City Council Meeting   4/16/2012

Dede Smith

Dede Smith

OK.

I wanted to make one change and to accommodate our trade commission because they are here in full power, full force, so they would not have to wait until the end of the meeting.

So I want to move that to item 4 after the public hearings.

Is it okay with the council?

There are two public hearings we have, and after that we can move those so they can

Mr. Norris.

Here.

Ms. Smith.

Here.

Mr. Huja.

Yes.

Ms. Szakos.

Here.

Thank you.

The three proclamations we have today, and I'm going to start with one of those dealing with Arbor Day.

There's a proclamation about Arbor Day, whereas in 1872, Sterling Morton proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture that a special day be set aside for planting of trees.

Whereas this holiday called Arbor Day was first observed with planting more than a million trees in Nebraska.

whereas Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and the world.

Whereas trees can reduce erosion of our precious topsoil by wind and water, cut heating and cooling costs, moderate the temperature, clean the air, produce life-saving oxygen, and provide habitat for wildlife.

Whereas trees are a noble resource given as paper, wood for houses, fuel for fire and beautify our community.

Whereas trees in our city increase property values and enhance the economic viability of business areas and beautify our community.

And whereas trees, wherever they are planted, are a source of joy and spiritual renewal.

Now, therefore, I, Satyendra Singh Huja, Mayor of City of Charlottesville, Virginia, do hereby proclaim April 27, 2012 as Arbor Day in the City of Charlottesville, and I urge all citizens to celebrate Arbor Day and support the effort to protect our trees and woodlands.

Furthermore, I urge all citizens to plant trees, to get in the hearts, and promote the well-being of this and future generations.

Signed, 16th of April.

And I think there's somebody here to receive.

Betsy, are you here to receive?

Betsy is the chair of our tree commission.

Mayor Huja and members of council, I'm on your agenda in a few minutes to bring you up to date on the initial months of the tree commission, but on behalf of the commissioners here and those not present and everybody in Charlottesville who loves trees, I would like to thank you both for establishing a tree commission and also for making Charlottesville a tree city and being committed to having a green city and declaring Arbor Day on April 27.

Thank you.

This proclamation is in honor of National Park Week.

Whereas the National Park Service has been the steward for protecting our natural environment and its treasures, and whereas for nearly 100 years the National Park Service has provided places that fuel our spirit and define our character,

preserve our rich culture and heritage and provide breathtaking and accessible areas for outdoor recreation, educational programs, and economical family activities which contributes to everyone's well-being.

And whereas the city of Charlottesville is located at the foothills of the Shenandoah National Park, one of the most visited national parks in America with over a million visitors a year, and whereas we recognize the park's contribution to our local tourism industry

and Quality of Life and whereas this year's theme is Picture Yourself in a Park and invites nature enthusiasts to reconnect with each other in the great outdoors and whereas during National Park Week there will be an array of unique events and activities that will be offered and admission to all national parks during this week is free.

Now therefore, be it resolved that on behalf of the City Council of Charlottesville, I, Satyendra Singh Huja, Mayor of Charlottesville, do hereby recognize April 21, to 29, 2012, as a National Park Week, and call this observance to the attention of all our citizens, with warm gratitude to Shenandoah National Park.

Good evening, I'm Jennifer Flynn.

I'm the Deputy Superintendent at Shenandoah National Park and on behalf of Superintendent Bogle and all the park staff, I want to thank you for your proclamation of support for National Park Week and for Shenandoah National Park.

Come visit your park, Shenandoah, a national treasure in your backyard during National Park Week, as you said April 21st through 29th.

The entrance fees are waived for the entire week and it's a great opportunity to visit your park.

Shenandoah celebrated its 75th anniversary last year and we appreciate the support we received from our neighboring communities.

The planning group for the 75th anniversary was comprised of representatives from the nine counties around the park, park partners, park staff, and other local representatives.

We consider the year-long celebration to have been a great success.

The strength of this group was the representation from both sides of the mountain, the Piedmont and the Shenandoah Valley, collaborating together on how to raise the profile of the park and our region.

That group has chosen to continue meeting under the new banner of Celebrate Shenandoah.

In 2010, visitors to Shenandoah National Park spent nearly $71 million in local communities and in the park, supporting 1,087 jobs.

The future of Shenandoah National Park and the surrounding region has intertwined.

We invite you to participate in a one-day workshop, Connecting for Prosperity, Charting the Future Together, on May 24, 2012 at James Madison University.

The keynote speaker will be Ed McMahon, noted author, attorney, and expert on creating sustainable, livable, and prosperous communities.

The values that draw people to Shenandoah, the grand views, the natural quiet, the wilderness, the animals, the pristine waters, the recreational opportunities are values that the National Park Service cannot protect on our own.

Our park needs all of our communities and neighbors to support the values that Shenandoah embodies.

The Shenandoah National Park Trust is one of our partners.

The Trust was established in 2004 as the park's official friend, group and fundraising partner.

Mayor Huja and City Council members, thank you all very much for this proclamation.

It means a lot to the National Park staff as well as the staff and the Board of Trustees of Shenandoah National Park Trust.

We are located two doors down essentially from City Council.

We chose Charlottesville as the headquarters for Shenandoah National Park Trust for a number of reasons, one of the most important of which is Charlottesville is a really important gateway community to this National Park.

It not only offers recreation opportunities

and places for people to go to recognize historic sites within Shenandoah National Park, but it also adds a huge quality of life to people that live here and who are looking to relocate here.

So we are the face of the Shenandoah National Park here in Charlottesville.

Over 14,000 acres actually of Albemarle County reside within the park boundaries.

Thank you very much.

Next Proclamation on a very serious topic deals with Distracted Driving Awareness Month, which is the month of April.

Whereas distracted driving can result in injuries and death to motorists, pedestrians and bicyclists, whereas the health and well-being of our citizens are a direct result of increased awareness about the dangers of distracted driving

whereas distracted driving occurs when drivers divert their attention away from the task of driving to focus on other activities instead and whereas 80% of all crashes and 60% of near crashes can be attributed to some form of distracted driving whereas the estimated 1.6 million crashes per year can be attributed to cell phone, talking and texting

while driving, whereas distracted driving is a serious life threatening practice that is preventable.

and whereas in order to reduce number of crashes as well as improve driver safety, motorists should dedicate themselves to adopting and maintaining a safe behavior while behind the wheel.

Therefore, I, Satyendra Singh Huja, Mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia, do hereby recognize April as Distracted Driving Awareness Month in the City of Charlottesville and call upon and encourage all our citizens

to increase their awareness to the danger of distracted driving, signed 16th of April.

Hi, everybody.

Mayor Huja and members of council, thank you very much.

I'm Maggie Pearson, Director of Communications at Mickey Hamlet, Attorneys at Law.

Thank you for having me.

Quite a few of our attorneys have young or teenage kids, so when we heard about National Distracted Driving Awareness Month, it made perfect sense that we should find a way to be involved.

So it's all about education, as you know, and basically getting the word out.

That's what we're going to be trying to do.

We'll have a press conference on Thursday and we'll have a table on the mall with pledges for people to come by and sign.

And here are a couple of little things that you can do to stop driving distracted.

Turn off your phone when you get in your car.

What a concept.

When you're in the car, put your phone where you can't get to it.

Turn your phone notifications off.

The less you hear your phone, the less tempted you'll be to reach for it while you're driving.

If you need to contact someone, pull over to a safe location and put your vehicle in park.

Those are just a few little things.

Thank you very much.

Basically, the message is no matter what it is, it can wait.

I'm pleased to announce as a reminder to some and to add up to many, next Wednesday April 25th is our Spring Job Fair.

This is one of the biggest events that the city organizes each year.

This year over 70 employers are participating.

There will be many jobs that they will be hiring for.

are interviewing for.

Next Wednesday, April 25th at the John Paul Jones Arena from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

It's always a very well-attended event, and particularly in this economy, it's a very important event.

So I want to thank the city staff and all of the partners that are involved in organizing this clean job fair.

And also, just as a reminder, pool passes are on sale starting April 16th, which I guess is today.

Yes, I have a few.

I just wanted to note we got this email from Piedmont Council for the Arts today to announce their Arts Reach program.

And this is an effective network for free and low-cost local arts resources for our underserved community members.

And it is an avenue for people to contribute art supplies, to contribute tickets,

funding of really anything that has to do with access to the arts and I just thought it was a really an amazing resource and whatever it is they know where it is best goes.

So Piedmont Council for the Arts, I apologize I don't have a contact but it's on Google.

The other announcement I'd like to make is near and dear to my heart.

At the Ivy Creek Natural Area next Saturday April 21st for anybody in

who knows the Ivy Creek Natural Area, the historic barn out there which was built in the 1930s by the first African American extension agent for our region, Conley Greer.

That barn has been renovated and it will be reopened and it's a public event.

It's at 2 o'clock.

It's a wonderful opportunity to not only see this historic building but to get access into it.

Everybody always wants to get into that barn and this is your opportunity.

2 o'clock, April 21st, Ivy Creek Natural Area is on the African American Heritage Trail.

It has a really amazing history and is a city park.

It's one of our city county jointly owned parks.

So it's our park.

So I just wanted to mention that and along the same lines Earth Week is this next week starting Sunday April 22nd in the Main Street Arena on April 22nd Earth Week Eco Fair will be happening.

This has become an annual event.

and is really, really great.

And if I just might mention on the Ivy Creek Natural Area, Ivy Creek Foundation, National Park Creek Arbor Day, just on a sad note, the Ragon Mountain Natural Area is now closed as of today.

Oh, okay.

A couple announcements.

One on creative community planning and the other one on place making.

So tomorrow night, April 17th, from 7 to 9, the Bridge PAI will be sponsoring a panel discussion.

about what does it mean to be and have creative community planning.

Some of the questions the panel will be discussing are what historical processes align to make this place unique, particularly along Monticello Avenue?

What is the right relationship between planning and organic development processes?

Seeking meaningful input from the community.

Alternative strategies that ensure inclusiveness and excellence.

how to bring in traditionally excluded voices in the planning process and how to listen to vested stakeholders and truly address their concerns without them hijacking the process.

So that is going to be, again, sponsored by the, that's pretty interesting.

I'm going to be on that panel discussion.

I better bone up on that one.

Other people on the panel are Pete O'Shea, Lance Hosie, Dan Zerman,

myself, Allison Hirsch, Chris Genzik, who was here, but I think he's gone, and then possibly Maurice Cox.

I think Maurice Cox will be on that panel discussion.

Second, on April 26th at the Omni Hotel from 5.30 to 7.30 will be a program sponsored by Charlottesville Tomorrow called Placemaking, a blueprint for our future.

Charlottesville Tomorrow is asking that we all join them for a town hall meeting about our community narrative.

our Sense of Place and why those things directly affect the prosperity of our community.

There will be a special presentation by Dr. Catherine Laughlin who is a national expert and has been working on the Knights Soul of the Community Project.

And she has a background in

Management, Planning and Community Practice, as well as been involved very much with this Knight Foundation research on what makes people engage and attach to their communities.

Interesting panel discussion to follow that will include

Andrea Douglas, the director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, Kay Slaughter, former mayor of the city of Charlottesville, David Sloan of Sloan-Milby Real Estate Partners, and Paul Beyer of the TomTom Founders Festival.

So I urge you all to come.

I've brought this to the attention of our city manager that perhaps we might be able to get discounted tickets, if not free tickets, for our Human Rights Commission Study Group as well as our Place Design Task Force because those issues really do matter and are a very important component of the placemaking blueprint.

So, thank you.

One is to encourage everyone to come to the city market every Saturday from very very early way before I wake up until about noon and one of the features that is happening at this year's city market is there's a time to meet with a city councilor

I did it on this Saturday.

They asked for 9 to 10, 1030?

And I know I'm doing May 12th.

I'm not sure when the rest of you are, but May 5th.

Dave, do you have one yet?

So I'd also like to announce that on Monday night, next Monday, a week from today, at 6 to 8 p.m. at Charlottesville High School in the Commons, the cafeteria area, there is going to be an open house for the Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project.

This is a

co-sponsored an event from the Nature Conservancy in the city of Charlottesville working to renovate or rehabilitate a whole section of stream that goes through there.

If you've seen it, the banks are very eroded and abrupt and it's in bad shape and the fixing of it is going to not only make it look more beautiful but be better for wildlife and also slow down the course of water.

So it brings less sediment downstream into the rivers and into the bay.

So the agenda is a chance to view project displays, get some overview and goals of the project, learn about the design and the schedule, and for people especially who either hike through there or who work or live near there, what to expect during construction.

The staff will be there as well as folks from the city.

Parks and Recreation Department, I assume.

So I've been to a couple of those previous meetings and they're really informative, so if you're interested I urge you to come.

And then one other thing, and I must say this was just handed to me and I did see the announcement and I saw the email.

It is a little out of my area of expertise and so I will give it for what it's worth.

I'm going because I think it's interesting, but the newest GIS web application.

