City Council Meeting   4/4/2011

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I'd like to call this meeting to order.

Dr. Brown?

Here.

Ms. Edwards?

Here.

Mr. Huja?

Yes.

Ms. Szakos?

We have three very special recognitions to start our meeting with tonight and the first is we want to honor some members of our community who were recently recognized by the Charlottesville Planning Commission for commendable efforts in various planning initiatives during this past year and I'd like to read through the brief descriptions of each of the award winners and then if any of them are here tonight at the end

will have them come forward and be recognized in person.

So for the outstanding neighborhood effort, the 2011 annual planning award went to the Martha Jefferson neighborhood for their diligent work in becoming the first conservation district as well as continued attention to the progression of the Martha Jefferson hospital relocation.

Outstanding plan of development

went to Whole Foods for their work in constructing a 10 foot shared use path that will be part of an important road project.

The path will have an entrance on Hydraulic Road to be mindful of pedestrians.

Citizen Planner of the Year, went to one of my favorite organizations, I hope they're here tonight, Bike Charlottesville, there they are.

Bike Charlottesville for being instrumental in bringing together the Charlottesville and surrounding area bike community, including cycling clubs, advocacy organizations, retailers, employers, and individuals.

Their dedication to communicate and lobby safe cycling for transportation, recreation, and sport, both on and off road, is to be commended.

They are also a vital asset to policy makers like ourselves,

and to planners for their research and their ideas to help retrofit our city for better biking lanes and better future planning for alternative transportation.

This falls right in line with how we are now thinking about our future and our goal to make Charlottesville a green city.

The Herman Key Jr. Access to the Disabled Award.

This is named for a gentleman who was a good friend to many of us here in the community, Herman Key Jr., who unfortunately is no longer with us.

But Herman was an active Charles the Citizen and a former planning commissioner who was a big advocate for accessibility in the community.

And this year's award was presented to the ADA Advisory Committee, and I know there's at least one member of that committee in the audience tonight, I believe.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the ADA Advisory Committee is that it provides an opportunity for representatives from different departments of the city to get together to discuss how services, buildings and programs can be made more accessible for people with disabilities.

There have been a significant number of matters that have been resolved when city representatives are made aware of a certain need or issue.

And as city staff become more familiar with the needs of persons with disabilities, the quality of services for all citizens stands to benefit.

The Eldon Fields Wood Design Professional of the Year, which is named for another former planning commissioner and active citizen, Eldon Wood, is presented to Bruce Fordell.

And Mr. Wardell is being honored tonight for his terrific work on the SRO, Single Room Occupancy Project, the crossings at 4th and Preston.

Mr. Wardell's design took a very tight, challenging parcel and created a gem of a building that satisfies the multiple requirements of an SRO.

It's an excellent development that will encourage pedestrian-oriented redevelopment in the area around 4th Street.

The Neighborhood of the Year is awarded to the Martha Jefferson Conservation District.

Starting in 2006, Martha Jefferson Neighborhood Association took steps to have a historic survey conducted at the neighborhood's expense.

The survey was an attempt to have the neighborhood listed on the national and state registers.

The neighborhood provided educational outreach on the effects of a historic conservation district and also conducted a formal ballot for all potentially affected properties.

This resulted in having part of the Martha Jefferson Neighborhood designated Historic Conservation District in 2010.

Outstanding Sustainable Development.

This year's award was presented to the Greenhouse, new apartment building on 14th Street near the corner at UVA.

The Greenhouse is a LEED-certified apartment building fronting 14th Street and incorporates many green features.

NDS, Neighborhood Development Services Staff Member of the Year, unfortunately no longer is with the City of Charlottesville, but we still want to recognize him.

Nick Rogers is NDS Staff Member of the Year, consistently provided thorough balance and thoughtful staff reports to the Planning Commission, and he is now, I believe, in a new position in Fairfax County.

And so on behalf of the City Council, on behalf of the Planning Commission and the citizens of Charlottesville, we would like to congratulate all of the individuals and organizations who were honored tonight and we want to thank you for your commitment to making Charlottesville a great place to live.

So if any of the award or the honorees are here tonight if you want to come forward and let's give them a big round of applause.

All right, we have a lot of bikers here.

Thank you very much.

Absolutely.

Thank you very much.

Let's give them another round of applause.

Secondly, I have a proclamation for Child Abuse Prevention Month.

Whereas the month of April is recognized as Child Abuse Prevention Month in the Commonwealth of Virginia and across the United States.

And whereas during fiscal year 2010, 250 qualifying reports of suspected child abuse or neglect were investigated in the city of Charlottesville.

That's 250 too many.

Whereas physical abuse and neglect, sexual abuse, medical neglect, and emotional abuse and neglect lead to long-term outcomes for children such as developmental delay, mental and emotional disorders,

anti-social and criminal behavior, childhood pregnancy, truancy and academic failure, alcohol and drug abuse and suicide and whereas the city of Charlottesville faces a continuing need to support innovative programs to prevent child abuse and to assist family members when child abuse occurs and whereas in Charlottesville there are dedicated individuals and organizations who work daily to counter the problem of child abuse and neglect and to provide parents with the assistance they need

and whereas all children deserve freedom from verbal abuse, sexual abuse, physical abuse and neglect and emotional abuse and neglect and whereas children deserve to have days that include loving hugs, warm homes, tender care, parents and adults who listen and who promote self-esteem, give quality time, provide necessary food, shelter, clothing and medical attention and whereas it is vital that we join forces to reach out to parents and children to prevent recurrence of child abuse and neglect

and whereas it is indeed appropriate and fitting to focus attention upon the problem of child abuse and neglect in the Commonwealth of Virginia and in the City of Charlottesville.

Now therefore I, Dave Norris, Mayor of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby proclaim the month of April 2011 as Child Abuse Prevention Month in the City of Charlottesville and call upon our citizens to observe the month with appropriate programs and activities.

Thank you, counselors, for this proclamation, and thank you, Maurice.

I do want to introduce one of our social workers who works in our Child Protective Services, and that's Ashley Sonali.

And she's been with our department for a number of years, helping to protect the children in our community.

I also want to say that it is a community effort and we do rely on everyone in the community to support not only their own children for safety reasons but also the children in their neighborhoods and the children in their extended families.

We do get reports from family members.

We get reports from medical professionals, from the schools, and from other people in the communities who have concern for children.

Often it's abuse when it's in the family.

It's because the family is in stressful situations and having problems coping.

And our department works with those families to try to keep the families together, but yet keep the children safe.

Outside reports of abuse often come from the family members themselves and we want to, again, keep the victims and the perpetrators separated.

Again, I want to thank also all of our partnerships with the city schools, with our medical professionals, with the Charlottesville Police Department for all the good work they do in helping us do our jobs.

And finally tonight we have a proclamation regarding Minority Health Month.

Whereas National Minority Health Month is in recognition of health issues that impact racial and ethnic populations.

And whereas the focus of Minority Health Month 2011 is quality school lunches.

Whereas the City of Charlottesville acknowledges the impact that student lunch has on the total health of our minority populations.

And whereas research supports the need to address minority health, increase awareness of health disparities, advocate for increased access to health care, and encourage minorities to take action to improve their health.

and whereas state, county and community partnerships are necessary to improve minority health throughout Virginia,

and whereas illness and chronic disease may be prevented and managed by maintaining a healthy weight, eating healthy nutritious meals, being knowledgeable of family history and getting regular checkups and screenings and whereas minority health is a priority for individuals, families, communities, the state and the nation.

Now therefore I, Dave Norris, Mayor of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby extend greetings and best wishes to all observing April 2011 as Minority Health Month.

I'd like to thank the council for recognizing Minority Health Month, as well as I'd like to recognize two members, board members of the Black Nurse Association, David Simmons and Deanna Simmons.

Again, I'd like to thank you all for recognizing the Minority Health Month, the Black Nurses Association on behalf of them when we were founded in 1990.

and we represent our mission of trying to assist individuals, particularly the minority population system with health access to the health care system as well as trying to help educate individuals about different types of health issues and providing screening within different organizations.

We also partner with several organizations within the community, not only within Charlottesville but also surrounding communities.

So we'd like to recognize them as well.

We appreciate your recognition and we hope to be partnered with other people within the future.

Thank you.

We have a few announcements.

I have two.

The first is Our Town Charlottesville Community Discussion Series.

This is our Taking Council on the Road to various neighborhoods.

Next Thursday, April 14th, we'll be at Mt.

Zion First African Baptist Church at 105 Langford Avenue at 6 o'clock until 8 o'clock.

There will be dinner provided.

It's always really good.

There'll be fun supervised activities for kids.

We urge people from the neighborhoods around Ridge Street, Burnett Commons, South First Street, anywhere kind of in the area of that church to come and tell us what we should know about your neighborhood, about your perspective on the city, things that you think we might be doing well, things you think we should do better.

Things we should stop doing.

Just share with us your ideas.

We'll have department heads for most of the departments with us.

They can answer a lot of your questions right on the spot.

This is your time to be heard.

So I hope you will all come.

The other event that I have to announce is happening right here tomorrow night at 6 o'clock.

It's a popular education forum called A Century in the Making, the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act and its effects about health care reform, featuring Joanne Grossi, who's the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Regional Director.

Come and see how the new health care law affects you.

It is right here, 6 to 8 o'clock, Charlottesville City Council Chambers.

Thank you.

Other announcements?

We'll handle that in just a moment.

Thank you.

This occurs Thursday, April 28th from 3.30 to 6 o'clock p.m. at your neighborhood elementary school.

This is a chance to register your child if you have a child who will be five years old by September 30th, 2011.

You can come meet the teachers, visit the classrooms.

To register your child, you'll need to bring his or her birth certificate, social security card, a physical, and proof of city residency.

And if you don't have all these documents, just come anyway and we'll help you get them.

Also, Charlottesville Area Transit is once again this year offering a free youth ride program for youth in the city of Charlottesville and in Albemarle County.

