City Council Meeting   11/15/2010

Ms. Barfield, if you call the roll, please.

Dr. Brown?

Here.

Mr. Huja?

Yes.

I have a few announcements to start us off tonight.

First of all, we want to note that the Charlottesville website has a new look, a new functionality.

As always, it's at Charlottesville.org.

If you haven't had a chance to check out the new website, please do so.

A lot of good stuff on there.

Secondly, we are now accepting applications for our Neighborhood Leadership Institute.

This is a program whereby city residents can learn all about your city government and it promotes citizen participation in the community.

That deadline for applying is December 31st of 2010 and you can find an application at charleshill.org or call 970-3182.

We have a community meeting regarding the improvements that are hopefully soon about to take place regarding the Belmont Bridge.

That meeting will be taking place November 30th, 2010 from 6 to 8 p.m. at City Space here downtown.

and of course Virginia Gingerbread Christmas.

You cannot go wrong with Virginia Gingerbread Christmas.

The Downtown Business Association has a whole host of events coming up over the next month relating to downtown for the holidays and we want to encourage people to come downtown and participate.

Just as an example, Friday November 19th is the

Winter Wonderland at the Grand Illumination from 5 to 7 p.m. at Central Place.

Saturday, November 20th is our visits with Santa Claus from 12 to 3 p.m. at the Omni Hotel, many other events.

And if you want to learn more information, there's an easy website to remember, which is simply VirginiaGingerbreadChristmas.com.

Any other announcements from other counselors?

Okay hearing none we are going to move forward to matters by the public and as is our custom when you come forward please state your name and address and we ask you to keep your comments to three minutes.

Mayor Norris and members of the City Council.

My name is Paul Long and I live at 1410 Grady Avenue here in Charlottesville.

I have come to speak briefly about the city's budget surplus.

Charlottesville is experiencing a tremendous increase in the number of its homeless population.

They are not being adequately served by the South Asian Army and PASM, even those two organizations are doing a tremendous job with the resources they have.

I propose that City Council appropriate $2 million of the surplus to provide additional services to the city's homeless population.

Additional funding could be offered to the South Asian Army and PASM and they could provide additional bed capacity for the city's homeless.

I believe that funding should be offered to nonprofit organizations who are willing and able to set up night shelters for the homeless during the winter months.

Charlottesville builds itself as a world-class city.

None of its residents and citizens should be forced to live in tents or on the streets during the winter months.

Thank you, Mr. Long.

My name is David Steinberg.

I live at 2055 Polo Grounds Road in the county.

Driving here tonight, I have many options, including the new county road parallel and close to Rio.

Why was that redundant road built?

Talk it up to an archaic notion of progress that some business interests and some of my county neighbors can't get out of their heads.

Driving used to be the way of the future, a vision of the modern as a triumph of personal convenience.

The new road is an out-of-date commitment to that old-fashioned idea.

Because it promises autonomy, the very word automobile seduces us into being motorists.

But in fact, our so-called autos reduce our autonomy by lashing us to car making,

oil drilling, land gridding and road paving.

Most directly, the MOA question is about whether to support gridding and paving or to begin to loosen their grip on us.

Our dilemma is not due to lack of local creativity.

There's plenty, plus boundless potential for local action.

Rather, this dilemma is due to power moves by power players and to our being hypnotized into two obsessive compulsive repetition disorders.

Obsessive compulsive repetition disorders.

Driving and the delusion that driving and driving dollars are solutions to rather than sources of problems.

To vote tonight for the MOA would be to hope that the 250 interchange will be built, but this would be a hope for the triumph of illegality, a hope that might well prove to be in vain when the case comes to court.

Either way, the situation for the city, not for us in the county, will be dire.

If a highway goes through the park and the interchange is not built, then an at-grid intersection will increase snarls on 250 and stress on Free Bridge.

If a highway goes through and the interchange is built, the green light it sends to drivers will put pressure all along McIntyre to aid getting into this increasingly congested city and to pass through it.

I see why paving and gridding is part of the mindset of my fellow county residents.

Many are newbies, well accustomed to chopped, gridded land parcels.

They live on them.

But I don't understand why you, custodians of a delicate, potentially even better walking city, would accelerate traffic into and through your town.

Indeed, would sell your birthright to a high-pressure chamber of commerce for a mess of pottage.

Thank you, Mrs. Steinberg.

Richard Stapp and 116 Olinda Dry, Charlottesville.

Mr. Mayor, Councillors, Mr. Brown, Mr. Jones, I wanted to commend all of you for being truth tellers and truth seekers.

I wanted to thank each of you for the due diligence you've sought in seeking answers to the cost of our water supply and pointing out discrepancies in the water demand figure and promoting the efficiencies of a revised water plan.

to thank each of you for your due diligence in researching the environmental impact and costs of the Ragon Mountain Dam Reservoir Natural Area.

To thank you for understanding the legal and fiduciary responsibilities you have to all the citizens of Charlottesville in the fair and equitable distribution of costs and benefits to the new supply water plan.

Thank you for your responsible support

of dredging and phasing in any new dam construction which is understood by all to make our community water plan realistic and complete.

Thank you for the due diligence to meet with the DEQ so that we finally understand the nature of the process and the role that agency takes as a resource to all communities in Virginia as they plan their water needs.

I wanted to thank each of you for making yourselves available to the public, the press and the local media where we can all hear your views.

I thank you and I ask that you keep up this good work and do what's best for the citizens of Charlottesville who have placed their trust in you to balance the needs and wants of competing interests and resolve this matter in a responsible and transparent fashion.

Thank you, Mr. Stamin.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Members of Council.

I'd like to know if any of you took my challenge at the last couple of meetings that I attended that I brought about the problems encountered at Mickey Drive and also the intersection of Kmart where the turn lane is.

Twice last week I almost had an accident.

a person trying to get back into the traffic lane coming in front of me at that intersection where the right turn ended and begin after swinging back into the through lane and to get into the right hand lane to turn onto Route 29.

That sidewalk needs to be taken down and moved back and continuing the right turn lane all the way to Route 29.

There's still a problem at Mickey Drive.

I'll stop and let the vehicles out at Mickey Drive and get honked at and impatient drivers pulling around me and continuing on their merry way.

Both of these intersections have gotten worse since moving the light from the Kmart and widening the road up to that point.

I'm putting this city on notice.

If I or any member, this is the second time, if I or any member of my family have an accident there because of the dangerous situation someone created, someone in the city created, I will hold the city responsible not only for injuries but our vehicles as well because being retired I don't have the money to buy another car and my insurance would not pay me enough if the damage is more than the vehicle is worth.

Now the surplus.

I feel you should not spend any of this money because we are looking at hard times.

The dollar's already been devalued.

And I recently read that you might up our taxes five or six cents.

This money could be used as things get tighter in future budgets.

I'm not going to

I'm not getting any raises to offset increased taxes being retired should the city raise our taxes.

I'm not against bicycles, but I am against what's going on with them.

I had two instances this week where a rider passed me on the driver's side at a stop sign at Locust Lane

as I was turning onto Locust Avenue.

Had I not seen him past my driver's side window, I would have hit him.

He continued on Locust Avenue on the wrong side of the road where I passed him going up the hill.

Then on another day, a few days earlier, a bicyclist never stopped at the Calhoun Locust, just cruised on through the four-way stop sign and kept on going.

The last time I brought bicycles up and on my way home, a bicyclist dressed in dark clothing, no lights or reflectors, swished by in front of me on East Jefferson Street, ran through the red light on the right-hand side of the car at the light, proceeded onto East High, and then again turned left on the red light and ran in front of an oncoming vehicle at East High and Locust.

Training needs to be mandated for all bicyclists that are not adhering to the road issues.

and again they should have to buy tags like I do for my vehicle.

Now, I don't know whose suggestion this is but, oh Christmas tree, oh Christmas tree, now we have a community tree on the mall according to channel 29 but the date of progress is referred to as a Christmas tree donated to the city.

Where did the community tree come from?

Where we headed?

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

Agenda item number five reported in the TMDL update.

On October 7th, 2010, I attended a presentation by Bill Keeling, NPS modeling and data coordinator,

at the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation on the Chesapeake Bay model, a data model used to determine present and anticipated sentiment and runoff into the Chesapeake Bay.

He said, quote, this model does not represent real conditions, end quote.

Yet this model will be used to determine the cost of localities of their share of the Bay cleanup.

He could literally speak for hours on this model in its deficiency.

The most important thing to me as a resident and a water sewer rate payer, and most likely soon to be a stormwater rate payer, is the astronomical cost my fellow citizens and I will be forced to bear.

In a November 8, 2010 letter written by Jim Talbert, NDS Director, to the EPA and the State Department of Conservation and Recreation, quote,

draft TMDL costs may be on the order of $700 to $1,800 per household per year for the stormwater management loan during the 15-year implementation period.

Obviously, costs in that range are extremely high, if not completely unaffordable."

And did you know that the original reason the Bay is polluted is runoff from large animal farms in Pennsylvania?

My second, the second item I'd like to mention or talk about is item six, report resolution on the McIntyre Road extended section 106 MOA and MOA is that's the memorandum of agreement from the Army Corps of Engineers, since there was a memorandum of agreement from the Federal Highways.

In January 18th, 2006, a letter signed by then Mayor David Brown to VDOT and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors regarded 10 conditions that the city expected VDOT to meet in compensation for allowing a road through McIntyre Park.

Condition 4A, the intersection of McIntyre Park and 250 must be a graded interchange.

However, in the MOA, the Honor Corps of Engineers states,

whereas the aforementioned route 250 interchange will require a permit and the Norfolk District cannot complete its review of VDOT's permit application until or unless it receives and reviews either a joint permit application for the interchange as the terminus for the project

or a recognition in writing from the appropriate official in the city that the at-grade intersection with Route 250 will be the terminus if the above-grade terminus is not constructed.

I hope I didn't confuse them.

Item number six was they asked for a new lake or a pond.

However, the designs now show, this is from the Army Corps of Engineers, drainage basins.

So what happened to the lake or the pond?

Condition number seven said we needed to be compensated with additional park land.

Well now I have walked the land that is supposed to be the additional park land and it is a sad joke.

Land adjacent to a road is not an equitable substitution for what is now McIntire Park.

Condition number 10, council has no interest, this is a quote, council has no interest in this parkway becoming a de facto eastern connector that is being used by the public to travel from route 29 north to Pan Tops and route 20 north.

City council is now desirous that the county and VDOT demonstrate a commitment to the eastern connector.

but where?

When?

So why don't we just remove the ramps that enter and exit from the 250 bypass and then it will make it as the Chamber of Commerce wishes a road that is a gateway to downtown.

Thank you, Ms. Hall.

Good evening.

My name is John Cruikshank.

I reside at 324 Parkway Street.

I speak this evening as a representative of the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club.

I am also a consulting party on the Section 106 Committee for the McIntyre Road Extended.

Sierra Club leaders have been asking city councils to respect the integrity of McIntyre Park long before I became an active member.

I won't take time explaining why we believe a highway that will encourage 24,000 cars to drive through McIntire Park each day is a terrible idea.

We do, however, support the creation of bicycle and pedestrian paths and improved access to the eastern section of the park for those who will truly enjoy its serenity and natural beauty.

Tonight, I am asking you not to sign the memorandum of agreement for the McIntire Road Extended.

Instead, I suggest that you take the time to compose constructive comments to the Army Corps of Engineers that will ensure that the least damage possible is done to the park.

I also feel that the memorandum of agreement should not be signed until the Corps

receives an actual permit application for the road as required by federal law.

As a consulting party, I see some serious flaws in the MOA.

