost always involves can you do it with fewer people and I think Council Edwards has a great idea which is some point during the course of

maybe next year if we could have an update on how the program's doing to make sure that everyone's happy with that but I think it changes hard but I think you've obviously given a lot of thought to how to do this well and I'm certainly respectful of that opinion and it sure sounds like you've succeeded on that.

The bigger issue for me

really has to do with how all our budgets are going to fare in the next couple of years, not just this year.

And I think that my overall concerns about spending more on salaries, a small part of that concern, a part of that concern is

You know, people that work for the city directly, people that drive your school buses, people that work for us, work just as hard as the people in school systems and we're not giving them a raise and so I think that, you know, I kind of agree with the line of thought of, you know, I talk to

Mr. Mickey today, and I really understand, you know, we have a school system with a lot of demands, and we really need to get the best teachers, and we need to compete with localities to get the best teachers.

We need to make sure we are not behind the localities, so I get that.

But the issue I have that I'd like just to raise is that

You know, we may not have additional new money next year.

You know, pretty much we've had a formula where we try to go roughly 40% of the new revenue we get from real estate taxes.

We kind of give you a figure so we can be supportive of the challenges you face and make sure that the financial challenges aren't there.

And just so as you're planning, you're discussing for next year the fact that there may not be new city money.

because who knows what the real estate market is going to do but it may not increase at all.

On top of that, the state has balanced their budget by using stimulus money.

So I'm pretty sure they're going to hit the city hard next year and the year after that.

And so the school systems are going to also.

I think it was, I supported the move of the city manager who will be talking about this in the city manager's budget not to raise salaries because that means that for the next year you haven't bumped up the number you have to start with and so I'm sure I'm just preaching to the choir here, you guys have had all these discussions but that's where a lot of my concerns are about this.

The whole final comment I have is

I would have to learn more at some point in the future at a, perhaps at a school board, city council lunch about where we can go or where we are with the alternative programs.

Some of our discussions in the past have been not just about what we're doing with our existing alternative programs, but how can we improve those programs.

And you can't do everything at once.

And so, but I think that discussing where those programs can go, what's good about the way we're doing it now, what can be improved would be a great

I don't feel like as city councilors we've done a good job, or as school board members, you guys have done a good job, in fact I missed the last city council school board work session, of prioritizing these meetings.

I think in the course of last year

Maybe half of them have been canceled because of there not being a quorum on one side or the other.

And I'd like to see us have these meetings every month.

I'd like to see that we all put them on the calendars just like we do the council meetings and the planning commission meetings where we don't miss.

And I'd like to see that occur because I think they're important meetings.

Just a chance for the interaction between the bigger public and city council.

Just so we can really fully understand what's going on.

So I hope that will

I agree with that, that we really ought to make an effort to meet every month and I think we just need to do that.

In response to a couple of your other

points on the salary issue.

It was certainly a discussion that we had about whether in this economy that this was the right thing to do, but in the end we felt it was just compelling

since we were able to save money through other means by cutting essentially 22 positions and we're cutting those positions based on the declining enrollment that we've had not only projected for next year but in the past couple years particularly in the special ed area we hadn't adjusted the number of teachers in that over the last few years and so we were able to make these proposed cuts and so by cutting this number of positions

We have put ourselves in a position to have some money to spend.

In the city, I understand you're freezing some open positions and are making that decision.

On the board we felt that it was important enough to get two pay raises that we wanted to look for efficiencies elsewhere so that we could give pay raises.

and because there's nothing more important to the success of a child than the teacher.

We're going to be losing some of our most veteran teachers because we're doing this retirement incentive program and so we're anticipating losing at least 20 of our most senior teachers and that's what we've kind of planned into the savings.

that we're realizing from the retirement incentive but we may well get more than that because there's a lot of teachers who are eligible so we're going to be losing some of our best teachers and it's just that much more important next year that we're able to hire the best teachers, the ones that are going to be here.

and be our next best teachers for the next 30 years.

And so we just feel like that's a critically important thing and the raises are probably not going to keep up with inflation.

We asked Mr. Gillespie what the local inflation rate was and last year it was 3.2 or something like that.

And so this coming year, you know, we're probably not even keeping up with inflation with these raises, but we thought it important enough that we look for efficiencies elsewhere and still find the priorities of adding a three-year-old program, modest increase, adding the ESL teachers that we need, and adding a world language program continuing to expand.

and Dr. Brown.

Today, as I went around to schools and I asked schools to let me know when they're having team meetings.

I want to come and be a part of that team meeting.

And today I was at one of our schools that has had many challenges.

And as I sat at the table and there were teachers around the table and they were talking about specific instructional strategies and intervention that was taking place with individual students.

and they were talking about, the social studies teacher was talking about what goes on in the English class and what she does in her class to support the English class.

The English teacher talked about what happens in social studies and science that supports and she supports what happens there.

The interaction and the collaboration that was going on in that school, I walked away knowing that what we've done and how we've invested in our schools, we have had a major impact on the culture in our schools and ultimately the success of our students.

This was a hard budget to develop.

It was developed with a great deal of input from many different people.

But in that school today, I've realized what we're doing is right.

And we are changing the lives of young people, and we have in our school division dedicated employees who are in it for the long term.

And that's what we want to have in our school system.

That's a good segue into my comment.

We all, all taxpayers, all citizens of this community have a vested interest in the success of our school system.