This is an opportunity for thousands of area students to take advantage to unlimited access to transit during the summertime.

Officials from CAT, Charlottesville Area Transit, will be visiting schools to take picture IDs.

Tuesday, March 29th at Buford and Wednesday, March 30th at Buford.

I won't go through all these, but check with your school and make sure you know when the dates are that they'll be visiting your school.

Or you can contact customer service at Charlottesville Area Transit at 970.

Okay, we're going to do matters by the public and then we'll get to your item, Mr. Huja.

As is our custom, when you come forward for matters by the public, please state your name and address and we ask you to keep your comments to three minutes.

Thank you.

My name's Randy Page.

I live at 1401 Wilford Street in the city.

I'm coming to talk about the softball fields and particularly the article that was in the paper.

And I guess I'm addressing a lot of my comments to Councilwoman Edwards and Councilman Brown.

I haven't played softball for you.

I stopped the year that Dave outran me.

I think that was two days after my knee replacement, but I'm not sure.

But I've been an advocate for the western side of the park for a long time.

And during this process, I've talked to Tim Tignor and Brian Daley on and off at times.

and try to stay abreast.

Tonight I'm coming as a taxpayer before you.

I don't feel like this is a change we need to make right now.

I think we have other options out there.

Replacing those softball fields would be

allow us only a 3.6% increase in the rectangular fields in the city.

But it would mean over 22% loss of the softball fields.

We have to consider the infrastructure of those fields, the fact that we have lights.

Where are we going to put lights that we're not going to have to go through a fight?

So those things have to be taken in consideration.

Not only that, are we going to have to purchase land to do this on?

There are a lot of wonderful activities out there, and I'm all for using these fields for other things when softball is not being played.

Small soccer fields, they would be great for small kids, which would remove them and take pressure off some of our other fields.

Girls softball is a wonderful growing sport in the area.

It would suffer a tremendous loss if those fields were taken away from them.

I don't play anymore, but I've enjoyed going over and watching those kids have a good time.

And I really do think that a lot of the things going on in this park, we have to ask the question of where will our children play?

Because there's a chance the first tee is going to be pressured onto the golf course and those things.

So we need to retain some of these things.

that we have more serious projects in town that we have to look at.

We have the dam, we have dredging coming before us, we have urban renewal, we have healthcare, we have a 17% poverty rate.

All these things deserve our attention.

And to spend a million dollars or whatever it's going to cost to move a couple softball fields and purchase land is not one we really need to make right now.

There's a new state park coming in out of Biscuit Run.

I think we can pressure the state.

I think it's the only state park they have that has no water feature.

So there needs to be things to pull people there in a couple of active rectangular fields that we could maybe go in partnership with the state to help produce would take some of our pressure off our budgets and things like that.

So I really wish you would consider holding off on this.

My name is Vanti Nguyen.

I live at 1116 Little High Street and I'm here tonight to present a petition that was posted by Joanna Salides, a member of Citizens for a Sustainable Water Plan.

I have copies of the text of the petition and of the comments that some people posted, one for each of the Councillors.

and also a partial list of the signatures.

You can go and view the signatures on the site that's written on there.

And as of six o'clock tonight, we had 362 signatures.

I'm going to read the text.

It says, we believe that new and accurate water demand and dredging estimates will show that our community's water needs can be met through maintaining our current resources, namely dredging South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.

Therefore, we ask you

to one, prioritize dredging as the first step to enlarging our water supply.

Two, aggressively pursue accurate information on which to base decisions through timely and properly written requests for proposals.

3.

Stop all progress towards an earthen dam and 4.

Commit to a water plan that is environmentally and financially conservative from both a water supply and a waste treatment perspective.

We believe that Council's recent decision in February to build a 30-foot earthen dam at Braggart Mountain Natural Area

is environmentally and financially reckless.

Inadequate information, namely an inflated water demand estimate and inaccurate estimates of dredging costs and returns has led to this decision, casting it as a false choice to suffer drought or compromise our rivers or clear cut and flood our forests at Ragged Mountain.

City residents will pay the price of this plan for years to come in the form of higher water and sewer bills, lower water quality, and the loss of significant city assets including land at Ragged Mountain Natural Area and the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir.

We want City Council to develop our water plan supply

Water plan, supply and storage based on accurate and timely information, not false premises.

Anybody here or that is watching can go to this link, SeavilleWater.info to sign this petition.

Thank you, Mr.

Moon.

Good evening.

My name is John Cruikshank.

I live at 324 Parkway Street.

I'm speaking tonight as a representative of the Piedmont Group of the Sierra Club.

Our group believes that a community's future water needs can best be met with aggressive water conservation, phased razing and repair of the dam at Ragged Mountain, and capacity-restoring dredging at the Rivanna Reservoir.

We believe this approach will preserve the integrity of the Rivanna Reservoir and minimize the environmental impact on the Ragon Mountain Natural Area, which happens to be one of the best hiking areas close to Charlottesville.

The Sierra Club recommends that information from a new demand analysis of future water needs be completed before the community water plan is finalized.

Please secure the money for dredging the Rivanna Reservoir before making any other agreements on the new water plan.

And I'm going to ask for a little audience participation.

Thank you very much.

Ma'am, gentlemen, Mayor Norris, I'm Bob Fenwick, 901 East Jefferson Street.

Almost all the talk on the budget is focused on spending, but don't forget the savings side as well.

The vast majority of us have already found ways to save on non-essentials, and the city could too.

In fact, the city used to have a program that they would incentivize, as an incentive for taxpayers finding savings, the taxpayer could share in the savings.

And I would ask that you bring that back.

That would be a step in the right direction.

The point is, in these economic times, the focus of the budget process should include how much can we save.

And the pride the city shows in a AAA bond rating would mean more to us than, now we can borrow more at a lower rate.

Savings would mean we wouldn't have to raise commercial real estate assessments, which means higher taxes, on businesses in the face of a brutal, declining real estate market

and challenging retail environment.

How in the world can assessments go up when the value of commercial real estate is going down?

Many businesses are already on the edge and this is the last thing they need.

Big or little, savings or savings, they all mount up.

Savings would mean we would have the resources to implement a robust youth activities program.

including restoring city playgrounds and parks.

Two weeks ago, two young men at this meeting floated the idea of a boxing club.

That's a great idea, and if they're watching tonight, I would love to help them with that.

A big way the city can tighten its belt is to acknowledge just how severe this economic downturn is and postpone non-essentials, big and small.

Citizens have been saying for years, since the new dam and reservoir and pipeline won't be needed for 40 years, build it in 40 years.

This is not the time to burden businesses and citizens with huge water and sewer fee increases.

Drudge now, save a ton of our money, and dam later.

In a smaller way to save, the city clock from the downtown mall, $26,000 minimum.

An interesting idea, but not now.

Not with taxpayers paying their taxes with a credit card and businesses closing their doors.

There are some who say having a clock on the downtown mall contributes to the quality of life in our city.

I would maintain the quality of life in our community is better encouraged by the laughter of children in a safe, well-maintained playground or park or picnic shelter

with their families close by talking as neighbors and friends talk.

We like to say we are a world-class city, sort of like London is a world-class city.

London has a very famous clock, Big Ben.

Thank you, Mr. Fenwick.

Rebecca Quinn, 104 4th Street.

I've got a lot so I'm going to take a deep breath.

I attended the March 22 meeting of the Rivanna Board of Directors and I wanted to publicly thank Dr. Brown for so pointedly ensuring that a number of councils expressed interest were heard and acted on at that meeting.

I especially appreciated his endorsement of additional office hours during the upcoming demand analysis project.

Thank you, Dr. Brown.

I came away from the meeting with a somewhat better feeling than I've had in a long time.

But as always with Rivanna, there are some lingering questions and concerns that I'd like to share.

Demand analysis.

This work is probably already underway.

It's on a very short timeframe.

We will all watch carefully how public involvement component is implemented, especially how comments submitted by email at public meetings and during these office hour periods that will be held after the day after public meetings are handled.

I will ask that the first public meeting the consultant provide a detailed description of the analytical methods.

We know there are multiple variables to be considered and you know you have citizens who are no slouch when it comes to math and statistics.

Dredging.

Regarding the dredging RFP and moving to the next step, I think Rivanna's staff will continue to need pushing in the right direction.

The board approved asking HDR for a cost estimate to prepare the RFP.

I'm cautiously optimistic that they will develop the scope you've indicated you expect with the flexibility we all consider to be important.

Please ask that the draft RFP be made public, available for comment, and also please reestablish the selection committee with citizen representatives that work so well when selecting HDR.

The timeline for the dam.

I asked a simple question about the timeline for actions and decisions.

The executive director declined to answer.

You may know that county members asked for such a timeline at its February meeting and again at its March special meeting.

I asked if it had been developed and if so, when would it be available?

And if it hasn't been developed, was staff told not in a public meeting to not develop a timeline?

Next, DAM and meeting and coordination with stakeholders and regulatory agencies will be ongoing through March and April.

That phrase comes from Rivanna's report on ongoing project.

I asked another question, also not answered.

Which stakeholders?

and when were or when will those meetings be held.

Concern about rates.

The board expressed a concern about the impact of paying for the Woolen Mills pumping station if the higher cost option was selected, which this board supported.

It comes as no surprise that I wanted to jump up and say, ah, you could lift a lot of burden on taxpayers if we don't build a new dam and pipeline.

When will Rivanna estimate what the rates will be, what you, the city, will have to pay, not what individuals will have to pay, including the long-term costs and debt?

So three things for you to follow up.

Please re-establish the committee to review the RFP and select the dredging contractor.

Find out who are these stakeholders.

Have you had further consultation?

Has the public had further consultation?

And lastly, when will Rivanna estimate the impact of the dam and pipeline and that on the rates it charges the city and the county?

Don't you think we should have that sooner rather than later?