It does not take into account the full cumulative impacts of the McIntire Road extended and the interchange together.

The park and nearby historic sites are thereby not receiving adequate protection.

Mitigation for the noise and visual effects of the traffic on the park, Rockhill Gardens, Hard Bargain, and other historic sites are inadequate.

There is no provision for closing the roadway to automobile traffic during specific hours or days of the week.

This would open up the park for families to use in the way it was intended by Mr. McIntyre.

The replacement parkland is inadequate.

Serene rolling hills are being replaced with roadside property along the Meadow Creek Parkway in Albemarle County.

The people of Charlottesville are getting gypped.

I know that some members of the council support this road construction project.

But I don't believe that any of you want it to be a shoddy job.

I believe you all care about the beauty of our city.

Therefore, I ask you to take the time to get it right.

Look over the memorandum of agreement and ask city staff to compose suggestions for improvement.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Crookshank.

Mayor Norris, Councillors, my name is Jim Nix.

I live at 2402 Cary Lane in the city.

Many in this community have the impression that a wide gulf separates city and county officials on the issue of the community water supply plan.

But both sides have been willing to compromise and only a few relatively minor differences remain.

Let me highlight the many areas in which there is agreement.

To begin with, you and the County Board of Supervisors have affirmed the need for all of the major components of the community water supply system to include the new pipeline joining the Ragged Mountain and South Fork Rivanna reservoirs, a replacement pumping system and pipeline between the Ragged Mountain reservoir and the Observatory Hill water treatment plant, major overhaul of the Observatory Hill plant, and expansion of the South Fork Rivanna water treatment plant.

and additional storage at Ragged Mountain either by means of a new dam or by additions to the existing dam that's there.

The ultimate height of the dam is also agreed to be sufficient to support a reservoir 42 feet above the current level of the reservoir and is to be filled in phases as demand increases.

There is also agreement on all of the key goals of the community water supply plan to include compliance with statutory requirements to provide adequate stream flows for our rivers and an emphasis on water conservation to reduce demand.

Furthermore, there is agreement on the important issue of ensuring the future of the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.

As a first step toward preserving that reservoir, the Albemarle County Service Authority Board voted last month to fund RWSA to develop an RFP for dredging.

The only major issue on which agreement has yet to be reached is the initial height of the new dam or expanded dam to be built at Ragged Mountains.

There is agreement that the initial pool height will be established at a level required to satisfy the demands of the community for the next 10 or 15 years.

Further filling will occur only if demand grows sufficiently to require it.

Now the question of whether to build a new dam or expand the existing one must also be settled, but the city and the county have effectively established a mechanism for resolving that question by tasking the independent technical review team for an evaluation of the Black and Beach Study to assess the soundness of its conclusions and the validity of its cost estimates.

I'm optimistic that a deal can be reached in the near future without the need for an outside facilitator.

Although the recent letter to county taxpayers doesn't mention this, the county has dropped its insistence on immediately filling the Ragged Mountain Reservoir to full height and has agreed to join with the city in exploring ways to economically dredge the South Fork Reservoir.

Counselor Szakos has proposed a way to resolve this dispute and discussions focused on cost sharing can probably take us over this last remaining hurdle.

Thank you for the opportunity to talk with you again tonight.

Mayor Norris, members of council, I'm Daniel Bluestone, 501 Park Hill.

So I decided to give the new warm fuzzy VDOT a try and I haven't been driving on this road between Melbourne and Rio but I took my bike.

and I rode up to Rio Road and I found what I had suspected which is that this is just VDOT's sort of trying to build coalitions for more highways because up there I ran into some sand and a little foliage and ran right over construction debris

which for the first time in my 55 years or so or maybe 50 years of bicycling, I double-flatted my tires.

So I walked home and I walked along the pedestrian path that's provided and I, needless to say, was annoyed but my annoyance was mild in comparison to my thought about what this, the inadequacy of this park space that's been provided.

VDOT thinks that a replacement parkland is just a green space on a map.

They have no clue the difference between actually being in a place where you somehow get away from road noises.

They've built a wonderful platform for us to admire the Meadow Creek Parkway from right next to a huge sewer easement which is a gash through the land that we used to use for the Rivanna Trails.

We used to walk up the Rivanna Trails and get to that

Unbelievably wonderful special place where the water came percolating through the railroad viaduct and fell over little falls and you felt you were in another world.

They've provided a pedestrian bridge to go over that point.

and that pedestrian bridge is towered over by a highway bridge where you can no longer hear the water.

What you hear is the racing of cars going by above your head.

It's appalling that this is considered to be replacement parkland.

It simply is not and we need to address that issue before going on.

And by the way,

If you go and check that out, you will be looking at the future of the east side of McIntire Park.

There's no question that that same experience is going to be there from the elevated interchange to the rest of the parkland.

Central Park in New York City has many worse traffic problems than we have, yet they find ways to close the roads in that park during certain hours of the day and certain days of the week.

Why is transportation system management not part of this MOA where we say there are certain days of the week, certain times of the day where McIntire Park will be turned back to the people of Charlottesville who want to use it as a park rather than as a transportation corridor.

It should be in the memorandum of agreement.

Finally, the view shed issues of the views out of Rock Hill Gardens and also out of the National Register of Property at Hard Bargain are going to be decimated by the construction of the retention basins and by the creation of the sewer easement.

We really need to address that in the memorandum of agreement.

I hope you won't sign it and that you'll take time to get it right.

Joan Fenton, 3705 Country Lane in the county.

I'm here because I'm really disgusted with the lack of response from Maurice, from you, from other members of council other than Holly.

I sent an email back in June about an issue concerning the cafe ordinances.

I stopped Maurice on the mall and asked him about it.

I sent another email directly to you and nobody has had the decency to call, to respond.

to say anything.

And I find that to be bad management, a bad image for this city, I'm a business leader, I own property in this community, and I can't get a response.

Several years ago the vendor and CAFE ordinances were reviewed.

and at that time there was a Downtown Property Owners Council of which I was a member and I was also the chair of the Downtown Business Association.

We requested that cafes be reviewed every year so if somebody wanted to put in a new restaurant they could have the option to put in a cafe.

The way this ordinance was then put through was essentially once you get that cafe your license comes up every year but you automatically get it renewed.

So Korn Capshaw on my block has 20% of the square footage and he owns every piece of cafe space and I can't get cafe space.

That means my commercial property can never have a restaurant in it.

That means the woman that came to me wanting to rent my space could not rent my space because she couldn't get a cafe.

So you are essentially subsidizing corn and anybody with a cafe and they get to keep that forever.

And I pay the same taxes.

My building's worth less.

So either lower my taxes by 30% or review the ordinance and make it so that people that own property and want to put a restaurant in can do it.

And for God's sakes, respond to people when they contact you.

And if you're going to be the city manager, then I think you better show better respect for the downtown business community if that's the job you want.

And I'm sorry to be nasty about it, but it's been six months and I can't get a reply.

Good evening.

I'm Peter Kleeman.

I live at 407 Head Street in the city.

and I've been an engineer and a transportation engineer and environment engineer my entire professional life and I understand the value of breaking down large projects into small pieces to look at them in detail to make decisions at the scale where real decisions can be made.

When looking at the impacts of whole projects, though, one does need to take the bigger picture.

So what I have here is a map of the assembled from the little bits and pieces that were included in the

distribution that you likely received from the Corps of Engineers associated with the memorandum of agreement, that when you look at how all these pieces fit together, and as Mr. Bluestone mentioned earlier, what are claimed to be mitigations of damages to this part of the park open up new damages for other sections of the park that have been ignored because of the segmentation, breaking this project into bits and pieces so that details can be solved in separate compartments.

So if we look at this, you'll see that the project you're being asked to consider is not even really a road.

It starts at Melbourne Road, or ends at Melbourne Road, but the starting point is somewhere in the middle of the park, missing US 250 by 775 feet.

We have been told that this is an independent project with independent utility.

Now, I'm not sure what that utility is,

I would call it very close to zero if it's considered to be an independent project, that it really needs to be coupled with something that will get you from the middle of the park to some other

connecting point in the transportation network.

So unless there is some kind of a combination where we're taking this piece that may be a road and investigate it as a road for good engineering purposes, that it does not allow you to figure out what the impacts of this road segment is without looking at what the rest of that road is.

The bigger picture is essential if you're going to look at the environmental and the social, cultural, historic, and environmental impacts of this project.

So my conversations with the Corps of Engineers and with VVOT have all been independent of the public because, as you heard in an email I sent you earlier, the last time the public has had a formal opportunity to comment

at a public design hearing was in 1999, May 27th.

So we are at the point where this project is about to move forward and a very large portion of the population of Charlottesville has never had an opportunity to comment on the design, the function,

the impacts or the purpose of this roadway.

I have encouraged you and will encourage you again today to allow the public to participate in this process to meet your vision of being a citizen-centered, open, environmentally sensitive government and I think that that should be done prior to any signature of any document about impacts of this road segment that is not even a road.

Thank you, Mr. Kleeman.

Ma'am, ma'am, gentlemen, I'm Peter Kleeman's intern, but I'd like to make a comment about the city water plan.

A lot of the talk has been that conservation is a one-time thing.

We've already gotten as much out of conservation as possible.

We've already picked all the low-hanging fruit and I'd like to make an announcement to the citizens of Charlottesville

American Standard sponsored by Nolan Company up on Ridge Street will have a tractor trailer come through on November 24th.

That's a Wednesday, Wednesday a week from 7 in the morning until 2 p.m. in which they will show all the latest in water-saving technologies.

It's interactive.

Everything will be hooked up.

People can turn things on and do whatever they want.

That was a bad analogy.

So it's an opportunity for the public to really see what the citizen groups have been talking about that perhaps the medium-hanging fruit is getting just a little bit lower.

We're getting ready to pick that as well and water conservation is an ongoing thing that is just going to get better and better and will have a big impact on the water supply plan.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Good evening.

Dee Dee Smith, 2652 Jefferson Park Circle, and I do have a handout.

On September 20th, you all

in a great show of democracy, cooperation, negotiation, came up with a compromised water supply plan that satisfied a lot, not all of, I wasn't completely happy with it, but it satisfied a lot of what city residents have been asking you to consider.

The very next day on September 21st you met again in what was not quite as much a Democratic meeting.

That would be the four boards.

And you have before you a list of the members of the four boards.

That would be six board of supervisors, five city councilors, six members of the Albemarle County Service Authority, and the seven members of the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority, two of which, of course, are repeated.

That is a total of 14 county representatives

Seven city representatives and one joint member.

I don't need to tell you that this is neither fair nor are the four boards particularly legal.

It's a construal that came up as far as I can find out in 2008.

about the same time as the judging task force came up, which also was grossly, we were, the city was grossly outgunned.

But nevertheless, the four boards has been given quite a lot of credence, particularly in the press since that meeting.

We hear a lot what was decided at the four boards meeting.

and by members who were there.

So I'm asking you to level the playing field.

I'm asking you to create a city-based citizen group that can sit at the table when these four boards, other four boards meet.

This committee, however you wanted to set it up, could serve many roles to protect city water resources.

It could just be for the water.

It could be for wastewater.

It could be for TMDL.

There's lots of ways you could do it.

But I'm just asking you to, as I say, just make it fair.

Make it so the voices of the city are equally heard with the voices of the county.

And I do feel compelled to remind you that what we're talking about here is hundreds of millions of dollars in city resources.

And that's before we start talking about the tens of million dollars that you're going to

to be cajoled to put forward in this water supply debate.

So I beg you to create some way to level this playing field.