I have a personal vested interest in having two of my own children under your care.

and you all do an excellent job and I think the ship is definitely moving in the right direction and I want to commend you publicly once again for your continued success in implementing the changes you just talked about and I want to particularly commend you for your commitment to efficiency.

because I think we all want to see, we all want to make sure, we all want to be assured that our, the tax dollars that we're allocating to the schools are being used in the most effective, most efficient manner.

I think you're demonstrating with this budget and your other actions that you've heard that message and that's the direction that you're taking this budget and taking the school system.

And in particular, you know,

There have been concerns raised in the past about the size of the central office and I think the fact that the biggest proportional cut in your budget, correct me if I'm wrong, is in the central office.

And so I think again you've heard that message.

The question of course, and several counselors have mentioned it, is so you're acting to be more efficient and reducing staff and then you get pushback when you talk about individual staff members and in particular

the class coordinator who's been, as you have acknowledged, has been very successful in administering that program.

And I think some of the concerns that I've heard from supporters of the class program has been more about the process, maybe the way in which this decision was made, the way in which people were involved in making this decision,

or informed of this decision.

I'm wondering if there was ever any discussion about phasing in this change because the concerns that people have who may not be completely assured that the program is not going to suffer because of the success of the coordinator.

Good question.

As we looked back in the whole budget development process, we had over 20-some meetings to get input on the budget.

But regardless of the number of meetings that you have, if you don't hit the specific stakeholders that are most impacted with changes in the budget, then you've missed a part.

And we certainly acknowledge that we did not hold a separate meeting with our

Class Council and the parents who make up that council.

That would have helped us in this process had we done that.

But as we received comments from our parents and the community on the class program, we put into action right then a written, visible

transition plan so that our parents and our teachers and our stakeholders could see how we were going to transition the responsibilities from a division level coordinator to another staff member.

The process that it was going to take and how we would ensure our parents and our teachers that we would maintain high quality

a high quality experience in that program.

As I said, we had a meeting last week with our parents and our staff members.

In that meeting, I think we had an opportunity to hear from our parents, and we learned a lot in that process.

We do believe that the transition plan that we have put in place will ensure that we are going to have success.

We looked at putting a part-time coordinator in place and felt like,

I would say I think that

The City Council can recognize that in building a budget and particularly when dealing with position cuts that it is kind of a sensitive thing of when you can start talking to people and you couldn't start talking to people until staff had talked to the individuals who were most affected and perhaps that could have happened earlier in the process but at least up until that time that that had happened we couldn't really go directly to the stakeholders and do that.

But it would have been best, and I think it was a mistake that we didn't reach out directly to the stakeholders at the earliest opportunity after that, even though we had already set up all these meetings at PTOs that were broadcast to all people that would include the class members.

and that we went to those and heard from anybody who came in addition to other ways to contact us.

I think that there was an error to not reach out to the class board at that time and I think that probably one of the reasons that happened was that the whole plan is that nothing is going to affect

the actual delivery of services.

This is a background position, coordinator position, and so I think that the fact that we had RAP had these budget meetings that are lined up with a lot of different groups and the fact that the whole plan is that nothing negative is going to affect the program, that that might have led to that oversight.

I hope you have a chance.

I know we have another presentation by Mr. O'Connor, but I hope at least a couple of you have a chance to stay for the public hearing.

I know there's a number of people here.

Even though, again to reiterate Dr. Brown's point, we're in a bit of a bind because city council can't tell the school board how to spend their money.

But I think it's important to give folks a chance to talk and we can certainly urge you in a certain direction, but at the end of the day it's your call as it should be.

I want to know one other thing, which is I was very pleased to hear the preliminary results on the success of the three-year-old preschool program.

I believe it was within a matter of days or weeks after you started that you and I sat down and talked about, can we get a three-year-old preschool program, and you were very open to that idea, and I just want to thank you for your leadership in moving forward with that initiative.

Absolutely, Doug.

Okay.

Thank you all again.

We're going to have a presentation on our city budget, but before that I'm going to call a six-minute recess.

I'm going to reconvene at 9.30 to get started with the next presentation.

P.A.E.

D.A.B.

No!

Steiner!

No!

No!

No!

In Carolina, Boston, North Carolina, Greenbrier, 10th and Page, Fry's Spring, Starr Hill,

We are going to reconvene and in fact

Well, I guess we got one more first.

Mr. Huja, come on up.

We're going to change the order around a little bit.

I had a request from a parent in the room who is here to speak on the school budget, and we have a number of parents with children in the chambers, and rather than having them all sit through a presentation on the city budget and then have a chance to speak, we're going to shift the order a little bit and have a

public hearing just on the school budget you just heard and that way our school partners that are here can hear the comments and then those who wish to leave can leave and then we'll have the city budget presentation and then the public hearing on the city budget.

Yes, and we can't have a public hearing on the city budget until we've had the presentation on the city budget.

So I'm going to open up a public hearing and when you come forward, please limit your comments to three minutes and give your name and address.

For those who wish to speak on the school budget, just come on forward.

I'm not going to use this sheet because I don't know who signed up to speak.

I'm going to deliver the first half and have somebody else deliver the second so we keep it for six minutes.

My name is Kim Daves and I live at 710 Hinton Avenue.

I'm the President of the Parent Advisory Council for the City of Charlottesville's Creative Learning and After School and Summer Program, also known as CLASS.

With all due respect to Dr. Atkins, I would like to correct her on one of the things that was presented.

It was an error made.