Thank you, Ms. Crane.

Scott Beyer, 2556 Summit Ridge Trail Good evening, Council.

I know construction of the SRO will begin soon, which is good, but before it's finished, I wanted to discuss how the way we build around it could reduce its potential negative effects.

And to do this, I wanted to cite some national trends.

In most cities, SROs get clustered with other social services just outside downtown.

They're placed together here because their users benefit from downtown access and because it's thought somewhat cynically that concentrating such services downtown might contain them from nearby residential areas.

But this strategy has often backfired.

Not only do service users end up entering adjacent areas anyhow,

but they often hurt the one where they're actually located.

This is because social services by nature attract people with mental illnesses and addictions and their areas often become crime ridden with this increasing proportional to the level of concentration.

This has reached an extreme with Skid Row in LA where the clustering of dozens of social services has created one of the most dangerous square miles in the U.S.

But it finds lesser extremes in cities all over the nation, large and small, many of whose downtowns have thrived enough to improve adjacent areas only to hit a wall once reaching areas heavy in social services.

But these areas can work, and it's when they're surrounded by an intensity of other uses that counterbalance some of their effects.

Greenwich Village has many SROs, but it also has two universities and thousands of market rate residential units.

And this diversity has made it one of the premier urban neighborhoods in the country.

So in Charlottesville, I know we won't be clustering services, but our SRO at 60 units will be denser than any nearby residential building.

So it's essential that future projects around it are allowed equal density to achieve this counterbalance.

We can do this on one hand by upzoning the Preston and West Main corridors, but more specifically by finally encouraging rather than discouraging further development across the street.

We're already aware of how urban renewal wiped out an entire community here without replacing it with anything for two decades.

and we're also aware of the prospective condominium on McIntyre and Main that was voted down a few years ago.

So it's like we've been fixed on keeping the space a mostly empty parking lot with a smattering of businesses.

But I can speak from experience in saying that when large vacant land like this juxtaposes high density SROs, particularly outside downtown,

It can foster petty crimes that lead to worse ones.

And this process can bring down entire neighborhoods.

Thank you.

James Richardson, 115 East High Street.

And I think what you'll see from the photos is that in a couple cases the signs have been installed directly in the middle of the sidewalk, in one case leaving barely three feet of space between the curb and the sign itself, which I think by ADA standards is

barely over the minimum.

So on one level that's a concern of mine that the signs were installed probably improperly, but on another level it sort of works contrary to what the city council is trying to achieve in terms of improving pedestrian mobility.

There's been a lot of talk about that in terms of allocating money from the budget to improve pedestrian mobility.

And so I think what I'd like to see going forward is one, if we could somehow or another fix the existing installation problems.

And then two, on a bigger scale, to look at how the planning and engineering processes work to make sure that they are working together with the city's goals of improving pedestrian mobility.

Thank you, Mr. Richardson.

Yes, I have two issues I want to discuss, but I think I'll just discuss The Haven instead.

I had heard that there was some controversy surrounding The Haven, issues with funding, for example.

I know The Haven had asked for $45,000

...funding from the city for which it only received a fraction.

And I know some noise has been made about the Haven's function and also the kind of people who would frequent that type of place.

but I believe that it's important to recognize that at a time when the middle class is falling apart basically I had read recently, I forget which publication but it's a reputable one that one in four children in this country is either likely to suffer from poverty or is already impoverished and

at a time also when the average American family is struggling much more so than the Great Depression to make ends meet.

I believe that it's important to have resources such as the Haven available, not just to help the poor people in the community, but to help anyone who may need it.

Elizabeth Breeden I'm Elizabeth Breeden and I live at 981 Old Lynchburg Road.

For 25 years I sold sculpture out of a studio and then for the last 10 years I followed the directive of a group of people who sat at my kitchen table and said it ought to be easy to put art on the streets of Charlottesville.

I think you get a good deal for that, but I think that at that time I was also a substitute teacher at Jefferson School and if someone had asked me ten years ago if I wanted money for art or if I wanted money for preschool, hands down I would have answered preschool.

After ten years exploring the value of public art, however, I believe that it's dead even, that I would not want a child not to have art in their life.

and to explore the expressions of the spirit that that allows any more than I would not want a child not to read.

You have before you tonight a chance to purchase a sculpture for one-fifth due to the rapt negotiations of Mr. Huja.

One-fifth of the value of the sculpture.

I'm here to assure you as the manager of Art in Place that it is well-crafted.

The craftsmanship is exquisite.

The maintenance is minimal.

I'm not at all worried about this piece and its longevity on the streets of Charlottesville.

It also has a value to lift the spirit by telling the world that a butterfly, the very symbol of transformation, can also be created by weighty stone.

So I really enjoy its portrayal.

Thank you, Ms. Breeden.

I'm Brandon Collins, 536 Meade Avenue.

I've lived in Charlottesville all my life.

and I've got a couple of things to talk to you about and maybe some stuff on the budget if I can get it in in my three minutes.

First off, I wanted to just push you to accept and think about the process that went into the zoning changes for the music halls.

It was a very open process and I think everybody who participated in that is feeling pretty comfortable with

with what the Planning Commission came up with.

So please keep that in mind.

A lot of folks worked really hard on that, and I hope you remember that.

One thing that I'm not so sure is a really popular topic this evening, but it's this issue of renaming the pavilion.

You know, this is going on all over the country.

You know, everything out there has a label of it of some kind.

a corporate label.

This is not the city we want, and I think a progressive council might think about, let's stop this trend here.

Let's not let this happen here.

I know it's not the biggest issue facing you, but it is an important one.

And these are the reasons I hope that you get into local government.

So I'd urge you to maybe take that out of the consent agenda and maybe rethink that.

And along those lines, if you want to be a progressive city council, please think about why you got in local government.

Again, it's not too late to rethink the water supply plan.

Dredge first, then think about the dam later.

There's three of you here.

I think you got in government to make some positive changes in the world.

You can do that on a local level.

You only get this decision once.

This may be the biggest decision you make in your life.

Please rethink that.

And the same goes for Parkway in a lot of ways.

That said, you know, Mr. Carr is right on the money about the Haven.

You know, what's it going to hurt to give them all the money they asked for?

The Haven is really just a band-aid on a sick society.

You probably can't change the whole society in Charlottesville.

There's some things you can do, and maybe we can talk about that during the budget hearing.

To say you're not sure that they're completely efficient or some nonsense like that is just ridiculous.

They are doing good out there.

They need the money.

It's a tiny bit of money compared to what you deal with.

Hi, Jacob Wolf, 614 Monticello Avenue.

I'm here to talk to you about the music zoning changes tonight.

First I just want to thank Jim Tolbert for his work shepherding forward this proposal.

I think those of us in the music community started out with very pessimistic opinion about our chances of getting some kind of change that reflected what we wanted.

But in fact, after a very productive

and constructive and democratic series of meetings we really have arrived at something that is about 90% of what we were looking to have happen.

Now in your agenda it does say that this passed the Planning Commission unanimously and that's not quite accurate.

There was one dissenting opinion and it wasn't someone who was concerned about the effect on the neighbors.

It was someone who thought that it should be more open, that there should be more by right use, that we shouldn't stifle music in any way, if possible.

So I urge you to think about that.

There are two specific areas of concern that I have.

One is the downtown extended area, which is home to businesses like X Lounge and Alhamra,

X Lounge I'm not so sure about, but Albemarle I know does already have music at that restaurant, live amplified music, and so far it's really been no problem.

I would propose a compromise because I think that this is the ideal test case for the provisional use permits, which

As you know, I think there are three permit levels at issue here.

There's a special use permit, which costs $1,500 to apply for.

And that's what's currently proposed for the downtown extended area.

and then there's the provisional use permit which is supposed to be, you know, if you comply with the rules and you don't bug your neighbors and you don't have complaints then you're allowed to continue on with that kind of activity.

I think that is, I think the provisional use permit is exactly what this situation is for.

Based on the location of these businesses they could be, there is some potential that they are up against residential zones that might complain

and I think that we should do our best to facilitate that provisional use process to let that work itself out.

The second zone and I know that no one wants to think about it is Belmont.

Really what's happening here is we've opened it up and like I said this is 90% of what we want.

Most businesses are going to be by right use from now on if this passes.

Really, in fact, this is only singling out one or two businesses over in Belmont, one of which has a singer-songwriter night on a weekly basis.

It's kind of absurd to tell them that they can't do that.

It's not generating really any noise outside of the business.

I understand that there is potential for problems, but I think that this is where the provisional use permit, that is its purpose.

I know that I'm short on time here.

You're out of time.

I'm out of time.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I would like to close by asking what kind of cookies are these?

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Wohl.

I'm Bailey Elizabeth.

I live at 613 Bluntam Avenue.

I've been working with Jacob and others on the music zoning issue since January.

And basically, I think that what the zoning board has presented to you guys is exactly what the music community wants at this point.

Any further changes that we feel are necessary, we're not going to mess with for a little while.

I personally need to take a break.

I don't know how you guys do it all the time.

Other things, I really, really strongly encourage you not to allow the pavilion to be called the Intellos Pavilion.

That sucks.

I don't want corporate sponsorship of anything in this town.

It's what makes downtown special.

I dislike the fact that we have an Urban Outfitters on the mall.

I think the mall should be for local businesses only, but I know that that doesn't work well, so whatever.

And the other thing, if the option is to put a $25,000 clock on the mall or give The Haven more money,

people, not a clock, feed people, give them jobs, give them places to shower and like involve themselves in a local community.

That's it.

Thank you very much.

That concludes matters by the public.

We will have a chance at the end of the meeting if anybody would like to offer additional comments.

We'll now open the meeting up to council member responses to matters by the public who would like to get us started.

First, comments by Bob Fenwick about budget-saving ideas and incentive to the public to provide those ideas.

We ought to explore that.

I think we used to do that before, and we ought to encourage that.