And if you can't do that, then let's just forget this four boards game.

Thank you, Ms. Smith.

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

We're now opening up to council member responses to matters by the public.

To Mr. Long, I just wanted to mention, I'm sure that Pacham does do housing for folks in the wintertime.

I know my church participates in that.

There are places, I think you're right, that there's always not enough, but that is one place that people do have to go, so I don't want people to have the impression that there's nothing.

But you're right, there's always more need for that.

To Ms. Roberts, I would like to say that I did take your challenge of trying to turn left out of Mickey Drive.

I have a friend who lives there in the senior apartments.

And it is hard.

And I think especially because quite a few of the people who are coming out of there are either elderly or are driving cars that might not have as much get up and go as some.

It's a tough place to come out of.

So whatever attention we can give that, I think we should keep looking.

Let's see.

Actually, to John Cruikshank, although I appreciated your comments.

Where are you?

I'm sorry.

I have to call you out on one word that you used, which is gypped, which is actually a racial slur.

And I'm sure you don't know that, but now you do.

But it strikes my ears since I do know that.

So just wanted to point that out.

and the MOA things I think we'll discuss when we discuss the MOA later.

So if that was, oh and to Ms. Fenton, I'm sorry that we're

I'm sorry that she felt un-responded to.

That's not something we usually hear from the public, and I'm glad to hear from somebody who's not happy, because we often do hear from people who are responded to.

We actually did and when this issue was first raised we sent Jim Tolbert our Director of Neighborhood Development Services which oversees those issues on the mall and he explained to her the background behind our policy and explained to her that we were

probably not going to change that policy.

So it wasn't necessarily a lack of response.

It was confusing that with not the response that she was looking for or hoping for.

And so she's continued on a couple of occasions to come back and ask.

Any other council member responses?

I'll make a couple comments.

I'll also apologize to Joan Fenton for not replying, although I'll add her to a long list of people I haven't replied to over the years.

but also point out that it's a complicated issue because on the one hand you could have people apply over and over a fresh slate every year for seating on the mall but on the other hand people invest in a restaurant and they kind of have a business plan that's based on the seating and next year they don't have any.

I think that creates an unpredictable path and so it's not an easy issue to solve.

It's certainly a creative idea by D.D.

Smith.

I expect no less.

But I can't imagine something that would take four boards and adding a fifth and expect it to actually get any work done.

It's hard enough with four.

And the good news is that nothing happens unless city council wants to go along with it.

So it's an environment for discussion, but it's certainly not a majority vote environment in terms of decision making.

I just wanted to make a couple comments starting with Mr. Long, what I hope to see for

Our homeless population is a way to provide comprehensive services, more wraparound and case management services that include workforce development opportunities because I think that providing opportunities for additional training and additional education is going to be the key to moving people to the next level in their lives.

To Naomi Roberts, I did

I also took on your challenge and wanted to explore more of what that traffic looks like, especially in light of the redevelopment conversations we're having with the Mickey development.

And also to you, Merry Christmas.

And to Joan Fenton, just whatever the next step would be to bring this enclosure to this.

I have two comments.

First, I did go to Mickey Drive and Hard Rock Hydraulic, not only even myself, but I also took City Engineer to look at it themselves with her, and she is looking into that.

I am not sure what she has done so far, but I did go and take her with me to look at it.

And as to the Mr. Paul Long about homeless,

and as Ms. Szakos mentioned there is a pattern program plus also CIRI is now sponsoring ASRO project, housing project for homeless which will start construction in the near future.

I want to echo most of what's been said.

Also, thank you, Ms. Smith.

I'm intrigued by your idea and look forward to thinking about it further.

I did want to correct the record.

Mr. Nix, you said the county has dropped its insistence on immediately filling the Ragged Mountain Reservoir to full height.

My understanding is that

That reservoir was not going to be filled the full height for many many many years to come so I'm not sure

if it's accurate to say the county has dropped its insistence on immediately filling the reservoir to full height because there was no plan to fill, immediately fill the reservoir to full height.

So maybe we can track down the real story on that.

But anyhow, but I actually do appreciate the positive tone of, in general, the positive tone of your remarks tonight.

And I happen to agree with you.

I think we're very close to a good resolution, so.

Mr. Mayor, may I?

I'm sorry.

I reside at Carlton Road.

Speaking about this homeless situation, I came to Charlottesville in 2009.

I have never seen such a homeless disaster in my life, but I'm not here to talk about the homeless right now.

I'm talking about why this city can't supply an emergency.

I'm not talking about just give away an emergency city bus pass for people who want to go to a job interview.

I say I know there are homeless people online on the computer and can't get to an interview and the city will not furnish a bus pass.

Okay, I'm not homeless but I had an interview myself a few weeks back.

I could not find a city bus pass and I actually did not have a dollar and a half that day.

A dollar and a half if you don't have it is like $1,000.

I did not have it.

I went to the city manager's office

to ask why the city do not supply such a pass.

And my God, in the city manager's office

The employees were so unknowledgeable.

They was not knowledgeable about nothing.

They did not know the operation of the city transit.

They told me the trolley would go all the way up to Two Bag Shopping Center.

They told me University Bus goes to Fashion Square Mall.

This stuff is not so.

They did not understand what the city was all about.

And I found that really upsetting because they would rather demeanour me.

And they were not going to demeanour me.

than to say they did not know what was going on.

And this is not right.

There should be a way for the citizens of Charlottesville, I've only been here one year, but there should be a way for the citizens of Charlottesville to go to job interviews if they do not have transportation and all these city buses running around here.

And these city buses will not let you get on this bus if you do not have a bus pass.

and it may sound like something trivial, whatever the word is for it, but it's not.

It's really something that should be addressed.

And say for myself, example, my God, if I can't get to a job interview, thank God I got the job.

If I can't get to a job interview, then I'll be a potential new homeless person in Charlottesville.

So you're not really extending a happy hand to the homeless if you can't provide just simple things.

But what I want to ask is why can't this city

have black some kind of a log at city hall when someone need emergency or bus pass, come and sign it, sign their emergency, their destination and just have it on file so that no one builds the system but be there available for this public and please don't tell me this city can't afford it because I do not buy that.

That's all I have to say.

May I make one suggestion about the issue concerning the cafes?

If it is the pleasure of the council, we can bring something to you in December to consider.

Does Social Services offer such?

It's not an emergency

So maybe we can just find out if it's possible to expand that to somebody who may not be on one of those programs.

Yes, thank you.

All right, we are now, let's see.

I have a few programming notes.

First of all, I want to welcome our friends from the Boy Scouts of America.

Which troop are you guys with tonight?

75.

75.

It's great to have you guys with us.

Come back often.

Secondly, I want to welcome our friend Rodney Thomas from the County Board of Supervisors.

Good to see you, sir.

Come back often.

and I did want to note, a personal note that as most of you know all of us up here hold other jobs in addition to being public servants and unfortunately my job tonight is going to take me away from this meeting in a few minutes but Holly Edwards will be running the show and you're in good hands so after the consent agenda and the discussion on the McIntyre Road extended MOA I will have to take that.

Holly will be in charge.

So our consent agenda tonight, we have item A is minutes of November 1st, item B is an appropriation of $7,250 for the West Haven Clinic funding, second of two readings.

Item C is an appropriation of $1,430 to Karen Roberts Memorial Fund for Girls, second of two readings.

Item B is an appropriation of $87,500 Second Chance Act grant, first of two readings.

Item E is an appropriation of $10,000 donation from Dominion Virginia Power for the Eco Remond Project, first of two readings.

Item F is a resolution Charlottesville Civil War sesquicentennial.

Committee, first of one reading.

Item G, a resolution neighborhood matching grant program, first of one reading.

Item H is a resolution complete streets resolution, first of one reading.

Item I is an ordinance petition to rezone property at 1006 Linden Avenue, second of two readings.

Item J, an ordinance petition to rezone property at 110 Summit Street, second of two readings.

Item K is an ordinance abandonment of Stating Road sewer easement, second of two readings.

Mr. Mayor, I would like the minutes to reflect that I am recusing myself in the consideration of item B on the consent agenda, an appropriation of $7,250 in funding for the West Haven Clinic.

I'm employed as a parish nurse through the Jefferson Area Board for Aging, and in that capacity provide services at the West Haven Clinic.

Duly noted.

I just wanted to make a comment on one thing in here, not to hold it up or pull it out at all, because I do support it fully.

We have the Civil War Centennial Committee now, I've said it too.

Duly noted, thank you.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Carries unanimously.

We are moving up item 6, which is a report and resolution on McIntyre Road extended section 106 MOA, first of one reading.

Good evening.

As you're aware, the McIntyre Road Extended Project is a local state project that has passed the state environmental review process and design approval by city council.

However, this project also requires a permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a federal agency, for a stream crossing.

During the permitting process, the designation of McIntire Park as a historic resource triggered the Section 106 process.

Under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, federal agencies must take into account the effect of their undertakings on historic resources and provide reasonable opportunity to comment with regard to such undertakings.

The area of potential effects

has been identified and it was determined that McIntire Park would be adversely impacted of the three historic properties located within the area of potential effects.

Those three historic properties are McIntire Park, Rock Hill Academy Landscape, and the Charlottesville Albemarle County Courthouse Historic District.

The Army Corps is lead agency with the Department of Transportation acting on its behalf to coordinate this process.

VDOT is also administering this as the last of two projects on the behalf of city projects, this and the Jefferson Park Avenue bridge replacement project.

The Army Corps, VDOT, and the Virginia Department of Historic Resources have met with

consulting parties to resolve the adverse effect on McIntire Park.

First, by documenting past efforts through the years to reduce and minimize the project's footprint and second, by following proposed mitigation contained in a memorandum of agreement.

The proposed mitigation has been quantified as follows.

As designed by a committee appointed by council,

There will be implemented two rain gardens that extensively use native plants and integrate the stormwater management basins into existing natural features.

In addition, landscaping to integrate the project visually into existing natural features and minimize its impact on the park is also planned.

Installation of signage prohibiting truck traffic and posting a speed limit of 35 miles per hour

Photographic documentation of the east side of McIntire Park and historical documentation of the McIntire golf course.

Included in your packet is a resolution that outlines the date of the current draft.

Thank you, Ms. Tucker.

Well, of the notes that I took, there was concern about a joint permit, and the term joint permit, as outlined or used in the language, refers

to the standard permitting that takes place on an individual project joint meaning joint agency coordination and therefore joint review.

So it's not necessarily a joint permit between projects.

It's called a joint permit to coordinate multiple agencies.

I also wanted to assure council that careful coordination has occurred

while we've developed with the city leading the charge the interchange memorandum of agreement and VDOT leading the charge for the McIntyre Road extended projects memorandum of agreement so that each take care of their own area of potential effects and stand to cover their projects singularly as well as together.

And I think another point that I made note of is the potential to close the road to traffic on weekends for park usage.

That has come up in discussions with the various agencies and so as not to preclude council's sole authority to choose to do that through the park master planning process.

With respect to adding that as a mitigative measure, that's certainly an option that council has, but we felt that it better protected the community to leave that as the community's

and apparently that's been agreed upon by the agencies with jurisdiction as well.

Not really.

I agree that I'm certainly interested in seeing us be able to close the parkway on Sundays or say for recreational use so that you can bicycle along it without the sound of roaring traffic above your head.

But it sounds like there's nothing in this that precludes that.

That's how we've been moving along.

Other comments?

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

I'd just like to note my continued opposition to the project, not necessarily because I don't think all the correct procedures have been followed, although I think there's some

questions that have been raised about that just because I oppose the project itself.

Anyhow, it's been moved and seconded.