A last reminder from last city council meeting that I talked about mayor's challenge for water conservation and I wanted to encourage, it is for the whole month of April, I want to encourage people to go on www.mywaterpledge.com you can pledge how you can conserve, you can have a friendly competition with other cities, see who can conserve more, so please take time to go to

Three prominent African-American sculptors from different parts of the country are going to be visiting Charlottesville to present visions for a new vinegar hill monument.

We have Melvin Edwards, Preston Jackson, and the team of Rodney Leon and Lorenzo Pace, all of whom are nationally known sculptors, will be presenting their ideas.

I want to add to that that we want citizen's opinion about this sculpture so that we can express community's viewpoint.

Thank you.

Oh, you took me by surprise, Mr. Huja.

Does anybody else have the names?

So they don't think you didn't like them?

and I also want to say that we are really blessed by many citizens willing to serve on boards and commissions of the city because this is your city so we appreciate your volunteering on boards and commissions so that's why we do the appointments every city council meeting some appointments of that nature and I hope you go to our city website and see what vacancies are there so you can apply and if you don't succeed first time try again

Next item, probably the most important item of this city castles from my point of view is matters by the public.

And as you know the rules are very simple.

You have three minutes to speak and you may not speak on the item which is scheduled for public hearing.

For any other topic you can speak for three minutes and I'll have this measurement time measure and I hope you'll be able to wrap it up within three minutes.

Good evening, Council.

I'm here because I saw the meeting last time and I saw the presentation on fluoride and I

Ate at a restaurant here tonight and I couldn't drink the water.

I had mouth cancer in 1993.

I went to non-toxic doctors including Hans Nieper where Reagan went when he had colon cancer and he told me no fluoridated water because of the immune impact because it's going in my mouth and trust me you do not want mouth cancer.

And obviously it works so I don't want fluoride.

And let's just go on something that we can agree on.

The water quality report for the city of Charlottesville says that the water is safe, reliable supply of drinking water.

And I've given you 12 points where I have issue.

I haven't slept, I don't think, since the last two weeks to put this together for you.

I only ask a couple of things.

Number one, I want you to read it.

and understand it.

Number two, I ask that you give it to doctors Peek and Cook and tell them to refute it or to accept it.

Simple as that.

It's not fair that you people have to make a decision that is as complex and full of politics and greed and corruption as the fluoride issue.

You'll see there's a book called Fluoride Deception and it's precisely what it is.

I've documented it meticulously.

I'm a teacher.

And the next thing that I would ask you to do is put this on the website for the public to decide themselves, to get informed, to give community involvement here.

Put it on the web.

We're in an electronic age.

It's incredible.

Today, I just put these things together, and they're sitting somewhere for anyone in the world.

I wish my parents were here.

So anyway.

And the last thing I would like to suggest is that we involve our young people.

Let's put together a form.

Bring in the head of the ADA to defend their position.

Bring in the head of the Department of Health from the state of Virginia, where they did not share with you their own toxicology report.

It wasn't Dr.

Peek's fault, but yet I found it.

In fact, it's been missing for years and years.

It was written in 1980.

I went to the author.

I found him on the internet.

He sent it to me.

And now it's on the web for the world to see.

Let's have a forum.

Let's get our high school kids involved with it.

I will bring in the people that are on this second side of this sheet.

I know virtually all of them.

Folks, the great man is gone, but we talk on the phone.

So let's do that.

It's a national issue.

You shouldn't have the burden to have to pile through all this crap that people give you.

Let's bring in these people.

Let's solve it for the nation instead of all these little towns going through this stuff.

And the last thing, the lead issue, I've shown you just a couple of things.

There's higher lead in the blood and in the water when you fluoridate.

Blood lead levels increase violent behavior.

It affects blacks more than whites, just like dental fluorosis.

Can we get the camera on some dental fluorosis?

I noticed that Dr.

Peek said there was no toxic effects except mild fluorosis.

The picture that I have there, and it's on the internet, if the newspapers will put out what I've got, that is dental fluorosis.

In Augusta, Georgia, 80% of the children 12 to 14 have fluorosis.

14% of them have moderate to severe.

Emerald Young, I'm a Algora County resident and I'm here to request that City Council and also the Board of Supervisors put a warning on the water bills regarding giving infants, bottle fed infants, fluoridated water.

If infants and young children receive fluoridated water as their main source of nourishment because they're bottle fed, that will, before their teeth have erupted, that increases the likelihood that they're going to have dental fluorosis.

And dental fluorosis is not merely cosmetic.

It is a sign that something systemic

you have been poisoned systemically by an excess of fluoride.

Other governments which have taken the step to warn their consumers, if you go to the Vermont Department of Health, they have a warning about feeding infants fluoridated water.

If you go to the city of Austin, they also have a warning.

The House of Representatives for New Hampshire voted in March to have the warning regarding

Infants and fluoridated water printed on their water bill.

So you have a precedent of other governments being willing to inform the consumers of the risk that come with ingesting fluoride.

Infants are not the only group that are vulnerable, but they're the most likely to be harmed at the very start of their lives.

So you can have misrepresentation of facts by omission, and there's been a serious omission regarding the health risk of fluoridation.

Which one of those is mine?

Okay, all right.

Another thing, now 93% of Virginia's public water supply is fluoridated.

So if it's such a great public health miracle, then why do most of Virginia's children, school children, have dental caries?

is not working.

And in 2007, the Virginia Department of Health stated that 21% of Head Start children in Virginia need dental treatment.

So it's not working.

So we're ingesting something that's not working, but we're also getting a health risk.

So, that's what I would like you to consider is putting a warning on the water bills and also the Department of Health and Human Services and also on your website.

Betty Mooney from the city.

Well, I guess water's a hot topic, and I'm here about yet another water issue.

I recently heard on WINA a local physician from UVA, Dr. Julia Whiting, and a medical researcher, Lori Delahunty, who's spent 35 years as a medical pathology researcher.

literally begging the public to come out as their civic duty and ask you not to put chloramines in the water.

Well, we have the fluorides in the water, but now adding chloramines apparently, according to these two medical experts, would be greatly detrimental to many of our citizens.

They outlined that it would be toxic to the point of death for some

citizens on dialysis.

It'd also make the conditions of people with lung difficulties worse, dermatology problems and renal problems.

And then for the citizens in their homes, it would increase the expense of just having appliances in their homes because

Apparently, according to these two experts, when chloramine and fluoride interact, they form a compound that is very powerful to take metal out of your pipes.

And so you're going to have to, if you're a citizen on the water supply system, replace your appliances much more frequently.

They said that it would shorten the life of washing machines, dishwaters, hot water heaters, and the rubber flappers inside toilets, all degrading at a much faster pace.

It's also going to impact our business community.

And this is all information that I've sent to you and that came from these two medical experts.

here at our community at UVA that small pharmaceutical companies could not use our water any longer, biotech companies such as that started by Martin Chapman could no longer use our water, medical researchers at UVA could not use our water, pet stores could not use our water, or any businesses that have anything to do with dialysis, and breweries could not use our water.

It is apparently very, very difficult to get chloramines out of water without a very expensive carbon filtration system that is beyond the reach and the price tag is beyond the reach of almost all businesses and definitely beyond the reach of individuals in our community.

Dr. Whiting concluded her remarks saying, it is our civic duty to speak out about this.

If you have any concern about your health,

If you have children, lead should be a huge concern.

We all know that lead lowers IQ and is also associated with anti-social behavior.

And Lori Delahunty concluded by saying that the public has to stop this.

So I ask you all to please halt all work being done on this at RWSA and ask for your own independent research.

I understand their scientist claims it's safe and fine.

but we know that that's their scientist and we cannot just take that for a face value.

Mayor Huja, City Council, I'm Paul Collins from 1623 Bruce Avenue and I am the owner of Hartwood Books at the corner.

This is a somewhat drier topic than we've been on.

It's parking lots.

An event took place on Friday that caused me to come to this meeting and that is simply this.

While I was loading boxes of books in my van in front of the shop, I heard a dispute take place in the parking lot across the street.

A policeman came down the street

Eventually the dispute was settled in a fashion.

The person who owned the car was arguing with a tow truck driver who had driven back up to the car and raised it off the ground.

The tow truck driver wanted $120 to release it.

The person had in his hand the receipt to show that he had paid.

So he was there, the tow truck driver could see the receipt,

He had paid his money to be in that.

He was in the exact same spot where he had paid to be.

And yet they wanted $120 to take him out.

The policeman, I think sensing the injustice of this, tried to intervene, but it is private property and eventually got the amount reduced.

But this is happening because it's an automated parking lot.

There is no attendant there.

It's a machine and you pay the machine, you get a ticket.

You're supposed to put it on your dash.

It's policed by tow trucks.

Tow truck drivers will come around and look at the dash of each of these places.

Now here was a case where the vehicle was still there in the same spot the person had paid and they wanted $120 to release it.

If the city council has the power to do it, I'd like to see some regulation put in that sort of thing so it doesn't happen again.

In addition to that, the machine doesn't give change.

So you have a situation where, and I've already talked to people that this has happened to, $5 bills, $10 bills, and $20 bills have been spent for people who wanted one hour of parking.

Now this is a windfall for the parking lot.

It seems to me that money should be returned to the public in some fashion, but what I'd rather have is a law that said there needs to be a change machine if there's going to be a machine that rather than a sign buried among many, many signs in this parking lot saying we don't make change.

I mean, if I tried this in the shop, if I put a sign saying we don't make change and the guy bought a $2 book and gave me $20, I said thanks.

I don't think it would work.

And so I think we need

some type of regulation in that case if the city council has the power to do that.

I'd also like to see if other parking lots switch to this.

I'd like to see signage changes taking place ahead of time.

In this case there was almost no transition.

Bang, they put up a machine.

Now for the first week or two they had somebody there along with the machine and they could instruct some people who came.

But of course

I'm at the corner and we have tremendous numbers of people coming through who are new to the area and are not familiar with the parking situation.

This was completely inadequate and the signage was completely inadequate.

In the first month or two, they told I would estimate hundreds of cars.

I've been there 37 years.

and I think they've probably towed more cars in those two months than I've ever been towed since I've been there.

And it's people who make mistakes.

It's not people who are trying to steal parking.

They're making mistakes.

So if the city council has any ability to regulate that, I'd like to see them regulate it.

I wonder also if there is revenue sharing with tow truck drivers.

If a parking lot

actually gets any benefit from having cars towed, this gives them a sort of perverse incentive to have the cars towed.

I don't know the arrangement with this parking lot and it may not be the case at all, but it seems to me it should be the case that there is no revenue sharing allowed.

This would be a simple way I think to help visitors in the city, to give them a better experience in the city.

I mean if your car is towed,

That's a big thing if you're coming to visit and we get tremendous numbers of visitors and the only reason that this parking lot can work in this fashion, which is essentially to periodically severely punish their own patrons, the only reason it works is because there's an endless stream of visitors to the university.

There's parents and people going to the hospital for appointments,

There's all sorts of visitors to the university area and that's why they can do it.

If I did it, I would run out of, well I'm in a book business so I don't have that many customers, but if I did do it, I would run out of customers very fast.

They don't run out of customers because there are so many visitors.

So those are some suggestions.

I don't know if you can do anything about it, but I hope you can.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm sure you all know why I'm here.

I can identify it if you'll show it to me.

I'll be happy to identify it.

You can say your name.

I'll say it out loud.

Jeffrey Fogel.

Thank you.

I have been speaking to this council I think now for six or seven months about the issue of disproportionate minority contact with the criminal justice system.

We were blessed with an excellent report that came out of researchers at the University of Virginia with respect to our juvenile justice system that gave us an incredible amount of detail and also pointed very clearly that the problem is race, nothing else but race.

Of course I'm sure people realize that

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees equal protection of the law.

And that 14th Amendment guarantee was designed to provide the equal protection of the law to the newly freed slaves.

We find ourselves now 150 years later, and that guarantee has yet to be made.

It has yet to be met in this particular area as well and it cries out for rectification.

Now the coalition that I represent consists of the leading and most renowned civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP.

The leading and most renowned organization in support of the protection

of the Bill of Rights and that's the American Civil Liberties Union.

The leading legal organization in our community that has fought for and represented people in their rights and that's the Legal Aid and Justice Center.

It represents believers and achievers, ex-felons who have turned their lives around and who are committed not only to themselves and to their fellow ex-prisoners but to also making changes in the community with respect to the juveniles that they deal with and with the problems that they've seen because they've lived it.

The Public Housing Association of Residents for whom this is a critical issue because so much police attention is focused on our public housing projects and the interrelationship between the two is critical to altering the situation.

There are representatives of each of those organizations here.

Virginia Organizing, which I'm sure you're all familiar with and may be one of the counselors more than others.

has been a leading force not only here in our community but throughout the state of Virginia in fairness to all of our citizens.

I submitted a proposal on behalf of the coalition to the council about a month and a half ago.

Unfortunately, I have gotten scant feedback from anybody on the council about any concerns or questions they had about what we were proposing.

