City Council Meeting   9/6/2011

Music playing

I've never seen anything like this before.

I'd like to call this meeting to order.

We're going to start with some proclamations tonight.

I believe Mr. Rory Carpenter is in the room with us tonight.

We have a proclamation regarding truancy prevention, which obviously is an important cause for our community.

Whereas the Charles Albemarle Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee is charged with convening stakeholders to study local juvenile justice practices.

and whereas the JJAC develops and implements strategies to prevent delinquency and promote accountability and rehabilitation and whereas truancy has long been identified as an educational, social and juvenile justice issue worthy of public and private attention

and whereas the JJAC has identified truancy prevention as an area of focus in its efforts and whereas Truancy Prevention Awareness Month will encourage and promote daily school attendance.

Now therefore I, Dave Norris, Mayor, on behalf of the Charlottesville City Council, do hereby recognize September 2011 as Truancy Prevention Awareness Month in the City of Charlottesville, Virginia and call us observance to the attention of all of our citizens.

And we do have our Juvenile Justice Coordinator, Rory Carpenter, with us tonight.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the opportunity just for council to take a look at September and define it as truancy prevention month for the city of Charlottesville.

Same thing in the county of Albemarle.

Juvenile Justice Advisory Committee has done several studies and one of the most important ones was on the risk factors of kids who were involved in the juvenile justice system.

And we found that upwards of 50% of those kids were truant, missing at least 15 days of school.

So we worked as a team to try to figure out how we could help the community to educate the community about the issue and to resolve it.

We've developed programs to work towards that.

working with kids and families one-on-one, but we thought it was important to educate the public.

Truancy I think kind of slides under the radar, but it's really important for kids to be in school, not only to be educated, but to not go down that road that can take them into juvenile delinquency.

So thank you very much, council members.

We appreciate it.

Thank you very much Mr. Carpenter.

Good to have you.

Next we want to honor some professionals who play an important role in our workplaces.

This is a proclamation in honor of National Payroll Week.

Whereas the American Payroll Association and its 23,000 members have launched a nationwide public awareness campaign that pays tribute to the more than 156 million people who work in the United States and the payroll professionals who support the American system by paying wages, reporting worker earnings, and withholding federal employment taxes,

and whereas payroll professionals in Charlottesville, Virginia play a key role in maintaining the economic health of Charlottesville, carrying out such diverse tasks as paying into the unemployment insurance system, providing information for child support enforcement and carrying out tax withholding, reporting and depositing.

Whereas payroll departments collectively spend more than $15 billion annually complying with myriad federal and state wage and tax laws.

Whereas payroll professionals play an increasingly important role ensuring the economic security of American families by helping to identify noncustodial parents and making sure they comply with their child support mandates.

Whereas payroll professionals have become increasingly proactive in educating both the business community and the public at large about the payroll tax withholding systems.

Whereas the week in which Labor Day falls has been proclaimed National Payroll Week.

Now therefore I, Dave Norris, Mayor of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby give additional support to the efforts of the people who work in Charlottesville, Virginia and of the payroll profession by proclaiming September 5th through 9th, 2011 as National Payroll Week in the City of Charlottesville.

And here to receive this proclamation and tell us a little bit more about the importance of this week is Darrell Kozuk from the Human Resources Department at the University of Virginia.

It's an honor to be here.

This is a week that's very important to us.

We say in payroll, payroll is the reason people come to work.

So hopefully you'll still get your paychecks in these hard economic times, but we appreciate all your support.

Thank you.

Keep up the good work.

We have a couple of very special guests from our friends with the Jefferson partners, Jefferson School Partners.

We have a big event coming up next week which has been long awaited and it's been many years in coming and here to tell us a little bit more about event on September 14th, Martin Burks and Steve Blaine with the Jefferson School Partnership.

Good evening, members of the council.

This is exciting times.

Exciting times, really.

To bring you up to date, we have closed on the property.

We've closed on the loan.

We've energized a contractor.

And if you've been riding by the school, you see this wonderful fence around and activities inside.

And the majority of the activities have been, at this point,

the demolitions inside the building as well as the leveling of the ground for the parking lot outside.

But it's exciting times.

We still have a few things that we need to work on and that is we need to raise money.

And I am now the chair of the foundation.

So we want to make sure that we raise money for particularly the Heritage Culture Center.

So they'll be up and running at the time that we open the doors.

And we're here to personally invite y'all to the groundbreaking that will be held there at Jefferson School on the 14th at 11 a.m.

Here to invite council members and the public, of course, for the September 14th groundbreaking.

It's been three years with this group, the partners working together to come to this important milestone.

While the Foundation's fundraising efforts continue, it's important to point out that the building has been fully financed through a combination of tax credits and other incentives.

Thank you.

We want to take a moment, we often like to honor city staff who go above and beyond and distinguish themselves in service to our community and by extension distinguish our city.

Recently, one of our city staff people received the highest possible award in her field.

We have with us tonight Jennifer Leucard from our city purchasing department.

On August 29th, 2011, at the National Institute of Government Purchasing Forum held in National Harbor, Maryland, our City of Charlottesville Procurement and Risk Manager, Jennifer Leucard, was named National Purchasing Manager of the Year.

with more than 2,600 member agencies representing over 16,000 professionals across the United States, Canada and countries outside of North America.

The NIGP is international in its reach.

Candidates for the NIGP Manager of the Year award are selected from nominations submitted by NIGP chapter affiliates or individuals.

Jennifer became the Virginia Association of Government Purchasing's nominee for this award following her win of the Virginia Association of Government Purchasing Professional Manager of the Year in March 2011.

Jennifer has made significant contributions to the advancement of the purchasing profession and professional development.

She demonstrated a high level of involvement and made many contributions to the public procurement profession by initiating innovative concepts, publishing articles, acting as a mentor to other purchasing professionals, and serving on special task forces as well as excellent leadership, enthusiasm, and personal commitment to the profession and the institute.

We want to take a moment to congratulate and to thank Jennifer Lockard on this accomplishment.

Jennifer?

I'm very thankful I work for the city of Charlottesville and all the support.

Great, thank you.

We have a few announcements and then we have one special presentation to wrap up this segment of the meeting.

Sure.

I have a couple of announcements.

The first is to make sure that everybody knows about the 10th anniversary of the 9-11.

It's going to be at the pavilion down at the end of the mall on September 11th at 5 o'clock.

At 4.30 there's going to be a Pegasus helicopter flyover over the downtown mall.

and at 4.45, a march of honor from the Paramount to the Pavilion and the program starts at five.

There'll be a program, some speeches, I think the Glee Club is performing, the Virginia Consort is performing the 4A Requiem, I'm singing, and the Virginia, or the Municipal Band will be playing as well.

So I think it'll be a really nice commemorative experience.

I think it'll be good music, good speeches, good kind of coming together as a community.

So I encourage everyone to come at the pavilion at five o'clock on Sunday, September.

This is coming Sunday.

Also this Thursday, September 8th, is another of our Our Town Charlottesville meetings where city council goes into the neighborhoods for a two-hour meeting of dinner with free childcare and all public comment.

We are doing the North Downtown Martha Jefferson neighborhood on Thursday at City Space, just above the parking garage.

It'll be at 6 o'clock on Thursday, and then we have another one two weeks from now, Thursday, September 22nd, at Burley School for the Rose Hill and Kelly Town neighborhood.

So I encourage people to come.

The food is always good.

Mr. Mayor, I have three different announcements.

I want to start with something fun.

Shrek 3D Movie.

It will be on September 9th, Friday September 9th.

It will be in Forest Hill Park, a dark time, free movie.

So if you enjoy 3D movies, you ought to show up at Forest Hill.

I think I might show up myself.

The second announcement relates to master planning for east side of McIntire Park.

As you know, that part has not been planned for a long time.

There are three meetings scheduled.

The planning will begin on September 26th.

Three meetings on September 26th, October 24th at 6.30 p.m. in Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center.

And the third meeting

from 6 to 8 p.m. Charlottesville High School, common room B.

So basically, for master planning for McIntyre, if you're interested in that park, this is your chance to come and take part in it.

Meeting on September 26th, October 24th, and December 12th at Charlottesville High School.

And third, a very important project, which the city has supported for a long time,

There will be another community job fair on Thursday, September 29th, which will be co-sponsored by monster.com and Daily Progress.

It will be from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. at John Paul Jones Arena in Charlottesville.

Last time we held this, there were 2,200 recruits, 90 companies and 2,000 people there.

So I would hope that if you're interested in jobs, this would be a great place to go, and you can get a lot of new skills also.

We help with resumes, interviews, and other skills that you need to get a good job.

There are many partners in this.

I won't read them all, but it is a joint venture, and Citi is taking part in that.

The job fair,

Thank you, Mr. Huja.

I just have one announcement to parents.

Our school year has been underway, and I still think it's the best time of the year.

But first of all, this is the 2011-2012 Parent Information Guide.

I think this is one of the better documents, one of the best documents that we have for our parents.

It's so important for all parents to make sure that they read this document.

And if you have any questions about it, contact your child's teacher and the principal of the school.

But I think one of the best weapons against

the achievement gap or low graduation rate, also begins at home and making sure that parents are informed and that the parents feel supported.

I got a letter.

I just found out, well, my girl's in 11th grade, and I found out that all 11th graders get this letter at the beginning of the school year.

And it says, dear parent or guardian, please find and close information concerning the student's high school graduation status.

Now is the time to start talking to the teachers and the guidance counselors about the graduation status.

Don't wait until mid-year or toward the end of the school year when you're worried about the grades.

Now is the time to do it.

And the letter also says if you have any questions, to contact the guidance counselor now.

So to all the CH students in 11th grade,

I've outed you.

The parents are aware.

And to all the parents, if you have any questions, contact the guidance counselor and the school principal.

Now is the time to get everything in place so that at graduation time, everything will be in order.

And I guess my last announcement would be, since school is underway, please be mindful of the school buses on the roads.

The school buses hold our most precious treasure.

If you have the speed to get to work, take a different route.

Don't go past any of the elementary schools because you must drive 15 miles per hour.

I do, and I'd like to bring up a couple of items on my bucket list.

Since I'm coming to closure, I have some things that I'd like to make sure get accomplished between now and December 31st.

And call it a bucket list or my wish list.

No, I'll wait till then.

Some of it's related to dialogue on race, activities and initiatives.

And I'd like to talk about

the elected mayor and some of the ideas that were generated about that and why it's not on the agenda.

We had talked about it, but it's not on the agenda.

But I didn't want to talk about that.

And then just something also related to our school system and give you just an idea.

We don't have anything

I'm going to have a sign that says Home of the Charlottesville Black Knights.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

Any other announcements?

I did want to note that Friday, September 30th is our 2011 Government Services Day.

This is an opportunity for citizens to learn about your city government and all the services that are provided through city hall, city government.

You can get a tour of city council chambers, you can watch the police SWAT team in action, visit the fire department demonstrations.

take a passport tour, see yourself on television, take home some great money-saving information.

It's adult-minded but kid-friendly.

So September 30th to Friday from 10 a.m. to – Mr. Jones is all excited.

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the downtown mall.

We look forward to seeing you there.

Okay.

We have one last presentation to wrap up this segment of our agenda.

Another event that's coming up

This Friday, September 9th at the Jefferson Theater on the downtown mall is the Lighthouse Studio 10th Annual Youth Film Festival.

Unfortunately, it conflicts with the NAACP Banquet, so I won't be able to attend, and I know a number of us are attending the NAACP Banquet.

But I do encourage people, if you're not attending NAACP Banquet, to check out the Lighthouse Studio 10th Annual Youth Film Festival.

It starts at 6.30 with a reception and 8 o'clock is when the films start.

The Lighthouse is a wonderful asset here in our community that encourages young people to get involved in filmmaking.

As a teaser for the film festival, we wanted to show a clip from a short version of a film that one of the Lighthouse participants made herself.

And she is with us here tonight, Miss Charlotte Cherry.

And maybe Charlotte can come forward and give a little intro to this film.

And then we're going to project it on the screen so you can see the kind of quality work that's coming out of Lighthouse these days.

Charlotte, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

So I have been involved in Lighthouse for a number of years and it's a great asset in the community to teach young people how to make film which is not something that people generally learn.

But this project is something that I initiated myself but with the help of Lighthouse was able to go with the Sister City Commission to Winneba.

Great.

Well, thank you so much.

And I believe Mr. Rice is back there.

We have to shake you.

I love the comparison, I love the sister city concept that we have chosen a city in the developing world.