Please indicate your vote.

And it carries 3-2.

Thank you very much, Ms. Tucker.

I am now going to hand over the gavel to our Vice Mayor.

And the next item on our agenda is the Omni Leads.

Vice Mayor Edwards, Members of Council, you have scheduled on your agenda tonight a resolution which authorizes the execution of a lease of city property for a cafe at the Omni Hotel and this has been in operation as a cafe

under a lease from the city since approved by city council in 2004.

You may be familiar with it.

It's a relatively small area, 502 square feet, located immediately adjacent to the Omni.

It is on public property, although not in an area that's usually part of the public walkway.

The terms of the lease are unchanged.

From the existing lease, they in large part track the terms and conditions we have for sidewalk cafes.

It is a one year lease which can automatically be renewed for four additional one year terms.

The annual rent for the property is $3 per square foot of lease space or the amount per square foot amount that's specified in the fee schedule approved by council.

Should council decide to increase the rent for sidewalk cafe space on the mall, the rent under this lease would automatically increase as well.

Any comments from Councillors or did anyone sign up for the public hearing?

Open the public hearing.

Any other comments from Councillors?

I have two questions.

for staff, I guess.

One is that the musical entertainment, it says, is limited to unamplified music and prohibited between midnight and 11 a.m. Is that the same as other businesses on the mall?

All right, take your time.

And my other question is, if someone is on that property,

say a homeless person is sitting on the step there.

Is that a case of trespass?

Within that 502 square feet, that is leased to the Omni and they have the right to restrict access to that area to their customers.

They cannot discriminate against, on the basis of any protected class, race, ethnic origin, religion, sex, or gender.

Well, I mean, I'm looking at a couple of different places.

One, the noise ordinance now.

It may well be.

It disturbs the guests in the room.

Well, that's true.

You have your own body of complainers there, don't you?

There he is.

I invoked you.

How late it can be played in this thing at the Omni?

We have 12 midnight to 11 a.m., can't be played.

Is that consistent with the downtown?

Yes.

That's all I have.

It is limited to unamplified vocal or instrumental performances between the hours, shall not be conducted during the hours between 12 midnight and 11 a.m. any day.

It's been moved and seconded.

Duly noted.

So it does pass.

The next item on the agenda is the year in adjustments.

Vice Mayor and members of City Council, I'd like to give you a brief update on year end, specifically talking about revenue and expenditures compared to budget.

This year our revenues were actually $1.2 million less than our budget.

And the main corporates were real estate taxes, which were under budget by $561,000.

Sales taxes were under budget by $612,000.

Meals taxes were under budget by $265,000.

Lodging taxes were actually over budget by $80,000, one of our bright spots.

Communication sales taxes were under budget by $227,000.

Tax on wills and deeds, which is a reflection of what's happening in the economy, was under budget by $146,000.

And personal property taxes were under budget by $178,000.

Now the good news is that business license taxes, BPOL,

were actually over budget by $802,000.

But when you looked at all of the revenues together, we were $1.2 million under budget.

On the expenditure side, we were

$4.8 million under budget.

So when you put the two together, we actually had a year-end balance of $3.6 million.

The major contributors to that were the employee compensation and benefits.

Remember last year you approved a bonus for employees?

That was put in a special account if the departments needed it to make their budgets.

They didn't need it, so that money was basically turned back in.

Recreation and parks were under budget by $520,000.

A lot of that was because of projects they could not get done a year-end.

So you'll see in the reappropriation paper, $200 and some thousand dollars asked for recreation in parks.

Social services returned $700,000 and that was primarily because of turnover savings and foster care expense savings.

Schools energy management and public works street lighting saved a total of over $400,000.

They were the major items on the expenditure set.

Part of the resolution tonight is appropriation of about $1.5 million

and if you look at Exhibit A, you'll see the individual items on there.

If you look at the resolution attached to your agenda, you'll actually see the explanations as to why we're asking for $1.5 million in resolutions.

Once you take the $1.5 million reappropriation request away from the $3.6 million, we end up with a little over $2 million.

Past councils have agreed with the administration and put that into the CIP contingency for future programming.

So that's basically it.

We've had pretty much another good year.

Revenues were certainly weak last year.

If you didn't have the $800,000 in default, you would have had a $2 million shortage.

And Ms. Borobel will actually give you a forecast for the next year in the long term.

But this year we're looking pretty strong as far as revenue.

I think we've reached the bottom and are hopefully going to start showing some small increases in the future.

I'd just like to...

I kind of recognize the social services department.

Are there any other questions from council?

This item also has a public hearing, so I'd like to open the public hearing.

Yeah, I signed up.

I live at 1503 Rugby Road.

And as temporary mayor, it's a pleasure, and members of council, I wanted to talk about the year end.

The $3.6 million surplus for fiscal 2010 is surely good news, since a surplus is always better than a deficit.

Whether this is the result of efficient city operations, as it sounds like, or inefficient budget estimation is irrelevant.

It still is a kind of substantial surplus that the city has consistently experienced over its years.

In fiscal years 2006 through 2009, we had annual surpluses of 9.8 million, 10.9 million, 5.8 million, and 5.3 million.

This year, I'm not going to ask you to return some of the surplus to us through a rate decrease.

I've discovered this is a futile request.

Instead, I ask that you tell us what you have done with the money.

Over the past five fiscal years, you've accumulated a total of $35.4 million.

Where has it gone?

It's all off budget.

That's a lot of money.

A city can do a lot with $35 million over five years.

How has it been spent to benefit our city?

Now, I'm aware that every year some of the surplus is given to city employees in the form of a bonus.

Some of it is returned to various departments.

Which departments have gotten this largess?

Some of it is added to the capital improvements plan.

How much is currently in the CIP and what projects have been funded through it?

And some has been tucked away in rainy day or other slush funds.

How much is in those funds currently?

In other words, can you account for the $35.4 million?

I'm sure you can.

But we, the taxpayers, should be informed about it before we enter into the new budget cycle.

In fact, I was going to say, will you have a report available by the next council meeting?

Well, we've got the second of two readings in three weeks.

And I think this would really be worthwhile telling us how you've spent the extra money.

Where has it gone?

I live at 407 Head Street in the city.

At many meetings in the past year and before, discussions about the fact that there have been insufficient funds available to do ongoing maintenance.

We've had maintenance deficits that have led to problems in our pools, sewers, other infrastructure.

and I would recommend that rather than taking whatever chunk of money is being put into new projects I think some portion of that money should be put into maintaining the projects that we already have in place and not allowing them to go with undone maintenance which will rapidly decrease their value and lead to the need to replace these structures at very high costs in the future.

So the funds that have been accumulated I think from

budgets in the past should go to maintain the projects that were funded under those time periods.

And so I would encourage some significant portion of that funding to find its way into maintenance in the city.

I want to say about the budget, okay, and why it matters from the whole city in Charlottesville.

Also, these are services that are important for the city services and the county.

that this winter has been very hard for the budget for all of them, right?

We're on the same page?

Okay, it's been a hard year and also a brutal summer.

Okay, okay, we're on the same page?

Okay.

I have not been speaking because I couldn't speak before.

Now I can do better than I used to be able to speak.

Okay?

That is partly the reason it is important for getting these services in the city and

It's part of the budget in the end.

It's all about the budget in the end.

And I have right now on the hospital I got said it was right now this was on the city and this was on Northridge, okay?

And

The question is that all these terms like scapegoaters and all of these things, this is not very recently, the whole country has been from this concern about the budget

from the north to the south to the east and the west.

We're always worrying about the budget and how can we afford this.

All I'm saying is the city is, right now, it is funded from Coca Cola products, okay?

and the city is called Pepsi Place for a reason, okay?

You understand what I'm saying?

The city is projects historically.

It has always been cola cola products, okay?

Okay, are we on the same page?

Yeah, pretty much.

And why it is called Pepsi Place is because that is Pepsi Place.

That is the competition.

Okay?

You understand what I'm saying?

That is historically why it has always been a war from the city

Yes.

Okay.

That's all, you got it.

Okay.

It's all about, and the hospitals is the same.

I got right now, I got on this from, this is near the city, but on the county it is, I got the

the news that is more cheaper yet in the city, CityLink or whatever you call that thing.

Okay?

Yeah, I've got the information I'm saying.

So, it's very important from the budget

When you're thinking about all these hospitals and the homeless and everything, the reason was just historically it is the whole state has always been worried about which bypass.

Can you just state your name please?

Thank you.

Was there anyone else that wanted to comment on this issue?

And if not, I will close the public hearing.

Can I address Mr. Falta's questions?

We can provide that information for council where the $35 million had been spent over the last four, five, six years or so.

I would clarify that it wasn't done off budget.

I'm not sure what off budget means, but any decisions that were made about funding would have come through city council.

They would have had a chance to weigh in on it.

So it wasn't just done behind the scenes or something like that.

It was done as part of a

city council decisions and probably at a city council meeting as well.

I'd like to see it, thank you very much.

I think Mr. Phelps raises an underlying good point which is to have us budget a little closer to where we expect to be would not be a bad thing.

But having said that, I think we're pretty close this year, especially if you consider the fact that we had two and a half million dollars in a

and a reserve contingency, an economic downturn fund.

So if you kind of take that into account, if we hadn't had that, we'd be looking at a million difference, and I think a million difference in a budget this big is probably you don't want to try to cut it any finer than that.

And I agree, I think that putting the majority of it into CIP where there's

And I also think a major difference between this year and maybe some of the other years from three or four or five years ago is that part of the reason that we had surpluses at that point was on the revenue side, whereas this time it's primarily about the expenditure side.

The revenues were down for this year.

And so one of the things, and we'll talk about this throughout our budget process, one of the things that we're asking folks to do as we go through the budget process for this year is to take a close look at

trends and especially on the expenditure side over the last few years.

And if it's becoming obvious to us that a department doesn't need a certain amount of money, then we would adjust accordingly.

There are two things that I have.

One is Mr. Kleeman's comment about infrastructure maintenance.

That is something that we fund out of the CIP, right?

I mean, some maintenance comes from that, large maintenance projects.

It is.

That is true.

And I think we've done a better job with our

I'm all for

for saving for the future.

We know that we have the infrastructure with the sewers.

We know we have whatever the water supply is.

We have the schools which would like us to look at dealing with their reconfiguration of grades.

I think we have parks.

Well whenever I see Mr. Falls at the meetings I know it's budget season and I know that I think having as much information available just opens up the spirit of transparency and any ideas that you can bring forward to make sure that we do that and we're accountable to doing that and to get as much citizen involvement as we can.

Just following on that idea of citizen involvement, I think this year one of the things we're hoping to do is open it a little sooner so it isn't just a completed process that people can tweak at the end, but actually a little more participation in the beginning.

I have sort of a question about the budget.

To what degree does anyone think the sales tax revenue went down because of the winter and the number of shopping days in December and January that were lost?

I mean, there are a lot of snow days on weekends.

Is that something we've thought about?

I don't think it's any doubt because of the way this does fail that we definitely lost revenue.

I don't think we caught up, if you will, to some degree.

It was bad timing with the downturn in the economy at the same time.

So I'll move the appropriation.

Is there a second?

Second.

So it's carried to the next meeting.

Madam Vice Mayor, as we're turning the page from fiscal year 2010 to fiscal year 2012, we are coming to you tonight as the very beginning official kind of formal beginning of the budget process for our next fiscal year of 2012.

I have spent a lot of time up to this point on the budgets, especially on the CIP.

We're getting our budget requests back from our departments over the next week or two, and we'll be having department discussions, departmental discussions with them about what their needs will be for next year.