And what we were simply proposing was that we bring together the forces that are working certainly within the criminal justice system, some of whom have expressed an interest in trying to deal with this problem, with the people in this coalition who have some expertise and a great deal of passion and compassion to try to deal with this issue.

Now I realize that there are entities in place which are dealing with a variety of issues that would affect disproportionate minority contact.

And I respect their efforts.

On the other hand, if you look at the statistics over the last decade or so, you see that they haven't changed much.

and I think what this requires is the participation of the communities that feel passionately about this, who are affected by this in conjunction with the people who run the entities and are participants in the entities that can actually make the changes.

I don't think you can separate those two out and have an effective alteration of what's going on in our criminal justice system.

and I know I was a little surprised when I saw on the agenda finally that this issue was going to be discussed and all I saw on the agenda was report.

I had no idea what that meant.

I then went and looked at the backup material.

I saw nothing.

I would have thought that perhaps our proposal, which I tell you was carefully thought out,

would have been presented so that the public as well could see what it is that we were proposing and why we were proposing it.

I saw nothing like that.

And I'm disappointed that we don't get feedback.

I'm disappointed that we don't have a dialogue.

We're going to speak our three minutes and then that's it.

We don't have a dialogue.

You will have your discussion but it won't be a dialogue with those of us who have been pressing this issue.

I assume that the reason that it's on the agenda tonight is because we've been pressing it to be on the agenda.

But I think it's been a little disrespectful not to have included this coalition in the discussions that apparently have been had among some people on city staff or otherwise about what should be done about the problem and how you might formulate or constitute a task force or otherwise.

came before you and asked that if you were going to have a human rights commission, put this issue under their agenda.

It would have been appropriate, but you decided to put that off.

But none of the reasons that you decided to put that off are applicable to this issue.

So once again, I'm going to urge you, there should be a task force.

We are prepared to work hard on it.

If there is a Human Rights Commission, you can certainly meld that under the jurisdiction of the Human Rights Commission if you decide on something else.

But the time has come to do something.

As I said, 150 years is enough for people to wait for the guarantee, not a hope that there will be equal protection in this country, but presumably a guarantee and a promise to the newly-fraid slaves that they would entitle to equal protection of the laws.

And when we look at the laws being applied here in our system, they are not.

Thank you.

I hope you will stay here.

Good evening Mayor Huja and members of the council.

My name is Angela Cholfi.

I'm the legal director of the Just Children program of the Legal Aid Justice Center.

I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you about agenda item number five on disproportionate minority contact.

The report you will be discussing tonight was commissioned by the Charlottesville Albemarle Commission on Children and Families.

It found that although Charlottesville's black youth showed no significant difference in risk patterns than their white peers,

They are between two and three times more likely to be arrested, referred to intake, put on probation, and placed in detention than white youth.

This data is consistent with data that previous study groups have collected in the past.

Mr. Fogel talked about the principles of justice and equal protection that really underlie the urgency that we take action today.

I'm gonna focus on the nuts and bolts and just describe what I think it would take for Charlottesville to launch a serious effort to reduce disproportionate minority contact or DMC.

For youth, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention out of the U.S. Department of Justice has laid out a very detailed blueprint that begins with the creation of an action-oriented steering committee.

According to OJJDP,

The purpose of a local steering committee is to reach consensus on the goals of a DMC reduction effort, identify problematic decision points and positive interventions, and create a sense of urgency among local leaders and stakeholder groups to search for active solutions to racial and ethnic disparities.

OJJDP recommends that the committee include key high-level stakeholders in the juvenile justice system as well as non-traditional stakeholders, young people, and others in the community who are concerned about DMC issues.

The steering committee should lead an effort to gather detailed data at each decision point in the system from initial contact to detention.

The purpose of collecting this detailed data is to identify problematic decision points and to determine whether local practices may be contributing to the disparities.

Once disparities have been identified, the steering committee must decide whether and how to change longstanding local practices, where to target interventions, and then implement those changes.

This can only be done with the blessing and participation of senior officials as well as local stakeholders.

Finally, I'd just like to thank Mike Murphy and Rory Carpenter for spearheading an effort to apply for a grant to tackle these issues.

I think you'll hear more about that tonight as well.

And I'd like to thank Martha Carroll, Dave Chapman, and Tim Longo for personally participating in the grant process.

Whether or not the grant is successful, I sincerely hope that Charlottesville will move forward with the urgency that these issues so desperately require.

Thank you very much.

Good evening.

I'm Nancy Carpenter, an Albemarle County resident.

I'm coming here this evening to on a couple of different matters.

Once again, we have our farmers market season starting up and we don't seem to have a permanent home base for our city market.

I did tell Ms. Smith that in my opinion, the city market should stay at its Water Street location.

And I think that way because it is historically

a public space and to me a public square, a public space is a place where there has been commerce is conducted or people come together to comment about the actions or inactions of their governing body and I think that the space at Water Street meets those criteria because not only do I

I am able to purchase from the local bounty of our farms, but I can go to craftsmen, I can go to food artisans that provide wonderful bites to eat as well as speak with people who are trying to inform me about local issues in the city or in the county.

I think as the city grows, the development of a market district can be an opportunity to bring a vision

to an almost blank canvas in that area and I would urge the council to be bold and move this conversation forward.

I also had an opportunity this weekend on Saturday to attend the program hosted by the Dialogue on Race and it was a very great group of engaged citizens there that were trying

to talk about a difficult topic that I think we all have to face in this community whether we live in the city or whether we live in the county.

And we did come up with a lot of concrete concerns in the areas of education, in the areas of diversity, in the areas of local politics, in the areas of law enforcement and even in the areas of dress.

And going along hand in hand with that conversation to me is the main lining of far too many youths of color into the juvenile justice system.

And I just want to understand why the use of the justice system in the 21st century is the equivalent to the Jim Crow laws of the 19th and 20th centuries.

I think we need to have an active commission.

I think it's going to be a commission that should be able to take corrective action, that should collaborate with existing

I'm concerned that we're going to lose a generation of children if we don't

take this difficult conversation on here in this locality.

And I would just like to urge the council to be bold as well and take on this difficult conversation and this difficult path.

Thank you.

Hello again.

Rose Purdy, I want to thank you guys.

I was too nervous to thank you last time for hearing me out and inviting me up.

I'm here again on the same topic that I was last time, trying to decriminalize marijuana.

If I keep coming here to plead this case, I do it not only for my peers in drug court and jail, but for the everyday Joe who keeps his secret.

Every day Joe has his, he keeps his secret because he doesn't want his life to be uprooted the way mine has been.

If this battle has been, if this battle against the war on drugs is won, it symbolizes the beginning of a new larger battle.

It will be won against the state and eventually the Supreme Court.

My ordeal with drug court will continue either way.

I'm trying to look at the big picture, and I'm here for the future and the well-being of other people.

My dad once told me that if every single person who smoked weed showed up at the police station with a joint behind their ear, there would not be enough room in the jail for everybody.

This would solve the problem of criminalizing large swaths of the populace in an instant.

And he was right.

But I learned from my involvement in Occupy Charlottesville that it really isn't easy to organize people, especially people who have been criminalized.

These people have been effectively silenced because they don't want to be implicated.

They're not here because they don't want their faces on the record.

Having given it some thought, I realized that decriminalizing weed and fixing drug court are kind of two separate issues, but I feel like I kind of addressed them both at the same time.

It seems clear to me that OAR Region 10 was originally designed to be a treatment facility otherwise I'd be on probation right now rather than in drug court and it seems that the program is really underfunded that

They just repeat what they're taught without any real thought to how it's affecting people's lives.

I actually spoke with the drug court administrator about this and he said the exact same thing everyone else says within that system, the program is voluntary and you have a choice.

And what he actually meant, it sounds kind of tongue in cheek to me when people say that to me because what he means is, be grateful that you're not in jail.

And I guess I am, but this is when I tell him that this is punishment, what I'm going through is punishment for a transgression that I'm not going to feel guilty for.

And I assure him that I can live up to these physical obligations of the program, but that I will continue to speak out against this treatment.

And that treatment should be synonymous with healing.

These seem like they might be two separate issues but I think that they both point right to the core of one issue and that's that the system that I'm paying into is not treating people humanely.

I grew up in West Virginia in the mountains and until I was about 16 I really didn't know anything but freedom and I formed most of my world view there.

I thought that like everything was rolling hills and awesome forests and you know I loved it and then I came to Charlottesville and ever since then that view has been breaking down.

My new world view is where people in America live in ceaseless industrial sprawl

Stratton-Sluth Hello members of council and general public.

I'm Stratton-Sluth, 704B, Grave Street,

And I will start by saying something I've said here before that wasting the public's money on projects like the Meadow Creek Parkway and the dam scam could not happen without a great deal of public deception.

and let me say also that we have lost a sense of proportion about these issues.

We want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars facilitating sprawl through the city, more traffic through the city, pardon me, and also hundreds of millions of dollars on giving away our water to promote a pattern of development in the county that

is unhealthy.

And here we are asking for 300,000, I believe, to set up a human rights commission and yet that's too expensive.

Or it's too expensive to use carbon filtration

instead of poisonous chloramines to meet the federal standards which may be elevated by all the stuff that's going to get dumped into the water if they build a dam.

That is just speculation, that last part I have to say.

So we recognize when we hear language which

actually means the opposite of what it's supposed to when Bush says it.

Things like no child left behind.

Oh, well actually that's to track kids so we can send the resources to the smart kids, meaning the rich kids.

Oh, healthy forests.

That means taking as many trees out as possible so they don't catch fire.

and yet we tend not to recognize this kind of doublespeak when it happens here in our community.

There's been this issue about the Nature Conservancy planning our water supply and how they got a million dollar grant from Nestle.

Mr. Huja told us that that was not so, but now you tell us that in fact it is so.

I would like to ask about this.

Well, did Ridge Schuyler, who works for the Nature Conservancy, did he just make a mistake?

He's the number one guy here.

He didn't know about a million dollar grant from Nestle.

Did you believe him when he said this?

And you also said that the debate has been over on the dam.

Well, if the debate has been made under false pretenses, is it a debate?

And you said that

It was legal for Nestle to donate to the Nature Conservancy so they could help plan our water supply and then lie about it apparently.

Well, does something have to be illegal to be corrupt?

So then the Nature Conservancy also has serious ties with Goldman Sachs.

It's a practical revolving door.

They've had a couple CEOs that have served on both of these boards and several other

board members.

Are these the kind of people that we want speculating with our future?

I don't think so.

Also, we have the Free Enterprise Forum and the PAC arm of it, the Monticello Business Association, which did spend some money, I'll say, helping Mr. Huja and Ms. Galvin get reelected, but they spend much more money in the county.

And the county board of supervisors is, in their allegiance to the sprawl lobby here,

in town shows that that money is apparently well spent.

And let me say that this Orange Dot project at the Free Enterprise Forum and the Nature Conservancy and some other groups did in order to help with poverty.

Well, I think that perhaps that was yet another distraction.

We had Mr. Holbert from the Free Enterprise Forum saying, please just give us this dam so we can focus on poverty.

Well, then when the living wage came up,

He made a statement that, well, we didn't mean that kind of focus on poverty, I guess.

So, I'd like you all to focus on people here in Charlottesville rather than special interests.

Hello, council members.

My name is Dan Purdy.

I'm Rose's brother here in support of her.

I want to also speak about the war on drugs and

The decriminalization of marijuana.

I wanted to encourage you guys to kind of look at this from a reverse perspective.

Rosa told me that this has been on the city council agenda for the city to actually officially direct the cops not to enforce this law.

I would like to encourage you to look at it from the other perspective of that if we were in this place today and that marijuana was legal, we would not be sitting here with public outcry for it to be criminalized right now.

Not with the standards that have been set with alcohol and tobacco.

There's just no way.

You could look at the arguments for it, which I jotted down.

You could say that it would corrupt our youth, but that's mainly just misinformation that moms don't realize that you can get black market stuff much easier than you can get.

government regulated substances.

You could argue the public health issue, but again, with the standards that have been set with alcohol and tobacco, there's really obviously much disregard for public health in substance abuse areas.

And the government, it seems like, has purposely stifled research on marijuana, because I believe that it would contradict their view on it,

criminalization of it.

No proven deaths, no real public health issue there.

Also, I guess the only real argument you could make is that it's big business.

It is a very profit-oriented, the war on drugs specifically is very profiteering and very profit-driven.

Big pharma also ties into it with the drug companies being able to prescribe far more

painkillers, which are also addictive and very dangerous and haven't been tested.

And it really just is a vicious cycle about the cops that enforce it and the bloated budgets of police agencies, which has kind of shifted to the war on terror, not so much the war on drugs, but always their next thing.

And also the prison system, which has turned into this sprawling profiteering network as well.

which is very ugly.

Unfortunately, jobs is probably the only argument you could make for making something like this illegal, a weed that grows by the side of the road.

But I just wanted to also encourage you to look at the bigger picture and that we really need to not just decriminalize weed, but also just the whole war on drugs and the war on liberty that's been taking place.