The program goes through sixth grade, not through seventh grade.

I also would like to say that I think that Dr. Atkins has done an exceptional job since she has started and I know that she came into a big mess and she has really turned some things around and I'm very proud of her for those things.

I just have this one issue.

I simply want to do what's best for the children of class.

I feel that everyone present tonight shares that goal.

As I prepared for tonight, I kept my mind open to everything including embracing change.

in search of what I feel is the best path forward.

I have led minutes from past Parent Advisory Council meetings, also known as PAC, dating back to 1985.

I've studied the budget, received feedback from current parents, citizens, and local business owners, spoken to past members of PAC, and those who are now old enough to sign petitions who have attended class.

I have attended meetings with administrators and the school board.

I have kept up with the blogs.

I've done all I know to do to get as much feedback as possible from the public on this issue.

So I feel like I have a very good handle on how the public is feeling about the coordinator position in particular.

I'm not afraid that the whole program is going to fall apart.

I feel like it needs dedicated leadership.

I have three issues and then I have some solutions.

Sorry, because I think if you're going to bring up issues, you need to have solutions.

The three issues I have, the first one is the flawed process, which was spoken about earlier.

Eighty-seven percent of the class revenue is born from the parents of the class students, not the school system.

In this context, the parents should have been invited into the proposed budget cut process in the form of a designated meeting for class parents.

I feel it would have been appropriate to give us an opportunity to express our concerns and to try and find an alternative solution because it very well could have been one.

It is up to us to decide whether or not that position is needed.

We pay for the bulk of the program by far.

Issue number two is the timing.

Last Thursday we did have a meeting, and I thought it was a very good meeting.

And I thank Dr. Atkins and the other administration for having that meeting.

Ms. Ivory, you're wonderful with your presentation of that meeting, and I really, really appreciate that.

It yielded most concern from parents about the summer program, which is being planned as we speak right now.

Concerns were raised about safety, bullying, redundancy of activities.

While last year was exceedingly better than the prior year, there is still much work that needs to be done between now and when the program starts.

Currently, the senior site director plans the program with guidance from the current coordinator.

I do not feel like now is the time to begin the process of transitioning the coordinator's position.

I would like to see the coordinator focused on the summer program.

with the Senior Site Director rather than spending the days transitioning.

This year poses some increased logistical challenges with the program being limited to three schools as a result of construction in other schools.

We have some particular issues this summer.

The new designated coordinator for class also coordinates one of the few programs in the school district which is rapidly growing.

So who they're giving this position to

There are very few programs that are growing this rapidly, and this one is growing very, very quickly, and that's the English as a Second Language, and that is evidenced by adding an English as a Second Language position.

She also coordinates the Gifted and Talented program, which together, with taking on a new program like CLASS, would be more than anybody could effectively accomplish this quickly.

I also hope this is my third issue and last issue, and then I'll move on to some solutions.

How much is understood about class by those who have made the decisions to cut the coordinator and those who will be involved in the future?

They said they will divide the duties up between principals.

And while the principals are responsible for everything that occurs in the school, they have not been engaged in class program.

A principal has not been present at a class meeting since 1999.

They know what's going on in their cafeteria.

They know what's going on in their gym.

They coordinate attendance and things, but they have not been involved with the curriculum.

They don't know about the program.

They have not been engaged.

The school board has a number assigned to attend PAC meetings, but the designated number has not been present since 1996.

It was made apparent by those present at both the Walker Upper Elementary School meeting and the business meeting that there is limited knowledge of the program by at least some of those who are key in passing the budget cut.

And I won't get into all those details.

Very last statement.

At the meeting on Thursday, administrators indicated that they were more involved than parents realized.

They stated that they visit class sites on a quarterly basis.

Based on the information that I have since received, they have not visited class sites while they are in session on a quarterly basis.

Thank you.

Stuart Taylor, also 710 Hinton Avenue, and what I wanted to do was just kind of wrap up what she had said, the three key points, and that is, in conclusion, we've outlined what you guys jumped right on, which was the flood process.

There's a big map of all the different meetings, and even they have remitted to the fact that we were kind of left out of the process, and that, you know, means a lot, just that alone.

But what we'd like to do is offer some solutions on how we might move forward from this point, because obviously that's water under the bridge.

So the timing of the transition bothered us and obviously the knowledge of the new coordinator versus what we feel like the current coordinator has and just that position offers because as you guys know if you've ever been in management you know having seven people do a job is usually not as good as one because you spread the responsibilities and it becomes their tenth thing to do not their first thing to do.

So with that said, we do feel like we have a proposed solution and that is we'd like to ask the council, the mayor, Mr. Norris, really for just one year of funding of this program so that we can work with the school board to try to put some better practices in place.

Similar to your luncheon request, we would suggest that the parents hold PAC meetings on a monthly basis and attend at least one PTO meeting to make sure we don't fall through the cracks when they have the PTO meetings.

Maybe we would have caught that at an earlier stage.

This will result in a better understanding between the two different groups that really have a common goal.

The current coordinator, we'd really like to see her, instead of really working on these transition duties, is to actually focus on our current duties with a heavy emphasis on improving the summer program, which Kim alluded to, and address the growths that were identified at last Thursday meetings, or the improvements that we think can be made to the program.

Finally, the principals, we would ask that they visit the programs during the checkout time, 4.45 to 5.30, catch the parent here and there, ask them what they think is working for the program and what's not.