Tonight, Ms. Beauregard will walk us through

some potential guidelines for this year that we'd like the City Council to consider and then also provide you with long-term financial forecasts as well that will help us as we're going through this process.

We do have a budget work session that will be coming up in December to address these issues and your concerns as well.

Can everybody hear me?

Is this thing on?

Yes, it's quick.

And there's copies in the back for citizens if anybody wants to pick one up and there's a detail with the numbers that aren't in the PowerPoint but they're on the web, so.

Well, let me just say while this is warming up, good evening everyone.

And now that you've heard about fiscal year 10, and we're almost in the middle of fiscal year 11, now you get to hear about the start of fiscal year 12.

It never ends.

I guess it keeps going on and on all year round.

But yeah, tonight's kind of our official kickoff for the budget for fiscal year 2012.

So I'm going to walk you quickly through this PowerPoint and then at the end, anybody interested, I know there's quite a few people in here who are interested, you'll see many opportunities for some engagement by the community.

So tonight's presentation, I'm going to do a really quick update on the revenues, where they stand right now.

And actually, as Mr. Ray said, we're looking pretty good right now.

We've started the budget process.

Departments have indeed started to submit their budgets.

I'll talk about the next five years.

Of course, it's been real difficult to trend out the revenues, but things do seem to be picking up somewhat.

Each year council adopts a set of budget guidelines and they don't typically change but we do ask that council adopt those and then there's usually discussion around a few of those.

And then we have some dates for proposed work sessions and a community budget form which we've held every year for a couple of years now.

And then our first work session actually will be in December which we did for the first time last year.

That seemed to work really well so we're going to do that again.

Just let me bring, I want to just bring this up because we've won this award again.

This is the Government Finance Officers Association Annual Budget Excellence Award.

We've run it for 17 years now.

I actually have 17 plaques in my office in the drawer.

There's four areas that we get scored on.

Policy document, which basically is does your document outline your city's policies, short and long term goals, things like that.

Financial plan, does it describe your fund structure?

Does it talk about your long-term planning, et cetera?

Operations guide, does it tie all the plans and planning processes together that go into creating the budget?

And then communications, how easy is it to read?

Does it have nice visuals in addition to the numbers and the narrative?

And we, again, we've won the award for fiscal year, the fiscal year we're in right now, 2011, and we'll continue to, every year we make improvements to the budget.

And so we will go for that award again for 2012.

So let me just do a quick revenue update for this current year that we're in right now.

And as Bernard said, things are actually not looking that bad.

When we came to council this time last year,

We were looking at a deficit, hey, the magic number, $1.2 million, which is about where we ended up.

So this time last year, we had already talked about that with the community and with council, and sure enough, that's what happened.

This year, however, I'm going to start with real estate tax revenue, because that's our largest money, our revenue that comes into the city.

Things are looking pretty good.

Assessments seem to be holding for now as to where they were projected, which was pretty much flat.

We'll get next year's assessments sometime in January.

I'm sure everybody looks forward to those mailings and notices in the mail.

But for right now, things are looking pretty good.

And this also assumes no change in the tax rate for the next year.

Personal property tax revenue, of course this is the other tax everybody loves, the tax on your car.

This again has shown some declines in 10, but we expect it to start picking up again.

Some of that might be because assessments are starting to improve or hold their own.

Another part of it, if you remember, the car tax, the PPTRA, which is the Personal Property Tax Relief, is essentially going away.

And as that shifts more of the burden to the localities away from the states, this revenue will also grow.

And unfortunately, that also means that taxpayers will pay more.

and that literally is a result of the general assembly and them doing away with that essentially.

Sales tax, and we've already talked about this some, we've actually revised it downwards significantly for this current year we're in by about $500,000.

Again, this is just looking at the way it's trending right now.

and hopefully this will start picking back up again.

For 2012, we're looking at maybe about $9.5 million.

That seems like a lot of money, but it's only less than 1.5% increase and it barely gets us to the level we were at a year ago.

So again, this has been one of the more difficult areas to trend given everything between the weather and the national economy, et cetera.

Bepole is another one where actually we did, as Bernard said, we performed very well in 10.

However, a lot of that had to do with capturing new assessments, and while that is nice as a one-time boost, it doesn't happen often, but also it does increase your base.

So it does help in the future, whereas it expands your base as you go out, all things holding equal, as we hope they do.

Meals and Lodging.

We've been pleasantly surprised by these, especially lodging, which actually came in better than expected in fiscal year 10.

And the combination of these two, we expect to grow a couple of percentage points in the upcoming years, and hopefully they'll do better than that.

But these have actually started to trend upward earlier than sales tax, which surprised us a little bit.

So things are looking better than this time last year.

I think we were pretty depressed, actually, this time last year.

And then what are we going to do for the rest of this fiscal year?

Well, we're going to continue to track state and federal mandates.

We obviously can't predict everything that might come down, and we certainly can't control it if it's an unfunded mandate.

So we have to continue to track those.

Council also did adopt an economic downturn fund in 2011 of $2.8 million.

It's the second year they have done that.

So we have that as a cushion, albeit right now I can say this time last year I was saying we were going to need that and it doesn't appear that way this year.

We're going to continue to monitor revenues.

We have a revenue team that provides monthly updates.

We don't meet monthly, but we do have updates.

And we continue to monitor revenues.

And so far, as I've said, things have looked pretty good.

And again, we've encouraged departments to become more efficient and continue to live within their means, which we have definitely been experiencing.

So as we enter into planning for a new budget for 2012,

Here's where we are in the process right now.

Part of the package that council received that's also on the web, we have a budget work plan, which basically is now a 12-month work plan.

It used to not be that way, but it is now of all the activities that happen to put a budget together.

The citizen budget survey has gone out in utility bills, so if you haven't received it yet, you will.

But it's also online, so you don't have to wait to get it in the mail.

And council will receive those results, usually in January.

The 2012-16 proposed capital budget will be going to the Planning Commission next week as part of their work session agenda.

And then on December 14th, we'll be in a regular meeting with a public hearing.

And this is just a first draft of the capital budget that goes to Planning Commission and usually it does and will change anytime between then and when council receives the final proposed budget in March.

We're getting departmental requests in and we're already starting to meet with departments about their budgets and in the next couple of slides you'll see that we are going to try to schedule the work sessions and the community budget forum.

So some of the guidelines we gave to departments, we always try to give some guidelines to city departments as they're putting their budgets together.

Submit budgets that are flat slash very, very lean.

Any new request, I mean any request expenditure has to be 100% offset by revenue or other service reduction and completely justified obviously.

We actually are doing a prioritization of non-profit and outside agencies right now.

So for 13, we should have a new process in place.

And we have two processes right now, the agency budget review team, which reviews human services agencies, and a budget office process, which reviews all the other agencies that don't fall within the AVRT.

So we're not accepting applications for fiscal year 12.

Agencies understand that they could see level funding or maybe reduced funding depending on where department funding falls.

And this is a joint process with the county.

So that's happening right now.

And schools receive 40% of new revised, new real estate and personal property tax revenue.

And that is a target and that's also a budget guideline that you'll see in a few slides.

So I've talked a bit about the major revenue sources and we try to look at five years out not to get depressed because the gap gets wider as we go out but to see what are the issues that we might be facing and can we better plan for those issues as we go out into future fiscal years.

I mentioned the revenue team, and we do have a revenue team that consists of budget, finance, commissioner, treasurer, economic development.

And so as a team, we look at all the revenues and try to put a complete picture together of what these forecasts might look like.

Real estate assessments will be released beginning in the new year.

As I've mentioned, other revenue sources are fairly flat.

Even the ones from the state are pretty flat right now, which is better than going the other way.

and we're always looking at ways to continue to reduce, and this is on the expenditure side, not the revenue side, we want that to grow, to reduce expenditure budgets in 12.

And then last year we mentioned that we're looking at more decreases in revenue and I think, as Bernard stated, we've reached a new reality, a new baseline.

So we're hoping that's where we're at right now, that we're not going any further down in revenues, but that here's our new baseline and this is kind of where we need to kind of make assumptions from here on out.

So these are kind of the major assumptions we've made going into the forecast.

And here's the macro chart.

And as I've said, there's a detailed sheet in the back and on the web.

So as you can see for starting at 11, adopted and revised, pretty close.

pretty much the same number, 140.7 million and as you go out though, the red line and the blue line start getting wider and the red line of course is expenses and the blue line is revenues so the farther out we go, the wider the gap becomes until you get to about an 8 million dollar gap projected in 2016 and that has given everything we know today about where revenues might go and where expenses might go and again if you were to pull these up from previous years, I think you'd see these numbers

were maybe nothing like they were the previous year because things do change over the year and we have to take that into account and that's partly about what it's about in terms of responsible budgeting to make sure we're doing a good job at fitting the numbers with what our needs are.

So again, as I've said, the details are in the back.

One thing I do want to mention though about the revenues is that

I know this issue came up a lot last year and it's bound to come up again as the city county revenue sharing and that formula is driven by county assessments.

Their assessments, as probably everybody is aware, have gone down.

We are now going to start experiencing that pain.

Starting in 12, we're going to probably see about 300 to 350,000 less in city county revenue sharing than we're getting right now.

In 13, it goes down about another 400,000.

We're not going to see it start going up again until 14 and we won't see the level we're at today until 16.

So we're going to start sharing that pain that the county's been feeling in the assessments starting in 2012 and we're going to have to factor that in because a portion of that goes into the operating budget and then the remainder goes into the capital budget.

Facilities repair, equipment replacement, etc.

So we're going to have to balance all that given that we know that's not going to be, that revenue source is not going to be at the 18.5 million that it is at right now.

So that's part of the gap in 12.

The gap right now in 12 is about $2 million and some change.

But let me remind everybody that this next March when we come to council with the proposed budget, that gap will be closed.

We have to come to council with a balanced budget.

So right now our job between now and then is to figure out how do we close that gap.

Just want to remind everybody that these are City Council's vision priorities.

We absolutely take these into consideration when we're putting the budget together.

We want to make sure that we're taking care of these areas that Council have said they really care about.

Some areas probably are weighed more heavily than others, but nonetheless, all these areas get some attention when we're putting the budget together.

And we try to bring some attention to that.

Okay, so the budget guidelines, and again I think council will talk about this more at the December 2nd work session, but let me go through these really quickly.

These really have not changed for the most part, but I want to bring up the first one is maintain the current real estate and personal property tax rates, which basically says we're proposing no change in the tax rates for the next fiscal year.

Then second one basically says we're going to have a balanced budget.

Revenues and expenditures are going to be the same when we have the proposed budget ready.

And of course, we know about the council vision areas to focus on those.

The fourth one, let me just talk about this one.

Last year, this was a new one, use of performance measures.

We're also going to be showing on December 2nd to City Council a performance measures reporting tool that we've been developing.

We've been working very hard the last couple of years to get departments to start collecting performance measures.

They're now looking at the data behind that.

We're figuring out what measures we're going to report on and look at, and it's been a very hard process.

Let me tell you, this is much harder than putting a budget together.

But it's been very rewarding because I think when we get ready to really get this going to show to the public, it's going to be a really cool reporting tool and a great product.

And I think people are going to want more, which is very exciting.

And that's probably going to hopefully answer the question, where does my money go?

What are the services really doing?

What impact are they having?

And it's going to be more of a results-oriented focus than I think what we've seen before.

So it's a really exciting thing.

I mentioned before the 40% to schools, and right now that means they're going to get 100 plus thousand more dollars or so than they are receiving an 11.

If you remember, an 11 actually got less money because our real estate person probably both went down.