I'd just like to close by saying President Obama had a campaign promise of ending the war on Iraq, but his administration really just shifted battlefields.

They never really addressed the whole idea of a foreign policy of preemptive wars of aggression that got us into the place.

They've started many more.

But in decriminalizing marijuana, we can't afford to simply move to the next battlefield where, you know, maybe less people will notice the injustices going on or something like this.

We must wholly reject and reverse the police state trend that's happened since 9-11 and embrace the sweetness of liberty.

Thank you very much.

Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to speak who would like to sign up?

Good afternoon, my name is Deitra Gilmore.

I live at 613 Hinton.

I just want to speak about the criminal justice system that's dealing with our youth.

I support Jeff Fogel because I happened to visit a juvenile detention center yesterday, well at least that's what they call it, but it's a juvenile prison.

The same uniforms that the adults wear, the children were wearing, double wire, barbed wire fence.

Everything that they use as an adult when you enter into a prison system, when you go to visit, that's what applied to the youth.

There's something terribly wrong when you take

13, 14, 15 year old, maybe 17 at the top and you lock them away.

We have to figure out another way to deal with what's going on with our young people other than incarcerating them.

Because to me what you are doing, you are breeding them for the bigger prison system.

And I know that the prison system is a commodity.

I truly know that because I've been in and out of those prison systems for years visiting different people.

But when you go in and you see these young, young children that's housed in these prisons, something is wrong and we need something.

We need to stop this epidemic of our children and grandchildren being locked away.

So I feel like we need a coalition or something

Something needs to change because it's heartbreaking as a mother and as a grandmother when I walk in and I see these young, young children.

We're not talking about men.

We're talking about kids that's in there for violation.

They haven't murdered anybody.

No drug charges.

Just a mere violation.

And I want to say this in closing.

You know, if it was your child or your grandchild, wouldn't you give them more than one, two, three tries?

Wouldn't you keep on pushing to see that there's some type of programs in place that stops this type of behavior?

Because there's something terribly wrong, so we need to do something.

Good evening, Brandon Collins, 536 Meade Avenue.

I didn't think I'd get the chance this evening.

I am speaking on behalf of PAR, Public Housing Association of Residents.

We recently joined the Criminal Justice Coalition along with a bunch of other great groups that are doing a lot of serious solid work.

and I just want to point out that FAR does support that coalition and supports the creation of a task force dedicated to addressing disparity in our justice system and juvenile contact with the justice system.

Last year I gave you all a report and it actually was handed to me by Mr. Fogel and it spelled out really clearly

this problem that we have and the data doesn't lie.

It's the same thing as looking at a room full of white people and they're all holding hundred dollar bills in their hands and there's one black person in there and he's begging for scraps or just has a penny.

It's the same thing when you look at that document and you see exactly what is going on.

You can't look at that document, you can't look at a room like that without saying there's racism going on.

and you as a city council, I don't think you want to participate in a racist criminal justice system.

That's what's going on here.

Right now you have a chance to do something meaningful about it.

You have the chance as well to address the war on drugs here.

This is all really important, important stuff and I'll just reiterate

This stuff has been brought to you over and over and over again.

This really is your chance to address it.

When we were talking about mass incarceration, I know you all were there.

Everybody's nodding their heads in agreement.

Yes, this is a terrible thing.

We've got to do something about this.

This is where you do something about this.

This is the time to do it.

And I urge you to create this task force.

It's not going to cost you anything.

And we desperately need it.

And it's going to do something meaningful.

We cannot have a pathway for kids

who are as young as 10 years old to go into detention, into incarceration, that's it for them for life.

I mean that really is it.

And when you look at the data, you've got a whole lot more black kids than you do white kids going into that.

All kids need this chance to avoid going into detention.

Thank you.

First time for comments by the city council members.

Thank you everybody for coming and actually the water folks aren't here.

I think I'm the one who's sympathetic to the fluoride argument, maybe the only one.

But we are going to have a public chloramine session.

Don't know yet, but we will have a public information session on chloramines, so that's a good thing.

We'll be talking about the disproportionate minority contact issue.

later.

I just actually wanted, and everybody did such a great job of talking, I'd just like to say to Deirdre that I think you hit the nail on the head in the sense that we need to be talking about the issue, but we need to start earlier too.

How do our kids get there?

And I would hope that the discussion really does not just start when they're arrested, but starts earlier than that.

I think it was a late edition, which may be why you didn't see it, but it is on our website.

I think I was added a little bit late, but the report was included and it certainly will inform our discussion tonight.

Ms. Carpenter, you raised the issue of the city market.

and I'm pleased to report that will be on our agenda in May.

What's the date on that?

May 21st.

May 21st.

We will be taking up the issue of recommendations from the Market District Alliance and

The next steps for finding permanent home for the city market.

Also, I'm pleased to note that the proposed resolution regarding marijuana and the drug war will be on our next council.

Is it our next council agenda?

May 7th.

May 7th.

Poor discussion.

So thank you to those who spoke rather eloquently on that topic.

And I, too, just wanted to thank Ms. Gilmore for just making it personal.

We can talk about statistics all day long.

But when you talk about your own family, your own kin, your own visits, your own experiences, that's really where it hits home.

So one thing that I wanted to, and we are going to be talking about the task force for disproportionate minority contact later, but I do want to say that I think that we see

the outcome.

And I think that we, you know, I think I agree that it is about race and that it is about a racist system, but I think in a way we don't even have to agree on that to know that we have to do something about it because the consequences are clear.

We have this report that we've gotten that we got a year and a half ago, I guess, and I think it's very clear that it's not okay that children in our community are having

those choices thrust upon them.

And I think that, you know, we talk about the incarceration of children.

We also, probably a little less in our community than in some, and yet it happens here as well, the incarceration in adult prison of children where children, you know, as young as 14 can be tried as adults and end up in adult prisons in horribly inappropriate situations.

So I think that, you know, I'll save my specifics for later, but I'm really glad that you bring that to us.

and Mr. Fogel, I was really struck by your talking about the 14th Amendment as this promise that was given, what Martin Luther King called the blank check, that we have to start filling it out, we have to start writing the amount and we have to start delivering it.

So thank you for being here.

I guess with the fluoride stuff, I'll just say that I appreciate all the time and effort that go into folks who really care about this.

It is something that really has already been decided.

I don't feel any need to revisit it.

It's something that people have been fighting since the first fluoridation happened decades ago, and I'm sure it will continue to happen.

People are welcome to continue talking about it, but I don't feel the need to revisit it as a council.

The parking lot rules and regulations and things, I'm wondering if it would be possible for maybe staff to spend a little time looking into what's possible about that and to see if there is something that we might be able to offer as a

whether it's a persuasive factor or a regulation or something that might help to stop that because I think that it sounds like in this particular case it's a little extreme but I think that we need to make sure that people who visit our community understand at least signage issues that they know what they're getting into when they park somewhere.

The other is

Let's see, I too believe we need a permanent home for the city market and am looking forward to the new ordinance or I guess it would be a resolution on marijuana for our discussion at the next meeting.

I did want to just clarify what Mr. Salidas was saying, which just seemed a very strange conflagration of facts that I found odd to have in one spot.

The Orange Dot Project was not about the Free Enterprise Forum at all.

I think the Free Enterprise Forum had no relation with the Orange Dot.

I know that there was some funding that got given to the Orange Dot Project by the Chamber of Commerce who co-released it and paid for its release, but it didn't have anything to do with the Freedom Forum or the Free Enterprise Forum.

nor the Nature Conservancy.

The Nature Conservancy was not involved in the Orange Dot Project.

The person who did most of the research for the Orange Dot Project had worked for the Nature Conservancy, but since then had worked for Tom Perriello's district.

So I think that that's, it doesn't help to come and lie about things that just are not necessary.

You know, you can disagree with the outcomes of it and that's fine, but I would appreciate

Just a clarification on where it came from.

Yes, I will, again, many of the topics that were raised by the public we will be talking about in more detail later on.

And I would like to just address a little bit of some of the issues again with the chloramines.

It's getting to the point where, and I've brought this up with our city manager, that I would like to create a Q&A fact sheet because I have been looking at all these, finding answers to many of these questions.

Be it the result that chloramines can result in nitro,

Same in formation in some drinking waters.

Well, it will not in our drinking water.

It's been tested already.

Lead increased in lead counts in our water.

No, it will not.

They've already been looking at the pH levels that will regulate that and there's already additives that are not lead producing and

We can go on and on with several of the other comments.

For example, that there is no way to remove chloramines from your drinking water.

There are filters that can.

The talk about if we went to an activated carbon filtration system, that there really is, that's the better way to go.

and that when you do look at the fact that the EPA has said that the chloramine solution is a valid safe solution and when you look at the costs involved with putting in place the alternative system, you are starting to talk about adding 30 to 40 dollars a year on someone's bill as an individual resident.

There is a cost implication to all of these choices.

And if you're dealing with businesses, that's going to be even greater.

And we're talking about one of the biggest needs of this city is to create an economic environment that creates a wide range of job opportunities.

It will provide a lot of solutions to some of the juvenile problems that we're facing because children will have a career track.

They'll have a job to look after when they are graduating from high school.

These things are all interconnected.

We need to be very, very careful when we say one thing or the other.

Water is critically important.

You have to look at how much it's going to cost.

It's going to be safe, and when we do it in a cost-effective manner, we're going to be able to grow our businesses.

One of the other issues that came up

If we did change gears at this point to move towards a carbon filtration system as opposed to looking at the chloramine secondary system and the system that we've currently been operating or moving towards,

and the point of the matter is we would be in non-compliance with EPA because we will not be doing it in an expeditious manner.

So again, the EPA was the entity that insisted that we do something about our water supply.

We opted for the chloramine system.

It was approved by the EPA.

It is cost effective.

We need to move on to talk about other issues simply because we're in a desperate situation economically.

We definitely have to get our folks employed, skilled, ready for those jobs.

I wanted to make two or three comments.

First of all, I would also ask staff to look into the parking lot if you see if there are things that we can help with because I think it affects our visitors to our community and we want to be welcoming to them and not unfair to them.

Second, I'm also looking forward to discussion in the City Market.

Those of you who go to City Market know that I'm there every Saturday morning and probably longer than anybody else in this room.

So I'm looking forward to more discussion of that and finding a solution.

Third, I wanted to just say a comment to Mr. Salinas.

I made my decision on a water plan based on what I thought was best for this community, not based upon anybody else's opinion.

And I still stand by them and I will be happy to discuss with you otherwise.

Thank you.

Anybody else?

Next item on our consent agenda.

Item A, minutes for March 29th, April 2nd, April 3rd and April 10th.

Item B, an appropriation to the Virginia Department of Health Special Nutrition Programs, $95,000, second of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation to the Domestic Violence Services Coordinator Grant, $47,548, second of two readings.

Item D in appropriation of funds for CDBG FY 2012-2013, $441,300.75, second of two readings.

Item E in appropriation in the police department, special events over time in miscellaneous revenue, $72,876, first of one readings.

Item F, a resolution for Energize 250, a residential energy efficiency campaign in honor of Charlottesville 250, $50,000, first of one reading.

Okay.

I actually just have a question about energized 250.

I don't know if anybody's here who can answer it.

I'm not complaining.

And the other question I had was about Smith Aquatic, Mr. Daly.

It looked like we were transferring some funds out of there.

Are we all in the clear with Smith Aquatic?

I know there were some issues with the heating system.

Regarding the Smith Aquatic and Fitness Center, there are still a few punch list items that the contractors are working through and facilities management, Public Works Department is managing that.

From a funding perspective, the project is considered complete.

Are we giving up all the money for Smith?

No.

So there will still be some?

Correct.

And I'd just like to note that I had asked Page to make a couple corrections to the minutes, one of which I wanted, thanks, that's fine, just to say publicly which was in the minutes it said that I would rather have a carbon filtration system rather than chloramines with

Chlorine as a secondary and not chloramine.

Thank you for the correction.

Any other comments or questions on the consent agenda?

All those in favor?

Opposed?

Pass.

Next we have two public hearings.

First deals with issuance of series 2012 bonds.

Kristi Hammer will be presenting that.

Good evening Mr. Mayor and Members of Council.

I'm here tonight to present to you a resolution which authorizes the city to sell general obligation bonds up to $15 million in new debt and up to $30 million in refunding bonds.

The new money bonds were adopted as part of the FY12 and prior adopted capital improvement plans.

The refunding will consider and evaluate all bonds previously issued to provide the city with maximum savings.

A summary of the projects to be financed is included on page 1 of your docket and information and project descriptions are on page 3.

We're meeting with the rating agencies next week to rate these bonds and we expect to maintain our AAA bond rating.

We will also expect the official rating reports by the end of April.

The sale is scheduled for mid-May and closing is anticipated by the end of May.

Being a AAA community, we're expecting to get great rates again.

Any questions before we have public hearing?

One quick question.

We don't really have any input.

Kevin Roddy, our financial advisor is here.

He can answer more clearly but basically we make a presentation to the rating agencies and our grade is our grade.