Not just an out-of-state setting, but an on-site setting.

And have those principals attend at least one PAC meeting per month.

And then finally, the school board, as Kevin suggested, have them have a designate.

If they can't come themselves, maybe a substitute, they could attend the monthly PAC meetings.

and then finally share that information back with the other school board members on a monthly or bi-monthly basis.

And then the administrative team, we'd like to see the school board share that back with the head staff so that we can all of them work together with these different meetings similar to your city council and school board luncheon meetings.

We would like to see the same thing foster over the next year so that we can solve this together as opposed to trying to come up with a solution kind of last minute.

In closing, I'd like to say that I really feel like this solution is proven in an effective way for everyone to get up to speed, get on the same page, allow us to address all the needs in an adequate time frame.

And this is a year-round program that involves hundreds of children and needs to be taken very seriously, as we know that they have, because they've thought through this and they've justified their points.

We feel like we just wanted to justify our point as well.

We think it should be continued.

And we ask that you guys stand up for class.

Thank you.

Anybody else like to speak on the school budget?

Thank you Mayor Morris and other city council members to be here.

It is a profound pleasure to be before you this evening.

As a parliament of the City of Charlottesville School Board, I would like to thank each of you all for your support of the school system.

Your support has allowed personal and academic success for all in the school system.

I just want to spend a moment to speak on the class program, the school administration, and school board.

We've heard the concerns of the

Public and we appreciate their comments.

We really sincerely do.

Many of these changes will be incorporated into the changes of the program that's coming up.

The decision makers are very familiar with the CLASS program.

We're very familiar with it.

CLASS is an extremely successful program.

and we would never take any steps that would negatively impact that program.

And we said this as a school board members, we said this, I personally said this as a father of a daughter who uses the program every day and loves the program, loves the staff at their Moran.

And I said this as a parent, it depends on this program.

I'd like to echo what Mr. Wade has said.

I have a child who started with the class program this year.

She's a kindergartener.

She comes home every day speaking so highly of the class program and our side coordinator.

One of the things that I've learned over the course of this school year is class is not just an after school daycare.

It continues the learning experience and the commitment that the school board has and Dr. Atkins and the administration has is to make sure that that continues, gets better and grows.

I'm here to speak to you this evening as director of the Upward Bound program at the University of Virginia.

I have a very unique position which allows me to work

with not only the Charlottesville City School Division but other school divisions in the Central Virginia area.

And I must say I would like to commend not only city council but the city schools for providing me with an excellent group of students to work with that are part of the public school system in the city of Charlottesville.

You have continuously done the right thing to make sure that our students move from a form of dependence to independence through your funding of our schools, through your summer youth internship program.

My students

have had the opportunity to participate

in this state and in this country.

And I would like to thank you for that.

My name is Maggie Kelly, 1628 Mason Lane.

I have two teenage boys that went through the class program and I have a kindergarten who's at Venable now.

And I'd like to say that for Charlottesville, I'm very happy to see here that we are all of the same heart and trying to do all the same thing to help with these children.

That track is if your budget, I heard you speak of if the program had at what point enough people were enrolled or it would be in your budget to have a coordinator.

Please keep that in mind.

that you all do need a transition but to keep the coordinator that is currently in existence because I have seen the progress.

I can go and infinite the problems that have been fixed.

I'm a nurse.

I work all shifts and my children, you know, I even pick them up.

I can't start from when their homework, you know, I'm trying to get them fed and in bed, and I can't thank enough for what they do there as well as having them in a safe environment and having them in front.

But with how the city coordinated with, and it didn't get brought up yet, about the Parks and Rec component, because where the city brings on, I mean,

Close program goes off, the city has picked up, and this is the actual first year where that has been a smooth transition.

My supervisor is very happy, I've not had many needs in my scheduled variations for iPad to try to find and plug in.

affordable childcare.

They have a sliding scale that is very fair and it allows me to utilize that program.

And I guess I'm very upset that I guess the sheriff's school has issued the first pink stuff.

I understand she's actually kind of fired or laid off or whatever.

Which brings me to the future where

How many people in this city are going to be laid off?

I know what child care costs and I can't afford it.

So what's going to happen to these children if class wasn't here?

And the parks in America are coordinating.

So the city, I think it's great that we're all going to talk.

I hope that with the wonderful things that they have done to both those parents like me who

By the way, I would not have known about any of this if it wasn't for Ms. Rogers, who's my site coordinator.

And if she's going to be taken away from that site to be picking up the slack with the now new coordinator who has all these other coordinator positions, where she's going to have to be in those meetings, either it will come back to where the kids are.

She wasn't there one day, and

It was a personal need, but the older boys were trying to tell the person who they were who didn't know what was going on that they were allowed to do all kinds of things.

And the man and I were sitting there going, ahhh.

Any other speakers on the school budget?

All right, I want to thank you all.

I appreciate the patience and perseverance of everybody else in the room.

This is a long night.

It's a very important business to cover, and I do understand that it takes a lot out of us to sit through all of this.

But I appreciate the comments that were made tonight.

We have a number of other opportunities where we'll be continuing to discuss the budget matters, school budget and otherwise.

We're going to be meeting with the school board I believe this Friday, if I'm not mistaken, this Friday at 12 o'clock here in the basement conference room of City Hall, I believe.

And I'm sure these budget kinds of issues will come up in that conversation.

We have a budget workshop on the

Community Budget Forum on the 25th, Wednesday the 25th at 7pm in City Space, the old Social Security office downtown.