We know that there's so much in common between the two cities, the people are not so hospitable.

When I say the GDP, I'm talking about the general income level of the people.

Here, we are predominantly fisher folks.

And this kind of activity, it is seasonal.

But the sort of economic venture here is seasonal.

From my own perspective, Salisbury didn't have a unique festival like Winbar.

Essentially two competing groups.

So it is in reality a family relationship.

Remember as two sister cities you are also siblings, and therefore you are always welcome to our community.

So again you will see that film and many others Friday September 9th at the Lighthouse Studio 10th Annual Youth Film Festival at the Jefferson Theater.

And we are now going to move on with the matters by the public.

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

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

Mayor Norris and members of the council and my name is Paul Long, I live at 1410 Grady Avenue and the national press has reported that there is no net job creation for the month of August and the Daily Progress has reported that 2010 saw job creation stagnant in the city of Charlottesville and our area.

It is time for this council to take the initiative in creating new jobs for Charlottesville and the surrounding area.

America is not a poor country.

Our banks are sitting on trillions of dollars which they refuse to lend to businesses and individuals and this despite the bailout of billions of dollars of guarantees in the Trump program at the beginning of the economic crisis in 2008.

I call upon this council to create a public works, public jobs program to be funded in part by the $3.5 million surplus of the previous budget and by a special tax on all the city's banks so that all residents of the city can be put to work.

Charlottesville needs to aggressively encourage a variety of businesses to move into the city.

Charlottesville can no longer afford the luxury of being just a small college town.

It is time for Charlottesville to grow and to make sure that this growth is shared by all segments of our community.

A great part of the Democratic Party has forgotten its history and its working class roots and has become a lap dog to Wall Street, big business, big banks.

All members of this council claim to be members of the Democratic Party, but I wonder if Andrew Jackson or William Jennings Bryan, U.E.

Long, Franklin Roosevelt, or Lyndon Johnson were to come back to life and observe the deliberations of this council, that they would recognize council members as being members of the political party whose values and philosophy they championed.

Thank you, Mr. Long.

I'm Joanna Salides, 129 Goodman Street, Charlottesville 22902.

Good evening, Councillors.

I'm here today to ask you to give appropriate feedback to ACOM regarding their just released water demand forecast.

Specifically, I'm asking you to ensure that they reduce the per resident and per employee water use further every year.

Right now they include a one time step down in water use per resident around 2015 and no reduction in water use per employee over time.

I made a very simple graphic to explain why we need a reduction with every increase in population.

So here it is.

Bear with me for a minute.

So you know this is last year 2010 and this is a very simple graphic so let's pretend that in 2010 we had four people living in the city and they all lived in this one house and the house used this much water so then you can calculate how much water per how much water each resident used by you know dividing the total amount of water by the number of people and what you end up with is that

Each resident used one unit of water.

So then if we go to 2015, a little bit into the future, and we doubled our population, now we have eight people in the city.

We need a total of two houses now, but the second house, the new house that was built to accommodate the additional four people, is of course built to the code that we have now.

The code that we already have in place mandates water efficiencies above

that which we have in the older housing stock like this house here.

So then we calculate the water use and we've gone from one unit per resident to 0.87 units per resident, a reduction.

Similarly, we go on.

Here we are in 2020.

Now we have four more people, one more house.

Of course, that new house also uses the same water efficiencies.

Now we have a total of, by the same math, 10 units of water divided by 12 people equals 0.83 units of water.

So we've gone from 0.87 to 0.83.

Finally, we do a big jump here

and we've jumped 20 years now into 2040.

You can see that these people are not so happy anymore.

As you, yeah, okay.

So we're not, we're feeling kind of unhappy here.

It's not because we're so much more crowded in 2040, though we are.

The increase in density in the city by itself does not have to be a problem.

No, we're unhappy here in 2040 because in this particular possible future, in this particular possible future, because around 2011, the majority of city councilors decided that parks and green spaces were expendable.

They thought that it would be greener and smarter to build roads, reservoirs, and sewage stations in our parks.

We're also unhappy in the future because some in 2011 thought it would make the economy stronger to make residents pay much more for the most basic necessity of life, water.

Anyway, as you can see, this 19 units of water divided by 24 people equals 0.79 units of water.

It's just a reduction every year with the increase in population.

Also with, I'm almost done, the employment

works the exact same way as we get more employees.

We have more places of business which use the same water efficiencies.

Thank you, Ms. Leis.

Thank you, Mayor Norris and the City Council.

My name is Robert McAdams.

I live at 2211 Williamsburg Road and I am representing a broad coalition

of civic organizations and congregations who want to make the International Day of Peace a recognizable day on our calendar.

We've joined together in an effort to celebrate and commemorate the International Day of Peace and to challenge our community to envision a society where peace, nonviolence and justice are the norm and anything to the contrary is an exception.

We're coming to each of the municipal

governing bodies in our area and we're asking for very simple requests.

What we're asking is that you officially commemorate the International Day of Peace through a resolution and that you communicate that resolution to sister cities such as the one we've just seen on the film and that you simply designate someone from the staff who can serve as a liaison with our coordinating committee to facilitate communications.

These are very restricted requests, but they can have a very strong impact in the community.

As I've spoken to a number of groups, I've learned that one of the most important things is that the words in support of peace and nonviolence be spoken.

The International Day of Peace has existed for 30 years, but it is largely unknown in the community.

By taking these actions, you will be joining with thousands of communities around the world and over 100 million people celebrating the International Day of Peace.

So I understand from the clerk of the council that this is an item that will appear on the next meeting's agenda.

I urge you to support this, and I thank you for your time.

Thank you, Mr. McAdams.

Mark Cabot, 400 Altamont Street.

I'm here representing the North Downtown Residence Association.

I want to first thank council for the neighborhood grant money that you all made available early this year and thought I'd let you all know what we kind of did to put to good use.

First thing we did was a newsletter and I'm going to pass out a copy of the newsletter to everybody.

And that went out about a week ago.

and also let council know that on September 18th at the Haven from 1 o'clock to 4 o'clock we're also having an annual meeting and council is invited to attend that if you all like.

One thing I want to especially point out is something that we're doing with this newsletter is we're trying to encourage people to go to the site and sign up for what's called RSS feed which automatically gives a download of any changes that we have to our website

letting them know about any things that we post on the website, letting them know about changes, if there's a safety alert, crime alert, things of that nature and just general changes.

The feed goes directly to the person, also lets people remind them about dues each year.

Another matter that we used funds for was redoing the roundabout.

This is actually going to be done in about a month or two, but the roundabout at

Park Lake Road, where we're going back into it, re-beautifying it, and re-landscaping it.

We also redid our website with some of the funds, and one of the things we did was updating the website and the RSS feed, allowing us to do that.

I'd also like to let you all know about something that we started up earlier this year, which is called the Beautification Award.

which we've been doing.

We've given out three of them so far and one went to the Sidgo station, Taulkton Oak, which technically speaking is not in our district, but we felt it was an entranceway and they did a really nice job of re-landscaping the area so we thought it should be recognized.

We also wanted to give one to Queen Charlotte for the excellent job that they do in maintaining their property and also to the restaurant Fellini's for the

maintenance that they do around the block where their office is, where the restaurant is.

We've noticed that they go out there every day and clean it up and get the trash that accumulates there.

So we're doing this with the idea hopefully to encourage other businesses as well as residential homes to beautify their property and keep it looking nice.

and we like to also encourage other neighborhood groups to do maybe similar type of projects too.

Thank you very much, Mr. Kavett.

Good evening.

My name is M. Rick Turner.

I live at 1663 Brandywine Drive in the city.

I'm the president of the Albemarle Charlottesville NAACP.

I'm here this evening representing this iconic civil rights organization.

I'm sure that many of you read the August 7th, Sunday's Daily Progress letter to the editor from one of our city's esteemed citizens, Mr. Eugene Williams entitled, Radical Experience is Still Going On.

If by chance you haven't read it, please do so.

I'm here this evening to support, commend, and follow up on Mr. Williams' important statement.

I quote Mr. Williams' statement.

There are days and hours when the downtown mall area today looks like it's for whites only.

There are times when nearly a black person can be seen from one end of the mall to the other.

Nearly a black waiter, policeman, or employee admit the hundreds of stores, restaurants, and offices.

What does this appearance convey to our young people, university students, and all the rest of our citizens?

Apparently owners

and managers have no interest in hiring black people.

I'm sorry, Mr. Williams' quote ended with the rest of our citizens.

That's the end of Mr. Williams' quote.

Apparently owners and managers have no interest in hiring black people.

Perhaps there's an unwritten secret code against hiring black people and maybe it's no secret at all.

in another time and place such blatant racism would be addressed with boycotts and other forms of expressions of disapproval.

I wonder what young people, both black and white, think about this picture or the community's silent acceptance of this apparent segregation.

What this conveys to me is a weak,

and any factual community and chamber of commerce that silently sanctions things as they are.

Thank you again, Mr. Williams, for your reminder.

Perhaps we need to take the dialogue on race to the downtown mall and open a conversation to suggest that its offices

merchants and businesses begin to offer employment opportunities to Charlottesville black citizens and create a more welcoming environment for all.

Thank you, Dr. Turner.

Good evening, Brandon Collins, 536 Meade Avenue.

Lived in Charlottesville all my life.

I have a daughter who's also lived here her entire life.

I share Dr. Turner's sentiments and the dialogue on race should be focused on what's going on downtown.

You know, we have a situation in Charlottesville where people can't find work, and I know there's been attempts to make that a little better, but as Dr. Turner even just pointed out, black folks aren't getting hired.

There's a lot of folks out here who aren't getting hired.

There's a lot of folks out here who are underemployed.

There are a lot of folks out here that are working really, really hard and still can't make ends meet.

I had a press conference yesterday calling for public works programs and some various other things and two of the counselors here responded to that in the daily progress as it not being feasible.

I think you either misunderstood what I was getting at or deliberately misrepresented what I was getting at.

I'm not proposing that we employ every resident of Charlottesville through public works.

Obviously there is a private sector here and they employ people.

What I'm suggesting is that we make sure that every resident in Charlottesville has a place to turn to and we do everything we can do to make sure those folks get a job.

Now I've got tons of ideas about all this stuff and what I'm hearing from council is it's not feasible.

I'm tired and I think a lot of folks out here are tired of hearing of all the things we can't do.

If my ideas aren't good enough for you, maybe come up with some other ideas and really get things going.

But public works is a way to get people working.

There's a lot of work that needs to be done in the city and it's worth it and I think a lot of people want to see that get done.

So do something about it.

I urge you to look at the statement I made yesterday and see what exactly it was I was getting at.

You know, I'd like to point out some of the stuff I was getting at was the Section 3 coordinator position that just opened up.

I think that's a great thing to build on.

I was very much dismayed and kind of puzzled that that coordinator position has been filled, but there was no input from the Public Housing Association of Residents.

Those are folks who are directly affected by that position and they should have input and I hope that's not an indicator of how that position is going to proceed or how the upgrades to public housing is going to proceed.

You need to keep these folks included in all these decisions.

You know, moving on, it's a new semester at UVA.

Living Wage Campaign is kicking off in a much more aggressive mode this year, and I urge all of you to get involved, get involved with the students.

I'd be happy to put you in touch.

I would love to see a more aggressive stance from city council about a living wage.

I know last year you re-upped your commitment to a living wage, but there was some hesitancy to confront the university

Thank you, Mr. Collins.

I'm Nikaya Walker.

I live at 503 Drude Avenue in the city.

I'm here today, I sent a letter on August 30th to city council members and others in the community concerning Region 10 Community Services Board.

I sent the letter out to others, not just Region 10 leadership team or board of directors because I tried to go through the executive director and didn't have any success.

And I know that some of the grant requirements on the state level that you all are asked to sign off on and we

I'm no longer an employee there, but I know when I was and the employees that are currently there are just looking for a little bit of assistance to have their voices heard.

I would say that there, in the letter, a couple of things that I pointed out was that the current management approach, treatment approach was ineffective for the members of our community, misuse of funds, mistreatment of clients and staff, staff morale and how that affects client services and what we are able to deliver to them.

And so I'm here tonight just to really

Stand in front of you so that you all can know that this is a very serious matter.

I went to the executive director on my last day of work at Region 10 to talk about client treatment, the lack of a treatment philosophy,

some of the things that are needed in this community so that some of our citizens who are most in need of the services, Region 10 is pretty much it as far as substance abuse services, get what they need.