Any other questions from the staff?

We have one person signing off for public hearing, Heidi Gordon.

Is she here?

Lake Albemarle Road, Charlottesville, Virginia.

No?

Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to speak on this topic?

If not, I'll close the public hearing.

I'll second.

Thank you.

All those in favor of motion?

Next public hearing is sale of Elliot Islander property.

Good evening Mayor and Council.

On your agenda tonight is a public hearing and ordinance to sell a piece of city-owned property on Elliott Avenue.

This is a piece of property that is adjacent to the cemetery, Oakwood Cemetery.

It's a little over three acres and it's one that we've been working on for quite some time to develop the RFP and go through the process.

Just to give you a little bit of history on this,

We met with council probably close to a year and a half and two years ago to talk about this property and determine if you were willing to let us put it out on the market for housing if you indicated that you were.

We engaged the Charlottesville Community Design Center to work with us and we actually had

Charette on a Saturday at the design center to talk about design concepts.

Prior to the Charette we had a number of stakeholder meetings and with people in the neighborhood, the development community, our non-profits, to also talk about the things that we might want to make sure got included in any project that was submitted.

The things that came out of that, the principles that were discussed were that we ought to be looking for

somewhere in the vicinity of 30% of affordability that we ought to have around 50 units that there ought to be, as any project went through the process, there ought to be a great deal of working with the neighbors and making sure it fit in with what was going on in the neighborhood.

It ought to respect the cemetery and the scale of the neighborhood.

It ought to be fairly dense because of its location near downtown and the important issues were the building character, sustainable techniques, mixed use and or income, the character of the buildings and connections to the surrounding neighborhoods and the downtown.

We put out an RFP for proposals in October with responses due in mid-December and we received two responses to this proposal.

One was from a team consisting of Habitat for Humanity and Southern Development and the other was one consisting of a team of Milestone, Java PHA and adjacent property owners that own property adjacent to the city site.

After evaluating the written proposals and having an opportunity for both to come and present their ideas to the team that reviewed them, the team is recommending to you that the property be provided or sold to the team consisting of Habitat and Southern Development.

The reasons for that

were several and it was a very difficult decision because we got two really good proposals.

They took a little different approach but we felt like both were good proposals.

One of the primary reasons was that we felt that we preferred the Habitat Southern team was their offer for price on the property and if you just initially read them you may think that's a little odd because they offered to pay us $10 and the other group offered to pay us $550,000.

However, the other group said that if their cleanup, they would deduct every dollar their cleanup cost up to $550 and if

They went over that.

They wanted us to loan them the money in excess of $550,000.

With all the research we've done in talking to both teams, we believe that the cleanup costs for that site are going to be well in excess of $550,000.

So we would be, they would be looking to us for a loan to be able to handle that development.

So that was a concern that we had.

We also felt like that

The Southern Habitat team had a better track record of experience, particularly in providing the mixed income approach.

They have another project in the works.

They have worked together.

The other folks have strengths and have experience, but working in housing in the city of Charlottesville, other than PHA, there's not a lot of track record with the others, so that was one thing that weighed on us.

The better defined partnerships, we felt like that the way that they proposed to handle the affordability piece was much better defined, and the fact that they had created

Partnerships going in with CRHA and Region 10 and that Habitat of course has a track record of providing that income level to the lowest income working families.

So we felt like that was strong and felt that those were reasons that we felt very strong about the recommendation.

We also felt that again the tie to CRHA where they have committed that up to five of the units would be provided an opportunity for CRHA residents to be able to transition to home ownership was a strong component that would be marketed directly to CRHA residents

and to the extent possible if there were qualified residents they would work with them and get them in housing and then the commitment to try to attempt to work with Region 10 for a facility right across the street from Region 10's clubhouse that they have now was also a strong tie.

Tonight before you, of course you have the public hearing, you have

the ordinance that would sell the property and the proposed sales contract to go along with that and the ordinance would authorize the signing of that contract at the appropriate time.

It does allow for a due diligence period for them to do more background before the contract is signed and the closing would not actually take place until all approvals are in place so that we don't give up our land and then

have to wait forever and there are timetables that are built in the contract that would have to be met so that we have some control over making sure that this project is a reality.

One of the issues that we looked at and made the decision awfully difficult was this was not a design competition.

This was an opportunity for people to give us a proposal to buy a piece of land and develop it.

But we asked that both teams submit a concept to us so that we could see if they had thought it through and if they had an idea about how to make it work on the site.

And both teams did that.

We have some boards here tonight that will help you understand possibly what we would get

from the proposal from the team that is recommended.

This is a conceptual site plan.

This is Elliott Avenue and the road going in houses fronting the cemetery road and they do offer also to make improvements to this

Road, plus to give some funds to the cemetery, to the city to upgrade, make improvements in the cemetery, and to plant street trees.

This is an aerial view perspective as you can see.

This is a mixture of detached single family and attached properties, so it's a good mix of types of units.

This is perspective from Oakwood,

what you would see from Oakwood.

Most of you, y'all got this this weekend, but these are just blow ups of it.

This is a perspective from Elliott, so a chance to see what those look like.

One of the things that would really interest

was a proposal for green streets.

This is something we would have to work through our process but to actually have green streets that had good environmental characteristics would reduce seriously the amount of pavement in the area and a drawing of what that would look like plus the front porch culture that would go along.

So again we felt that this drawing responded, this

These sets of drawings and concepts responded very well to the requests that we made and the concepts that came out of the design charrette.

One of the things that struck us also was the experience that Habitat has in providing affordable housing and the difficulties

with any type of housing for affordability that's not fee simple.

If you're trying to do it in condos because of association fees and all the difficulties in mixing affordable and market rate, that this was a proposal that would allow them to do fee simple ownership, which for any of the affordable units, which was a strong component we felt based on the experiences that we've seen in our partnering in the last few years with them and providing those type of developments.

You've got the proposed ordinance in your packet as well as the draft sales contract, so be glad to entertain any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Norris.

There's a couple of comments there.

One is that we would encourage them to work with whoever they can.

We think that's strong.

That's up to both parties to decide if they want to do that, but we would absolutely encourage that and have already done so if they're the successful

The other thing I need to mention is these are concepts.

If you agree with us and pass this ordinance, then they will have to start a period of going through a design process, working with the neighborhood, working with our staff, working with the Planning Commission.

This design may very well evolve over time, so I don't want to leave here saying this is absolutely what you'll see, but there will be a great deal of community process to get to a final design.

What are they locked into?

I mean, we're hearing 47 units, 20 of which will be affordable.

Yes.

It's 47 plus or minus.

It could go to 50.

It could go to 46 or 45 as they design it.

Anything they do, you ultimately have the final approval in the plan approval process.

Oh, really?

And I have another question.

How does the city own this piece of property?

To the best of our knowledge, no.

No, it was

As we understand, when a lot of the demolition was done on the downtown mall, that's some of what's there.

But we've had soil borings done and it's 20, 30 feet deep of stuff that's been put there.

It all appears to be inert.

It doesn't appear to have any environmental issues.

There was reference to money for replacement trees in the cemetery.

Will the cemetery lose trees as part of this?

No.

Okay.

Is this just time for questions, Mr. Mayor?

Yes, if I do.

Okay.

Just for final clarifications.

Okay.

Okay.

So we will open the public hearing.

Excuse me.

Good evening.

My name is Doug Ford.

I actually live in the county.

I'm on the board of Habitat for Humanity here in Charlottesville.

I'm a lawyer with Legal Aid and also on the faculty at the law school.

And I just wanted to express on behalf of Habitat that we're very thankful to the city council and to the staff for their support for affordable and mixed income housing in communities.

and as you may know Habitat itself is moving past the idea of home to home to home to a broader concept of communities

which is very much part of the mixed income view and some of the experience cited by the staff and from our perspective the staff's recommendation is right on.

It creates, you know, we believe will be a beautiful mixed income neighborhood and really at no cost to the city and in fact converts what arguably could be considered a liability into an asset, into an asset that will generate, you know,

tax revenue because it will be homes and people that will be paying taxes.

And as I think the predecessor up here just described, it's a pretty thorough review process.

This is an RFP.

It's at the front end of the process.

There's further planning and review to happen.

So it isn't like this is the last time the council will be looking at it.

And we just urge that

You vote that this process moves forward.

I guess as a final request, if I could, if just folks in the audience who are in support, if they would please stand up.

Thank you.

Hello.

My name is Jean McCusker.

I am a county resident, but I am also a business owner whose business is located in the city of Charlottesville, so I am a Charlottesville taxpayer.

I'm also on the Board of Habitat for Humanity, so I have a lot of vested interest in this project.

I'm very excited that you are considering the proposal, and thank you for your support.

And it is an opportunity to create a wonderful development within the city of Charlottesville that's mixed income.

As an employer, I see my staff, I see hourly employees in the city really struggle with affordable housing.

And as a city, we have to be committed to fixing this problem and helping these folks.

So this project is a step in the right direction to show that we can build communities that can be mixed income.

and Habitat has done a wonderful job, if you look at Sunrise, in creating mixed income and we're not just building houses or homes, we're building communities and we're doing that by community development with the people that are going to live there.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor of this council, Mr. Brown.

Mr. Jones, nice to see you again.

My name is Blake Carabotti, 1108 Little High Street here in Charlottesville.

I'm one of the members of the other development team, Milestone Partners with Frank Stoner and LJ and Piedmont Housing Alliance, Java through Gordon Walker and Chris Murray,

and myself and Barbara Pilkey who own the immediately adjacent land in Brevie Cannon who will come up in a minute and speak.

We certainly appreciate, hadn't had the opportunity to bid I guess on this project.

Starting way back, you know, I've been involved with this land for 30 years.

My partner and I have rented affordable housing on this site for 30 years.

We probably know the neighborhood a lot better than just about anybody else around there.

It has been our vision.

In fact, we tried twice before to do this.

once in 1984 where we actually approached the city for a rezoning and backed off of that because of an economy at the time and then most recently trying to purchase the property about two years ago from the city.

It has culminated in this, we think obviously that our design, our design team, our development experience is equal to or maybe even better than the other team.

The big issue is risk.

The big issue for the city is risk.

Now our plan calls for up to 80 units, so that's two-thirds again what the Southern Development Plan calls for.

So the tax revenue over a period of time will easily ameliorate any problems that might be occurred up front.

One thing we did do in a very

We're essentially private enterprises here in a very studied manner, looked at the remediation and after talking to several people, being on the site, looking at the soil digging, not the soil borings of it, felt more, it would be about $750,000.

to do that.

Since then we've discovered more than this that might cause that to go down.

So we confronted the issue, we're not going to take risk as private and we don't think the city should take risk.

The other development team will have to do the same exact thing that we do.

We feel that the comprehensive nature of our proposal, which has not one access but a possibility of three access, one on Rich Street which would either be an in or an out, one on Elliott Avenue,

and then possibly one at the old Cemetery Road to Oak Street.

Our project has 40 affordable units 20 by Jefferson Area Board for the Aging in a new aging in place for low income individuals to be on the site 20 or maybe more from Pima Housing Alliance that would be a combination of rental and fee simple that comes with the financing and what we do on our property would be a mix of that so that the affordability would not be concentrated on Elliott Street

as a member of the neighborhood for so long, I think that's the biggest sell point for our project.

So we would certainly ask you to maybe consider our proposal, possibility of having the council entertaining two presentations, one from Habitat as recommended by staff and one from us to better consider the proposals.

And then in the end, I think we're going to be open to talking.

a very serious and very emotional thing for us because we've been there and put so much of ourselves into it.

If we do not win, we'll probably talk to Southern Development and hope that the roads system would not enter the cul-de-sac, which is something that we would likely fight, quite frankly.

Thank you.

Hello, I'm Brevy Cannon.

I'm also one of the adjacent property owners and I also live at 710 Ridge Street just down the block in the other direction.

And I want to second everything that Blake just said and also put in a pitch to

potentially hear a proper five-minute presentation from our team with all the visuals and everything else since this is an important decision on the last big piece of property in the downtown vicinity in Charlottesville.

And I think, you know, I don't think it's undue at all for it to get a proper five-minute hearing in public since I think everybody's been in consensus that both of these plans have a lot of merit and a lot to offer.

You know, just to hit a few of the high points,

We do think that our proposal did a better job of creating connections with the local downtown with the with the downtown network of roads that are around it.

You know, we just heard about three potential access points.

We do think that to end up with a cul-de-sac this close to downtown in the middle of a downtown network of roads is a failure of urban design.

And there's a lot of reasons for that.

We're not saying that, you know,

They made a bad choice to do that but this site really deserved a more comprehensive vision, a planning vision to begin with and that's what our team tried to do by bringing in all the adjacent property owners and envisioning how could the

you know, outlet onto Oak Street, take advantage of the existing road in the Oakwood Cemetery and you know, I think frankly, whichever project wins, it deserves some sort of solution like that that ends up with more than one access point for this neighborhood.

We also think that

It's an advantage, it's a point in our favor that Southern Development has had a virtual lock on development in this part of the city for the last 20 years.