Second comment by James Richardson on sign and sidewalk.

I sent that information to our city manager to look into that.

It is, I guess what bothers me more than anything else is that if you can imagine a sign in the middle of a car driving lane, right in the middle, or halfway middle, you'll never do that ever.

willingly do that on the pedestrian sidewalk.

So I would like to, I think that should be treated also equally as a time mode of transportation and safe and convenient.

So I would like you to make those corrections if you can and not do that again.

I would, just because several people alluded to it, I don't know if we want to pull the pavilion out of the consent agenda or just schedule a conversation about it, but I would defer my comments to that if we're going to do that.

but I have other comments.

So I'll skip mine until those comments for the moment.

Let's see.

Oh, about, let's see.

I just wanted to thank Randy Page for your well researched and helpful comments about the fields.

I think that those are some interesting numbers and I found that very compelling so thank you.

and Mr. Fenwick.

I also really like the taxpayer-found savings idea.

I think that's a great idea.

But I did just want to point out that you talked about that we raise money by raising assessments and we don't.

Assessments are supposed to be actual value of property.

We don't raise those in order to raise more money.

That's something that

theoretically happens independently of the need for revenue.

So just want to make sure that that's understood by people who might be listening.

And I also suggest that you talk to Wes Bellamy about the boxing club.

That's your man.

To James Richardson, I fully agree with the idea of how it looks about how we value our pedestrians by putting things in the sidewalks.

But the thing that I found most useful

was the idea of trying to figure out kind of a public way to find out how those processes work because I think that that's often where we get bogged down is when when people don't know the process or when we don't know the process things can happen and we don't quite understand why and I think that the more transparency the better and that I'm not quite sure exactly what that

comes out too, but that resonated with me.

To Brian Carr and actually a couple of other people who mentioned The Haven, I just wanted to let you know that The Haven has withdrawn its request for funding.

Not because they were upset that we didn't give them enough, but because they understood that this was a year in which we had frozen funding to nonprofits and there were a lot of other nonprofits

who didn't apply because they understood that there was a freeze on our funding for nonprofits this year and they felt, the Haven folks felt that now that they understood that that they didn't want to be kind of cutting in line and so they have withdrawn their request and I'll say that I was so impressed by the

You know the community mindedness of that move that I actually did make a donation to the Haven which anyone else is Welcome to do and also to all those other nonprofits who are not being supported by the city Consider looking in your own heart and in your own bank account and making donations.

A couple of comments.

To Randy Page, I've also appreciated the information about the softball fields, and I'd be open to doing more homework.

So I appreciated that.

And just to say that I was never selected to play softball, while I was always the last one picked.

So just keep that in mind.

To Scott Beyer,

Brandon Collins, will you raise your hand, Brandon?

And Brian, will you raise your hand in the back so Scott can see you?

He's sitting in the back.

I'd like the three of you to meet at the butterfly to have a full discussion about the diversity and ideas that you all have about SROs and homelessness and

Brandon's spirit about the need for the haven and Brian's insight just to get a different perspective about the chosen location for the SRO and the benefit that it will have long term.

And that's what city councils are for, an opportunity to express your opinion and now I'm making sure it's a chance for people who may not otherwise have an opportunity to meet each other to have insightful and I hope a lively discussion

to Jacob Wolf and to Brandon.

I just wanted to say Brandon's name again because Jim Tolbert gets a lot, but it's rare that Jim Tolbert has extended a thank you.

So I wanted just to echo that moment.

Dr. Brown?

I don't have much to add.

On the softball issue, I'll comment to my friend Randy Page that I kind of brought this up at the work session because I felt like we'd actually never made a council decision on how to program those fields and I felt like moving forward we ought to close that loop.

I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority.

I think I spent too many years being mediocre at softball and then discovered my love of soccer coaching kids.

And so to me, the needs in the community, I like to look at what the kids need more than what the adults need.

And so I have more of an interest in rectangular fields.

But I don't think I represent counsel on that.

And I think there's good arguments on both sides.

And I think, as you can see here, you made a compelling case.

And the only thing I'll mention is I'll also spend a little time correcting Bob Fenwick.

He said that taxpayers are paying taxes with credit cards.

There's a sign in the budget office.

If you want to use your credit card, come see us.

I have a few comments myself.

First of all, I want to thank Mr.

Page for your comments.

There's a quote that's been missing from the recent discussions about this topic, which I think goes right to the heart of the matter, which is a quote from Bill Mueller, who's the director of the Soccer Association of Charles Albemarle, who would be the primary beneficiary of swapping out softball fields for rectangular fields.

and Bill Mueller said at an event that Mr.

Page attended and others attended that he does not support taking softball away from McIntyre, even though soccer would benefit from such a move, but he would like to see the city and the county work closer together, find additional rectangular field space.

elsewhere and I think that's exactly the right approach.

Secondly, thank you to Ms. Nguyen for bringing forward the petition and I thank Ms. Salidas for prompting that effort to keep us on task about

Water supply alternative and in my mind preferable water supply solutions.

Scott Byer, your use of the term SRO I think differs slightly from what Virginia Supportive Housing builds and manages as SROs here in Virginia.

I'm well aware of the kind of SROs you're talking about in Greenwich Village and in LA, which is something of a different beast.

Actually, in Virginia's supportive housing, what they build are apartment buildings that have on-site security, on-site support services.

It's not a flophouse, which I think is what you often see in some other big cities.

And in actuality, in a number of the cases in Virginia where they've built and managed these SROs,

reduced crime in the neighborhood and actually improved the neighborhood.

But I get your basic point.

Let's see.

Jacob and Bailey and all the folks in your group, I just give you all kinds of kudos for just doing your homework, researching this issue, organizing forums, mobilizing people, working with Mr. Tolbert and his staff.

You did a great job.

And I think it was an excellent example of what citizens can do when you get involved.

Sink your teeth into an issue and you can actually make positive change happen.

And I did want to reassure you, you brought up the issue of the downtown extended and how it would be a great test case for a provisional use permit.

And actually the proposal before us tonight does have that as a provisional use permit.

So no special use permits anywhere in any of the ones we're looking at tonight.

And we'll get to the pavilion.

I don't know if we need to have it pulled from the consent agenda if we could have a discussion about it.

It doesn't matter.

So we'll get to that issue in a moment and we can talk about that.

But thank you to all who came and spoke tonight.

It is my pleasure to announce the ordinance for tree commission.

It is a long time in coming.

There are nine people who will let people get off.

Council is appointing nine new people to the tree commission.

Martha Durfek, Bill Emory, Robin Haynes,

Thank you Mr. Huja.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Ms. Edwards.

All right, and it carries unanimously.

Thank you very much.

On our consent agenda tonight, we have A, the minutes of March 21st.

B is an appropriation of $95,000, U.S. Department of Agriculture, USDA Summer Food Service Program, second of two readings.

Item C is an appropriation of $92,029 for the Police Department, Insurance Recovery and Miscellaneous Revenue and Change, second of two readings.

Item D, a resolution of $6,000, purchase of Azure sculpture from 2009-2010 Art in Place show, first of one reading.

Item E, Resolution SUP, Special Use Permit for 1417 Emmett Street, 1st of 1 reading.

Item F, Resolution CDBG, Community Development Block Grant and Home Funding, 1st of 1 reading.

Item G, Resolution of Transfer Funds to Wayfinding Account, $23,500, 1st of 1 reading.

Item H, an Ordinance Voting Precinct Reconfiguration, 2nd of 2 readings.

Item I, an Ordinance Tax Exemption for Disabled Veterans, 2nd of 2 readings.

Item J, an Ordinance, Overlay Zoning Restriction for 233 4th Street NW, Individually Protected Property Designation, otherwise known as the Jefferson School, first of two readings.

Item K, an Ordinance, Telecommunications Franchise, Moonstream, first of two readings.

And Item L, Resolution on Pavilion Naming Rights, first of one reading will be removed and added to the end of our agenda tonight.

I have a comment on item D. I don't want to pull that out of the, but I would like to make a comment.

Sure, please do.

Staff sent us a procedure for designating buying future art, and there's one minor change I would like to suggest that it says that art in place should be determining what the price should be for the new sculptures.

I don't think that is necessary because our place is pretty liberal with our money.

In terms of, are you recommending just strike that language?

Would you replace it with something?

Nothing.

Okay, well that's actually not before us tonight, as I understand it.

Great.

Okay.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

It carries unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Are you going to have it really issued?

At the end.

Okay, thank you.

Hi, good evening everybody.

We have a really quick PowerPoint presentation just to go over Council's amendments that you have made and some small staff administrative amendments that have been made.

So tonight is on Council's budget as we know it, although we already know there might be one change.

Can everybody hear me?

So as I said before, this is actually city council's budget.

We've had several work sessions.

We've already had one public hearing.

Council's made several budget amendments.

Staff has a few amendments that we are also recommending happen for fiscal year 2012.

So we have a few slides that just show what those amendments are.

So this is the revenue and the general fund.

It started out at $142.9 million.

We actually had several additions in revenues, a couple of good news items from the state.

Tax home bank stock is going to be, we're projecting it's going to be up $198,000.

State aid for police protection is up $144,000.

Tax recordation receipts, which is on deeds, contrasts, et cetera, is going up 89,000.

And then the city county revenue sharing item that you see, $560,000, is to cover the capital increase, budget increases council made, which you'll see in a slide in just a moment.

Decreases in revenues include personal property tax down $52,000, parks and recreation revenue down $12,000, and then two items for city-county revenue sharing on the operating budget and economic downturn fund, which basically, again, covered the capital improvement increase.

So the total revenue amendments for 2012 are $368,137, which brings the general fund up to $143.3 million for fiscal year 2012.

These are the expenditure items.

Increases include a transfer to reserve account.

When the state finalized their budget, the schools actually received additional dollars from the state in the amount of $670,000.