And I am here to say from someone who was there for almost four years, someone who watched a lot of staff turnover, that that's not happening.

If you ask for data, you're not going to get it because it doesn't exist.

But if you talk to community members and staff there, they would tell you the treatment that they receive.

That's usually very hostile, and I pointed that out in the letter.

If you talk to other community organizations, I mentioned Tim Longo, Police Chief in Charlottesville, Social Services, if you talk to them,

You'll hear that recidivism rate is high based on the clients they serve, how families in this community is affected by what is not happening at Region 10.

And so if there's anything at all that the City Council can do, and in my letter I talked about digging deeper to make sure that you're not getting surface level answers, that they are actually being honest with you about what staff is not able to do because they, you know, just feel really crappy.

most days, and what the community isn't receiving from Region 10.

Thank you, Ms. Walker.

Good evening.

Richard Lloyd, 1825 Locashade Court.

Several months ago I was asked by a number of different organizations in town to look at the Belmont Bridge as an engineer.

And I went down and I looked at it and I looked at the stalling concrete, looked at the rusting and so forth.

But the thing that really got me the most was why is it built this way?

So I went out and started researching that and the first thing that popped up was that years ago we had a yard master.

The C&O railroad station had a yard and the yard

had a coal tower and a roundabout and was quite a yard.

In fact, to get across this yard, they built a bridge.

The original bridge was a wooden bridge and they replaced it with a concrete bridge, but the yard was expansive.

This is a picture from the 1930s of the yard and you'll see all the steam, they had steam engines.

and to get across the yard they built a bridge.

And this is a key fixture.

This bridge starts over here and goes across the first set of tracks.

There's a stand.

Today there are three sets of tracks.

There was a roundabout.

That's a rather large structure that was just to the north of that.

And the roundabout was to change cars so that the cars could be coming into Charlottesville, could be diverted to these 14 tracks.

Cars could be set aside while they were loaded and unloaded and traffic could still go by the railroad station.

So we look at this bridge that we're talking about replacing was built in a whole different era for a whole different reason to a whole different set of constraints.

And I would just ask the city council before you talk about replacing this bridge, look at why it's so damn, excuse me, it's so long.

We don't need that much.

The exit side on the Belmont is a very confused intersection.

It blocks traffic every day.

It backs up.

I've talked to the people there.

The stoplight there, you stop and then if you want to continue back, you have to do 180 to get to some businesses, large businesses like Arctronics and so forth.

That whole intersection is a mess and could be redone very nicely.

Just asking that before you spend money on this bridge, consider

Do we really need that?

Do we really need that bridge?

Or do we need a much smaller, shorter, lower bridge?

We still have to have headroom, but we don't have smokestacks on the trains anymore.

Today I went by and I talked to Mr. Gibson of Gibson's Deli and he was talking about the bridge and just as I was eating my hot dog, he said there are five businesses there.

One of them is already out of business.

Traffic, foot traffic is being diverted across the street.

The other four are suffering.

just from the fence that went up.

Nobody from the city has been by to talk to him, I mean nobody.

While we were sitting chatting in Wauptefella from the city of Charlottesville neighborhood development, asked him, what's going to happen to the neighborhood when you put in the bridge?

Can this be improved?

Thank you, Mr. Lloyd.

That's the final speaker during Matters by the Public.

We're going to now open our meeting to council member responses to Matters by the Public.

Thank you to everybody who came and spoke tonight.

I would like to start with the comments to Robert McAdam.

And I think the idea of International Day of Peace is a worthy topic to support.

I concur.

I think that when we talk about an International Day of Peace, I think we need to be thinking about peace in terms of wars, but also just in the way that we treat each other locally.

So it is a local issue, and I think it's very appropriate that we deal with that at a local level.

I also just wanted to – let's see.

Actually, I wanted to thank Richard Lloyd for that interesting history on the bridge.

It really was very informative and I think that that's, you know, I'll look at it with new eyes and I think we all will, so thank you.

I guess to Mr. Collins, I just wanted to mention that there are some ways in which the city is looking at, where are you?

There, sorry.

What the city is doing, part of the reentry program that we're looking at now is that kind of project.

And I think that we really are, at least I am certainly, and I think I'm not the only one here, open to looking at those possibilities.

I think that there are things that we can do that will help people both get prepared for jobs, because I think we need to look at workforce development and training, but also at being able to find places where people can work.

So thank you.

Dr. Brown?

Well, I'll thank Dr. Turner for bringing in his comments.

I think Eugene Williams has a long tradition in the city of bringing things to the attention of the community, and especially the white community, of things that we may not be noticing.

And I think this is an example of that.

I read his letter when it came out, and it caused me to think more about when I walk down the mall, and I think it's important that we do that.

I think that Eugene Williams has a way of bringing things attention to the white community and to the African American community as well.

I've been hearing concerns about African Americans and the perception of not being welcomed on the mall and the culture of the downtown mall.

I appreciate that Dr. Turner mentioned the dialogue on race because this gives us another opportunity to

I just had a dialogue perhaps within the Downtown Business Association Council and I'll ask Mr. Jones to follow up as to how we can be a part of that agenda at the next meeting.

And that will be an opportunity to have at least a beginning discussion of what it's like on the Mall for a lot of people in our community.

There are concerns that Ms. Walker brought up.

I think that we should follow through because we do fund Region 10 and maybe there's a way to just ask some accountability questions, especially as it relates to some of the things that we as a

as their funder looked for and for her to come forward in such a public way and to take a risk.

This is a statement in and of itself and I admire your courage in doing so not only as a previous employer but also

In the three and a half years I've been on council, very few African American women have come forward to speak.

And so you, you're part of a small crowd of women.

So I just admire you for doing that.

Regarding workforce development comments made by Paul Long and Brandon Collins, we are all well aware of the workforce issues that affect us.

And even though Charlottesville as a locality may have lower unemployment rates, there's still a large part of our population that's excluded.

And as we move forward with even some of the discussions about some of the larger projects that we have, I mean, these are a dam that's going to be built and still discussion about the pump stations.

So there are a lot of large projects coming down the road.

We're not sure what those projects are going to look like.

But as we make those plans, I think it's important to implement a policy like Section 3 with every opportunity.

You get the prize for the best presentation for public comment.

I think there was a lot to be said in the imagery that you provided.

Mr. Lloyd, I have to agree with Council Szakos.

Thank you for that history lesson.

But even with looking at the pictures, we talked about the Yardmaster.

It was a picture of 1963, and they were all white men.

Thank you, Ms. Edwards.

I too want to thank Mr. McAdams for coming forward and will support the resolution that's on our agenda at our next meeting regarding International Day of Peace.

I also want to thank Ms. Walker for coming forward and for your courage in pointing out some issues that we need to address.

I would also, in addition to the comments Ms. Edwards made, I would also note that we are about to make an appointment

the city representative on the Region 10 board of directors and I'm sure your comments tonight will help shape our conversations around who we might consider pointing as our representative to that board and the kinds of questions they need to be asking about Region 10.

And I think it's also fair to note that

We've heard your comments tonight, and I'm sure there's a lot of validity, but we haven't heard Region 10's response, so I want to make sure people don't walk away.

I want to make sure people know that there's always multiple sides to any story, but I do appreciate you coming forward very much.

I want to clarify something because I did have a lengthy interview with the reporter yesterday regarding Mr. Collins' event yesterday and I was a little bit, I have to say a little bit taken aback by the way in which my sentiments were characterized in that article.

I was very positive and said many positive things about

the issues that you were bringing forward and that Mr. Long's bringing forward tonight.

I think you're both, and Dr. Turner, you're all pointing at some critical issues here in our community regarding unemployment, about diversity in employment, about underemployment, about poverty and living wages.

I did make one comment in the course of that interview about how some of the proposals that you've brought forward in your campaign were not feasible in existing law, but she left off the second part of my statement, which is that because it's a Dillon Rule state and there are some things we may have to go get permission to do down in Richmond, but we've done that before and that doesn't mean that they're not doable, it just means within existing law they're not feasible.

I wanted to just make it clear my true sentiments on that.

and Dr. Turner.

I think you and Mr. Williams made some excellent points in your comments tonight.

And I would argue that actually goes even beyond downtown.

I think there's a real issue in our community regarding representation and diversity within our workforce, particularly within the class of professionals here in our community, in the city, in the private sector, at the university, in the county.

We have a long way to go to become a true community of choice for professionals of color and I think you're right on that we need to step up our efforts to engage the private sector and the university and the public sector as well and how do we grow and retain and recruit and develop a more diverse workforce.

Hearing none, we'll now move forward with our consent agenda for tonight.

We have a lengthy consent agenda so please bear with me.

On our consent agenda, we have item A, minutes of August 1.

Item B, an appropriation of $97,500 Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services Neighborhood of Promise Grant, second of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation of $65,000 CASA Start Truancy Prevention Program, second of two readings.

Item D, an appropriation Workforce Development Program carryover funding for fiscal year 2012, second of two readings.

Item E, appropriation of $182,500, Charles Albemarle, Adult Drug Treatment Court Grant Award, second of two readings.

Item F, an appropriation of $65,000, Teens Give Service Learning and Life Skills Program, second of two readings.

Item G, an appropriation of $452,704, Virginia Juvenile Community Crime Control Act Grant, first of two readings.

Item H, appropriation

$22,130.50, Fiscal Year 2012, Friendship Court Sponsorship Agreement for Enhanced Police Coverage

First quarter, first of two readings.

Item I is resolution, temporary grading and construction easement, Jefferson School, first of one reading.

Item J, a resolution, acquisition of 4.515 acres of Meadow Creek Stream Valley land, first of one reading.

Item K, a resolution, acceptance of Hillsdale Drive, first of one reading.

Item L, resolution, honorary street naming policy, first of one reading.

Item M, a resolution, honorary street name, Jackson P. Burley on Rose Hill Drive from Preston to Madison, first of one reading.

Item N, a resolution, fiscal year 2012, performance contract between Region 10 and the Virginia Department of Mental Health, Mental Retardation and Substance Abuse Services, first to one reading.

Item O, a resolution, transfer of funds to Wayfinding Account and the Capital Projects Fund, $43,113.09, first to one reading.

Item P, a resolution, Silverbach's donation, first to one reading.

Item Q, resolution, transfer of funds in the capital projects fund, Clearpoint performance measurement scorecard software, $12,000, first to one reading.

Item R, a resolution, police locker room project transfer, $12,365.40, first to one reading.

Item S, Ordinance transfer of Elliott Lot to Habitat for Humanity, second two readings.

Item T, Ordinance.

RWSA easement for Skanks Branch Interceptor, second of two readings.

Item U, an Ordinance.

What about the run out of letters, Mr. Jones?

Grant of utility easement under Jefferson Park Avenue and West Main Street to the University of Virginia, second of two readings.

Item V, Ordinance.

Infrastructure maintenance bonds, first of two readings.

Last but not least, item W is an Ordinance IPP, Individual Protected Property for Stadium Road, first of two readings.

Are there any items to be pulled for further discussion, any comments, questions, or a motion to approve the consent agenda?

Mr. Mayor, I'd like to pull item L, the street naming policy, please.

Item J.

Yes.

Any other items?

Okay, well we're on the same page then.

I'll make a motion to approve.

Is there a second?

Any further discussion?

If not, please indicate your vote.

And the agenda passes unanimously.

We did have an item on the agenda.

It's not common for us to designate a street or a portion of the street in honor of an individual, but we do feel we were approached by some members of the Burley Varsity Club and we readily agreed to this idea.

I'd like to read this resolution.

It's fairly brief.

Whereas Jackson P. Burley was a distinguished educator, church worker, and leader in the Charlottesville community in the first half of the 20th century, and whereas Jackson P. Burley was a member of the 400 Club of elite African American businessmen in Charlottesville, and whereas Jackson P. Burley High School, significant to the history of integration of Charlottesville schools, is named in his memory

and whereas a request has been submitted to this council to honor the memory of Mr. Jackson P. Burley by placing an honorary street name sign on that section of Rose Hill Drive from Preston Avenue to Madison Avenue and the request meets all of the requirements under the city's honorary street name policy, now therefore be it resolved by the city, by the council for the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, the council hereby approves designating that portion of Rose Hill Drive from Preston Avenue to Madison Avenue

with the honorary name of Jackson P. Burley Drive.

And I would note that Rose Hill Drive will still be known legally and officially as Rose Hill Drive.

This is an honorary designation.

And I want to thank the members of the Burley Varsity Club for bringing this idea to our attention.

Thank you very much.