We're projecting them to go up slightly in 12, so they're going to benefit from that.

Six and seven basically discuss our employees.

It's no secret that our employees have not received a raise in two years.

In the detailed financial sheet that council has and it's in the back and it's also online for 12, we're trying to figure out how we're going to propose a 2% salary increase for employees.

We don't know how we're going to do that yet, but we're getting to the point where if we don't begin to start making that investment again, we're going to start losing ground faster than we can gain it back.

In the past, if you think about the average we've been able to give, it's between 3 and 4% plus market rate adjustments.

So this is nowhere near where we've been in the past.

This 2% is also consistent with what we're hearing from schools in the areas and from localities.

So we're not going out on a limb here by proposing this.

This is what pretty much the region is talking about.

And of course, we do have a living wage.

We will continue to be committed to that.

Number eight speaks to new programs.

I spoke about before basically making sure that we either have a revenue source behind it or maybe something else is not funded to make this new program happen.

We've talked a lot about infrastructure tonight.

Again, this was a new guideline several years ago.

I think this was Blake Caravati's guideline, actually, that was reworded.

And it talks about infrastructure, and we actually have put quite a bit of money into the city's infrastructure, into both schools and the city facilities.

Tim and I already spoke about this.

This is the prioritization process that refers to the nonprofit agencies.

Number 11 speaks to our Capital Improvement Fund.

We have a policy to transfer at least 3% into our capital budget from the general fund.

We're going to be, right now, actually doing a lot more than 3% in order to keep our debt low, in order to make sure we can actually fund what we need to fund.

We have a lot of needs in the capital projects.

Council Priority Initiatives or Council Reserve.

This changed names a couple times.

We try to give Council a little bit of flexibility during the year, so this is kind of their pool to do that as events come up that they want to fund.

Or during the budget process itself, if you remember, we might give them some opportunities to fund something with that reserve if they choose and they might have some choices.

So this gives them some opportunities to do that.

We also have a fund balance target adjustment, which we adopted a few years ago as part of the budget, which basically helps us make sure that we maintain that 12% fund balance fund.

The general fund, a couple of people have spoken to it tonight, I guess you can call it the rainy day fund also.

But it's really an emergency fund that absolutely is for critical dire needs.

And then as we said before, a couple of years ago we instituted the economic downturn fund until some time revenues stabilized.

Has that time come?

We don't know.

We budgeted for a couple of years now.

So the big question will be, how do we continue that out into 2012, if we continue it at all, so that will all be part of the budget discussion.

Then we have some long term guidelines.

These don't really change.

And these are more about kind of long term city, looking at the health of our city, how do we maintain that health.

The bond rating agencies also really like these long term financial guidelines.

So I won't really go over these too much.

Okay, so getting into the timeline.

So right now I mentioned the CityNet survey.

Next week we go to the Planning Commission's work session to introduce the CIP for the next five years.

And then we have a budget work session from five to seven in city space on December 2nd.

Materials should be posted online before Thanksgiving.

We also, last year, we gave, or the year before, citizens were able to speak at the end of work sessions.

I assume that that will be the case again, although I'm speaking for Council right now.

but I think council actually enjoyed that so I assume that's going to be the case as well so there probably will more than likely be a comment session at the end of this work session so we invite the public to come to that and December 14th is the public hearing so if you're interested in the capital budget that's your chance to speak on that

And then we skip all the way to March.

A lot of stuff happens between December and March.

And March 7th is the formal presentation by the city manager on his or her proposed budget.

And the schools also present that night their budget separately.

On the 10th, there's a budget work session proposed.

Also on the 16th, the 21st is a public hearing.

The 23rd is a Wednesday, and a couple of years ago we switched these from a Saturday to a Wednesday evening.

That'll be 7 to 9 at city space.

And then the 31st is another work session.

April 4th, second reading, excuse me, second public hearing first reading, seventh budget work session which is proposed.

We may or may not, we've usually not had the fourth budget work session and then 12th is the actual budget adoption.

And that will complete the cycle and then we'll start on 13 on the very next day probably.

Okay, December 2nd budget work session.

And nobody got that joke, nobody laughed that we're going to start at 13 on April 13th.

Oh well, sorry.

It went all the way over your heads.

Okay, so on December 2nd, we're going to be basically revisiting, well first we'll start out, we like to have our financial advisors trek down from Richmond

because they are truly inspiring to us in terms of keeping our AAA bond rating and how do we make sure we have that in place forever.

Kevin will actually come and speak to Council about the things that we need to continue to do and we're already doing a lot of these things, but what are these things that we really need to be on the lookout for in the next couple of years?

And then we're going to do a quick, another overview of revenue expenditure forecast, make sure there's no questions, kind of go over into more detail.

And then council hopefully will adopt the budget guidelines.

And then we've got a list of major issues going into 12.

And these range from operational issues, to salaries, to capital expenses, so we'll go into detail about that.

and then Council, this is kind of their chance to start telling us what do they want to see as part of the proposed budget for 12.

And then we're going to do our quick demonstration on their performance management software and then we'll have wrap up and takeaways and citizen comment at the end.

And again, that's five to seven city space.

Okay.

We have a really cool new website.

I know some of you have actually been on it because I think you're on our email updates list.

And so you get an email every time we update something.

But I encourage you to go on and see what we have.

You can get onto the email list so whenever we update something, you get an email saying, hey, if I just updated something, go check it out.

Actually, we improved the website, and I kid you not, based on what Citizen said.

So I want to thank Colette for that, because her feedback helped us rework our budget website.

So we really do look for feedback, and we want to have no ways to improve how user-friendly our website is, and so that's no joke.

That's how that happened, and I really appreciate the feedback.

So we've got lots of great information on there, so I encourage everybody to go on and start looking at what we have.

That is my presentation.

I'm happy to answer questions.

I have one question.

You mentioned something about 2% salaries.

Yes.

That's what we're trying to do, work into the budget right now.

I have a couple questions.

Right, so for 12 right now they're looking at

Well, I guess I was just trying to look at your bar charts of real estate tax revenue.

Mm-hmm, and personal property tax.

That's what's going up.

That's what's making the difference.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's actually a $50,000 increase about.

It's going from $40,000,080 to $41,200,000.

but it's 0.1% increase.

Could you give a, you talked about the budget guidelines using performance measures.

Well I think we'll be talking about that.

Hopefully, I'm not really

Here's where we are in the process right now.

We are helping departments shape up what measures will be reported out during the second half of this fiscal year.

We have a software that's going to be showing the lengths of measures, how the measures are linking up to departmental goals and objectives and ultimately up to your eight council vision areas.

So that's what we're working on right now are those alignments and then we're also working on what measures are we actually going to be reporting on.

I think, Dave, we'll be presenting this to you at the work session.

We'll give you kind of a trial run and show you how it works.

I think, realistically, this won't guide our decision making for the budget for 2012, but we fully believe that we'll be in a position to utilize it in a much more intensive way, extensive way for 2013.

We're also asking if the department has any requests, for instance, they have to tie measures to that and we will be expecting them to report if they get that new request funded, who knows, then they will be held accountable

I mean, if they said they were going to report on certain measures to support that new request, then they will be held accountable to make sure that data gets reported to either support that new request or maybe it doesn't support the new request.

So it certainly means we have to sit in place partly to get departments practiced at this, at regular reporting.

So those are all things we're working on right now.

I'm just looking at the budget guidelines.

One of the things that I've just sort of noticed in my relatively short tenure on City Council, number three was talking about focusing on Council's strategic vision and priorities.

Economic sustainability, Center for Lifelong Learning, quality housing opportunities, Charlottesville arts and culture, Green City, America's healthiest city, a connected community and smart citizen focused government.

and this year I've seen, you know, it's really kind of nice to live in a city where that's paid attention to, that sort of vision and you can kind of see how a lot of the initiatives that have been already in progress when I came on and that we've been working on since then really tie into these and very few things that don't tie into them at all.

But I just have a continuing

sense of urgency about the second one, which is the Center for Lifelong Learning.

And it's one that I see less coming through the chute about.

And I wonder if there's any way that we can sort of look to department heads to kind of focus on that as one of the things in our strategic plan talks about how we measure our education system by how the least among us are doing.

We certainly can do that.

The nice thing about this performance measurement software is it'll show you how things tie up to that.

So we can definitely, if you're interested on the second, show you some of the things that are aligned with that vision area and we'll highlight that for sure.

For the utilities?

Oh, gee.

Well, that's not part of the general fund budget, so that's a separate issue.

We normally actually present the utility budget, I believe it's around the first of May of every year, but if you recall the last two or three years, one of the big items that goes into the rates is the debt.

We have a very large capital budget for water, a very large capital budget for sewer.

Rivanna has a very large capital budget.

I think we're forecasting somewhere between five to eight percent if I remember the five year forecast for water and sewer.

You know, I wasn't part of that story.

No, and I've heard anecdotally that as well.

I mean, again, that's not really the area directly I work in, but I've worked that they're very good at working with people and making sure that people do get caught up and not just blowing them off.

If there are no other comments or questions, thank you very much.

Okay.

Again, so December 2nd, we'll definitely be speaking in more detail about the upcoming budget, and I'll be getting that information out hopefully at the end of this week.

You should get a notebook, a small notebook.

You can, yeah.

And this is also a PowerPoint.

I hope it is.

Council this is just an update on where we were two weeks ago and where we've been on the Chesapeake Bay TMDL analysis.

If you remember I came before you along with Leslie Middleton and Steve Williams and we talked about our concerns about the TMDL and

and you wrote a letter or a letter the mayor signed to the governor about concerns about the state's water improvement plan.

And we indicated then that we had hired the Timmons Engineering Group to do some analysis of what the impacts might be on Charlottesville of the TMDL if it is implemented fully as it will be.

And this is just a follow up on that.

These slides are actually the work of the Timmons Group.

This slide just shows basically from Virginia to New York what the impacts areas are and I think the interesting thing in this slide

is that this is the area that Charlottesville is in and the impact area on the Chesapeake Bay that we have.

The key to this is that we come in with a James River right at the very bottom of the bay so we have a lot less impact than for instance the New York and particularly the Pennsylvania areas.

This is a graph that shows the major rivers ranked by their impact on the Bay and you can see the James in Virginia is way down in this area.

So our impact on a relative basis from the Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania area is much, much less.

We also have made great improvement in Virginia since 1985.

These are the nitrogen levels in million pounds per year that were measured in 1985.

You can see they're roughly 85 million pounds a year.

Those levels have gone down to 2009 when they were a little less than 65 million a year.

But the TMDL goals get it down to just over 50 million pounds a year.

So they still require tremendous cleanup.

The phosphorus loads, again, this is 1985 numbers.

They were measured in 2002, the cleanups, 2009.

You can see that there's been progress made, but there's still a need to drop from roughly 7 million pounds a year down to about 5 million pounds a year.

The Virginia Watershed Implementation Plan is based on several things.

One is an expanded nutrient credit exchange program.

Our concern about that is that it basically trades one stream for another.

If you buy credits in another part of the state,

You're sacrificing and not doing anything to clean up our streams.

And so you're leaving them to the, to the, you clean up the other areas where they don't buy the credits.

The plan also requires urban nutrient management plans for municipally owned lands, BMP retrofits on existing developed lands, redevelopment of 20% reduction in phosphorus, and for new development, post-development loads cannot exceed previous development.

The concern again that we talked about last time is that although Virginia has a water improvement plan, EPA says it has serious deficiencies.