We decided to take those funds, reduce our contribution to them that would go to their operating budget, and put those in a reserve account to be used at a future time, part of the 13 budget, for instance.

We've all heard about the

Capital needs they're going to have coming up, so we decided to put that aside in a reserve account to set aside for a future time.

And then there's three items that council added on the capital budget side.

Additional funds for the housing fund of $410,000.

Bicycle infrastructure increased by $50,000.

And council is going to fund the CHS turf field at $100,000.

Outside agencies, Albemarle, Charlottesville Regional Jail, they have a revised budget that increased our contribution by $42,000.

Last week, council decided to fund FAR's request of $25,000, which basically supplemented their loss in CDBG funds that they would have received from the city.

Legal Aid Justice Center is going to see an increase of $42,000.

TJ Hack the Haven.

This is still on here.

We didn't find out until 5.30 this evening that they were actually withdrawing their request.

So if council wishes to remove this item, our recommendation to them would be to put that back into their council priority initiatives funding.

And I'm sure we'll have a discussion about that in just a little bit.

And then the Paramount Theater Council increased funding by $32,500.

And this isn't really an increase in funding.

It's a little complicated.

They've provided the parent out with money and it's part of the year end.

They would give them an additional amount in equal, which basically equals their tax payment for the year.

This recognizes the payment all at once rather than doing it two times a year.

Council also expressed an interest in joining the National League of Cities and that cost around $4,000 and that's based on our population.

Police Department, this is an administrative amendment.

They're going to be building a locker room and a roll call room in the Market Street garage during the summer.

This covers their HVAC fees for that space.

And you'll see an offsetting decrease in this amount on the next slide.

Council also decided to fund a $25,000 matching grant for the 200th anniversary celebration.

What that means is that the committee would have to come up with that amount of money, the same amount of money to actually obtain that money.

So that will be ramping up.

As you know, it's going to be a big celebration next year.

on decreases.

This is the local contribution to schools.

You saw that as an increase on the other slide of the $670,000 economic downturn fund.

We reduced by 231 to help accommodate increases in the capital budget.

This is the offsetting police department HVAC fee 220206 amount.

And then council priority initiatives was reduced by 1202846 to fund some of those agencies that you saw on the previous slide.

And then finally, the Community Design Center.

That basically zeroes them out.

As you may or may not know, they are no longer in operation, so there's no need to provide them with funding for the next fiscal year.

So total expenditure amendments match revenue of $368,137 for a total budget of $143.3 million.

and on the capital budget side, you saw a lot of these numbers on the previous slides.

So we're increasing the capital budget by $560,000 on the revenue side and we're increasing it by the same on the expenditure side with these three projects, the housing fund, bicycle and the turf field for a total CIP next year of $24 million.

This is one that I inadvertently left off last week.

This is another administrative amendment just in the warehouse fund.

The warehouse fund is not part of the general fund.

It's a separate fund altogether.

This basically recognizes what they would pay in utilities.

They pay their own utilities.

It's based on square footage and a recommendation from Public Works Department.

So they have, we're increasing the expenditures.

They have more than enough revenue being budgeted to cover that amount.

So those are the amendments that council has decided on and what they're voting on tonight.

Again, I think we're going to have some discussion about what to do with the Haven money.

And again, they can amend that and put that back into their reserve or anywhere else they would like to place that.

So as of now, we have canceled the April 7th work session unless we decide tonight that we need to hold that work session for some reason.

And then the final budget approval is next Tuesday at 5.30 in the second floor conference room.

Thank you, Ms. Beauregard.

Any questions for Ms. Beauregard before we open the public hearing?

Hearing none, I will now open the public hearing.

We have three individuals who have signed up to speak.

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

And we ask you to keep your comments to three minutes.

May Norris and members of the city council,

My name is Paul Longway.

I live at 1410 Grady Avenue here in the city.

I again urge the council to take the plight of the homeless and their deliberations on the upcoming budget.

With Possum closing down with the arrival of Warm Weather, the only social slash religious organization providing overnight housing is the Salvation Army.

and there are simply not enough available beds out to Salvation Army to house all the homeless people if all the homeless people were to seek shelter.

I can understand that some people can be upset by the presence and the behavior of some of the homeless, but in the United States there is no reason to have a permanent underclass of homeless persons.

and the homeless population is not monolithic.

There's many people that are homeless because they have mental health issues, they're addicted, but there's also a lot of people becoming homeless simply because they've lost their jobs and they've exhausted their unemployment and all other resources.

And becoming homeless is something that can happen to an awful lot of people.

If I were to lose my job and not get another job and exhaust my unemployment,

You know, I could very well find myself in that position myself.

It's not a moral stigma to be homeless.

You know, there's millions of, I'll say hundreds of thousands of people that are losing their homes because they've lost their jobs and they're being foreclosed.

And I don't think that the majority of people who are homeless are there because they choose to do so.

You know, and people say, get a job.

The economy is maybe improving, but it's not rising back.

There's simply not enough jobs for people who do want to work.

I again urge the council to appropriate $2 million of last year's $3.5 million budget surplus to be made available to non-profit and religious organizations to provide additional beds and other services to the homeless and whatever the reason for the free zone non-profit organizations I think council

should revote that $19,000 contribution to the haven because there's different kinds of nonprofits.

If you're supporting art groups, if you're supporting galleries, I can see a freeze on perhaps their funding for the year and an economic downturn.

But with the homeless, we're talking about human beings, and I believe it is the function of government to help people who cannot help themselves who have no other course of resources.

Thank you, Mr. Maloney.

Brandon Collins, 536 Meade Avenue.

I think Mr. Long really hit the nail on the head and echo everything he has to say.

You know, if there is money available from a surplus from last year, please think about what is a priority here in Charlottesville.

I know you've talked about affordable housing as being the biggest issue, the biggest thing that you think about.

And it seems to be reflected in the budget for the most part.

But think about what could you do if you took that money, the amount of money you have budgeted for affordable housing, and doubled that.

I don't think that would be such a strain on the taxpayers or on anybody.

I think there's room for that.

Why not double it?

You're already doing some really great things.

You could have twice the great things that you already have and it makes a big difference.

I keep seeing in the budget the economic downturn fund.

There are people in this city who have lived their whole lives in an economic downturn.

It's not just when the economy started tanking a few years ago.

It's been like this for a long time.

We have a lot of people who suffer out here and you guys have a chance to really do something about that.

I know things are tight.

I think that's all the more reason to use the money you have right now dealing with these issues, dealing with the homeless.

Yes, go ahead and give the Haven the money they wanted.

Especially if there's money there available for it.

It's greatly needed.

And then the other thing is public transportation.

I think if you're serious about being a green city, continue to think about expanding public transportation, full service on Sundays, late night service.

There's a lot of good reasons for doing that.

But please, please, you know, right now is the time to be thinking about the lowest parts in our society here in Charlottesville.

Thank you, Mr. Collins.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Councillors.

Colette Hall, 101 Robertson

Tonight I dare to broach a sacred cow.

Affordable housing.

And it appears now that I will have to bring some balance to this argument.

First came homeowners relief for the elderly and disabled.

Understandable.

and then the homeowners relief for low income.

The previous council established a dedicated fund for affordable housing which has been increased each year for four years and now budgeted in the millions of dollars.

Land was bought for an SRO building.

Home grants and block grants were assigned to this project which therefore removed monies from other housing projects.

Home grants totaling an estimated 130

130,000 annually will be reallocated to the SRO for 10 years, which equals 1,300,000 to help run the SRO.

The SRO was supposed to be run by Virginia Supportive Housing, but it looks like the city is now assuming a larger portion of this responsibility.

In this current budget, another million dollar increase to the Charlottesville Housing Fund for affordable housing.

Recently at a February meeting for Charlottesville Real Development and Housing Authority, Charlottesville allocated 1.4 million funds for public housing.

The Daily Progress reported that $670,000 is now coming from the state to the city school system.

Ms. Beauregard spoke about that.

This frees up funds and of that, $410,000 will be added to the $1 million currently budget for the Charlottesville Housing Fund.

Last but not by no means least,

the future renovating, raising and rebuilding of public housing which is estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

Who will pay for that?

In a recent meeting, you, the City Council, has committed to pay for at least most of this.

When will it end?

From 2002 to fiscal year 2012,

Our budget went from almost $64 million to almost $143 million, a 38.8% increase.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Holm.

Doreen Wilson would like to speak.

All right, we will then close the public hearing.

Okay, we will then move forward with the Ordinance.

The first Ordinance is the Annual Tax Levy, the first of this before us tonight on the first of two readings.

Nothing more than I made a couple of weeks ago about the Tax Levy.

This is just for the property tax levy.

Is there a motion to approve the tax levy?

Alright, it's been moved and seconded.

It will carry forward to our next meeting on second reading.

Next we have an ordinance annual budget appropriation for fiscal year 2012 before us tonight.

First two readings.

As Ms. Szakos indicated that Haven has withdrawn its request.

I felt like the email that they sent withdrawing their request was sincere.

I think it wasn't that they were hoping we would still fund them.

I think that they really feel that they don't want to be in that position to take that money.

What I'd like to do is read the email so you all can understand what we're talking about.

And it's from Kaki Demilk.

Greetings all.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to share information about the Haven's successes and challenges at last week's budget work session.

I appreciated your questions and an ensuing discussion.

After some reflection, however, TJAC has decided to withdraw its request for direct allocation of city funds in deference to our fellow nonprofits.

One of our stated goals is excellent working relationships and effective collaborations.

We believe we stand a better chance at achieving that by avoiding the appearance of impropriety and instead building sustainability with our partners.

Thank you for your support and your consideration.

Dr. Brown, any thoughts?

It's funny, I have a couple of different thoughts.

I was somewhat skeptical of funding of The Haven and I felt like we ended up with a good compromise.

But having said that, to me there seems like there's something wrong with them having a need, having stated to us, getting us to agree to fund that need, and then through no fault of their own deciding we're really not going to do that this year because we don't like the politics of it.