So there's other opportunities to provide input and feedback and thank you all for being here tonight.

We are now going to move on to the presentation and I'm going to ask Mr. O'Connell to not necessarily

Good evening.

Is this working?

Don't sound like it is.

Again, it's 10 till 10.

I'm not going to spend a long time, but I think there's some important issues to talk about.

One of them about the city budget, you're going to hear me say this a number of different times, and I just say it up front, so I don't have to say it multiple times.

We thought it was important that we look at the budget over a three-year period, not just the year that we're opposing, which is FY10, fiscal year 10,

but also the year after that and the year after that because we've got concerns about what's happening in the economy and that by working over three years we can try to address a good number of the issues.

In a lot of ways, the city budget starts with this vision that the city council has adopted.

It's a 20-year vision.

If I had time, I would go through it.

But I think the Rubik's Cube that's up there is a pretty good way to talk about, as things shift, and they're obviously shifting in lots of ways, our council's priorities have had to shift as the economy shifts, as news for jobs and workforce development, and a number of different programs that we're trying to put an emphasis on in the budget, as those shifts have occurred,

We're trying to address that.

We provide lots of different services within the city you've heard me talk about before, all the way from animal control, from A to Z to zingers, and all kinds of services in between.

We're what's known as a full-service city.

And I think from the budget surveys, people appreciate that and like that and enjoy that.

We released this slide last year.

This was literally on the wall.

We just walked by it.

It was the best of times.

I think that sort of translates the year.

And we're kind of living with the budget because of the way the assessments lag.

We're still living with some good times, at least with the real estate market and how assessments work.

And we're clearly heading into some of the worst of times.

And one of the concerns about our budget is because of that, next year's probably going to be more difficult.

and for some other reasons I think the year after that's going to be even more difficult as well.

This is a slide that really came out of the budget last year.

We've been talking for the last two years about the storm is coming while it clearly has hit.

Hit more than anybody could have imagined.

And we've been hit by the state.

Almost

$3 million when you look at the combined impacts on the city and the school budgets.

And I think we all know the state economy is still seeing problems.

I think we'll expect to see changes that occur over the next few months and more reductions are probably coming.

and there's so many headlines all over the state.

Actually, the Charlottesville area and region is better off than I think virtually any other in Virginia other than Northern Virginia and probably better off than most cities in the country.

The things like furloughs, layoffs, they're not part of this budget, more reductions in services, more rows in taxes.

And nationally, these are just a couple headlines out of the Wall Street Journal last week.

A brand new word.

I mean we've been seeing incremental increases and increases in budgets for 30, 40, 50 years.

Suddenly we're seeing declines whether it's nationally or in the local budget.

That's a new phenomenon for everybody and we have to deal with and continue with it.

Just like people are having to deal with their home budgets.

One of the things we wanted to do was quickly show the impact of the city budget.

We talk about economic stimulus at the national level.

The city government and the schools employ a lot of people, but also the spending that the city does.

In the economic environment world, they use a factor of a multiplier of 1.45.

If you look here, that's almost 320 million dollars.

A third of a billion dollars that comes into the local economy that we see as part of the stimulus.

Same thing with payroll.

There's 1,702 positions that are proposed in the city and school budgets for next year, and as you can see, a little over $129 million that people have in their pockets to spend within the community.

That's part of stimulating our local economy.

This is from an efficiency study that was done that was presented to city council in February, and a couple conclusions.

Good value, one of the lowest tax

lowest city tax rates with a high level of service.

And that's one of the things that sets us aside.

And I'll show you a slide in a minute that emphasizes that more.

This is the budget survey that we did.

It was done in December.

Thirty-five percent believe they can get their money's worth.

I think that's still a challenge for us.

How do we up that even more?

But I think this is more important.

Sixty-four percent said they want their taxes and services held at the same level.

And that's essentially what this budget's proposing.

So I think there's good news in this budget.

For majority, there's no increase, and for a lot of people, there's an increase.

Actually, 61% see this.

There are no tax rate increases.

It's a mean, fat city budget, yet there are no reductions in services.

And if you read around the state, there's hardly anybody, particularly nationally, that can say that.

It's a conservative budget.

We're living within our means.

As everybody knows, we have to have a balanced budget.

We cannot present a budget by charter to city council.

They can't adopt a budget that's not balanced.

We're trying to work longer than just the next year, two years, three years out at least.

And in some ways, some of the capital programs are looking at least five years out.

We think this budget meets the community needs.

It continues the good services without reductions.

We believe it reflects council's priorities.

That's what

I think we'll have the discussion over the next few weeks and hopefully the community's priorities don't increase any of the tax rates or taxes and it funds several new council priorities.

These priorities come out of discussions at council head and working with the vision and seeing what's happening in the local economy

and meetings that were held during the fall and primarily looking at new workforce initiatives, poverty initiatives and there's special funding for that.

There's special funding for a summer youth mentoring program to be expanded which was highly successful.

A fair free transit program for new clients that are looking for work as a way to help people make that step.

There's funding for a dialogue on race.

A new program in energy conservation, corn energy conservation to help people

I'd rather rise their homes and save on energy costs and the continuing emphasis on affordable housing.

You can see the budget trends, kind of incremental increases, bigger increase, and then this is next year's budget.

So, flat 0.23% negative.

That's the first time we've had a negative budget in a long, long time and our budget's about $127 million.