I mean we can list off seven or eight different projects that Southern Development's done in this part of the city and we think that it's probably a good thing to encourage some diversity of developers who are willing to take on projects in this part of the city which really hasn't been the case much in the last 20 years.

We also want to point out that our team comes without any financial exposure of being in the middle of other development projects, which the Southern team does have.

We also want to point out that the Southern team has gotten some accolades recently for their design at the Woods Project, Barnett Commons Phase 2, which is actually just south of this project.

but that has been with the design leadership of Maurice Cox and Giovanna Cox and they're the lead designers for our project and they specifically wanted to work with us because they knew we had the buy-in of adjacent landowners and the vision to look at the entire six-acre stretch that goes all the way from Elliott to Oak Street.

We also want to bring to the Council's attention the fact that this is a

This is an area that has borne a heavy burden of low-income housing historically, and we think that it's a site that deserves a lot of sensitivity about how much low-income housing is going to be put on it.

Our proposal sticks with a one-third, one-third, one-third breakout of affordable housing.

More moderate income workforce housing and then market rate housing.

And from what I'm told by Maurice Cox and many others, there's an emerging national consensus that the one-third, one-third, one-third balance is really the kind of the sweet spot for integrating low income housing but not

adversely affecting the property value or the market viability of the development itself or any of the neighborhood around it.

And so we think that's a point in our favor and the other team does have a higher concentration of low income housing than that.

And then just to second what Blake said about some of the ambitious points of our project, I mean this is something that Blake and Barbara have been thinking about for 25 years.

Maurice and Giovanna have been in the neighborhood for 15 plus years.

I've been in the neighborhood for about eight years and we've all been walking through this piece of property for at least that long and thinking about what it could be one day.

We also share the ambitious vision to include all the green elements like passive water management and

at least Earthcraft Standard.

Maurice and Giovanna actually just, or Giovanna rather, just did the passive house on Lankford Avenue that was the first passive certified house in the state of Virginia and with the experience she learned in that process there's a reasonable chance that we could actually integrate some passive house standard to part of this project.

which would be groundbreaking.

We've got a real variety of architectural types in our project, multi-family, single-family attached and detached, townhouses and a 16-unit apartment building that faces on Elliott Avenue and we think is appropriate for the rebirth of Elliott, the Elliott Cherry Avenue corridor that really is ripe for some redevelopment.

We think that that more dense urban

feel is appropriate for that corridor and it would be kind of a missed opportunity not to have something like that masked on Elliott Avenue.

And we also think that we have a vision for creating a new pocket park to the north of this piece on the edge of the existing Oakwood Cemetery in a way that could do something to enhance the Oakwood Cemetery that could have a new

Good evening members of City Council.

My name is Dan Rosenzweig.

I live at 740 Lexington Avenue in the city.

I'm the executive director of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville.

I feel incredibly blessed to have come into an organization that looked at our housing needs in this community several years ago and said we have to try something different.

Not just different for Charlottesville, but different for the nation.

Habitat saw a group of people on the Sunrise trailer court that were in danger of immediate eviction, and they had no place to go.

And they were the most vulnerable of the most vulnerable, and that's why I got interested in Habitat.

Since I've been involved in Habitat, I've been blessed to have been invited around the country telling what we do here in Charlottesville.

And I get the same question everywhere I go.

They say, you know, what about neighborhood opposition?

What about political leaders that don't like all that affordable housing?

And I said, there's no NIMBY in Charlottesville, there's YIMBY.

we want to mix housing, we want affordable housing.

So Charlottesville broke the mold and we broke the mold so that we can continue to break the mold and find new ways to partner and new ways to export what we're doing here because this is the home of Thomas Jefferson, that's what we do.

We create democracy and we export it.

We create new forms of mixed income housing and we export it.

And this is yet another opportunity to work with who I believe is a hero, Charlie Armstrong and his team at Southern Development that they're taking every 100% of the risk here.

they're putting their own money into this and we've pledged not only that we weren't going to take money for remediation but even afterwards we're not going to ask for a dime of CHF money so that money can be spread around and create more affordable housing.

Southern Development is doing the development pro bono on this site.

What that means is that they're developing lots, they're selling lots to themselves so they can build homes and they're giving lots to Habitat, they're providing a lot for Region 10,

and we're reaching deeply into the most vulnerable in our society, residents of public housing and saying if you work hard, we're going to provide a hand up and you're going to get yourself out of public housing.

What that's going to do is make housing that has been for too long, instead of being transitional, it's been a point in overtime.

and what we're trying to do is to break that cycle so that we can begin to get people through housing and into self-sufficiency.

That's what we do.

So I feel incredibly lucky to live in Charlottesville where we have a council and a staff with a vision that they do.

I think this is a great project.

I'm as excited or more excited about this than our national president setting trailer park transformation.

I would ask, I would want to clarify just a couple of things, and I know you've heard a lot of comment already tonight, but a few things is that our intention is, if we're lucky enough to be awarded the right to negotiate this contract, our first phone call is going to be with the other group because we do believe that that whole block developed is better than half of it.

In our concept plans, one of the concept plans shows a cul-de-sac, but the idea is that we'd very much like to see that road extend all the way through Oak because we think that will make a better project.

The other thing too is that I've heard talk of the effect on city schools and national study after national study that have tracked

Kids who are in safe, decent, affordable housing shows that children do better in schools once they've gotten into a safe, decent, affordable housing environment.

And I would say across the street of Burnett Commons, the place that nobody said, everyone said, it had its doubters that I wouldn't take off.

There are approximately 30 families and every single family, from what I understand, who has a child sends that child to public school.

and we expect the same thing's going to happen.

That not only is this not going to be a drag on public schools, we think that this is going to be a benefit from Clark because we're attracting a demographic that's going to send their kids to schools and that it's supportive.

Their habitat partner families, they're going to be supported all the way down.

So again, I want to thank the staff committee for its recommendation.

I want to thank you for your vision and your foresight and not only saying, not saying no, but saying yes to affordable and mixed income housing.

Is there anyone else who would like to speak on this issue?

If not, I'll close the public hearing.

Oh sorry, there's somebody there.

Hi there.

I'm Barbara Pilkey.

I own a number of houses on Ridge Street.

Everybody has said good things and both proposals are really good and they all strive to do things that the city wants and that the city needs.

Blake and I have been providing affordable housing on Ridge Street in at least 40% of our units for 30 years.

It's our goal to have the best of all possible development on our land that would really be a benefit of the city and we think we have super good partners in the proposal we presented and we'd like a chance to present our concept to the city council before you make a final decision.

Is there anybody else who would like to speak on this issue?

I do appreciate having gotten the latest round of drawings from the Southern Development Habitat team.

And I do share the concern that we weren't originally given the same drawings to look at because it is very difficult to compare a site plan with an aerial photograph.

It's important to look at street elevations not only

again street perspectives because you look at apples and apples you can tell which one has the better meat.

So when I finally did get my drawings and I do feel it's unfortunate that the public doesn't see both side by side so I hope in the future we do that, that we do have the same drawings with the same kind of board so that the public can compare and contrast

just like we can when we put our packets together.

So with that, and I do have my comparative packets, and I'm going to look at this not programmatically because both have very, very excellent programs.

Both are doing a lot of the things that we as a council have said that we aspire to from an equity standpoint, from a mixed income standpoint, and from a sustainability standpoint.

So I'm going to look at it purely from an urbanistic standpoint.

And I agree wholeheartedly that this would have been wonderful to have been designed as part and parcel of what is going to become our strategic investment area, the bigger, larger, walkable neighborhood.

But by the same token, if this is done right, it can start sending the message of what kind of development principles we want as we move towards a vision for this whole area.

So interestingly enough, when I look at the Habitat Southern Development Scheme, I see a really great strong street elevation, both along Elliott as well as along the Cemetery Road.

Those are the public faces of this block, and it really is in keeping with the whole rhythm of a street block network that the city has in most of its historic neighborhoods.

So when I'm coming up Elliott, I can imagine that incredible street elevation that I would see.

In contrast, looking at the milestone project that has some really neat moments, I see lots of backs of houses when I'm looking at that cemetery road elevation.

It suggests to me that that's turning a back on public space, which quite honestly is a little bit of a suburban orientation.

We're looking at

In terms of the Habitat, it's a much more public presence, public space, a public face to the public street.

I do very much like the fact that Cemetery Road is being activated as a real street.

You've got on-street parking.

Internally, the Habitat group has a street that is safe for pedestrians.

There's not

I can barely see if at all if there's any front-loaded garages so that you're not backing cars into the sidewalk, into the street.

I see that in the other one.

I see a lot of impervious surface, a lot of circulation network in the milestone project when it really doesn't need to be there.

I see a lot more efficiency in the circulation system and a lot greater protection of the pedestrian as they're walking along the street.

in the Habitat project.

So what I will say though, I do appreciate what Milestone did in terms of making the connection to Ridge Street.

It seems that that really is a road.

It looks like it could be a one-way road.

I would love to see that there could be greater east-west connectivity as well as north-south connectivity.

Again, you weren't

assuming you had access to that adjacent parcel.

But I do think that it's great that the other team did go that length.

I would again ask that the milestone team though, why would you put a park at park next to already vast open space?

It seemed a little redundant.

We need to get that nice edge.

You've got to get that edge to the open space.

and that seems to be what the habitat group is doing.

There was a greater understanding, I believe, about some historic urban patterns in your scheme so that independent of the program, I've leaned towards your scheme.

And I appreciate the effort that went in the other one.

and at first I was thinking your scheme was better urbanistically until I got the drawings I wanted and I could see it back to back.

So I don't know if there's anything else that I wanted to say.

I think that's it.

I did appreciate the effort to get some transitional housing

from public housing to affordable housing.

I think that was a, I share that and I do appreciate the income mixing.

I would like to know what the income mixing is ultimately for the Habitat Southern Development Project because

It is something that we do have to be very, very aware of, especially in light of the fact that the Clark Elementary School has got the highest concentration of poverty in the entire city.

I'll start to find it relatively short.

I think that in this case we could have, if we needed one of these proposals,

I'm not an architect like Kathy is, and yet a lot of the things she's talking about are things that I was looking at in my way more pedestrian way.

But I really think that, especially because staff has looked at this and recommended the Habitat site, but also because when I look at the different kind of concept of how

I really was encouraged by the idea that your first phone call would be to some of the other partners because I think that you guys pulled together some fantastic partners and I think

I find it a shame we didn't get presentations from both groups, formal presentations.

I know we got a lot of material, but I actually thought we were going to tonight, so I'm disappointed and sorry about that.

I don't know if that's still possible.

I do find there's benefits in both of the proposals had some really great elements.

I really like the more than one access of the milestone project.

I think there's a limit to density and I live on the south side of Charlottesville so I hate to see every little green space just be packed as densely as possible so I'm going to have a real sensitivity about that as well as

Bottom line is Southside bears the biggest brunt of poverty and we're putting more poverty there.

And there's not really a lot of ways around that other than it's home ownership.

I appreciate that.

And I sat down with Dan so he knows that I was the one who brought up the schools.

I very much am concerned about adding more poverty to

Clark, I'd be very interested to know how many children at Burnett Commons there are that are going.

That would be Jackson-Vaya, I'm quite sure.

I would sometimes like to know the number.

But I'm actually, what I'm going to focus on one thing, and I'm going to sort of look to the Habitat Southern Development proposal here,

is that there are as proposed 2022 units of affordable housing, five of which will go to public housing, at least five.

I am concerned that the other 15 are going to go to families that don't live in Charlottesville.

I know that's not a given, but I would like some guarantee or at least some guarantee that there would be a very valiant attempt to make at least half those units

the residents who already live in Charlottesville.

I don't think that the south side of Charlottesville needs to import more poverty.

I think we need to be starting to really uplift our residents and this has been a concern that I've had sort of any time we're talking about giving city resources to any organization that is

And the other issue, and we had talked about this, and you address it in here without actually saying it out loud, which is that it go to residents

that some of our impoverished residents who have generational poverty and not just new immigrants.

I think your efforts with the immigrant community are fantastic, they're wonderful, but not, we can't have that at the, not that the expense is the wrong way to put it, but it's exclusion of a population in our city that really is needing our help.

And so I would just like some

Assurance that our city residents will be served because this is our land.

We're giving up what may or may not be a valuable piece of land, but the way it's cut up and the values assigned to those lots, we're talking about three and a half million dollars worth of lots in

this proposal.

And I know it's going to cost a lot to remediate, but nowhere near that.

I think you corrected yourself in saying that this habitat would be imported in poverty.

I think habitat actually is an organization that lifts people out of poverty, helps people who might be in poverty to climb the ladder, which is why I think it's important.

Your second point is absolutely dead on, which is the extent to which

not only this project, but other habitat projects are helping long term, as you say, people that have been in generational poverty to get into home ownership, build an asset stake, to climb the economic ladder, I totally agree.

And I apologize for that phrase.

But I knew what you were getting at.