Well the politics of it are our fault.

They're our fault because we basically, even though we might have told the agencies we weren't doing any additional funding,

You know, we have a large amount of money in a council reserve that we put in there so we would have the option to fund things that weren't listed.

I think that's exactly the kind of thing it was meant for.

So I actually would just as soon as see us say,

We may have messed up in terms of not creating a level playing field for all the nonprofits, but that's not the Haven's fault.

There are at least five non-profits that I know of and they're not art for rich people projects.

They're human services projects.

They're things that deal with children, especially the highest risk children are in our community.

This is Child Abuse Prevention Month and one of these organizations worked very hard on preventing child abuse.

Who

did not apply for that funding this year.

I just think that Haven didn't understand that and that may be our fault, but I think they understand it now and I think that they're doing this in good faith and I think if we want to look later in the year at when we're

working on our policy of how we support nonprofits.

I think we need to be as generous as we can because it's important work.

But I would really urge that we not do it under the circumstances.

I think also what came out through the work session and it wasn't clear by the television reports was that it was given the impression that if they didn't receive this particular funding the haven would close and that's not true.

The haven is not at risk for closing and according to the executive director they will be participating in the

process in the fall for applying for funds in the same way that the other nonprofits will be.

And that's where the struggle was in terms of what's the process and what should be respected.

And the question that came from one of the nonprofits is how did we come to fund Legal Aid and FAR and what was the thinking behind that.

The thinking behind it, at least for me, was that FARS, especially the Intern Leadership Program, the adults in that program have children that participate in other programs around the city.

And the Leadership Program helps the parents to become better parents and stronger participants in community activities.

It's the same with legal aid.

The children of the parents who come from our low-income communities, when those children, when the parents of those children need legal services, they go to legal aid.

There's not any other place for the parents to go to.

So I was thinking about foreign legal aid in terms of

A broader brush of serving the entire, serving our community.

Now that doesn't speak to the process in respecting all the hard work that is now going into making sure that we don't get to this place again.

It's for the reason why we're here in the first place.

There has to be a better way

to be equitable with the way the funds are provided, not only with the process but with what's also available.

I think we should honor their request to withdraw.

And also, I just really believe that when anything bad happens, there's an opportunity out of it.

been the most difficult budget process we've had.

You know what, if we had had this budget process the first year I was on council I might have bailed out a long time ago.

And also with that comment, Colette, I don't want you to think that your words were not heard.

and you, and again I'm going to echo what you told me, Colette Hall said, the most important thing and difficult thing that you will ever do will be balancing the budget.

And you were absolutely correct.

But I'd like to believe that what comes out of this Haven discussion is a broader discussion of how we address homelessness and poverty.

And that homelessness cannot be just in a vacuum because it sometimes creates people with stereotypes

about what homelessness means.

And I think that's important for us to recognize that it's a broader issue.

And so homelessness, poverty, we've had a poverty work session.

We've had a discussion about Bank On that we need to just follow through with that.

And I think it might be a good time to again have a second poverty work session to see how we can address this.

My only concern in dropping this appropriation for the Haven was that one of the conditions that we had attached to, I want to make sure that one of the conditions that we had attached to that appropriation still gets honored, which was we had asked the Haven to work with city staff and other key stakeholders on

the development of a downtown satellite employment center which I still think is critical in terms of helping not just people who are homeless but anybody in our community who is in need of work to be able to access the jobs that are available and access the training resources that are available

Not everybody has easy access out to the One Stop Center out on Hydraulic Road and I would still like to see the Haven and the city staff and the Piedmont Workforce Network put their heads together to see if we can create such a satellite workforce center, employment center.

Alright, well I'm hearing majority sentiment on council for removing the allocation for the haven from the budget and but obviously there's strong sentiment on council for continuing this discussion as Ms. Edwards eloquently said about poverty and homelessness in our community and the best way to address that in a holistic way.

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to take a moment to thank our budget team for putting together this budget.

Leslie Beauregard, Aubrey Watts, Bernard Ray, Ryan Davidson, and Rick Berwick have been working very hard since the fall and all of our department heads who put together their budgets with their staff.

I think we've put together, as I've mentioned a couple of times, a very good budget that sets a solid foundation for us but also recognizes the economic times that we find ourselves in.

And they've been incredibly responsive when we've kind of come up with things that were sort of hard to do, like, oh, we need an extra $400,000 for the housing fund.

OK. And figured it out.

Well, and more importantly, I think responsive to members of the public.

Absolutely.

Whenever they had a question about the budget, I mean, there's always a response within 24 hours, it seems, which is incredible.

Alright, well I'd be happy to entertain a motion to approve the ordinance as amended.

It's been moved and seconded and I will carry forward to our next meeting.

Thank you very much.

Next item on our agenda is a report and resolution regarding Belmont Bridge sidewalk repair.

This is before us tonight and the first of one reading.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council.

This is an item that has been before you several times.

We, as you know, have a sidewalk on the east side of the Belmont Bridge that is in really bad condition.

The Belmont Bridge is scheduled for or is going through the design process for replacement

We don't know when that may happen, although we're getting some good feelers from the state that if we get our plans ready by spring, there may be some money available to help make that happen.

So it may be sooner than later, but at this point, the way the projections are, it could be four hundred years even.

But they are telling us that that may not be the case, but we don't know for sure.

Because of that, we got estimates to look at repairing the sidewalk on the east side.

And as you may recall, those estimates were in the vicinity of $300,000 plus to repair it correctly.

And we felt like that was not a good expenditure at this time given the fact that we don't know how long it will last and we might spend the money and then it could be as little as

you know a year from now it could be as long as five or six years from now before it would be torn down but it will be torn down so we would lose that investment.

We came to you with a couple proposals for fencing and you indicated that you wanted us to go back to the drawing board and look at better looking fencing and a better project.

We have done that, we also met with the

the pedestrian safety bike committee to talk about it and when we had our first meeting or two meetings on the Belmont Bridge project we've talked with all the people that have come about it and while it's not unanimous support that closing it is the best idea there is an understanding that closing it at this time is the appropriate thing to do.

The pedestrian surveys we did on the bridge indicated that less than 5% of the total pedestrian traffic on the bridge uses the east side anyway at this point.

So what we are doing is we are proposing to you is that we put a fence up that is in your package.

You'll see is an aluminum fence.

It is a black fence.

It would run for approximately 600 feet where it would tie into the ends of the bridge, have signage on it that the sidewalk is closed that would be permanently affixed so it doesn't blow down.

and the heavy winds we've had.

And we think it would be much more attractive.

It would be anchored back to the bridge every 50 feet to the bridge railing.

But by being aluminum, it is much lighter and will not have the impact of the footprint and the attachment on the sidewalk than any other.

That was one of our chief concerns.

You asked that I meet with

Counselors Huja and Szakos and let them look at it.

We did that and they have recommended that this is a much better approach.

The total cost is in the vicinity of $14,000 and we would recommend that we proceed that way also.

We also looked at two other options for trying to make the bridge appearance nicer.

One of them was trying to put flower baskets on the bridge

and after studying that our Parks Department recommended that we not go that route because of the difficulty in watering the number of times it would have to be watered and the safety to their crews in trying to access that to water it.

They felt like in that heat island that

that you would have to water any flowers because of what you would have to plant them in more than once a day basically in the summer to keep them alive.

And the only way to do it would be to water them from the travel lane because of the supports back to the bridge railing.

You wouldn't be able to walk behind it to get water in there.

So they recommended we not do that and we agreed.

The other is a request that we look at art in place or some kind of artwork.

And there are two reasons that we've recommended we not do that.

One is that if it's anything that's our typical art in place, the weight of those art objects and the support are heavier than we think that the sidewall will support at this time.

We just don't feel like it's appropriate to put any weight, concentrated weight anywhere on that

that sidewalk.

If you walk it you can see the holes, you can see the issues we're having now and just as we go along the longer we go the more challenging that's going to become.

What we do want to do is a suggestion by Ms. Szakos and that is to go in with a thin layer of concrete and try to make the appearance better.

It won't fill the holes but we can skim it and hopefully make it look better from the street anyway as you drive by.

The other concern about the art

that our traffic engineer had was we already have a lot of traffic issues on there with moving with lanes merging with the difficulty there of getting through that bridge the heavy traffic and two concerns that she had one is that placing art of any kind there would be a distraction that's right on the road and that she was very concerned about and the other is that if it was attractive enough encouraging pedestrians to walk across to take a look at it

Any questions for Mr. Tolbert?

I think it's a better solution than what we had last time.

Well, I just had one comment.

I'll reiterate my belief.

Mr. Huja, you made a comment, I think, earlier tonight, which was quite accurate.

You said if a sidewalk was a travel lane for vehicles, we wouldn't think about putting a sign in the middle of that.

And to me, that's the same in this case.

As Mr. Kleeman and others have said, if this was

a pathway for vehicles we wouldn't think about closing it down for four or five years.

We would do what it takes to keep it open.

Well, you'll be happy to do that if you've made a check to see what it does.

And actually, that's similar to the direction I was going because I actually took notes because what you said was you value pedestrians and you're pretty much appalled by this picture.

And I thought, ha ha, there's my opportunity.

Because if you are appalled at this, and that this is worthy of an investment for a pedestrian that maybe we should reconsider,

How we value pedestrians and just make the investment in the bridge.

You say it's five or six years.

The way the funding has been, are you sure?

We're really not really sure if it's going to be beyond that.

I mean it really wasn't much longer than that that it rose to the level of priority with the council that started it.

But again, you're right, we have no clue when we're going to get the money.

It could be longer.

That's what makes it hard.

One thing I left out of the recommendation that we are doing also is we're putting an LED crosswalk on the south side of the bridge to

I understand the automobile analogy but the fact of the matter is we have a lot of parts of town that have a sidewalk on one side of the street and we have

functioning sidewalks on the other side of the street.