14 positions are proposed to be reduced sitting rather

We've looked closely at all the departmental budgets and there's an increase to the schools that's built in as you saw a minute ago.

This is an offer to try to look at the last two years in terms of staffing.

And this chart is looking at two things.

One is what we call the general fund.

The general fund is the property tax, local tax supported part of the city budget.

and so property taxes fund these positions.

This purple part at the top are special funds.

Charlottesville Transit, which gives a lot of federal money, state money is a majority.

Social Services is a majority of the funds come from federal government or the state government.

And then we have a couple contracts with the schools.

for efficiency purposes, building maintenance and school buses, that 100% of the cost is paid out of the school budget, and then finally our utilities.

This is the actual general fund, the local property tax supported part of the budget.

As you can see, we have a slight growth and then a reduction.

Actually, next year, if you compare it to 10 years ago, we've got six fewer staff that are working

that are funded by local property taxes and we've improved a lot of our services.

To me that's what efficiency's all about.

We're doing more for the fewer people.

So the council's initiatives are funded, no salary increases for city employees, no cuts in city services, patch rates and fees remain the same, and here's some capital projects.

This may be the biggest change that's in the budget,

And if we work out five years, we probably can't sustain this, but a couple of years after five years, I think we're going to run into problems.

But this budget is $8 million less than last year in terms of capital projects.

And as we go through the budget discussions with Council, we'll spend some more time talking about that.

There's a significant amount of funding to finish the funding for the Smith Pool Aquatic Center.

which is this new building here.

This bid is about to start.

There's dollars in there for stormwater.

We had a discussion with council in January and the decision was rather than go with the utility that we would try to find money in the capital budget for the next couple of years.

And so that's what the stormwater is and then the home energy conservation that I talked about earlier.

There's also within the budget what we're calling an economic downturn fund.

but essentially that we know the economy is going to get worse, either at the state level or locally.

We anticipate more of these storms to occur.

We just don't know.

And I don't think anybody knows what's really going to happen.

So we think it's prudent to step back and set some money aside as a contingency to make sure that we have things covered, that we don't have to come back and increase the tax rate or cut services in order to meet some change that goes on.

We think that is a way to do some proactive planning.

This is a general fund budget.

The biggest revenue we have are local taxes, 68%, and then a variety of other things.

As you can see, I'll quickly go through.

Here's sales tax, meals tax, creams all the way up, and both places in the rest of these slides.

This is the first time that

that we've seen in 30 years or so that the taxes are starting year to year to go down.

Every single one of the local taxes.

You can see that with personal property, with the business license tax, with the rooms tax.

And this is the expenditure side of the money.

Where it goes, 33% of our budget goes to family schools.

It's roughly a third.

The rest of it's all kinds of other things

Next biggest one is public safety, justice, courts, police, fire, those kind of services.

And here are a couple quick things.

Over a $127 million budget, you can see the slice that is the local taxes.

Here are some of these other funds that are not local taxes.

There's a variety of them.

There are a couple of things that we've done to try to save money within the budget specifically.

One is that we're proposing no pay raises for city employees for a couple of reasons.

One is this concern about where we're going to be in the future.

And if we give a pay raise this year that builds in not only for this year but next year in a place to start.

We're concerned that if we do that we may have to make some significant cuts a year from now.

We also see what's going on in the marketplace and our belief is that

We're in a pretty good place in the marketplace right now.

We'll have to see where we are in a year.

We're reducing 14 positions for about three quarters of a million dollar savings.

And the departments within our budgets, other than people, reduced close to $600,000.

The funding in schools is a $500,000 increase of over $30 million from the city, 1.28%.

And there's two and a half million dollars that's in the capital program that's dedicated to school use.

And these are the council's new initiatives.

Probably the biggest one is the council's interest in workforce and poverty initiatives.

And we've set a reserve aside for council to have a serious discussion about that that follows a series of work sessions that we've already had.

And so that's probably the biggest new one, the Summer Youth Program, $85,000 for free, $63,000 in the dialogue on race.

So there's a little over $16 million for capital projects.

You can see the schools, the Cheryl Smith Center, and the three priorities of council.

And I've said this a bunch of different times and we've showed you a bunch of different values.

We think this value is coming and worse.

So we're planning for the three years.

We're anticipating a flatter decline in the real estate market next year and the year after we think it's going to be tougher.

Now, the second on the Development Fund,

I mentioned how impossible it is, but here's the other significant one.

If we have a 5% shift in the real estate tax assessments, that's three and a half million dollars.

Almore County had a 5% shift this year, so that's not unheard of.

That's what we're preparing to possibly happen in Charlottesville, and who knows what's going to happen with the real estate market.

We just think it's prudent to anticipate that.

and this is what our financial advisor said.

We go to the down market in May and I read it by taking actions such as establishing an economic downturn firm within the proposed budget for cities management again demonstrating the leadership expected among the highest rated localities in the U.S.

There aren't many cities that can say that or I think anticipate what we see coming and not raising taxes and not reducing services nor laying people off.

Here's what's happened with assessments.

We clearly know they grew pretty rapidly for a number of years and then here's this decline and we see that decline going down even more.

Here's what happened with the tax rate on the other side of it.

We've gone from a $1.11 tax rate to $0.95.

That's a $0.16 reduction.

If we were still at $1.11, that's another $8.5 million that we'd be collecting from Charlottesville residents.

So even though the assessments weren't up, the tax rate went down significantly and it's reflected in what people pay in their tax bills.