I am inclined to support, I too thought we were tonight getting presentations from both, but I too am inclined to support the Habitat and Southern Development proposal for many of the reasons that have been decided and the recommendation from staff.

But as has been said before, I think there were some excellent elements in the

Thank you for the comments.

I have looked at this property for a fair number of years.

I have the privilege of working with both parties over the years and we have very good possibilities in each case.

I think we could do well in both proposals, but I think Habitat proposal does have a number of advantages which staff has pointed out.

I think I am confident that two existing property owners will see to their benefit and the benefit of the community to join in with this proposal because there is no reason not to if there is a piece of property they can develop and then that could provide the extra access points which would be desirable I also agree with Ms. Smith's comments that we want to

We can guarantee but we make valiant effort to see the people who are already here in the city of Charlottesville and get a first opportunity for housing in this area.

This is not a HUD funded project so we can ask for that compared to HUD projects.

I think we would have a, as Kathy mentioned,

The proposal which is in front of us does provide many of the qualities which is a good place to live and grow families and I think it will be an asset to our community and it will set a good trend in this neighborhood.

I would like to make a motion that we accept the habitat southern development proposal.

Right.

It'll be in the draft contract, right.

Can we see it before we... Sure, yes ma'am.

And this is the first of two readings, so we'll have another discussion.

Well, I guess if we're going to add on other criteria, it would be to increase the connection points if it's possible.

I think to the extent possible we can put that there.

So that was a second.

Okay.

Okay.

So we are only frustrating today.

Do we need to vote on the motion?

No.

No.

Because I accepted the announcement.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Again, I will thank both the parties for their efforts to help them work together.

Next item I have moved forward is tree commission update by Betsy Warren.

Yes, yes, I am and I'm actually feeling very good about my few fellow commissioners who are still here at 9.30 and would just ask those who are here to raise your hands up and show the endurance that you have.

Thank you very much for joining me.

Mayor Huja and Members of Council, I am Bitsy Waters, Chairman of your newly appointed Charlottesville Tree Commission, and I'm delighted to be here with some of my colleagues to report on what we've been up to since we convened last fall.

I'll just wait for the door to close if that's alright rather than trying to holler over the folks.

You've had a lot going on here tonight.

We've had very helpful briefings from a number of city departments on our urban forestry plan,

and on current requirements for tree preservation and replacement as part of the city and private development processes.

We've also begun to review an excellent database of what other cities in Virginia have done to protect and add to their tree canopy under Virginia's enabling legislation.

We've learned that we already do a lot to preserve and plant trees in Charlottesville, but there are many opportunities to do more

and have our city become a real leadership in the stewardship of trees.

Based on the charge you've given us, our review of the adopted urban forest management plan and our briefings to date, we're focusing our work in three major areas.

The first is public outreach and awareness.

The second is legislative and regulatory initiatives.

And the third is offering comments on city plans and activities that affect trees.

Let me give you a quick overview of how these three categories will play out in the coming year.

In our first area of activity, public outreach and awareness, we plan to celebrate two Arbor Days in Charlottesville this year.

Spring Arbor Day will coincide with National Arbor Day on April 27th and will emphasize tree preservation.

Specifically, on Friday, April 27th at 10 a.m. in Forest Hills Park, we will be partnering with the Charlottesville tree stewards

to erect the first sign marking a landmark tree in the city of Charlottesville.

In this case, a beautiful white oak located at the entrance to the park.

A representative of the Virginia Department of Forestry will join us at the event and there will be activities for children and tree planting in Fifeville led by the Charlottesville tree stewards later in the day.

A local troop of Girl Scouts will have planted some trees nearby in Forest Hills Park earlier that week, making this a truly intergenerational Arbor Day here in Charlottesville.

You're all invited to join us in Forest Hills Park at 10 a.m. on the 27th, and we hope you'll be able to be there.

In the fall, we will be working with City Parks and Recreation staff to identify a major public tree planting initiative to emphasize that fall

is the best time to plant public and private trees and to raise general awareness about the value of trees to our city.

We thank you for the funds provided in the city budget to support tree planting and we look forward to identifying places that will benefit most from having additional trees, including corridors and neighborhoods with limited tree canopy.

In our second area of activity, legislative and regulatory initiatives, we're looking at several possibilities.

One is advancing a landmark tree ordinance for Charlottesville that draws on the best ideas being used in other cities.

We think it's very appropriate as our city celebrates its 250th birthday to bring greater attention to our very special landmark trees.

Other things we're looking at in the way of legislative and regulatory initiatives are developing a common set of tree protection guidelines that would be used across city departments, something we've learned that we don't have at the moment, and stronger best management practice requirements for saving trees as part of private development that would be written into development contracts.

I'm sure you will hear more from us on some or all of these kinds of legislative and regulatory initiatives in the months ahead.

In our third and final area of activity, commenting on city plans and activities that affect trees, we have already put together a statement related to the development of the east side of McIntire Park, which reads as follows.

It's not long.

Bear with me.

The City of Charlottesville Tree Commission strongly urges the Parks and Recreation Advisory Board, the Planning Commission, and the City Council to maximize preservation of existing trees and increase the size of the overall tree canopy in planning for the east side of McIntyre Park.

The east side of McIntyre is already home to one of the most significant collections of landmark trees found in any of our parks.

These trees must be preserved.

In addition, the east side of the park offers an unprecedented opportunity to add to our tree canopy on an extraordinary scale as we transform this park into a first-class community amenity.

As our city grows in size and density, the contributions of trees to air and water quality, human health, and the beauty of Charlottesville cannot be overestimated.

A park filled with a wide variety of native trees for people

of all ages to enjoy throughout the seasons will be a tremendous community asset.

Please make the east side of McIntyre a high profile demonstration of the city's commitment to being a green city by making the preservation and planting of trees one of the highest priorities in final plans for the park.

That concludes our statement.

Now back to my remarks.

In addition to formulating this statement on the east side of McIntire Park, we've indicated a desire to comment on the comprehensive plan and other large city initiatives that relate in some way to the preservation and planting of trees.

We'll be working with the Parks and Recreation and other city staff to identify these as they come along.

Before closing, I would like to thank all of the city staff and Parks and Recreation, Neighborhood Development and Public Utilities that have helped us get off to a good start and give very special thanks to our main staff liaison, Chris Gensick, and to Tim Hughes and Doug Eamon

for all from the city's Department of Parks and Recreation who provided great leadership and support in our early months.

So we think we're off to an exciting start and we hope you do too.

We have a very active, engaged and able group for this inaugural commission and we look forward to working with you in the months and years ahead to see that our trees continue to be one of the major contributors to the wonderful quality of life we have here in our city.

Hello.

Thank you, that was great.

Actually I did send them to Page and so she has them.

I'd like to say I announced my candidacy under that white oak that you're going to do.

Oh, perfect!

So is there, and you probably said it and I just was lost on the, so is there a component of inventory that you're doing to see what kind of stands of trees are worthy of preservation and are you doing an inventory of where there's a severe lack?

Because I'm thinking out loud as we get the place design task force up and running,

Well, I'm happy to report that nothing we've done since we came together, but the city does already have a fair amount of data about tree cover in different neighborhoods, how detailed corridor by corridor.

I think one of the things that we're all aware of is that being a new commission,

A great deal has been done but not necessarily always pulled together and a great deal needs to be done.

In terms of an actual inventory, I think things like landmark ordinances often require both the city and private owners to come forward and say these are our special ones.

And the Parks and Rec folks have given us an original list of some of the most valuable trees in parks, so that's a start.

as I say there's a neighborhood by neighborhood study where so we do know which neighborhoods have less tree cover than others and the corridor plan which actually we have a corridor plan which Bill Emery reminds me of periodically so we haven't yet fully looked at corridors but I know that for the Fall Arbor Day there's an interest on the Commission in

Picking a place that will be highly visible, that we could see, actually it would be interesting to see how things play out on Cherry Avenue because there's a stretch there that people had actually pointed to and said that's public land and there aren't street trees and it may be that it would be in the way to do that given what you're moving forward with.

But we're looking, we would hope to have something fairly high profile then to indicate

our intent and the things that we do care about and we also try to use it to show people what kinds of trees can't be planted under utility lines so they don't have to be hacked off immediately when they thrive and that kind of thing.

Actually, the city has an amazing database.

Right.

Because they did an inventory, what, three, four, five years ago.

Yeah, they do.

And it actually has longitude, latitude.

So with this GIS viewer, you can actually look and you can zoom if you put latitude, longitude into Google Earth.

It'll just zoom in on the picture of the tree.

It's quite remarkable and with the sizes and everything.

So it's a fantastic resource.

Right.

I would encourage you to kind of join forces with other people like yourselves, other kind of bodies around the Commonwealth.

I know that one kind of balance that we're always pulling, and you alluded to it before, is the more trees we have, the more power outages we have in the spring and in the summer thunderstorm season.

I understand and actually they have not

We've not had Dominion come and talk to us yet.

We do plan to do that.

We know the challenges you do with undergrounding utilities is the cost of doing it if it's not part of a new development.

We have an entire tree commission that would like to underground all the utilities, but we do also recognize the responsibility to be practical in this.

I think understanding better you know which side of the street you're on and where there are and aren't power lines so you know we'll be learning along with you but you can expect that you will have a voice you haven't had in the past and I would like to particularly thank Mayor Huja who I think was a real champion of this as our planning director and I know was a champion for

for having a tree commission.

And I know many of you are very supportive of this as well.

Well, and I'd also like to say that, that I appreciate your, your, in your public education piece about helping people understand what kind of trees that they can plant near power lines, because it's heartbreaking to see a tree just come grow, grow, grow.

just decapitated and expected to grow again.

And I don't know how much you do or the tree stewards do about educating people about how horribly damaging that is to trees, whether there are power lines there or not, just as a way of trimming trees.

But thank you for everything you're doing.

I just wanted to have a seat in one or two comments.

First of all I am thrilled to see this group of people who are on our tree commission.

What really pleases me is that this idea of preservation is now becoming institutionalized in our community and not depending on one person or two persons.

So that is a very healthy thing in my mind that you are going to work on it and you will be worrying about it and I feel very

will leave their mind to see that it is somebody looking after the trees.

And each one of you I know is very passionate about it and that's what you require.

Second question, just a comment on April 27th, I won't be here but I would like to be invited on your next Arbor's Day.

Every year as Council has looked at the CIP, we have tried to add

money for trees.

And for a few years occasionally I had some concerns that we are not spending that money enough fast enough.

I'm not always for spending money fast, but in this case I think it will be no harm to think of trees.

Again, I want to appreciate your whole group's effort.

I hope that you will come back to us if you need ideas and questions.

Any other comments?

Thank you very much.

I'm here tonight to ask that you reenact the ordinance that details the speed limits on US 250.

State law requires that there be a traffic engineering study on file.

We were unable to locate the file from 1958 when the US 250 was built.

Also, we would like to add some language to the ordinance that clarifies the exact places where the speed limits change.

That language would change from 400 feet west of Image Street to 400 feet west of Image Street southbound ramps.

It just makes it more clear from a public standpoint.

As a person whose backyard backs up onto the 35 mile an hour section of US 250, I was very relieved to see that the study that you all did in March confirmed that that was an appropriate speed.

I understand the need to do a study and I would have, you know, sort of, I guess,

I had to go along with it if it said it wasn't, but I think it really confirms what the people who both drive on and live near that bypass know is that, although it looks like a four-lane highway, it's largely a residential street.

It's a street that goes right through the heart of our city.

A lot of people not only have yards backed up onto it, but there are driveways on the eastern end of it that come out, CVS and the Tire Place and the Pizza Place.

and then where Locust Avenue and Park Street come out there's not really an acceleration lane and there are a lot of accidents there I often see them as I come by people who've tried to pull out and somebody's going faster than 35 and just slams into them and I wish that people would be a little more

I actually have some basic questions about determining speed limits and I did read this.

I was trying to absorb it among the other 250 pages of background material we had.

So we need an engineering study in order to determine maximum speed limits.

The engineering study actually determines the 85th percentile for this particular study because the road is already built.

Okay, that's the original.

So the original design speed for the 250 bypass would have been?

So there's a maximum design speed over which you cannot go, I assume.

There are legal limits.

Again, they have to follow the traffic engineering warrants, usually from the FHWA.

Right.

Okay.

So there is a point at which you can't go lower than, I mean, if we wanted to make, I mean, this is, I'm not proposing this.

If I could just add, Mr. Mayor, the state statute which is relevant here states that if you raise or lower a speed limit it has to be supported by traffic engineering study.

Our problem, and this issue has been around for a number of years,

a number of

Defense attorneys who had clients charged with speeding on the bypass were beginning to come in and say, OK, let's see where the traffic study, would you produce the traffic study that supports these speed limits?

And as Ms. Brandt said, we couldn't find it.

I did find counsel minutes from 1967 where the traffic study was presented to counsel which justified these three different speed limits, 35, 45, and 55.

So I mean I did in our background materials we also got the list of roads that where it's 25, 35 obviously every single one.