OK.

Next, we have a public hearing and a resolution regarding priorities for our community development block grant program year 2012-2013.

This public hearing is intended to aid city council and also staff in gathering information about the city's needs.

The goals and priorities that we determine here tonight as a result of this public hearing will be the framework for the funding recommendations made by the CDBG task force.

Based on current projections, optimistically the city can expect a level amount of funding, but realistically we're probably looking at some budget cuts coming from HUD.

For this year, just to give some perspective, for CDBG we received about $480,000 and for the home program we received about $110,000 And just to remind you, the current priorities for this fiscal year were workforce development, construction of new affordable housing, neighborhood stabilization which includes homeowner rehabs, rental rehabs, homeownership and code compliance

Staff is asking that council make the following decisions.

First, to set the priorities for the CDBG and HOME program for fiscal year 12-13.

Having the specific priorities really helps the task force to ensure that the diminishing funds are targeted towards

Projects that meet Council's goals.

Task Force members really, it really helps to make the decisions a little bit easier.

It also helps non-profits on the front end to know what those goals and priorities are.

It takes a long time to apply for our CDBG funds.

It's not a horrible process, but it is a time-consuming process and knowing on the front end what those priorities are helps people make decisions about whether or not to apply or not.

The task force would also like to see a priority given to projects that offer collaborations between one or more agencies and projects that leverage city resources to a high degree.

Council can keep the current priorities as they are or they can change them to other priorities as you see fit.

Just a thing to note too that council has previously committed the city's home allocations to CRHA for tenant-based rental assistance or TBRA to help offset the conversion of tenant-based housing vouchers to project-based housing vouchers to help support the crossings at 4th and Preston in the SRO.

So going forward those home funds are probably not going to be available while the SRO is needing that support.

The second thing that staff is asking council to make a decision on is determining a priority neighborhood.

There's two things that we need to have a decision made on tonight.

The first regards the current year's priority neighborhood funding.

For fiscal year 11, 12, 200,000 was allocated to Fifeville.

But council also indicated that they would like to see that money specifically go to support the creation of a health clinic to benefit Fifeville residents.

The latest update that we have from Rob Manifold of the health clinic is that funds were not awarded in June and that they're awaiting a decision in December.

So as of now the funding status of that health clinic is still a little bit up in the air.

In the meantime a Fifeville CDBG specific task force has been created with Fifeville residents and they're currently meeting to identify neighborhood recommendations for CDBG eligible projects.

Historically, council would award the same priority neighborhood status for three fiscal years.

So if council decides to continue this trend, it would be Fifeville's second year.

And traditionally, the amount of funding has been $200,000, but that amount can be changed at council's discretion.

And then other options, there doesn't have to be a priority neighborhood.

Council could decide not to have one.

Council could decide to have numerous priority neighborhoods, or council could decide different funding amounts.

The third thing that we need a decision on is determining the percentage for social funds HUD allows us to allocate 15% of our budget towards social programs and Council can keep it at 15% or you can choose to reduce the amount going towards social programs

Fourth, we need a decision regarding administration and planning costs.

For years, that level of funding was kept at the same dollar amount, but because of reduced funds, we're now at our 20% cap.

We're getting less going towards admin, but we're getting it at a higher percentage.

And just so you know, admin supports the grants coordinator, and it's also now supporting the Section 3 coordinator.

And then any other additional guidelines or directions that council may wish to give regarding these funds would be extremely helpful.

As far as budgetary impacts, again, these monies come from HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, their federal funds, so there's no local budgetary impacts.

So to summarize, staff is looking for decisions on the following points.

the general priorities for the CDBG program and to a lesser extent the home program priority neighborhood allocations for the current fiscal years whether or not council would still like to see the health clinic funded or if they would like to allow the Fifeville task force recommendations to come forward their timeline is that they would have recommendations by the end of the year that way the projects could get

up and running by the beginning of 2012.

Zach recommends given the uncertain nature right now of the health clinic that the Fifeville Task Force be allowed to make those recommendations for funding going forward in spring.

In May of each year HUD will look at our budget and if we're carrying too much they'll take it away.

And so not having a project that's ready to move forward like the health clinic at this point is a big risk for us to take.

Second regarding priority neighborhoods is whether or not there should be one for fiscal year 2012-13.

Staff recommends that we continue and that we award it to Fifeville.

One option would be if the health clinic looks like it's ready to go, if funding's awarded in December and over spring they're ready to move forward, what we could do is if there's money set aside we could put that in part of our budget for next year and if it's not ready to move forward then we can just allow the task force to continue to make recommendations for those funds.

And then lastly, we just need decisions about the level of funding for admin and planning and also our social programs.

Sure.

Mm-hmm.

Right now we have six active members, though it's one of those ones that if anybody comes forward they are more than welcome to apply and hopefully be appointed to.

We also are working a lot with Abundant Life Ministries.

Yes.

So unless there's any other questions, we'll open the public hearing.

We do have one person.

Thank you, Ms. Thaksin.

Thank you.

I don't envy being in your position this evening.

I know that dealing with budgets and grants on limited funding is extremely frustrating.

and I have probably more questions than I have ideas but you know one one thing to me you know priorities the previous priorities should still remain the same I mean keep keep pushing forward with home since construction for affordable units I personally think it'd be okay to go for another SRO if that's a possibility and workforce development obviously is something I think is extremely important

on the list of available projects that you can use that I saw in the materials online.

One of those is just making infrastructure upgrades to make things easier for people with disabilities and getting the code that way.

We've got a population that's getting older here and we need to upgrade into all that.

You know, some of my questions,

Can we add funds to these programs?

We get the grant and can we add, say, our surplus money to some of these things that we consider extremely important?

Administration, is that something that can be reduced in favor of putting those funds towards something else?

My feeling is maybe that's not the best way to do it.

And then as far as access to some of these things as far as affordable homes, low income loans or low interest rates for new homeowners, can some of these funds be used to make sure that we're targeting groups of folks that really could use these programs and make sure

people get the message.

So that's really all I had to say about it and I'm sure you all make a decent decision.

I would like to point out you know we

I was going to say this earlier, but funding cuts from the federal government, if we weren't spending more than half of our budget on wars and the military, there would be a lot more money to fund some of these programs and so I hope you consider that as the peace conference comes up.

and as International Peace Day comes up, I think peace is a local issue and it affects us, it affects our poor folks especially and we need to make it a local issue.

It's not just some far away thing, but it truly is a local issue.

Amen.

Thank you, Mr. Collins.

Anybody else like to speak during the public hearing?

All right.

I realize I have one more question.

Yes.

So I understand from somebody who has been dealing with a CDBG allocation to a local small group that sometimes because it's federal funding and it has all these regulations and reporting procedures and all this stuff, it can be really onerous for a small grant.

from working with some agencies in the past that have gotten smaller ones.

I know one of the things that I now try to do is talk to each agency when they get an award and make sure they are kind of comfortable.

Especially this last go-round, a lot of what was recommended were at rates that were essentially feasible for a nonprofit to handle, but they got reduced and reduced and reduced again as budget cuts kept coming forward.

And so just trying to talk with them and make sure

This is the amount you're now at.

It might be a good idea as people start applying for this money to tell them then just so that they can really decide is this the source of money that I want so that we know that the money will actually go to programming that it should go to.

It's not that I think small groups shouldn't get money because I really wish those reporting requirements weren't there because I think it would be great, but they are there and there's nothing we can do about it.

And I would also like to say

Is there anything we can do about it?

Is there any way that we can kind of collectively take on some of that so that small groups can get just the cash they need for their programming and have the reporting happen maybe through a contract with the city or how that can work?

And that's a possibility.

I think the hardest part is just that HUD requires a lot that people don't normally collect data on.

Well, let me ask one more question and I'll be happy to entertain your motion.

There was a suggestion made that we add a priority relating infrastructure for people with disabilities.

Is that an eligible CDBG activity?

I just want to make sure that's clear.

And I had a question too.

For workforce development, the area that's growing in our communities is healthcare services with

UVA growing, the Emily Kerr Cancer Center, Dr. Jefferson's up on Pan Tops, UVA's built a new facility up on 250 near the North Ridge.

Clearly, healthcare is going to be the field we need to be paying attention to and preparing people for.

It's a way of being, becoming a

CNA, LPN, RN, Ladder, and there are other healthcare positions that we could actually start thinking about now in terms of just how things have changed in technology, even some of the experiences that people have working in labs and everything.

Is there a way to have a workforce development focus?

specifically with training in healthcare fields.

And so that the people that apply for grants know that the purpose of them getting the money is to provide training opportunities where the outcome includes not only training, getting certification and certificate, but actually a job at the end of the training.

because I would think that since we're the number one place to come to retire, that as people age in place, there are opportunities available for people to become care providers.

And I think that's another area we need to capitalize on now.

of doing that.

I really like that idea.

I want to make a comment first of all.

My understanding is there is money in capital budget for ADA access requirements.

Is that correct?

Mr. Tolbert is shaking his head yes.

Okay, so if we have that, I don't think we need to spend CDBG money to do that.

We already have the money for that.

Even the CDBG funds are already a pretty small amount left.

I'd like to suggest a motion.

Number of this first part, that we stick with our priorities with a clarification that we give in workforce development, health workers, we give priority.

Second part of the motion, that we keep Fifeville as a priority neighborhood, and allocate $200,000 for that.

Third, that we use last year's money again through a task force process, which has not been used so far.

Fourth, the administration meeting have up to 20% for administration.

Well I'll second it for the purpose of the discussion.

I'd like to talk in particular about what we're looking for in a priority neighborhood because I think that, I mean last year I think we had a really specific purpose with this priority and we do have a limited amount of funds that want to talk through what our plan is.

Is there a plan to rotate it through neighborhoods?

Is there a reason why we need to focus on Fifeville instead of other neighborhoods?

Should we have a priority neighborhood?

Just to share, it takes a fair amount of money to make an impact in the neighborhood.

So that's why it takes two or three years to make a difference.

And there's a task force just been appointed recently.

It has not been in operation for too long, I think.

I guess I retraced what my concern was.

I think with the idea about funding for the clinic, I understand why that's been delayed and I agree that going with task force recommendations for this year is wise.

If you don't use the money, it goes away.

Well, we discussed this last year and I agree that multiple years gives people in the neighborhood kind of a chance to sort of scale things up, try things out, make sure that they work, make sure that people understand what the possibilities are, see what's there.

I think the three-year cycle makes a lot of sense.

Yes, and the question I had about the priority neighborhood is when do we begin to allocate CDBG funds for redevelopment of public housing?

I think we've been waiting for a fundable plan or proposal before we start talking about allocations.

Is that fair to say?

Is this because, is this contingent upon

the healthcare clinic being built or not?

So if it is funded then the money will go to Fifeville and if it's not funded the money will still go to Fifeville, that's the question.

the money will go to in Fifeville will be determined by the Fifeville Task Force and they'll tell us what they think the needs are.

They will make the recommendation.

Technically we make it, but that we commit to listening to that input into doing that.

I also just wanted to ask a quick question that I know that they're kind of looking at the quarter development for Cherry Avenue in that area and one of the things that I'd like to look at as we look toward workforce development and maybe this year maybe this is a future year thing too

of kind of making sure that as we looked at possible jobs in that corridor to make sure that somebody's paying attention to workforce development within the neighborhood for the jobs that are coming into the neighborhood.

I think that that's kind of for what it's worth.

Okay, so we have a motion on the table.

It's been seconded.

I get the sense there's four councilors in favor of the priority neighborhood allocation as recommended by staff.

Any further discussion?

Any further comments?

I will be happy then to take a vote.

Please indicate your vote on the motion.

And it carries unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Ms. Saxton.

Good evening Mayor Norris and Councillors.

There's a required public hearing tonight and for the purposes of the public, Waynesboro Redevelopment and Housing Authority has made a request to City Council for approval to issue multi-housing revenue bonds to

to help renovate Blue Ridge Commons, which is located within the city of Charlottesville at 738 Prospect Avenue.

What's important to note about this is that the Internal Revenue Code requires your jurisdiction, the city council, to approve the issuance of these bonds.

However, there is no obligation on the part of the city by virtue of that consent.

Once you approve the issuance of the bonds, these are revenue bonds and they will be financed through the principal and interest payments that are made on those bonds.

So, staff is recommending that City Council approve this and the reason for that is that this is going to be a significant renovation project.

for housing within the city of Charlottesville.

The proposal is to renovate units for low and moderate income families within Charlottesville, 198 units.