We can safely get people across there if it's a well signalized crosswalk.

It's not quite the same thing.

And I think the idea of spending that kind of money for a temporary fix just doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Well the concern that I have is that's the route we take.

Sometimes we go to CHS when we want to go down 250.

There's a lot of traffic and people drive too fast and watching people cross the street.

They leave.

They're happy leaving Spud Nuts with a cup of coffee and a couple of donuts.

Then when they cross the street, they have to really almost dash because people are just driving so fast.

Well we don't do traffic calming on arterial streets but the LED crosswalk which they can punch the button and it will flash to let them do it.

The survey we did when working on the Belmont Bridge which didn't surprise me anecdotally watching it is that 95% of the people for some reason

The West side of the bridge is the preferred side and I imagine that's because most of the people are coming downtown and they just cross before they get there to make sure they hit the ramp down by the pavilion.

I think that's why the LED... We could also, Vice Mayor, we could also ramp up our enforcement there as well to make sure that people aren't speeding.

And that's fine, but we saw, my daughter and I almost saw someone get hit trying to cross there, so I'd rather just make the investment, fix the sidewalk.

So this is, we can go ahead and just

Second.

Has been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

Motion carries.

Thank you much, Mr. Tolbert.

And the next item on our agenda is the report and ordinance zoning tax changes for music halls before us tonight on the first of two readings.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

And before I get to the specifics, I want to echo what some of you have said.

This was a process that started off not in the right direction.

I think a lot of folks, as Jacob said, didn't believe that we would come to this, but the group of young folks that worked on this did an incredible job of thinking and being open-minded and really working hard.

and coming to the meetings we've had and so they make you feel good about the engagement of folks on those issues and particularly their age group by and large and really good experience.

One of the meetings you and I went to at Random Row Books was really one of the best public meetings I've ever attended with the civility and the comments and so it led to a good place.

As you know, we got into this issue because after we made the changes to our ordinance last summer dealing with the music issue related to the problems that had come up with Albemarle, our staff started noticing the numbers of places that were advertising music around the community and it just seems like every week there's a new place that has music.

One was mentioned tonight that obviously it's been working fine because we weren't even aware they were having music.

I think that's the, and having the old ordinance or the current ordinance in place, that's the danger we get every time somebody stands up to mention one, we've got to go check it out.

So, and we don't, you know, we want to get beyond that.

But what we realized was we had over 20 establishments that were, would be required to get a special use permit to remain legal and two establishments that could not even apply at that point for any kind of permit.

So we went through this process to talk about what's the best way to do it.

And I started off, honestly, in one place, but after the discussions came to another.

And that's what's recommended tonight.

The Planning Commission pretty much went along with everything.

They recommended one or two little changes, which I think are okay.

But basically what you have before you tonight,

is a change in the code that would take the provision that requires a special use permit to establish a restaurant music hall or music hall would take it from a special use permit to a buy-write use in almost all cases.

and the zoning districts in the B2 and B3, it's not allowed and we would make it provisional there.

In N1, it's not allowed and that's where one of the uses that would have been illegal is now.

We have suggested and proposed that it be a special use permit there.

In the industrial corridor, it's not allowed now and we would recommend it be by right and then in the downtown,

the West Main North, West Main South, the Highway, Water Street District, Urban District and the Corner District we have recommended that it go from Special Use Permit to Buy Right and all of those categories.

In the Downtown Extended we recommended it go from Special Use Permit to Provisional and that was one of the recommendations that the Planning Commission made.

and then the central city from special use permit to provisional.

In South Street, it would stay a special use permit.

My copy of the memo doesn't show anything there.

I'm not sure what's in yours.

I hope it's the same memo since I printed it offline just to verify.

That one was supposed to be a special use permit.

There was no change in South Street.

and so that's the series of recommendations that's before you.

The net result of this is that all but two or three of the current establishments that we know about that are playing music would become by right and the things that would regulate their activities are the noise ordinance, the occupancy limits that are on them, and ABC laws, which we feel are the things that are issues.

and if they're

We've got those codes in place.

Those codes can provide the regulations necessary and then it would take off the requirement that that $1500 fee and process be in front of folks.

There would be, to my knowledge at this point, three establishments that would not be by right.

Two of those would be provisional use permits, which is essentially by right.

They just come in and sign that they agree to the provisions and then one would be I have to apply for special use permit.

And even in Belmont, I know we're not talking about Belmont tonight, but...

Jacob mentioned a restaurant that has singer-songwriter nights.

As long as it's acoustic and incidental to the food, they're still allowed to do that.

Yes.

Today.

Today.

Right.

Okay.

I just want to make sure that's clear.

Non-amplified.

It's when they get into amplification.

When you go in there to hear music,

I think it's a good result of discussions.

You have to go ahead and approve it.

Is that a motion?

It's been moved and seconded.

It will carry forward to our next meeting for a second reading.

Thank you very much.

And Mr. Tolbert, I have a, not right now, but at the end of the meeting under other business, I have something I want to ask you about, so don't leave the building.

Okay.

Next item is a report, City Community Service Consolidation Report.

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council, it was just about a year ago at this time that Delegate David Toscano asked the City Council, the City School Board, Albemarle County Board of Supervisors, and the Albemarle School Board to come together to address some issues that were percolating about relationships between the city and the county.

It's mainly over a couple of issues.

One, the local composite index issues with school funding, but then also issues related to the revenue sharing and annexation agreement long standing between the city and the county.

The governing bodies came together, had a discussion about that, and ultimately decided there were three areas that we wanted to continue discussions.

and so we formed three groups, the annexation revenue sharing LCI group, the fire rescue services group and then the social services group.

And the annexation revenue sharing and LCI group met one time and determined that the real focus of this group moving on should be the schools and should occur between the school divisions to talk about issues related to LCI but then more importantly to both divisions.

Are there areas that they could work together to a mutually beneficial outcome for both the city schools and the county schools that would address some of the debated funding, a little over $2 million that was debated between the two?

So at that point that group, that committee no longer was in existence and it was the school's responsibility to meet and they've met several times to have some discussions.

Both the fire rescue services and social services groups met several times to discuss the possibility of consolidating services between the two jurisdictions.

and through their discussions and their research staff and the elected members of those groups came to conclusions that at this point consolidating services may not be the best route to take when dealing with some of the issues that are out there.

We have been collaborating on a lot of different issues with both fire services and social services for many years and I think both groups identified other areas that we could collaborate even more so on in the future.

And there were two reports that were done by those two groups and we have representatives from those groups here this evening to answer any questions that you may have that came out of these reports.

I was part of the social service group, and I think I was the minority opinion in the process.

I think just a lone establishment of a joint department, even if you didn't do anything else, you'd have one less director and one less assistant.

This is a quarter of a million dollar saving right there if you go to Virginia County.

You know, going into this, former city councilor John Conover

I think he sent us an email.

He may have voiced this opinion at the meeting we had, but he argued fairly forcefully that for any consolidation and joint initiative to occur, it was going to need to come from the members of the Board of Supervisors and City Council.

And that's what I found to be true.

I think that the report that's in here from the fire side, which I participated in, it's very accurate and a lot of work went into it and it was thorough.

But it was not unexpected.

It's sort of recounting on the ways in which we've worked well together and the reasons why there's no big savings to occur from consolidation.

And I think it was, you know, and I'll take some blame for not having pushed hard enough to try to get the electeds to grab this issue and to really put it out there.

You know, there is a common sense approach to it, which is, you know, if we try to look at ourselves as being one region, whether it's for social services or fire, each of us have, each jurisdiction to have its own staff, its own budget, its own planning process, you know, cannot necessarily be the most efficient way to go.

So, you know, I think some good work went done in here.

I kind of agree with Mr. Huja, though.

I think we had an opportunity to do something big here, and I don't think we took advantage of that opportunity.

I don't think the fault lies with staff.

And I can echo the sentiments of you both actually, and I too thought that by having the, not having an executive director of IDSS was an opportunity.

to look at things differently.

And there were a lot of good things that came out of the meetings and most notably was for an opportunity for the elected bodies to join in their legislative efforts on matters that impact social services and related human services.

I think that's a really huge opportunity that I hope we take advantage of in addition to the other core services that are available.

But again,

I would echo all of that.

I think theoretically when we look at ways that we could become more one community than two, I think those would be positive developments.

I think that to try to do it piecemeal by

you know looking at specific departments you know one thing I was struck by with social services the idea that hadn't occurred to me is that if you combine them you then have to build a new building because you'd suddenly have a bigger staff and so you eat up the savings by construction and so I think when we do it on this kind of small scale I don't know that we can get those sort of

And just as a final comment for me, I'd like to take this as an opportunity to formally thank Delegate David Toscano for providing the

The ambiance for the meeting that took place that at least helped to have the conversation and to set the tone for the potential for collaboration in different areas.

And this whole discussion really did bring out the fact that these two bodies, even though we are separate, do a heck of a lot together.

We really do do a lot of collaboration and a lot of talking to each other and a lot of training together.

And we actually have had some of those conversations, especially around the issues of training opportunities and that type of thing.

How can we do that more efficiently than we have in the past?

And can we find some opportunities that we haven't looked for in the past to bring folks together, to train together?

And not just train together, but also to have our

One of the dilemmas that we face in this discussion, this ongoing discussion about how do we work better together is that periodically this threat gets raised about coming after funding that's currently being directed for the city schools and appropriating it for the county schools.

And then we have to go and scramble and hire lobbyists to go down to Richmond.

Last year we spent tens of thousands of dollars of your tax money last year in Richmond fighting Albemarle County because of this proposal to take money from the city schools and redirect it to the county schools.

and it's very difficult to negotiate in good faith in that kind of an environment and so I would welcome an effort by our friends and partners in Albemarle County to stand down on these kinds of threats because they're terribly counterproductive and ultimately self-defeating and if the goal is, you know, if Albemarle County is trying to recoup

Let's say $2.8 million, which is the number that's often thrown around.