It does not provide reasonable assurance that it will be successful, and in fact the goals in it, the nitrogen is 6% over what EPA has set as a limit, phosphorus is 7% over, and if Virginia does not strengthen its water improvement plan,

EPA will include their backstops which basically mean only the communities with an existing MS4 permit will be the ones that are involved in the cleanup because that's who EPA can enforce it against and in that provision it requires 50% of urban land to meet aggressive performance standards through retrofit or redevelopment.

What we looked at here is trying to predict the cost to the Bay TMDL to the city.

We assumed the backstop remains in effect, and so a retrofit of 50% of urban land by 2025 and 30% by 2017, what does that mean to us?

We looked at existing BMP coverage, we looked at known BMP retrofit opportunities, and then looked at the construction costs for the gap and what the program costs might be.

The Gibbons in our approach were the 10.26 square miles of city, the MS-4 covers all the city, that there's an average 35% impervious area, that with existing BMPs we're making the assumption based on what we know that 20 acres are treated, that they're possible

Very readily available B&P retrofits on public land that maybe 56 more acres could be treated and that would give you 76 acres if by 2017 to treat the 30% of those areas, of our total area, that's 690 acres that would have to be treated.

Again, 20 of them already treated, 20 by potential retrofits on public land.

to treat 30% by 2017 with 690 acres, zero cost for the 20 that are already done, half a million for the 56 acres that are treated by potential retrofits on public land, and then 50,000 per acre for the gap of 614 acres.

30.7 million, again, by 2017.

We would assume it would be implemented by the time you got everything done over four years, so roughly 31.2 million over four years or 7.8 million a year.

And that's just construction cost.

That's all it is, is construction cost.

Does not include design, permitting, land acquisition, or staff time to monitor and oversee this.

Our engineers said, how do you account for design permitting, administration and land acquisition?

You basically double that by 2017 and get a cost of $15.6 million a year.

They didn't look to say, what if we assume that we wanted to go out and buy all those credits in the nutrient credit program?

Well, there's only one place that has any credits right now, and the estimate for right now is that those are going to be $25,000 a pound to purchase.

That's only going up with the large number of people trying to buy them and the scarcity of credits.

But even at $25,000 a pound, we're still talking $9.6 million a year to buy them.

What if the backstop is removed from the water improvement plan?

We're still looking at potentially around $3 to $8 million a year in capital costs to implement this.

We're not alone.

This is a chart that was put together to show the per capita cost of communities around the state.

And you can see that they range here.

You've got 437.

I think the highest is 658 in Williamsburg.

And that's not per household.

That's annual per capita cost.

to implement this.

So the number that you heard, if you assume 2.5 persons per household, you're talking $1600 or $1700 per household to address this, and that's the same number in line with where we are.

We also took a look at what the impact would be on development, and we looked at two sites.

First one was at Jefferson School.

We took a look at it.

Here are the existing area conditions.

We can get through that, but given the existing conditions,

If you take the plan for development, it leaves 66.5 percent impervious surface.

And then we did four scenarios of what it would cost the developers to do that.

One is if you must meet current state nutrient reduction of 10 percent, it's only about 22,000.

If you meet it at 20 percent, it's about 37,000.

If you go to the TMDL and the Water Improvement Plan, you're potentially up to 400,000 and then if the backstops are implemented, one and a half to two million dollars.

That's cost on top of the development of the Jefferson School that nobody's anticipated.

We also looked at the Water Street parking lots and again it's roughly two acres.

We used the development that was in the design competition and was approved and it shows as it is now 100% impervious with underground parking and the cost there would range

Again, anywhere from $50,000 to $300,000 without the TMDL cost and go to the next $600,000 to a million and a half dollars with the whip or the backstops implemented.

So again, major impact on development

in an urban area like Charlottesville if the TMDL or the WIP is adopted as it is and then the backstops are put into play.

We're looking at serious costs both to the city and to the development community which will

Those are just the bad news from this.

It's just an update on sort of where we are.

We wrote a second letter after we got these numbers to follow up the letter that the mayor had written.

that went into some detail.

I included that in your packet.

We sent that to both EPA and the State, the Department of Conservation Resources, to make them aware of our concerns and what the actions were in the situation.

There is some language in the legislative packet also to deal with this, but we're not asking you for any action tonight.

We just wanted to follow up since we told you we were having that study done and let you know

The concern we had and what the actual numbers really were and being glad to answer any questions you might have.

Council, we are trying to do everything we can to make sure that folks who represent Charlottesville on the state and federal level have an understanding of the impact that this is going to have on localities.

We are trying to reach out to legislators to make sure that they realize what the concerns are because this, as you know, will have a major impact on our budget and affect it in a way that

Quite frankly, we couldn't have imagined before this process kind of came down the pike.

So we're hoping first that the state can do a little bit more in providing a plan that is a little more acceptable to EPA.

But then also, we're also hoping that we would get some funding for this as well, understanding that this is an unfunded mandate and a significant unfunded mandate.

to localities.

And as Mr. Tolbert mentioned, this is an issue across the state of Virginia and the other states that are affected by this.

I would say that we did provide this letter to our Congressman and both Senators so that they would have the information knowing what we face.

My only comment is, one of the things we've talked about in the past is whether to have a storm water utility as a way of encouraging

businesses and residents to go ahead and take steps to manage stormwater and be creative about it.

That would not affect the actual development.

But would it affect the overall, you know, if we had incentives to have less impervious surfaces overall in the city, wouldn't that affect this equation?

It certainly can help in that process.

Next item on the agenda is the city's legislative packet.

Good evening Councillors, Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown.

My name is Richard Harris, I'm the Deputy City Attorney here for the City of Charlottesville.

This evening I have for you the proposed 2011 legislative program for the city to present

if you approve it to our local legislators for advancement in Richmond at the upcoming General Assembly.

What you have before you are the results of my outreach to all city department heads, conversations with some city councilors, staff members, and the TJPDC, a member of which you'll be hearing from after I'm done here this evening.

The requests and positions this year range from those that are generated at and will have a local effect here in Charlottesville all the way to those that seek statewide action or inaction as the case may be.

The overarching theme this year is one that was actually suggested by our Dr. Brown and that is to succinctly present a limited number of initiatives in order to underscore the city's enthusiasm for these initiatives.

And I think that the program does that.

I'm assuming you've read through these.

I'll briefly go over some of the items that are here.

The first is one actually in three parts.

These are all involving bicycle safety.

Coming from our city's Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Committee and brought to this program by our traffic engineer, there are three proposals intended to promote bicycle safety, which is an area of ever growing concern in our city as bicycles become a more prevalent form of transportation.

The first is a request to grant local authority for contraflow bicycling.

Contraflow bicycling is riding a bicycle the wrong way up a one-way street.

While at first glance it may seem counterintuitive, after speaking with a traffic engineer it turns out that in many situations a one-way street is actually the safest more efficient way for a bicyclist to travel based upon traffic conditions, volumes, speed limits, traffic calming devices.

So what Ms. Alexander has suggested is we seek authority at a local level to

make studies of certain streets and then have the authority to allow controlled bicycles on those streets if it will work out from a traffic standpoint.

The second is a request to increase the

minimum passing distance near bicyclists from two feet to three feet.

It's currently two feet by state code.

This option was presented at the legislature last year.

It did not gain much traction, but the committee does believe that this is something that would be a benefit for bicyclists and motorists alike.

So we are putting this in here as a possibility and a request.

The third is to make improper driving a chargeable offense.

Currently, improper driving is a criminal offense that cannot actually be charged against somebody, either a bicyclist or a motorist.

It's a drop-down charge.

It could be worked out as a plea bargain when someone is issued a reckless driving citation.

The suggestion that came from the committee comes from the fact that reckless driving is not often brought against a bicyclist because it's a rather harsh penalty.

By having an improper driving charge, which is a lesser charge, actually just an infraction, to have that as a possibility to charge it against a bicyclist, it would hopefully have the impact of being a deterrent to a bicyclist making unsafe maneuvers within the community.

That would also apply to vehicles as well to make it a chargeable offense.

Outside of those three under the heading of number one is number two, which is a request for public infrastructure maintenance bond authority.

This comes from Jim Tolga, our director of neighborhood development services.

This comes from situations where a single or two family home is being built in an already developed and operating neighborhood.

Very often when this type of situation occurs, there will be some damage done to the neighborhood to public infrastructure, be it the street, the curbs, the sidewalks, manholes, anything like that.

If something were to happen while this is going on, there's really no way to

received payment to get these things fixed in a timely manner other than for the city to go and fix it and try to get monies afterwards.

What we are seeking is to have authority to require bonds in this situation from somebody building within an established and functioning neighborhood where the city is maintaining the streets and public infrastructure so we can actually fix it and the neighborhood residents that are there already are not facing the situation of broken up street sidewalks or curves.

The final legislative request is following up on a resolution that City Council here passed earlier this year regarding predatory lending legislation.

It's seeking three specific code changes that you'd like to see bolster the current state code.

Those three, if you remember, are an interest rate cap of 36%,

including all fees that are charged at any time, meaning that's the cap, 36%.

Number two is the prohibition of a creditor's use of a personal check or device as a means to access a consumer's bank account.

And the third is to incorporate into the Virginia Code sections of the Military Lending Act in order to protect military personnel from predatory lending purposes.

Moving on to the policy positions, the first is the TMDL.

I will not go through that again.

I think you've heard quite a bit and went over from Mr. Tolbert.

The two letters that Mr. Tolbert mentioned are part of the legislative program.

They are attached to the program that will go forward to our local legislators should you approve this program.

I do want to make one point clear.

There is a section within the program that states that Charlottesville does not share all the characteristics of all of the communities that are part of the WIP for the TMDL and it states that the city of Charlottesville must be able to retain its unique issue, retain authority to respond to the unique issues that it faces because Charlottesville is unlike any other city or locality, just like all localities are.

So that statement was put in there and actually TJPDC understands why we do that in our agreement with that position.

One suggested by Council Szakos is opposition to a few initiatives which are to make changes to the machinery and tools tax and the business professional occupational license tax.

As you saw in Ms. Beauregard's presentation, that's a significant source of revenue and I put into our program that the city is opposed to any action being taken that will reduce or divert local government revenues or restrict local tax and authority.

This position is also reflected in the Virginia Municipal League legislative program which is put into our program.

and as always we support the Virginia Municipal League and the TJPDC legislative programs.

I have vetted each of these issues with appropriate city personnel and am recommending that you approve this program with any changes that you may have.

I'm happy to answer any questions.

After having suggested to you that you make this document succinct and focused and short so people knew what we were really talking about, I'd like to suggest another item for you.

and that is in every year that I've been on council we have actively included in this list our advocation for automatic restoration of felons voting rights and I think that I wouldn't want anyone to misinterpret the absence on that matter since Virginia is one of two or maybe three states that don't automatically

You know, restore rights when a felon has served their time.

Thank you.

I'm still going to ask for a vote.

Yes.

Yes, that had been an initiative in the regional program I guess a couple of years ago as we were looking to get the enabling authority to establish such a district and we also had the request for some revenues to be able to fund that.

As you recall, the enabling legislation to create the district was enacted.

The funding mechanism was not.

I actually believe I took that out of the program last year.

Certainly can reassert that, you know, same priority or same statement as we can.

I would like to see something of that nature.

Yeah, we'll put that back in.

I'd like to make another comment.

I'm really pleased to see the bicycling and pedestrian safety recommendations brought forward here.

And I think it's really interesting to note that one of the recommendations from the bicyclist is a way of trying to give the police a better tool to regulate

I think it kind of gets at the issues brought up earlier that

You know, I think a lot of people in the bicycling community would like to see bicyclists all be respectful of the laws and by giving the police a tool, I think it's an important thing to do.