My understanding from the parties that are planning this renovation is that it is an extensive renovation that will be looking at doing a significant overhaul of the units.

And just to clarify, this is not putting the city on the hook in any way shape or form financially or from a liability perspective.

This is simply a legality.

Exactly.

Wayne's World does have a division that does bond financing so I think when the parties were putting together this deal they were looking for opportunities and local municipalities that do do this type of bond financing on multi-

Family Housing and Waynesboro does have a division that does that.

Any questions before we open the public hearing?

All right, we will open the public hearing.

Is nobody signed up to speak?

Is there anybody who would like to speak on this matter?

Colette Hall, 101 Robertson Lane.

First of all, thank you for your clarity.

One of my questions was to be sure it is on the public record that the city is not responsible to pay back bonds because we have increased our service debt in the spring as it is.

I still am not clear about why does Waynesboro want to invest in Charlottesville?

Thank you.

That's what I was trying to get at with my question.

Maybe you can explain further.

Well, first of all, are there any other members of the public who would like to speak?

So we'll close the public hearing.

Waynesboro has a division that does bond issuances.

So they're not per se focused on investing in Charlottesville.

What they're doing is when a group comes to them seeking bond financing, they put together a packet, Waynesboro assesses it for its viability, for the potential of that project to pay back.

through the principal and interest payments on the bonds.

This project just happens to be in Charlottesville.

And the reason that it's before city council is that if another municipality wants to issue bonds in the city, they have to get permission from the city to do so.

Yes, and that's a good point to make.

Because they have this division, it's certainly something they're in the business of doing.

I had asked last week of staff to say, is this something, not for this thing, I know I'm all for this, but is this something that Charlottesville should be looking at as a possible revenue stream to do stuff like this?

and looking at this project is a good start for assessing that I think.

I support the general idea of bonds for renovation of this facility.

I was wondering if there will be opportunity for some of the residents who live there to get some jobs in this rehab project.

It will be quite a major rehab, I presume, in the neighborhood of $5 to $10 million.

So this is rehab and not addition of new units?

That's correct.

Yes, Councilor Edwards.

I believe that the residents are aware of the process.

I don't know.

I can say all these same questions came up at the Housing Authority meeting and I don't know if you want to come forward and give the same answers here that you gave that night.

I was actually very impressed by your answers.

Thank you, Mayor Norris, members of council, John Bolton with Community Housing Partners, Richmond, Virginia, 100 West Franklin Street, 23220.

So to answer your question, it's 198 apartment homes at the time now.

We have two of the former homes is now a community center.

One of the homes was a leasing office and another one is a police substation.

Part of the plan is to take all of those, put the community space in the office into a brand new community building on site and convert all four units into livable space.

The police substation will be put into space that's underutilized right now.

It was a former laundry facility and that's going to be rehabbed and used as the police substation.

But on your question as far as tenants being available to work on the site, absolutely they will know of the construction.

Our construction is our own in-house based out of Christiansburg, Virginia.

Every job that we go to, we certainly know that there are trades, people that do some of the work that we're actually doing on site, they will have more than an opportunity to bid the project.

One thing about this sort of project where you're doing kind of renovations of a bunch of units that are often very similar.

So you're putting in one bathtub and then another bathtub and then another bathtub and then another bathtub.

It's a great opportunity for apprenticeships and training of people who might not already have those skills but can learn them on the job.

So by the time they get to the sixth unit and you've got another 190-some to go, they really know what they're doing.

And so I think that we would like to encourage you to

Yeah, absolutely.

That was a great question that came up with the Housing Authority.

Programmatically,

Back at you about 120 days out, we'll send in writing a formal notice to the tenants, which has already been sent out.

We let the tenants know that there's going to be a rehab upcoming.

And then prior to construction, which is this time, is probably going to be starting at the first of next year.

So we'll likely come in in the next month or so.

And we have tenant resident meetings where we will go probably on a property like this that has 202 apartment homes.

It will probably take course over a couple of days.

We'll do some during the daytime and then some in the evenings and just to catch everybody's schedule.

So, but that process, you know, we'll talk about, you know, what's going to happen with the rehab.

And we're going to talk about the relocation.

that'll take place and you know at this time you know all that portion is still being worked out so to the extent that folks have questions you know we answer them you know individually are happy to sit down with folks and answer them when it comes to the formal process of actually sitting down with tenants we'll meet with them as a whole and then from there actually every single apartment home will have a sit-down meeting

Yes, ma'am.

We've been managing the property ever since, I think, about 1996.

We came into the property so very

It'll all be on site.

So you may move from one building to another while you're building, so it would not affect school schedules, busing.

things of that nature.

All right.

Any other questions?

Sorry.

It's already been moved and seconded.

What are the legal possibilities of our putting in a recommendation that local folks be hired for training?

Is that something we can...

You can certainly say you would desire it.

I mean, I think that the resolution has to have pretty specific findings in it about what, you know, and that's actually, you know, drafted.

And obviously, I think communicating to the developer that that's something that you want to see happen, but in terms of a

The resolution that's before you, I could interject, came from, I think, the bond council for this project.

In the transmittal, would that be sufficient if in the transmittal letter, because we have been asked for certified copies of this resolution for a number of parties.

I would just like it somewhere in the record that that was something that we're interested in and that we hope will happen.

I think that it seems like the folks are interested in doing that and so I don't.

Thank you.

All right.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

Hearing none, please indicate your vote.

And it carries unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Good evening.

Last month, City Council conducted the first reading of an ordinance granting the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority a permanent utility easement for the replacement and relocation of approximately 2,790 linear feet of existing Shanks Branch interceptor sewer line, which begins at Harris Street and extends north into McIntire Park.

The first 1,940 linear feet beginning at Harris Street will be relocated and replaced by the city in conjunction with the Route 250 Bypass Interchange Project.

The next 850 linear feet are within the limits of the McIntire Road Extended Construction Project, although not directly impacted by that project.

Upon request by the city, the Virginia Department of Transportation has tentatively agreed to issue a change order to their McIntyre Road extended contract so that this portion of the interceptor can be relocated and replaced as a part of their contract currently underway.

When relocating and replacing the 850 linear feet of the interceptor, VDOT will primarily use the temporary construction easement already granted by council in 2009 for the work on McIntyre Road extended.

However, in order to install an 8-inch city sewer line that ties into Rivanna's Shanks Branch interceptor sewer line, approximately half an acre of additional temporary construction easement is needed.

This additional easement area is shown as a dotted area in two locations on the map enclosed in your packets and also on the wall covered up by the screen.

Since the Shanks Branch interceptor serves only city residents and businesses, 100% of the repair and replacement costs incurred by Rivanna for this line are passed on to the city.

Based on the current VDOT bid prices, the Rivanna water sewer authority and city cost for replacement of the 850 linear feet is approximately $470,000 and if advertised separately may cost the city an additional $200,000 to $250,000.

There have been repeated sanitary sewer overflows from the Shanks Branch interceptor, including multiple manholes located in McIntire Park.

As a result, the replacement of the interceptor is necessary in order to comply with a consent order between the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

If the replacement of the 850 linear feet that is subject of the proposed resolution is not done by VDOT,

As a part of the McIntire Road Extended Project, the same work will need to be done independently by Rivanna and the City.

And in that case, the City would need to grant a temporary construction easement to Rivanna in addition to the permanent easement, rather than VDOT for the construction of the line.

Upon completion of the work, the temporary construction easement will expire and no longer exist.

City staff recommends Council's approval of the resolution which authorizes this additional temporary construction easement for the utility line work to be accomplished by VDOT.

Thank you, Ms. Tucker.

Questions for Ms. Tucker?

Seconded.

Seconded.

Any discussion?

Hearing none, please indicate your vote.

Carries unanimously.

Next item on our agenda tonight is a report and a resolution on the Housing Advisory Committee report use of Charlottesville housing funds before us tonight.

Good evening, Council and Mayor.

This is just a brief report and update and ask your adoption of a simple resolution regarding some work that the Housing Advisory Committee has been doing.

We presented some changes in the way that they were trying to get them refocused that were well received by the members that were at the last meeting but we didn't have a quorum unfortunately.

But one of the issues required some action so that we can make it work so we decided to go ahead and bring this to you.

We've advised the committee and

I don't think there's any issue with that, but basically what we're trying to do with the Housing Advisory Committee is to get them focused into doing some specific things at specific times of year where they can be very beneficial to you and to staff and what they're doing.

Those sorts of things that they would be doing are to be given an annual report every winter.

How did we spend our money?

How effective was it?

Who got housing and what kind of housing got built?

They're working now reviewing the housing element of the comprehensive plan and will be participating in that portion to inform the Planning Commission and we think they can be very valuable in doing that this fall and this winter.

We'll skip number three and come back to it, but they also are going to be very helpful in reviewing the concept that we received, concepts we received for the Elliott lot and helping to make recommendations to you as we go forward with the possible development of that.

and then as we start the implementation process of the section 3 plan we intend to involve them and get their input and guidance and ways that we can make that better.

So that will be a very early agenda item now that we do have the coordinator.

And then the real reason that we wanted to be before you tonight and have you take action is that last year if you remember we had at the last minute several, I think we had four

request for our involvement in tax credit proposals that were developers, either our non-profits or private developers that were trying to get tax credits.

And that process just seemed like it was very unwieldy and we didn't have time to really think them through and think about the impacts on the community.

And they wanted our money.

And even though they

didn't need it at that particular time.

The money could wait.

They needed a commitment.

So we thought through how can we make that process work better?

And so what we've proposed is that we have a subcommittee of HAC members that would not be the ones that get funding but the other members that don't get funding that would review any potential tax credit applications in the fall of each year.

Because that's when people start putting them together.

They know when they're putting them together.

and then they would make a recommendation to the council both on do we support it whether they want money or not, is it something good for our community and recommendations on funding which would not come out of the current year's budget but would be a commitment pending appropriation of the following year's budget which would give us an idea going into the budget process how much had already been obligated to tax credit projects so we think that would be very helpful in

and the way that we manage that process and we get some more order to it.

We wouldn't be, the city manager wouldn't be getting letters asking for his signature of support at the last minute without really having a chance to vet it with you and anybody else.

So the resolution you have authorizes that process.

We already sent out the RFP request and have received the responses for this year and we advised everybody that we would not be taking

Tax Credit applications pending your approval.

We got one, but we can work with that.

And again, since the money is not needed until after the next fiscal year starts, and the amount of money the one asked for was more than we have four times the amount of money that we have to even deal with right now.

So they'll give us an opportunity to really negotiate that.

But we asked for funding applications for new construction, rehab, and then miscellaneous, and really tried to focus on the units being created.

and our hope is to be going through those RFPs and bringing something to you in October potentially for recommendations for funding.

And we've had a lot of, we've already started having good discussion.

Ms. McHugh has been meeting with the applicants to refine what they're asking for, really find out, answer questions and what we find out a lot of times is people throw out an application

because the money's there and they really don't think through how they're going to use it or they don't really need it right now and they want to tie the money up but they don't need it so we feel like there's some opportunity there.

We also want to try to revamp that process a little bit again because of our experience the first two years and really have it more staff driven and review and making recommendations to you but having a couple of members of the task force rather than the full task force work with us so we can

get in-depth interviews and real conversation and really get to the meat of what people are trying to do so we can bring you a realistic recommendation.

As you know in the past, I think that the fact that we have the HACT recommend policy and then the task force make decisions without really understanding the HACT policy.

Sometimes we've had some disconnect there and the result has been we've come to you as a staff and recommended something different than the task force has recommended.

So we want to work with them and try to refine that process and

and but that's not part of the actual recommendation or decision tonight but that's the way that we want to move forward with it.

And then the final report, the final part of the report to you tonight is just an update on where we are with some of the work that's going on in the units.

I think this is the most exciting year we've had since the housing fund was created to actually be able to really see units that are being built and from the 60 in the SRO to the

Sunrise units that are being assisted to the Timberlake Senior Housing that was approved and then the smaller projects, EcoMod, EcoRemod and then the Burnett Woods which is going through the planning process now so I think we've been able to leverage our money very well to get these and it'll be very interesting at the end of the year when we really put the numbers together to see what kind of ratio of private dollars to public dollars we have but I think we're going to be

up around 100 units or so this year, which is ahead of where we project and say we need to be.

But I think that will be the best year we've ever had in spending the dollars that you provide us.

So that's just a very quick update about where we are.

And there is the resolution in your agenda that

Just to clarify, Mr. Tolbert, when you say all low-income housing tax credit projects will be submitted no later than December 1st, you're not talking about the full application.