Here's another way to look at this.

These are cities around the state that provide similar kinds of services and show us similar kinds of demographics, have scale systems.

That is a $1.08 median or 13 cents less than the median.

This is our website, www.shilesville.org slash budget.

Every slide I've shown you has got all kinds of detailed charts behind it.

Any budget information that we provide to city council that they've already been given is on our website, and any updates that we give council will be on our website.

So here's the budget calendar.

There's a public hearing tonight, a work session on the 24th, which is mostly for councilors' work.

The important one for citizens, I think, is the citizen budget form on the 25th.

I have a work session on the 2nd and then a serious public hearing work session and final adoption on April 14th.

This culminates almost two months worth of work discussions, public opportunities to talk about the budget.

To be honest, I think it's pretty remarkable we're standing here and we can put a slide up like this.

When we had the budget guidelines discussion with the council in the fall, I was pretty convinced we were looking at major cuts.

We committed to council, we didn't propose an increase in the tax rate, but probably major cuts in services, which means employees.

Now this is an article that, thanks to Dr. Brown,

and I'm going to read from it quickly.

This is by a guy named Richard Florida.

So you know him, don't you?

This is a, an urban economist who's been watching cities around the country, studying them for years, author of a book called The Creative Class, Creative Cities, of which Charlottesville has been listed.

And here's what he says, and I think this is a significant thing of beyond the budget that we're talking about tonight.

How will this crash reshape America and its cities?

On the other side of this crisis, America's economic landscape will look very different than it does today.

What fate will be coming for the cities of America?

How many various cities and regions fares the crash of 2008 reverberates into 2009, 2010 and beyond?

Going on, our economy is in the midst of a fundamental long-term transformation.

This one I want to talk about in just a second.

In the case today, the economy is shifting away from manufacturing, which we see in our community.

virtually no manufacturing, and I think the manufacturing that's here is, we're starting to see some reductions.

In tourism, I build the urban creative industry.

That too favors America's talent-rich, fast metabolizing places like Charlottesville, the university community.

He also goes on to say, today we need to begin making smaller use of both our urban space and the suburban rooms that surround them.

All of the city and county need to talk more together.

We can do a much better job of connecting suburbs to cities and to each other.

Another quote I particularly liked is by a guy named Paul Romer, a Stanford economist, who famously said, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.

And we're clearly in an economic crisis.

And now this crisis does come to opportunity, and I think that's our challenge.

The United States has used this kind of crisis time and again to reinvent itself, clearing away the old and making way for the new.

I think that's a challenge for us as a city government.

And to be resilient as we go forth.

This comes from the executive director of the National Sea Management Association that travels all over the United States.

And this is three ways that localities are dealing with budgets.

One is to hunker down and act like we're going to get out of this in a year.

I don't believe that.

The second one, a low tide sinks our ships.

The opposite of a rising tide raises our boats.

What that's saying is if you

do like 10% reductions or you freeze employees or do sort of across the board things or you do photos or those kind of, you're really not dealing with the hard issue of setting priorities.

And the third one is to see it as a transformational opportunity to really think services, how you provide them, what you do.

That's a multi-year kind of approach, but I think that's the challenge and the opportunity for us.

The other opportunities, I know county's really struggling.

I think there are opportunities for the city and county to look at working together in some very different ways than we've looked at before.

I'm not going to go through these.

The main one here is priorities.

I think this is going to be the type, we don't have to do it this year to the same extent that I think next year and the year after.

The harder discussions about what's important in this community, what are we willing to pay for.

And we're back to the pieces that make this a community, make it a great place to live, but I think also it's what makes it difficult as we get into harder economic times, what's important to us and how do we deal and respond to that.

Thank you Mr. Connell.

Questions from Councillors before we move to public comment?

All right.

We're going to have plenty of opportunity to ask our questions and provide our feedback in the weeks ahead.

So we are now going to listen to the public.

And the way that the process works legally is we are required to first have a public hearing on the annual tax levy, which is the

setting the property tax rate and nobody has signed up to speak for that particular public hearing.

Thank you for the opportunity to speak.

I'd like to reiterate what I told you before.

It looks like a lot of work was gone into the budget to keep it pretty much level with what it was in the past years.

So that's step in the right direction.

I did have

I have seven problems with it.

Last year I addressed the council about this time concerning the budget surplus for the fiscal years 2006 and 2007 which amounted to about $15 million.

This morning's daily progress states that there's a surplus of about $5.7 million for the year 2008.

In the past two years, the various departments were allowed to retain all or a portion of their unspent budget funds.

This year, according to the Congress, the surplus will be placed in the Counselor's Reserve Fund so that those monies can be used for council priorities which can now be reflected in the 2009 budget.

However, when the city has a budget surplus of over $20 million in the past three fiscal years combined, it is evident that the tax rate is much too high.

Therefore, in view of the large surplus, I would call upon council to cut the tax rate from the proposed $0.95 to $0.90 with $5.7 million

dollars left over from the 2008 budget, we should have more than enough to cover any economic downturns or inflationary trends.

Thank you, Mr. Sanderson.

Anybody else like to speak on the tax rates?

Okay, we will close the public hearing on the tax rate, and we will now open the public hearing on the City Manager's proposed FY2010 budget.

Again, when you come forward, please give your name, address, keep your comments to three minutes, and please don't feel obligated to repeat something that's already been said before you.

If somebody's already said something that you would like to say, feel free to just say ditto.