Anyway, I'd just like to thank everyone who worked hard on that to make that happen.

Do we need to make a motion, Madam?

Yes.

As amended.

Thank you very much.

You do have before you the regional legislative program draft for 2011 for your review and approval.

Most of you are familiar with the format of the program.

The program does contain a short list of high priority action items, Chesapeake Bay TML being the first one, followed by state and local funding and revenues, public education funding, transportation funding,

Land Use and Growth Management and Comprehensive Services.

The action items, as you will recall, are general statements.

They've been the priority of the region for a number of years and in most respects have only been slightly revised from last year.

The next section of the draft program has ongoing policy positions and concerns.

This contains specifically requested items from localities.

It also addresses important issues outside of those main topic areas and the action items.

Let me spend just a couple of minutes because I know you've had a long night and have already talked about some legislative issues.

Just to mention a couple of things.

I don't want to go into a lot of detail about the Chesapeake Bay TMDL position, but I do want to talk a little bit about the process that we went through to get this position drafted and before you.

It's probably the most extensive work that has been done since I've been doing this work for the planning district, which is about 10 or 11 years, to develop a legislative position to take out to the localities for approval.

You've heard in

A couple of meetings now about the TMDL and I believe at your last meeting you heard about the Piedmont Regional Pilot Project, which Mr. Williams was here to talk to you about.

The position has drawn off of the information coming out of that.

It is utilized input from

Local Planning and Community Development staff.

We're very fortunate to have Mr. Tolbert and several members of his staff take part in the meeting to give us feedback and help craft the legislative position.

We had a meeting of local elected officials representing the region.

Dr. Brown and Szakos participated in that.

and then the position went before the Planning District Commission.

So it's been, I think a lot of input and thoughtfulness has gone into the development of this position.

And I think it really puts us in a position when we get to the legislature in January to be able to offer some good input in terms of suggestions and options

that are going to be before the General Assembly to deal with this issue.

And we're also fortunate, I believe, in this region that we have several legislators who are members of key committees that are going to be taking up these issues by virtue of their membership on either

House Appropriations or Senate Finance Committees or the Local Government and Agriculture Natural Resources Chesapeake Bay Committees.

And we have several that we think will be able to carry our message forward as we continue to debate these issues.

While standing up front, the position states up front that we do support the goal of improved water quality,

It also addresses a number of concerns from across the various sectors that you've heard about that have been raised again through the pilot program.

It stresses the need for fairness in establishing requirements that are raised across the different source sectors, whether it's agriculture, whether it's permitted dischargers.

And it also, of course, requests that we have adequate state and federal funding.

We know, as we heard from Mr. Tolbert earlier, that this is going to cost a lot of money.

And then it also states those conditions under which we would be opposed to the legislation, to the TMDL.

Let me also mention just briefly the ongoing position that we've had on state and local funding and revenues.

There have been some revisions to that position this year, specifically to take into account some of the issues that Mr. Harris brought up, some issues that were raised last year in the General Assembly concerning local revenues and local revenue authority, specifically BPOL.

machinery and tools tax, communication sales tax.

There's also been some discussion about those issues in a couple of different commissions they've been meeting over the course of the summer and the fall.

So we've kind of enhanced the program to state our opposition to taking away local revenue authority, but we also continue to maintain the stance that we want to make sure that we

We don't want unfunded and underfunded mandates.

We don't want costs shifted from the state down to the localities and we need flexibility at the local level in order to be able to implement state requirements.

Just wanted to mention those two because I think they are among the priority action items or probably the two that have undergone either being new or some revision.

One last word on the TMDL.

We are having our annual legislative gathering on November the 30th.

We're moving it to an evening this year.

It'll be at our new Water Street Center.

We're going to continue with the presentation of the legislative program priorities, but really want to focus our time and our energy and our efforts that night with our legislators on the TMDL.

We're putting together a panel of representatives who will bring forward the concerns of each of the various sectors and then really hope to engage our legislators in some discussion about where we can agree on some areas to carry forward to the General Assembly.

That ends our formal agenda.

Good evening, I'm Peter Kleeman.

I live at 407 Head Street in the city.

I spoke before council at the last meeting about an item that appears as item K on this agenda, abandonment of the stadium road sewer easements, and at that time I presented concern about liability, whether abandonment

of the sewer easements also meant abandonment of the sewers and if there were failures in those sewers would the liability also be abandoned by the city and then accrue to the property owner who's now going to be faced with whatever repairs would be necessary and there was a discussion that this would be

researched and brought before council.

I didn't hear anything about it.

I would like to believe that that was done and that there is something I would just like to encourage that perhaps when there are abandonments of this type in the future that there be some proactive step to identify or to state what the actual abandonment is and who accepts liability for whatever the abandonment is, whether the city will

say if there are problems we will take care of it or it's yours now, you're on your own.

So I think that would be good information to be provided in all future abandonments and I just like to believe that that was done for this one.

My name's Downing Smith.

I live at 810 Locust Avenue.

When y'all had your resolution on the water supply, that was the most amazing thing I've seen in city government in the 25 years that I've been trying to keep track of what's been going on.

Recently, in the city market meeting, I was very impressed with the way y'all worked together.

And I certainly hope that y'all continue that spirit of cooperation

and working together.

Anybody in the city or county or anywhere for that matter can send y'all an email or communicate with you in other ways, but please don't let those people try and drive divisions within y'all.

Please continue to work together the way y'all have been working in the past, looking out for the best interest of the citizens of Charlottesville.

People have accused y'all of not cooperating with the county.

Cooperating with the county I think is important, but it's a two-way street and I won't go into all the things that I think the city, that the county has not cooperated with the city.

I don't think they've been a particularly good neighbor, but I want y'all to continue to work together and continue to look out for our best interest.

Colette Hall 101, Robertson Lane.

I have three questions.

One is, there was an article in the Daily Progress about the progress of selecting a city manager.

And I think Mr. Jones was quoted, but anyway, it was going to be narrowed down from five or six people to two to three.

and then a community panel was going and department heads were going to question those two to three people.

So I haven't heard anything more about that process and since, I hate to say it folks, but you come and go.

But in my 21 years of living in the city of Charlottesville we've only had two city managers

I'm not counting our acting city manager because he's in an acting position, but he's in a temporary position.

So could somebody update me on that?

Well, I will.

I mean, it's pretty much as you described it.

We had a bunch of names brought before us.

We have brought a handful of people in for interviews.

That was narrowed.

They've met with the community panels and department heads.

I'm not sure when it'll be announced, but we're making good progress.

But it's pretty much as you described.

I mean, we had a number of candidates.

It got narrowed.

We've had interviews.

We've had the finalists kind of meet with the community group and with department heads.

Okay.

Then there's two other things really quickly.

I want to just mention to you, Mr. Jones, that the citizens' budgets, you know, the surveys for that was going to be in the utility bills.

I know you can also fill it out online.

I prefer to fill it out on hard copy.

And I just got my utility bill yesterday and it wasn't in there.

So I'm going to miss the next round, I think, possibly.

So what should citizens do when they didn't get their utility bill picked up at your office?

No, we can certainly make it available at our office.

Apparently there was a problem with the mail house.

and that's why one or two cycles of the mailings will not have the utility bills or will not have the surveys.

What we're going to try to do is address those cycles next time around as well and extend the deadline for

Well, we're going to extend the deadline so you can turn it in whenever you get a chance to turn it in.

But we certainly can make copies available in the city manager's office as well.

They were just on the table.

You could go in and just pick one up.

We usually provide that to them as well.

Third and last one I'm going to kind of direct to Councilor Huja.

Ritterhold.

She talked about stormwater and she talked about billing the customer per like say square foot of his or her roof type thing to try to glean some money for stormwater.

I personally since that time have taken all of my gutters other than about a 10 foot

I hope that if something in the future is formulated that somehow all of those kinds of things that people are doing proactively already will be considered

Since all of that water now goes directly into the land that I own, does not go into some creek or down the street.

So I hope that when we do talk, enlarge that discussion about stormwater, that we don't just say, well, the square foot of your roof is, and therefore you should owe X amount of dollars, but figure

what people are doing proactively now to harvest their own stormwater.

I just want people in the Council to sort of think about that too.

The issue was just discussed a little while ago.

I think Dr. Brown raised that issue.

And Mrs. Edwards for going to Mickey Drive.

That's a problem there.

Did you go up further where the K-Mart entrance is and exit?

Are you all contemplating or looking into what can be done about that?

both of these situations.

Because it is dangerous, it really is.

And my daughter went to Legion Town and she's in and out all the time there.

And I do appreciate your looking into it.

Oh, well on Channel 29 they called the tree as a community tree down in the mall that was donated for the holiday season.

I'm not sure.

Okay, well I can certainly follow up on that.

Community tree.

They called it a community tree.

They probably call it because there are many people in this community who are going to celebrate Christmas.

Well... What it is is like a season.

Why can't it be called a Christmas tree?

It's always been called a Christmas tree.

Well I'm a Christian.

Yeah I understand.

I'd just like to respond to Mr. Kleeman.

I'm not sure about the liability just yet.

We're still working on that.

But what we try to do with old sewer lines is make sure that it's filled with a special type of concrete and capped off and closed off, which hopefully keeps us from having some of those issues of liability and having them collapse and cause problems.

So we try to mitigate that before it becomes an issue.

And I apologize.

I did send that to you, but I sent it to you very late.

So I sent it to you this evening, actually, that response.

So I apologize.

Earlier before the meeting.

I'll keep my remarks very brief because like many of us I have to get up early tomorrow morning to go to work but I just wanted to respond to a couple of comments were made about my remarks at the beginning of the meeting

The first thing, Mark, is the single-room occupancy project, slated at 4th and Preston Street, obviously hasn't even been built yet.

So that's not an answer, that's not a part of the solution for people who are unfortunate enough to be out in the street tonight, homeless.

And I think Possum and I think The Salvation Army are doing great jobs with the resources they have.

But I think we're having a problem in Charlottesville

On an anecdotal basis, I have an idea of how many people are homeless in this city, but I don't think that we have an accurate figure for that.

You know, and Councillor Edwards, I agree that even tonight we had a temporary bed for everybody who was homeless in the city.

That's not a long-term solution to the problem.

I like your suggestion for wraparound services and that takes a major commitment from the city and also from the state and the federal government to provide some of the funding for that, that a person, there's a variety of reasons why people find themselves homeless.

and I think that again on an anecdotal basis the big factor now is people who have either lost their jobs or can't find their jobs and just don't have money to pay rent and finding themselves in the streets as opposed to years ago it may have been abused women, it may have been people with addiction problems who are still a big segment of the homeless population but we're having new types of people who are homeless

You know, entering the field now of not having the resources to maintain themselves economically.

And I'm just going to say this very briefly.

It's not a matter that city council can do anything about, but I get very annoyed at the previous national administration

and the current national administration can give hundreds of billions of dollars in tort money to rescue big business and you know granted there may be economic reasons to do that to keep the economy going but when it comes to individual people who are down in their luck and are homeless you know and I wouldn't want to be out there living in a tent or the street

Society at large, we have to make a decision that, you know, this is the United States.

Nobody should be forced to live out in the street.

I'm not saying people should be living in the, you know, the Carlton or the Ritz Hotel, but we should have some provisions that we can intervene as a society and be willing to help them get on their feet, have a place to stay at, get the kind of services where they can get vocational training.

or, you know, training, pointing the right direction where they can get jobs and be economically self-sustaining again.

Amen.

Any comments from Councillors?

Any other business?

Just a reminder that I guess our next meeting would be the budget work session December 2nd, 5 to 7 city space.