No.

Right.

Here's what we're doing.

They will be having to submit a very preliminary to the state around that time in the fall and this is just to say we want to get it out there.

We don't want your full application.

We just want to know what you're doing.

I just want to make sure that's clear.

I have a question on page two under miscellaneous rental subsidy.

No, those are things that come out of your priorities.

that were set two or three years ago that you would support rental subsidies and counseling for people to help them deal with foreclosure or other housing issues.

Other than that I don't remember.

You did some rental subsidies for Region 10 for two years where they were subsidizing the rent of some of their tenants.

Okay.

You're right.

Other comments or questions for Mr. Tolbert or motion to approve the resolution?

So moved.

Any discussion?

Hearing none, please indicate your vote.

It's approved unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mr. Tolbert.

Next item on our agenda is a report in ordinance regarding spotlight abatement at 704 Montrose.

Ms. Armstrong apologizes that she was going to be here to continue this discussion, but she fell ill and so she entrusted me with that opportunity.

This is an item I think you probably don't need a lot of background, but just to give a little bit, the spotlight ordinance was adopted by council some seven or eight years ago to give us an opportunity to deal with houses that had been chronic problems in the community with code issues.

This particular house at Montrose was taken to the Planning Commission as part of the process for a public hearing and a recommendation for abatement of problems that had been going on for approximately 30 years with this property.

We came to you at the last meeting bringing forward the Planning Commission recommendation with a recommendation for demolition of this property for a finding of

that it was spotlight and a passage of the ordinance which would order it to be abated through the demolition.

At that meeting in July, you heard from the owner of the property, Mr. Rogers, and you gave him 30 days at that time to either demolish the property, obtain a contractor to rehab the property with a real contract in hand,

within 30 days or found a buyer with a real contract to purchase in hand within that time.

We conveyed those findings of counsel to Mr. Rogers in a letter after the July 5th meeting.

We gave him, actually until August 12th, a few extra days just to make it end on a Friday, I believe it was, and heard from him on August 12th

He came in with a letter saying, I want more time.

Subsequent to that, he had some contact with Ms. Armstrong.

He indicated that there were some problems and that he had been cleaning the books out of the house.

What we decided was we'd like to see that and if that's the case, if it is making effort, that might temper our recommendation when we came back to you.

So Ms. Armstrong set up a meeting to go and look and see what had been done on the 18th of August.

On the morning of the 18th, Mr. Rogers called and said, we can't go over there, I've had a disaster in the house and said that he'd had a floor collapse and so Ms. Armstrong got very concerned

about that and said, well, we really need to go take a look at it.

He would not go.

She went and tried to look in the windows and see what was happening.

Went to his house when she couldn't determine that and asked him to please go and take a look.

And he said, I can't, but we'll go tomorrow.

So she went tomorrow.

The next day on Friday, on the 19th, they looked in the house.

She said you could see where it had started collapsing.

and looked very dangerous and felt even stronger that the property is beyond repair at this point.

Subsequently, we have had conversations to see if we could just negotiate the demolition and get Mr. Rogers to agree to do that.

We've been offered, if he could not afford to pay for it, we would go ahead, rather than go through a process, if he would just sign acknowledging that, we would take it down

put a lien on the property for when and if he sold it, then we would get the city money back.

He has not agreed to do that.

Today I actually had a call from a realtor who said she had somebody interested in buying the property.

When we talked about the realities of the condition, she wasn't as sure as that she had somebody willing to make an offer

But what I told her was, even if council passed this tonight on first reading, that there was still going to be a second reading on September 19th, if they had a chance to, and she said they had been trying to contact, Mr. Rogers had been unable to, if we offered to help try to facilitate that, if they were able to get something together, then we could bring that back on the 19th, and it might change something, but she agreed.

that they didn't want the house for the house's sake, they wanted it for the property's sake.

So I told her we would probably still suggest that the house be taken down and that be a condition no matter what and then they could negotiate that as part of the sales contract.

So that is still out there.

Our recommendation still to you is that the property needs to be demolished.

It is in bad condition and needs to be demolished.

Mr. Rogers did indicate to Ms. Armstrong he would like to keep

The storage structures that are on the property for a while keep us books and those.

Thank you Mr. Tolbert.

Any questions for Mr. Tolbert?

The only comment that I'll make is that I'm sorry that we have to make this decision and the bottom line is safety.

In the structure of the house,

and the idea of Mr. Rogers trying to do any more than he has.

I have the funds too.

I have the house demolished.

I won't need the city's aid in doing that.

All I want to do is have a couple of months to get still some stuff in there that I can get out of there.

Books and furniture, refrigerators, freezer, gas range, and stuff that's in the back of the house.

The reason the thing collapsed was when I was moving this stuff, getting ready to move it out of there and put it in storage, I put too much stuff up on the top floor.

I put the whole practically everything in the house on the top floor.

and I overloaded it.

It was my own stupid fault that the thing, that didn't have anything to do with the termite damage.

That was my own overloading the floor.

But I'll have the thing removed, but I do want to get the stuff out of the rib.

The one story addition to the back, that's a good solid force and everything.

Termites didn't get into that.

And there's a lot of stuff in that back room I want to get out.

So if I can just have enough time to move it out, I will have the house demolished.

I looked at the code today and again, we have to give written notice that you've done this.

It has to be hand delivered, it has to be at least 15 days there and then there's longer time.

We can give it.

I told the realtor today that I thought it probably wouldn't occur before the first of October or end of October given the time periods.

at best.

That sounds good.

So you'll have up until the end of October to get it demolished.

You would have up to the end of October to get it demolished.

Let's also just emphasize again

I agree.

I think just for folks watching, though, it's real important that we note that this is not a house that someone has lived in for 30 years.

It's been empty of people for 30 years.

So it's not someone's home.

It is your property, and it's important to you, but it's not a residence.

Yeah.

Mr. Mayor, if I could, too, because I keep getting this question from the media and from the public.

We're not taking the property.

This property will still belong to Mr. Rogers when the house is demolished and the site is cleaned up.

So he will have an asset there.

Thank you for clarifying.

All right, we have a motion or a resolution before us tonight.

Does it just move on to the next reading?

Or we have an ordinance, I should say.

I move the ordinance.

Alright, it's been moved and seconded and will carry forward to our next meeting.

Thank you Mr. Rogers for being here tonight and I appreciate you working with us and we'll get this resolved.

Thank you Mr. Talbert as well.

Okay, so the next item on our agenda is a report on our local climate action planning process and here to report is our environmental administrator, Ms.

So with that music opening, I think I'll go ahead and start our presentation tonight while the slides come up.

Good evening, and thank you for having us here to report out on an exciting two-year process that we've called the Local Climate Action Planning Process.

And since that's kind of a mouthful, we love acronyms, so I'll refer to it as LCAP for the duration of our presentation.

I'd like to start off by thanking all the folks who were involved in this process.

And they're not here, but there are tens and dozens and half a hundred who had fingerprints and involvement and contributed to this process.

I also would like to thank our counterparts at the county and UVA who were very helpful in this.

For those of you who haven't met Nancy, I'm joined by Nancy Quirk.

She's been involved with this process as well since the beginning of last year when she joined the environmental division.

and we have a couple of steering committee members here in the audience as well.

So our presentation tonight is going to focus on the themes and the principles and the recommendations that came out of this process and we look forward to your feedback on those.

Obviously it goes without saying that we've appreciated council's support on this issue and look forward to moving and look forward to the next steps.

With that said, as an FYI, a similar presentation is going to the Board of Supervisors tomorrow.

So both city and county will have the chance to consider the outcomes of this process.

So when I was here about a month ago, I was focused on giving you an update on recent projects, recent initiatives, and many of the results that, with support, council support, move us towards, I'm sorry,

Okay, I hate to do this with my back to you, but move us towards the commitments of a green city.

And so tonight we're going to expand on one of the very important initiatives that I mentioned at that time.

I'd like to start with a reminder on the key commitments that got us here.

In the last several years the city and then subsequently the county made commitments with respect to climate protection and emissions reduction and that quickly translates to reduced energy consumption.

It led to an effort to do a greenhouse gas emissions inventory, which essentially consists of identifying those sectors and sources of energy use and the role they played in greenhouse gas emissions.

So you see from this pie chart that the key sectors involved in that subject or that topic are residential,

commercial and institutional, transportation, and then municipal.

And this pie chart reflects the data that covers both city, county, and university.

And you can see if you look simply at the municipal operations, those account for about 4% of the overall emissions.

And in this pie chart, the emissions associated with the university are within this red portion, this commercial institutional section.

And so you see at the end of the day that if we have commitments as listed on the left of the slide for significant emissions reductions from a community-wide perspective, we have to engage the community.

We can't accomplish this simply by ratcheting down on the energy use of municipal operations.

And it becomes an effort

to shrink this collective pie.

And because the university and the county were considering very similar issues and very similar challenges, the opportunity and the idea to tackle the how question, how do we reduce the community pie came forward.

We did end up, so we ended up with the local climate action planning process, which was envisioned to build on these commitments and which,

and the perspective gained from the greenhouse gas emissions inventory we had completed.

A January 2009 resolution, which is included in your packet, supported this approach by endorsing the city, county and university work collaboratively to address energy efficiency and climate change.

And so what you see here is essentially a summary of the formal process.

We utilized the planning and coordination council structure pack

as the forum for presenting the proposal and it was an opportunity to keep the city, the county and the university up to date on actions including most recently in August, reports of the final, presentations on the final report.

It included formal invitation from senior management as you see in the little invitation letter signed by Gary O'Connell and Bob Tucker.

and it included a very well attended community workshop in February of 2011 that really increased broader community awareness and provided an opportunity for a lot of input.

We're now at the point of bringing this final report to you and I would note that the report that you have in your packet is accompanied by a transmittal letter that was signed by all the members of the Steering Committee and which we feel strongly reflects their diversity and their commitment to this effort.

So LCAP, this planning process, has built on local synergies, a history of coordination and cooperation, and existing and demonstrated leadership.

We acknowledge that our community plays a role in efforts to protect the global environment and we recognize that actions at the local level bring benefits to our local community along the way.

So here on the screen and in the report you'll see the makeup of the steering committee and you can see that there are voices representing the business community, the science community, the elected,

community, the environmental community, and we had the good fortune that these folks participated and stuck with this process over the two-year period.

The steering committee was supported by a network of about 50 subject matter experts, staff, local business representatives, and staff from the city, county, and university facilitated a series of meetings

and interactions and presentations to the steering committee on the outcomes.

We deliberately did not limit the conversation that the steering committee or the working groups had with respect to climate action or mitigation strategies because we wanted the opportunity to explore the realm of possibilities and it turned out to be very effective.

Given the active involvement of the steering committee and the working groups, we had a lot of perspectives and a wide array of interests.

So the discussion was very inclusive and had many more perspectives than solely the environmental implications.

We're encouraged that this process brought us a more effective approach to reach widely across all aspects of our lives, our economy, and our community.

And I would certainly emphasize that despite the exciting discussions and debates we had through this process, the committee did ultimately find consensus on what is provided to you in the report, ranging from the recommended high-level principles to the next steps and the proposed action strategies that we'll go through this evening.

One of the first products that came out of the LCAP was the development of what we've called the five-part framework for our community energy profile and it really became not only the organizing element of the community workshop but it was a result of discussions that quickly translated carbon, conversations about carbon and greenhouse gas emissions to energy and a link and a recognition that energy is intimately linked in all aspects of our lives

and if you look at it through a municipal lens, many of these subjects, if you think the built environment, mobility, energy sourcing, materials and the landscape might seem to be focused on policies and programs or land use and transportation planning or management of our own existing building portfolio and our fleets and certainly decisions about protecting and enhancing

the green space and the forested landscape.

But if you look at it through the lens of our community residents and businesses, it translates perhaps into more commonly thought of language.

Where do we live and work?

How do we get around?

What are the chances for saving money within those areas?

What are the choices we have about where our energy comes from or how we can create energy

what are we doing with respect to the materials we buy the materials we have from small scale up to large scale existing buildings that can be reused and what really are the implications of the waste that generated not just landing on recycling but how can we produce less waste so that the emissions associated with waste management can be eliminated and then again the personal

from the individual tree that provides shade to a home or a business to the larger landscape where trees provide a fantastic role in sequestering or harnessing that carbon at the landscape level.

I would offer at this point that a lot of discussions came back to the means and methods by which the steering committee was exploring climate

Protection and energy reduction and emissions reduction.