I think it's pretty limiting.

I think ultimately with leadership like we see in Mr. Jones and Mr. Foley and with the political support that Dr. Brown was talking about, it's quite possible down the line we could be saving many times that through closer collaboration and consolidation.

But we're not going to get there if every year, every two years, we have to go down to Richmond.

and fight it out with dueling lobbyists and dueling campaigns.

That's my little editorial comment for the night.

Well, thank you, Mr. Jones, and keep up the conversation.

We will.

That's the last item on our regular business.

I did want to have Mr. Tolbert, if you could come forward.

We've gotten a lot of emails, and I know there's been a lot of public discussion on two issues in the last week.

As you know, Fedot started their project today, the JPA Bridge, which will be about a 16 month project.

Just a little background, they bid the project and had a good bid back in November and they've been going through all the, as you know, the funding processes and all to get it set up.

They really struggled trying to get started first of April because they want to be finished before the two football seasons and they want two full construction seasons to do that.

So that's why they were very anxious to get started today.

What happened with Shamrock is that our

Utility Department is doing a lot of major leak repair and line upgrades and they had this work scheduled and they thought they would be finished and out of the road before VDOT got started.

They've had some weather delays and they were not able to quite get finished.

They are down now to making seven or eight customer tie-ins is all that are left.

It will not necessitate any full closures.

They will have one lane open at a time with Flagman and will be working it to make sure that it flows as smoothly as possible there.

So they estimate two weeks or less to get that done and be out of the way.

So one of the things that happened is their contractor is also the VDOT utility contractor.

And because VDOT was paying more than we were, I guess,

The contractor pulled some of his crew off of Shamrock to put them on the JPA bridge.

We've had a conversation with them.

Hildebrand tells me that they're going to put them back on the Shamrock project, at least some of them, so that they can maximize the crews there to get that work done as quickly as possible.

We will have to resurface the road.

Lauren doesn't think it's going to be a full resurfacing, so she thinks it can be done and maintain traffic.

If not, then we may do it at night or something of that nature.

We'll explore those opportunities anyway to try to minimize that impact.

On stribbling, let me speak to the detour plan.

After a lot of conversation that Ms. Alexander and others had with the neighborhood, in particular the JPA, the Fry's Springs neighborhood,

The decision was made not to do a formal detour anywhere for this project because the alternatives were not good anywhere.

They were all residential streets.

That's just, if you look at where the traffic's coming from and where it's going to, the only ways to get there are on somebody, some other residential street.

And so the decision was made to sort of let it find its own route and that hopefully that most of the people that would be

impacting, it would take the residential areas would be people living in the neighborhood that would do that.

Hopefully we won't have a lot of the traffic coming from the county coming through and using the same detours.

There are significant major roads that they can take to get around.

We can't make that happen.

We don't know for sure.

We're trying to, you know, the full intent is we're monitoring that, trying to see how that happens.

Ms. Alexander will be back Wednesday and we're going to have a very active discussion of

and some things we might be able to do because the perception is that scribbling is going to be probably the most impacted street of all.

I can't imagine why most people would want to drive that winding gravel road, but I imagine that there will be some doing that.

The other is that it tends to sometimes lend itself to some speeding, so we're going to try to look and see what we might do temporarily to slow that down, so we're planning to meet Wednesday and

and really start focusing on that to make that happen.

The other issue that is out there that I think you've probably seen some emails is VDOT started a project at 64 and 29 which will result in, for the next three months, off and on closures of the 29 ramp.

We're not sure why they did that one at the same time, but we've gotten a lot of complaints about those two things happening.

They've been made aware of the concerns there.

We're hoping that the mural serves as a good educational opportunity for the folks involved.

The issue that we have is that the mural is painting of a property in a design control district, which by code has to go before the Board of Architectural Review.

There was no request to go before the Board of Architectural Review.

They just showed up and started painting.

We made it clear to them that they should not have done that, and we asked them to make application to go to the BAR, and they've done that.

the operator of Random Road filed the application since he's the one that encouraged them to paint somebody else's building and he took responsibility for filing the application and it will go.

I think Miss Scala has it scheduled for this coming BAR meeting.

The headmaster of the school is going to come and he's going to bring several of the students to speak out on this issue.

They meet the third Tuesday of the month at 5 p.m. in this room so

Days of 4th, tomorrow is the 5th, 19th would be that meeting date.

and I know there was some preliminary discussions that you had around that topic, I believe, or you were talking about having some... Based on your discussions, Mayor, we contacted every school, public and private, in the city of Albemarle County and said, this is an issue, here's what happened, we would like to meet and have conversation around how we can make this a good process and move this forward.

We had one taker out of that entire group.

We followed up,

Phone calls, we couldn't generate any interest with any of the art teachers, the art community to do that.

We can try other angles and other folks to do it and maybe it's starting at the BAR to talk about, if it's not in the design control district there's no problem.

The one on Richmond Camera was a sign issue more than it was an art issue.

They had some things in there that led it to be a sign maybe

and this one is clearly a different, pretty much a different situation.

We've had public art on buildings that have gone through the process.

We've had murals in that area that have gone through the process and been approved.

Other comments or questions?

Thank you, Mr. Tolbert.

Sure.

And we have one last item on our agenda tonight, which was the issue regarding naming rights for the pavilion.

Ms. Szakos asked that it be pulled from the consent agenda.

Yeah.

I guess I actually

Assume that I'll vote for it, but I also want to explain partly why, but also what some of the issues are.

When the lease was taken out on the pavilion, the lease that's currently in place in 2003, it included that the operator shall have the right to select the operating name used for the amphitheater provided, however, that operator must receive written approval in advance

from the economic development folks in the city for any names selected by the operator.

It gives them the right to seek out a sponsor or the sort of naming rights.

If I had been on council at the time, I would not have voted for that.

I don't think that we should have our city with corporate sponsors.

in that sort of publicly visible way, but I think that this is the law that we have and so I don't really see that I would feel comfortable denying it because I think that it's within the letter of the law and Intellos is, you know, granted it's a corporation, it's also a local corporation, it's not, you know, some

I guess there are really no pure large companies, but it's not a particularly horrible one.

I don't see any real reason within the current law that we have to say no to them.

But I do understand, I don't like the picture of it in my mind of what that looks like.

And I also really want to make sure that we

In this it also says that the city shall not get any money from any naming rights that are granted and I understand that but I also think that morally if the folks who operate the pavilion are getting a rather hefty income from naming rights that's affecting all of us I think it would behoove them

and I believe that they intend to but I would like to see it sort of confirmed in a public place to know how that will play out in terms of increasing diversity of programming or access to nonprofits to that space or any number of things that would sort of give back to the community.

So those are all things that I, those are my concerns.

I had a question about, Mr. Torvald Muehl has an answer to that.

What's the signage for the name?

If it's appropriate, it will go there.

I haven't been engaged in those conversations, but I know that if they're doing something that is in the limits of the BAR review, then it will go to the BAR.

Other comments or questions on this?

I think that your comments are eloquent and I'm glad that you have an opportunity to

Give some feedback, I mean some background to this as well and with that said, I don't plan to support it because of the lack of public opportunity for public input even though it may not have changed.

Well, how about what I was talking about, about ways that the community might benefit from this?

I think that if you look at what we have done over the six years we've been open, we certainly have tried to address the questions of diversity and programming.

I think if you look at similar sized venues and similar sized markets, you'd be very hard pressed to find someone who has a comparable line of a talent that we have brought, if you're looking for a similar city.

We have brought in African American artists, women artists, certainly in our Fridays After Five program, and we try to make sure that we have

Hispanic artists really try to cover the gamut as wide as we can and we absolutely will commit to continuing on with that.

The issue as far as non-profit access, we certainly try to work with any non-profit that approaches us about using the facility.

There's a process in the lease for city priority events.

which have allowed some nonprofits to come in and work under that process.

But also a lot of times I'll get calls where it's simply a group that wants to come down and meet during the afternoon and we look at that as just being part of the park usage of the facility.

The tables are there, they're available for people to come and to have a lunch meeting, to really use whatever they want.

When we get into where we're having to provide additional services to support those events, whether it's through providing electrical connections for sound systems, bringing out additional chairs and tables, those sorts of things to give them what they need, we generally pass those costs along, but we're usually talking in the neighborhood of a couple hundred dollars at tops just to cover our labor expenses.

So we definitely want to continue to have the venue available for nonprofit use

we're gonna continue to try to work on our programming and that's, you know, to a certain extent you're trying to bring artists to a community that oftentimes if you look at their calendar of where they're playing, we're by far the smallest market and by far the smallest venue that they're performing at.

So I think that that speaks to the way that we're able to present ourselves to the touring artists and bring them to our downtown.

Thank you.

I'll just reiterate, a couple of people have noted that this was something that the Pavilion Management was given the right to do eight years ago.

And so for us to now deny them that right would be a breach of contract.

I think that's dangerous territory for us.

I know it leaves a bad taste in the mouth in some people who understand that, but I think that argument should have been made eight years ago.

Right now we have a legally binding contract that we are being asked to honor.

And on that note, if there is a, unless there's any further discussion, I'd be happy to entertain a motion to approve the resolution.

I'll move the resolution.

It's been moved and seconded.

If there's no further discussion, please indicate your vote.

The motion carries.

Thank you very much.

Is there any other business before council tonight?

If not, we are going to open up to one more session of matters by the public.

Is there anybody from the public who would like to speak?

I'm not going to waste most of your time because they say if you snooze you lose.

Well, I snoozed and I missed my chance to make timely comments regarding one of the issues brought up tonight on the agenda.

But, however, I still would like my remarks for the public record and I'm going to pass these around if you'll be kind enough.

I'll even give one to Mr. Tolbert if he's still here.

There's nothing else.

Meeting is adjourned.