Good evening.

My name is Cheryl Cooper.

I live at 289 Blackthorne Lane.

Mayor Norris and council members, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening.

And thank you for your past support in doing all you can to minimize reductions in the 2010 budget.

By making cuts that have the least impact on client services and criterion growth, we limited our request to a 1.2% increase for the FY10 budget.

The proposed budget is for level funding.

This impacts us in three areas where we requested minimal increases.

$950 for daycare scholarships, $660 for case management,

and $1700 for congregate and home-delivered meals.

While the amounts are small, level funding will result in cuts as we build the FY10 budgets.

Like each household, city department, local business and agency, our expenses are going up as seniors and their families are being hard hit by the economy.

Congregate meal costs have gone up 5.5%, home-delivered meal costs have gone up 6%.

Families who used to be able to help seniors cannot afford to do so at this time.

Volunteers and staff who used to absorb the cost of mileage are now submitting reimbursement requests as their costs for other life expenses are going up and their resources are fewer.

Java staff receives salary adjustments only through a merit increase and this year for the first time we are not getting any increases, keeping compensation for Java staff behind others in the community doing similar work.

Job impacts the lives of our clients on a daily basis, allowing seniors to remain living in the community.

In the case of Mountainside Senior Living, providing affordable housing for those who need assisted living.

And by the way, Mrs. Marshall, our 96-year-old resident who comes to see you often, was unable to be here tonight, but she sends her regards.

Job is committed to having the community see aging as a lifespan process.

Our mission is to promote, establish, and preserve sustainable communities for healthy aging that benefit individuals and families of all ages.

We seek collaborations to ensure healthy aging, starting with the very young, so each resident has the opportunity to age in the community if that's where he or she wants to be.

Java has been asked to expand our health services model to the West Hayden community, where we would provide clinic services to community residents of all ages.

Our reservation in taking on the clinic is the lack of secure funding.

Again, thank you for your efforts to ensure the seniors of Charlottesville and their families continue to feel this is a good place in which to grow older because of the services provided to those aging in the community.

Thank you Ms. Cooper.

Good evening.

I'm Jackie Bryant.

I'm the executive director of Children, Youth and Family Services, and I'm here tonight to ask for your support for our Real Dads program.

The program was initiated by council in fiscal year 08 to provide support and education to help successfully involve dads in the lives of their children.

As you probably know, city schools report that over 50% of the students in their classrooms live with a single parent, mostly their moms.

So we have a lot of work to do to make sure that dads stay involved in the lives of their children.

We are asking you to please reinstate funding for FY10 with at least level funding and I will put in a plug that $30,000 would allow us to secure this position at full time and any additional dollars we raise would be used to expand the services to the dads in this community.

Good evening everybody.

I'm Eddie Harris, Parent Educator with the Real Dads program.

The program, since the last time I spoke with you all, has been making some real strides.

I'm not doing so much scattering as I am with intensity to the people that's on my caseload.

I do do a lot more outreach and what I'm finding out is that in doing the outreach, I'm getting a better response because of the intensity that I'm doing with the guys that I work with on a regular basis.

The type of change that I think we all are striving for, it's going to have to come with more intensity rather than just, you know, just a token service or just token information.

Because I'm learning that just knowing, you know, is not enough.

You know, just to know what I have to do is not getting it done.

So in doing more intensity, I can get to the core of what's going on.

and that takes time to build the type of relationship that I need to establish the trust that I need and I see real progress.

Guys are making strides and I think the best possible way to get this message out is to have a strong relationship with the guys that I'm working with and they in turn can be examples to their friends.

They in turn can carve the message.

There's no way that I can reach everybody

I'm just going to finish up by adding that in the past year we were able to secure a state grant which allowed us to take Eddie's position from part-time which the council funds supported to a full-time position.

Those state grants were pulled back from all agencies at the end of September and we have kept the position on it full-time because we believe in this service and we know it is making a difference for the dads in this community.

I would also just add, so far this year we have reached 112 men through outreach efforts

and Eddie is working intensively with 36 men for an average cost per beneficiary of $265.

Seems like a pretty good bargain.

So we have another sign up here to talk more about the services, but thank you for your consideration.

Thank you very much.

I'm John Westin with 67 Hilldale Drive.

I'm a volunteer for Java.

I've been doing it for roughly two years now.

I do the home delivery meals.

My main, where I pick my meals up is the Mary Williams Center on East Market Street.

I can tell you from my heart, these meals are very good.

The one I take food to is a big thank you for it.

And I feel like the people who are doing daydreams, so I've learned a whole lot in two years.

There's a lot of history from the people who come in there.

And I feel it gives them something to do during the day.

It gives them another home.

They have a hot meal.

They have friendship.

And it's like they do Easter parties.

Last year I dressed up as Kel for Halloween.

You know, we do little things there.

and it's like, I have a lady who lives at Crescent Hall here and I first went there, she did not want to, she has a hospital bed, but she did not want to get up during the day, but since the past year, when she knows I'm coming, she's up, her bed's made up, now she's taking walks outside, she's getting involved in doing things, I think a few years ago she tried to even do a garden, but we need meals delivered to her.

to our citizens very bad.

This keeps them out of the nursing homes.

And I just feel like, I know you all have a lot on your budget, but every time I take a dinner to someone or I take insurance to someone, I feel like I've done the greatest thing for the day.

And thank you all for your help.

Thank you Mr. Western.