But very quickly, the benefits that came along with those extended beyond that subject.

It went beyond simply emissions reduction.

And there was a lot of discussion about cost savings and being able to enhance and strengthen the businesses and their own operating budgets.

And what does it mean to a family who's able to afford

have some additional disposable income and use that for a variety of needs that our families have.

And that conversation ended up being called or it brought the steering committee together around the possibilities and the opportunities of co-benefits.

Those things that we can realize in a community that enhance the quality of our community as a whole alongside the environmental benefits.

So I give you a moment to look at the list here of

the co-benefits and to recognize that these span issues that are important to our community as a whole and that they reflect the city's strategic priorities and if you read the letter from the steering committee it's ultimately integrated into the message that comes along with this report.

Some of these are more obvious than others, but obviously we're talking about a global challenge and opportunities at the local level that can result in local air and water quality improvements.

We're talking about saving money through reduced energy bills that increases disposable income and lowers the operating costs for our local families and businesses and makes monies available for being reinvested and used in our community.

We're talking about strengthening our local economy, again through cost savings that our local businesses can see but also by becoming an increasingly appealing location for new businesses and potentially the space for the creation of green jobs.

Alleviating traffic congestion and other stresses and strains on our infrastructure.

Potentially and likely being able to tackle some of the challenges that we deal with when we think about health and

and activities and recreation and opportunities for our city, families and not the least of which to continue providing a model for citizens, other communities and earn the recognition that we have been earning and want to continue earning as leaders in this community.

So to many people, the whole idea of climate protection can be pretty abstract and can seem too large for any individual or any small community to address.

But when you break down the benefits into direct financial savings and local improvements here, we can start to see how this can benefit all of us directly.

The Steering Committee presents a set of recommended principles which are in your report, so I'm not going to read them to you.

But up to this point we've talked about leadership, we've talked about existing synergies,

We've talked about integrating the role of energy and carbon into projects and planning as examples, but in moving forward in a more strategic and focused manner.

We've talked about the co-benefits that can accompany energy-based decisions.

And so the rest of this presentation will focus on this final principle, which is really about making informed decisions and being able to afford the community members

the opportunity to voluntarily understand the impacts of emissions and opportunities within their day-to-day life to participate in this effort.

The Steering Committee essentially landed at two high-level next steps.

The first is based on acting on the existing commitments and to strongly integrate them into planning and operations.

And the second is to build on the stakeholder involvement that was developed through the LCAP

to expand information exchange.

And if we look at the first one and kind of drill down to the next level, there was consistent support and desire by the steering committee to see these goals and these approaches integrated into the comprehensive plan and other community planning efforts.

There is a recommendation to establish a plan of action for the city itself,

for its own internal operations as well as for and with the community at large, the wider community.

And there is a desire to provide regular updates on that progress to gauge are we making any impact, are we making any changes, and if so, are we satisfied with the rate at which that's happening.

and if you look at the second set of recommended next steps, there was a lot of recognition and celebration of local successes to date but not wanting to focus only on city, county and UVA successes but a great acknowledgement of the private sector businesses, construction projects, practices that can certainly help to

inform and inspire replication and can help us scale up to achieve and realize measurable improvements or measurable results.

There's a strong goal to continue collaborating and information sharing with UVA and the county, especially regarding not only successes and pilots and innovation, but also lessons learned on our projects.

And then finally this concept of

expanding on community engagement that can include both our internal staff at all levels as well as the wider community.

We wanted to include a slide about a couple of other initiatives which are addressed in greater detail in the report, but we're all aware of the local energy alliance program, which as a nonprofit that was seeded and strongly and launched with the commitment of the city and the county and many other important community stakeholders, LEAP is growing strong community roots and is focused on facilitating energy efficiency in the built environment.

Because of the potential that we collectively saw with LEAP, the city has made the commitment to direct energy efficiency conservation block grant funds to support the programs and services that LEAP offers.

Our community now is benefiting from the opportunity LEAP has with a team of AmeriCorps volunteers that are doing a very

comprehensive canvassing effort in the local community to increase awareness of tools and services and opportunities and LEAP has recently teamed up with

Better World Betty and the City and County and again several other important community partners to launch an initiative called the Better Business Challenge and this is a really exciting friendly competition amongst our commercial sector to celebrate the good practices that are in place and to raise the bar and raise the awareness of opportunities in these various areas of energy and water and procurement and leadership and waste management

So really it becomes an opportunity of addressing and integrating the various sectors that if you think back on the pie chart we need to be engaging in order to move forward.

And an outcome of this challenge is, have been and will continue to be a number of workshops that again try to provide information and tools to our commercial community.

And it's been a great collaboration where some of our local businesses have been able to share their own really

inspiring success stories and we've had the good fortune that the economic development departments of both the city and the county have been extremely supportive in helping explore and plan for and support these outreach and engagement strategies that can really help bring the LCAP recommendations to life.

A different but obviously a very related and interesting effort that we wanted to bring up is the solar project that will be occurring at the Charlottesville High School.

City staff are working with the school administration and the teachers to really encourage the use of this system as a teaching tool across the curriculum and you can see on the slide how

The initial brainstorming effort quickly linked energy and solar and the history of energy and the implications across a variety of subjects.

So again, this is an exciting way to reach a wider community.

To circle back to LCAP though, we've provided you with recommended principles and next steps that can serve as a roadmap and essentially as a guide to help move us forward.

So we'd like to speak for a moment about the framework action strategies.

The action strategies are based on valuable input from the working groups and they serve

as a compilation of tools, information, and actions that we can consider to achieve measurable reductions in energy use and related emissions.

The action strategies follow the five-part framework, and if you think back on that, and they're summarized here in the sub-bullets, these are organized, these are consciously organized to provide a hierarchy of issues based on their potential role and impact on energy use and emissions reductions.

and really thinking where shall we prioritize our efforts given what we can get out of it.

The action strategies were developed with a consideration of our local energy users, our emissions sources and those areas in which reductions can be pursued.

It's one thing to do a blanket sweep of all the practices across the country and this is essentially kind of the

boiled down version of the actions that appear to be most appropriate and effective in our area.

So this slide here is a snapshot of some of the pages out of the report that hopefully you've had a chance to look at the array of strategies that are presented in it and to look at that set of strategies or that compilation

in light of the pie chart that I showed you early on and recalling the role of the built environment between the residential, commercial, institutional sectors and the transportation sectors.

And you'll see that the way these actions are organized certainly lends themselves to kind of a logical consideration of next steps.

There are many low and no cost options which in aggregate can amount to significant emissions reductions and can create to elevate awareness and adoption of everyday practices that can benefit the community, the environment, and potentially and frequently have associated cost savings.

And then there are what we would call the heavy lift choices, ones that will require greater level of planning, a longer time for implementation, and some investment.

The action strategies provide numerous options and examples, largely drawing from local experiences that can help inform the next phase of establishing a plan of action, a plan that

prioritizes short, mid and long term goals and strategies and it takes into consideration the relevant impact of those decisions with respect to emissions reduction, the cost differences between the various strategies, the time factor involved, some are very readily implementable, some require a significant amount of ground work.

the reality of limited windows of opportunities and by that we mean for example key strategies such as access to financial incentives that LEAP has brought to our community to support actions in our residential and built environment and buildings but which have a sunset date so we need to consider the opportunity to jump on those and promote those and then opportunities to simply connect the dots to

create synergies and linkages between existing programs and planning efforts.

So the action strategies are not intended to be limiting or prescriptive, but really to build on a lot of good groundwork.

And that comes from our local examples, from the initiatives we have in place, from the knowledge and the experience base, from the fact that we have a receptive and action-oriented community, so we're not starting from a blank slate.

It's not the end of a project.

I guess that's, you know, depending on your perspective, good or bad, but it's a key milestone in what we consider an ongoing and evolving process.

With consideration of the LCAP principles and the next steps, it is staff's recommendation that we use the existing resources and mechanisms that we have in place strategically to realize a range of benefits, including but not limited to energy use and emissions,

and to use the five-part framework and the action strategies provided to evaluate and prioritize additional actions that will promote progress as a community towards our reduction goals and commitments.

This concludes the presentation of the report and I would again genuinely like to thank those folks who contributed to it and with special thanks to Dr. Brown for his long-term involvement and commitment to this subject.

Well, thank you.

Are we kind of done with the presentation?

Maybe I can invite the rest of council to come up front and make it a little more of me not talking at council, but talking with them.

Yes.

So I would like to say this whole experience has been a really positive one.

I had the good fortune to sign the mayor's agreement on climate change and then to kind of see the city working with the county and university to implement this through first our sustainability committee and now through the LCAP group.

and I think it's important to recognize the commitment that the staff of the city in particular but also the county and the university have shown in this process because a lot of communities around the country have signed on to the mayor's agreement on climate change or the cool cities

but for a lot of them I think they kind of felt like they had done their job when they signed the agreement.

I think we're kind of leading the way certainly in Virginia and I think really around the country of trying to take that commitment and actually live up to it and fulfill it.

And what I'd like to think is that

is that we can use the framework that we've created of having the city and the county and the university, the business community and all the different parts that came together on this and figure out a way of keeping that energy going and keeping everyone working together on this issue.

Specifically, I would like to see some type of periodic update in the future from LCAP or from our environmental administrator

or the city staff to make sure that city council always has these issues kind of front and center.

Well, I just want to start by also thanking you, Dr. Brown, for your leadership on this effort.

I know you put a lot of time and sweat and energy into it, and it shows.

And it's been a good process, and it's a very collaborative process.

And I know a lot of that is we owe also gratitude to our excellent administrator and others in the city and the county and university.

And it's an exciting process, so thank you.

I just had a question.

Yes, when we did the original baseline inventory, we used a piece of software that enabled us to capture data from around the community.

It is at a somewhat 30,000 foot level, but it creates a good snapshot and point of reference.

We have always intended to update that with interim years.

We've been hugely involved with LEAP and with LCAP and therefore have put off this latest kind of check-in till this point and that's really what we think is a useful next step is let's see where we are now based on the efforts from the last

Thank you.

And the other thing that I just wanted to point out when you were talking about the ancillary benefits in the community, I think one is employment in that there's been a lot of sort of buzz about new businesses that have started that are about green renovations, there's the eco shop downtown, there's the

the gardening place, there are lots of contractors now who are really specializing in this sort of work and I think that it's something that we should note and celebrate in our community that by encouraging homeowners like myself we're doing now a deep energy retrofit I guess it's called where we're hoping to reduce our home energy use by about 80% and pay for it over the next 15-20 years

and Dave

But for this it matters to me, and so I'm willing to do the work.

So I'm hiring local people, local contractor, local folks to do the work.

And I would actually add to that and certainly I know I might be speaking for LEAP but there really is a pretty exciting story about what's happened in this community in the last year to two years in terms of not just creating new jobs but creating a space

for existing jobs to be retained and for businesses to consider, you know, adjustments that really respond to the goals and the commitments and the focus of the community and to the extent that we can kind of ratchet up the dialogue about what we can be doing within arms reach in our own homes and in our own businesses, I think we do make some pretty significant jumps towards these seemingly kind of out of reach goals because

if we, one of the points that was very strongly made early on was these may seem like lofty goals and stretch goals and difficult to wrap our heads around, but there's nothing that's stopping us from doing something, from starting.

All right, any other comments or questions for Ms. Riedewald?

Mr. Mayor, thank you.

The Dialogue on Race government action team has been developing a number of the action ideas that were generated during the study circle process as part of the Dialogue on Race over a year ago.

One of the suggestions that has come to Council is to consider adding to the City Council vision statement and adding a section dealing with race relations.

At its retreat in June, the City Council decided to honor that request and drafted language to address the concerns of the work group and others in our community.

and a new section was drafted and others were slightly amended.

And I'll first run through quickly what the topic areas of the current vision statement, what they are, and then talk to you a little bit about the changes.

Currently we have eight vision areas, economic sustainability, a center for lifelong learning, quality housing opportunities for all,

Seville Arts and Culture, a green city, America's Healthiest City, a connected community, and a smart citizen focused government.

So I'll just briefly go through some of the additions to the vision statement as it was revised on June 9th.

We added to a bullet point at the beginning of our vision statement

I'll read, a leader in innovation, environmental sustainability, social and economic justice, and healthy race relations.

We added those four words.

We also added another bullet point, a united community that treasures diversity.

So moving on now, we've added a ninth subject area, and we've titled this a community of mutual respect, and I'll read to you the new proposed vision there.

In all endeavors, the city of Charlottesville is committed to racial and cultural diversity, inclusion, racial reconciliation, economic justice and equity.

As a result, every citizen is respected.

Interactions among city leaders, city employees, and the public are respectful, unbiased, and without prejudice.

and then we added one sentence to smart citizen focused government.

Citizens feel listened to and are easily able to find an appropriate forum to respectfully address or to express their concerns.

So in addition to the dialogue on race work group, in addition the dialogue on race work group is also interested in adjusting the strategic plan to address concerns about race relations and that's one of their suggestions as well and we'll have the opportunity to discuss that approach

when we revisit that issue of the strategic plan next year.

And so joining us tonight is Gene Shepherd from the action team and Charlene Green, the program coordinator for the dialogue on race.

Questions or comments for Mr. Jones?

It's been moved and seconded.

I just would like to thank all of you for participating in the dialogue on race and Holly for bringing this to the council and all of you for supporting the changes to be more inclusive in all of our language.

Okay, thank you very much and thank you for your work as well, Ms. Shepherd.

It's been moved and seconded.

Any further discussion?

Hearing none, please indicate your vote.

and the motion passes unanimously.

Thank you very much.

Next item on agenda is a report on McIntyre Road extended bridge.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

At the last council meeting, seems like ages ago now, we reported to you a change that had been made by VDOT to the McIntyre Road extended design

They had replaced a, or were replacing a culvert that was over Skeeks Branch and were going to build a bridge there.

And we informed you that, that had been, you'd gotten the information.

And as you may recall, this was done and they were able to not need the permit from the Corps of Engineers at that time and proceed without that.

The bridge design has been presented to us in your packet are drawings that show the plan view of the bridge and photographs that show what the bridge would look like.

Basically it's being built to look like the bridge that's on the county portion and a cross between it and one they built in Palmyra.

It'll still be two travel lanes, it'll still have the two bike lanes on it and what it will also have is the trail will come up and cross on the bridge

in a separated area on the bridge, the multi-use trail.

So again, it's very similar to the one that's built in the county.

And Mr. Brent Sprinkle from VDOT is here.

I had a question.

It was suggested by somebody that could we use this bridge

I asked Mr. Sprinkle that question.

I sent him the email that we received today and asked him that question.

Essentially, the answer is anything is possible.

Thank you, I'm Brent Sprinkle with Virginia Department of Transportation and as Jim said, it would be problematic to make that change at this time.

I can tell you that there will be a flat area under the bridge on the south side that should be wide enough for some pedestrian activity, whether you'd want it as a formal part of your trail

or whether you would want it as an informal type trail that I think the Rivanna Trails people have throughout the area.

It would be difficult to get the full 10-foot trail under there and address other issues from a safety perspective.

I'll say that I was a little startled at the way that this project came to us, but I think that the bridge itself is something that I find very attractive.

You addressed, there was a question that came up at our last meeting when this arose about how construction of the bridge might affect the way that this whole project is constructed where, I'm trying to remember exactly, Mr. Kleeman raised an issue regarding how you'd have, all the trucks would have to now go around.

I do.

His question was,

If the covert was going to be put in and be a crossing to be able to get borrowed from the south side, how did you deal with that?

We talked about that with Brent and Mr. Utterbach and basically there's going to be a temporary crossing there that was going to be constructed even then and this won't change.

Well we have not gone to the contractor yet to negotiate prices.

Generally speaking bridges will cost more than a culvert.

but we have not finalized anything on that.

Thank you very much.

Next item on our agenda is a report on water demand analysis population projections.

I am talking to you about population, not about water.

At your last meeting, the Water Demand Analysis had just come out and you expressed some concern about the population projections that were contained in that.

And you asked us to meet with AECOM and RWSA to talk about those projections, how they were developed and were they reasonable.

And we did that

And just to give you a little background on that, again, the projections are trying to estimate 60 years out.

And we haven't found a demographer yet that really thinks that that is anything that you can do with any degree of accuracy.

So we knew we were playing with something very difficult at the time.

But again, we did feel that 71,000 as a city population was too high.

So we started trying to understand that and

where that number came from and how it would be broken down.

We consulted, we asked the PDC if they'd done any projections and they basically said we've looked at a couple of scenarios based on the VEC projections and we were sort of right in the middle of where theirs were.

I mean they were, they said the same thing that it's just really it's very difficult to do and you know the problem in Charlottesville is because we had no growth

trying to project growth based on history is very difficult and you can either assume that we're not going to have any growth or that the last six or seven years may be indicative of what's happening or there's something in between.

And so they were trying to look at 10 years, 20 years and come up with something and they came up with a number that we thought was we

One was too high, one was probably a little too low.

We looked at the VEC employment commission, the Virginia employment commission projections.

They only go out to about 30 and while the numbers for that we were looking at were a little higher than that, they were within the order of magnitude of error that VEC projects.

And then we asked the Weldon Cooper Center if they would look at them and make any projections and Weldon Cooper Center said we don't do projections.

So they weren't able to help us at all there.

So when we looked at the numbers, the revisions, and where they have been revised now is to a projection of 63,482 50 years out, or in 2060.

The starting number is 43,475, which is our current census, 2010 census number.

Of that, 450 of those are UVA students living on grounds.

Of that, 9,300 of those are UVA students living off grounds.

and those numbers come directly from UVA's transportation folks that reviewed all their numbers to determine where the students were living.

That means that currently there are 33,725 non-student people living in the city of Charlottesville.

So we tried to look at that and look at the projections and see based on what UVA was giving us, what did that mean 50 years from now for a

non-student population.

And that number would be 49,392.

So it's a little easier to deal with, I think, when you look at a population of 33 going to 49 over that 50 years.

It doesn't sound quite the same as going to 71.

But it's still a growth.

It's still a growth that's pretty significant.

So we tried to look to see, is that number feasible?

Could it happen?

And I think we came to the conclusion,

Yes, it could happen.

Yes, it could not happen, but yes, it could happen.

And there's some factors there that influence that.

One is that UVA, we know, is growing at a faster rate than in the past.

We also know that if you talk to different offices at UVA, you get different numbers for what that growth is going to be.

And AECOM is using the numbers they were given by the UVA facilities division, which are more conservative of the numbers.

and that's fine, that's the ones that UVA said to give them but we also know that there's discussion that that number could be greater so there is some opportunity there that that number could be greater than what we've expected and with that, if you increase the students, you increase faculty, support staff and then the service jobs in the community that support all that so that could have an influence.

The health system is growing faster than it's ever grown.

They keep building, they keep adding people so

That's something we didn't experience during those periods of non-growth of city population.

And then we know that trends nationally show young professionals relocating to urban areas of which we are one and have had that happen.

So we feel that when we look at all those numbers as far as population, the current projection in 2060 of 63, 482 is a more reasonable, more feasible number than the 71.

You know, is it the number

None of us are able to really say that but we feel like it's something that you've got to have a number to plan for and this seems to be a reasonable way to go about.

The thing I didn't say is we looked at going a 15 year period to kind of hit

the middle, get some of the growth period we had but also some of the stagnant period and factor that in.

That's what was used to try to project to get to the 63 but then we went back and analyzed it against all the university numbers and the university minus the other population.

We feel pretty confident that this is a feasible number to have in a plan to use as far as the population.

Troy Kinzer from AECOM is here if you have any questions about that or

I guess I had more of a philosophical question, which I know at least one or two members of the public have raised in emails, which is if we're going to establish this as sort of a projection for water consumption purposes, should we not also be using this as a projection for other city services and other, you know, in our comprehensive plan, in our transportation planning, in our housing planning?

We're not projecting the same level of growth as we are for water.

I'm wondering should we try to be consistent?

Does it matter?

I would love for us to be as consistent as possible and we're just beginning the comp planning process.

The PDC is beginning the transportation planning update and so we're going to review this.

We're going to, you know, I'm not positive we will, but I think if

You know, we'd like to be as consistent as possible.

You know, the county numbers for their projections probably will be what they'll use, but they're a completely different animal when it comes to analyzing and projecting.

But if we can, you know, at staff level, we've had the discussion about how we might be able to do that.

In the last two comp plans, we haven't even done a projection of population.

I don't know that we wouldn't.

We just want to, you know, to see how it fits in.

I'm not sure we'd go out 50 years because typically you don't do that in comp plans anymore because it is such a guess, but the shorter time period is 10, 20, maybe 30 years because plans are typically a 25-year plan.

We presented in the report that was submitted and posted on the Rivanna Water and Service Authority website

The current with the revised is we slice and dice these numbers multiple ways so it's the urban area.

Let me point out one point of clarification from the last time that I think offered some confusion.

The way we presented data was a

a water service area population, which most people don't think in water service area.

Most people think in demographic populations.

And so we tried to explain that of how we got from the demographic population into a water service area population in our last plan.

So I hope that offers some of the citizens that raised some questions, some clarity about how we did that.

But that being said, 16.96 MGD for the urban service area.

That includes, I thought I saw a different number.

Correct.

I'm talking 2055.

Do you remember, do you know what the number is, which is the benchmark we've been using

I know, I want to hear him say it.

I just think it's important to note that for the record.

We have a water supply plan that's premised on generating 18.7 million gallons a day by 2055.

and the new projection being 16.17 is significantly less and just for the record, I'm not trying to reopen the debate here, but just for the record, the number we got from DEQ was that the full restorative dredging of the reservoir plus 13 foot rise on Ragon Mountain would produce 16.8 million gallons a day, which would be more than sufficient.

to meet this projected need.

I just want to note that for the record.

Just one.

Yes.

Our numbers are for human consumption only and there are other considerations that go into water supply planning.

Okay.

We do not.

OK, any other comments?

Thank you for your work on that.

I know you put a lot of hours into this, so I really appreciate all your work.

And I appreciate your responsiveness to the concerns that were raised by counsel and by the public about the population projections.

Yeah, I feel much more comfortable with this.

I think we've talked about we want density and we want growth within the city because that's the kind of population growth that we should be looking at rather than sprawl out across rural areas.

The first projection, I think all of us had a really hard time kind of wrapping our heads around how you would fit them.

Yeah, our objective here is not to come up and tell the city and the county and the service area what needs to happen.

We just need to make sure that we're planning adequately for what that crystal ball says about what it's going to look like in 50 years.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Tolbert.

That's the last item on our regular agenda tonight.

We do have a number of items under other business, and we'll start with Ms. Edwards.

And I'll go through that.

rather quickly since we also have something else on the agenda, but I wanted to talk to counsel about a couple of things because some of them

I want you to check your schedule, at least on one thing.

First, one thing we talked about at our retreat was an apology for Vinegar Hill.

And I've talked about that a couple of times, but I wanted to bring it up again because I wanted to kind of narrow down the date as to when that could actually happen.

And one of the things that was talked about in the dialogue on race is to have a form of some sort, and that's the topic, race, place, and redevelopment.

And there may be an opportunity to tie the apology for Vinegar Hill with the redevelopment conversation.

I think that's so important.

and I thought it was kind of ironic that we talked about the sister city at the beginning of this meeting because the analogy that was going to bring up in regards to Vinegar Hill is the African symbol of Sankofa and it's the mystical bird

with this head going back with an egg in its mouth and basically it symbolizes the importance of going back to retrieve what is important as you move ahead.

And as we talk about redevelopment and other things in the city, it's important for us to understand that path but to begin to let go so we can move forward.

Also, in terms of counseling dates, we have a lot of Thursdays that are filled with our community conversations.

My hope is that sometime in October, November, we can have an opportunity to have another conversation about poverty, almost like a second or another follow-up on the work sessions that we had on poverty.

But this time,

address it in a different way and have what I call systemic strategies to address poverty.

Because we're at a different place now.

We talk about poverty more a couple years ago.

And that would include

An update on the Bank On initiative because there has been some progress made.

An update on the Promise Neighborhood initiative because I know there's been some progress made.

Right, and what the mayor is talking about is out of the re-entry summit there was a suggestion that a peer network be developed that would come from our felons and be developed and what we found out was that the Darryl Hunt Project had such a program in a model in place already.

So they were able to come to Charlottesville to do a training so that the peer network could begin to come to fruition.

Can I make a comment on that?

It seems to me that it might be that those reports would be more widely appreciated were it to be at a council meeting rather than at a work session.

I mean, work session gets reported in the newspaper and has 10 or 20 or occasionally 30 people in the audience, but the council meetings, a lot of people watch them on TV.

And I think that would be a way of kind of letting the community know that