And I just wondered, for those that are 35, like in my neighborhood, there's one stretch of JPA.

It's the divided part.

And then it's, you know, 25.

And it's kind of 25 if you were coming straight.

So it's a sort of odd stretch of road.

And like Monticello Road.

There's certain...

Cressy, right.

So if any of those were to be questioned and we're interested in looking at reducing any of those, so we'd need an engineering study?

They can be.

It depends.

I actually don't

Okay, I may talk to you.

And if I just may mention that the Forest Hills issue, Mr. Jones is sitting right back there.

Oh, wonderful.

If I might add a little bit too, because it's my understanding that we're subject to the DOT classification system, so you have to move the transportation, the cars, within a network.

Correct.

So that you can't suddenly just get rid of a highway.

This is classified as a highway.

You can't get rid of an arterial because the arterial is the river that all the other tributaries feed into.

You can do

A lot, though, with your local roads.

And I would contend that a lot of our local neighborhood roads might be adjustable, that they might be quite a bit too wide.

And that can slow down traffic.

But when you're dealing with those major connectors in the network, it's a little tricky.

You know, Preston Avenue, though, would be a really interesting road to study because originally it was intended to be a much to connect down to Emmett, but it didn't.

So now it's kind of reverted back into something that's more like a collector road, not an arterial.

So I can imagine as time goes on we might want to revisit some of these roads because they never did get that full build out that was envisioned in the 60s.

But, you know, I think of 250

and it is an amazingly well-designed road in certain places because of the enclosure you get from the banks and then when all the vegetation is in bloom, it's more like a parkway in places.

I'd like to express the minority view.

I hate to be a contrarian, but I think you made a great point about 250 in your neck of the woods.

I don't have any problem.

And I'm not going to say what I'm about to say only because I got a speeding ticket once.

But I do think there is a stretch of the bypass, which is

rated right now currently or it's right now the speed limit is 35 which really needs to be higher because and it's I'm particularly referring to the stretch between McIntyre Road and the you know the west side of McIntyre Park by the fire station and I read the report and I know the reasons for retaining it one of which is there is a fire station there but

Drivers, it just intuitively does not feel or operate like a road that should have a 35 mile an hour speed limit.

And so many people exceed 35 miles an hour because it feels safe enough to do so in the flow of traffic.

Well, I'm sure we'll have to do that.

And for the time being, as Ms. Szakos recommended, we could

And I just wonder if it shouldn't change it hydraulic.

I mean it's almost because it changes in the middle of like nowhere, not nowhere but everywhere.

I mean that's just, I know that doesn't speak to any design issues or engineering issues and that's just a pedestrian comment but just common sense tells me that

I know, I know.

My microphone's not working.

Okay.

Are there other comments before we take some action on the ordinance?

If none, is there somebody has a motion to adopt the ordinance?

Since no one is leaping forward, I will make a motion.

in discussion of the motion, ordinance.

Is this the first reading?

This is the first reading, Mr. Mayor.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

We appreciate your help.

Okay.

Next item on the agenda is topic dealing with disproportionate minority contact.

Thank you Mr. Mayor, Members of Council.

We have at least three items to collect for you on disproportionate minority contact tonight and since we have

A group of presenters, we'll start with them.

Gretchen Ellis, Director of the Commission on Children and Families, Professor Dick Capucci, and one of his students, Todd Warner, all members of the group that authored the report that has been mentioned in public comment, which was completed in May and presented to the Commission and adopted September of last year.

After those folks share with you the items of their report, I can talk with you a little bit about the process that city staff and a number of community partners have undergone to apply for a grant to the Children's Center on Law and Policy.

So I'm just talking.

Kind of move it forward.

I ended up having two cover pages.

Okay, great.

No.

Ah, there it is, okay.

I apologize.

I ended up having two title slides.

I forgot to take the first one off.

Counselors, Mr. Mayor, thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today.

I'm going to give you a little bit of background about the task force on race disparity and disproportionality in youth services, and then Dr. Rapucci and Mr. Warner will talk to you about the findings of the study, and then I'll come back and talk to you briefly about where things stand now.

The task force was put together in, I'm gonna get this right, in late 2009 and was charged with six charges.

One was to identify whether there were disparities affecting minority children in four areas.

We're just gonna talk about juvenile justice today, but we also looked at mental health, child welfare, and physical health.

If indeed those disparities were found to exist, we would determine the consequences or results of those disparities and determine the causes if we could of those disparities.

Now I'll tell you that we have not finished work on looking at causes.

We elicited community input, reaction and recommendations both through the steering committee that represented a variety of different perspectives as well as from focus groups and community interviews.

We identified strategies including best practices to address identified disparities and we made action recommendations to the Commission on Children and Families.

So that is the background.

The task force members

are listed in the report that you have.

Task Force numbers met monthly for 16 months.

My voice goes pretty loud.

I'm slightly hoarse tonight, but I have a voice like camp counselor.

Can people hear me?

I got too many things in my pocket.

Okay, the way we've set this up is kind of a tag team and Gretchen started it off, we ended up doing this study as a result of the commission asking us to do it.

We do stuff around this town for the last 30 plus years, hopefully staying behind the scenes but just doing projects, etc.

I'm a professor of psychology at the university and my specialty areas are community psychology, children, youth and policy, particularly around juvenile justice.

So we got into this.

I started off with this so that you just know these are two very important terms.

disparity and disproportionality.

Racial disproportionality is the issue of one race is over or underrepresented compared to racial makeup of the whole community.

So that, you know, if you have a situation where you have 50-50, but in fact in whatever it is, you've got 75-25, we have a disproportionality of representation.

The second term which is different is racial disparity and this is where inequality in the way that youth and their families are served are based on race and the outcomes achieved.

Okay, this is an overview statement.

We're going to conclude with this and we begin with it so that you'll know what we're talking about.

There is really little question disparity and disproportionality exist.

We're not suggesting why or anything else, we're just saying they exist.

And locally, as Gretchen said, we looked across multiple domains.

The full report that we turned in, I think it was about 100 pages, and is loaded with information.

We cut this down to a very short slideshow.

The patterns exist across the domains, be it education, physical, mental health, child welfare, and where we're particularly concerned tonight is juvenile justice.

And the disparity and disproportionality exist both locally, statewide, and nationally.

So it's not suggesting anything awful about Charlottesville per se.

and being a scientist, I have to put that up there.

Whatever data we present has to be interpreted with caution.

It's hard to get.

It's very expensive data to get.

Let me go to the next slide and I'll say something about it.

We have two sources of the data that we use and we, particularly in juvenile justice, what was better than with the rest of it is the second part.

The first part is from the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services.

their research unit and they were able to present us with and give us access.

We didn't go get this.

They sent it to us.

Okay?

But what we have here is kind of mainly totals and percentages of juveniles arrested, referred, petitioned, diverted, received probation,

detention, confinement, etc.

We have it and Todd has the data if you want actual numbers but there's a couple of thousand cases.

This is not a small number of cases that are used on that.

The data that I think is most interesting to Charlottesville

and by the way we have this data on Albemarle also but since this was the Charlottesville City Council I thought we would only present data from Charlottesville.

This was provided by the 16th District Juvenile Court Services thanks to Gretchen and the Commission going forward and getting access and besides that she had a little bit of money to help support a couple of my graduate students for a summer and so we had access to all the files.

We ended up with 298 youth, we went through their files extensively, coded them, etc.

from the Charlottesville Juvenile Justice System and all the kids had to be on probation for at least two months or longer and these data came from 04, 05 and 06

The ages were 12 to 19, 77% of the sample were male, 54% African American, 38% Cartesian, and the others are kind of small.

So what we've ended up doing is looking mainly, and for you tonight, you're going to have some bar graphs that Todd's going to talk about that have to do with African Americans, et cetera.

And your question, which I didn't answer and I meant to, Dave, tell me again.

It's because this took a summer to collect 298 people and we

As I said, we do reliability checks, we do all kinds of stuff to make sure that our data is data you can rely on, okay?

And that's what makes it.

And once you get into the files, by the way, they're a mess.

I mean, I shouldn't say they're a mess, but that's not the way you're supposed to say it.

Yes, that's a good word.

Thank you very much, Gretchen.

You don't have to have high level.

Right.

It's a good sample and the 298 is here.

And by the way, just for those of you who know us, university people and stuff, none of this has been published anywhere.

It isn't publishable.

We did it for the commission.

We did it for the town.

It's for your use.

It is nothing that we have used for anything other than this.

Todd, do you want to come up and pick up the next

Todd was the person, my graduate student, who was in charge of juvenile justice.

And so therefore I thought it made good sense for him to present these graphs.

And I need to give Todd this thing.

Yes, here's this microphone for you.

And here's this.

OK.

So can you hear me clearly?

Is that good enough?

OK.

So what I'm going to be presenting here is pretty much the cliff notes version of what I thought was the most important part of the juvenile justice section.

And as Dick was saying, I was the sort of primary point person and author for that particular section.

So just keep in mind, there is more detailed information.

But I pulled out what hopefully should

be compelling enough to understand the story and the most important parts of that particular section.

OK, so the first slide is pretty straightforward.

It's actually just the proportion of African-American and Caucasian kids, adolescents, of course, that are living in the Charlottesville area.

And then on the right, you're seeing the proportion of adolescents in the juvenile justice system by race.

And this is any kind of sort of legal contact that they've had with the juvenile justice system.

And so obviously on the right, we can see the African-American kids are disproportionately represented.

Okay so the next thing that we wanted to look at is some common risk factors and the sort of notion or the traditional argument is, well some kids are more at risk than others and so that's why they're brought in, they have many more problems and so we were wanting to look at some of these quote common risk factors to see if these kids are in fact different or if we can find some patterns

and essentially we looked at various family risk factors, various school risk factors and individual risk factors.

And we essentially found no differences between the African-American kids and the Caucasian kids here in Charlottesville.

And just to give you a short sample of what some of those factors are, low family SES, having witnessed domestic violence in the past two years, this is family of course,

having a parent that abuses drugs or alcohol, having a family member incarcerated, these types of variables.

Who are you comparing in this?

No, I mean in this slide.

Oh yes, yes, I'm sorry, I should have clarified that beforehand.

So the more detailed analyses that have to do with risk factors, prior offending behaviors, this is from the Charlottesville Court Services Unit.

So this is the 300 kids.

Yes, exactly.

Now the sort of more broad, just descriptive data that I'm going to show later that shows the different points in the juvenile justice process, that's what we got from the state criminal justice department.

So, very good question.

I meant to make that clarification and didn't.

Okay.

So again, we found no differences across these risk factors for family, school, and youth.

And so the next thing that we wanted to look at was sort of prior offending behaviors and actual interactions with the juvenile justice system.

So the logic being that, you know, a lot of times kids that have, you know, more extensive offending histories are more likely then to be

recidivating again in the future and from what we could tell in our analyses we basically group the kids that are sort of have low interactions or another way to interpret this is they haven't offended a lot right and then we have some high interaction kids so they have you know more offending behaviors they have

You know, more misdemeanors, status offenses, et cetera.

And they sort of cluster together naturally, right?

So we have essentially kind of a low risk group as far as prior offending behaviors and a high risk group.

And again, we essentially see no differences in prior offending behaviors or interactions with the juvenile justice system by race.

Okay, and then to sort of follow up on that, we wanted to look at the most current or most recent offense for which they were actually on probation.

And this is sort of a traditional breakdown of different categories of crimes.

So you have person-related crimes and property-related offenses, at least as you're talking about,

juveniles in the juvenile justice system.

And again, here we found no differences across the current or most recent offense type for which they're on probation for.

Even though there is a slight difference there on the right, that wasn't really a meaningful or statistically significant difference.

Okay, and then more broadly we wanted to look at the different decision points or the different

points in the process of the juvenile justice system itself.

And this was, as Kristin asked earlier, from the Virginia Criminal Justice Services Research Unit.

And the way to really interpret this graph is the number above the bars is essentially the likelihood of black kids at each decision point compared to white kids.

Okay?

So, for example, we can see that the African American kids are two times more likely to be arrested, two times more likely to get referred, more than three times more likely to actually receive a petition, and on and on.

Okay?

And this is just a very basic breakdown of the likelihood of black kids at this decision point and white kids at this decision point.

yes yeah and so essentially the best way to think about it too is almost to go backwards so like of course the kids that got probation and detained were obviously arrested and referred so as they get further and further to the right they're getting further and further along into the system

Yes, yes, so essentially a kid gets arrested for some kind of complaint or someone calls the police and then they investigate it and they essentially decide whether or not they're going to refer that kid for intake and basically formal processing, right?

And send him along and then an actual petition itself is filed against the kid and that's sort of the legal charges.

against the kid.

And then the three, diversion, probation, and detention, those are outcomes, right?

So a kid can be diverted and essentially, you know, none of the charges will stick if he does X, Y, and Z that, you know, the judge sets forth or probation officer or whoever.

And then probation obviously is more intensive like supervised probation officer

You check in and it's a little more punitive, obviously, than diversion and then detention, obviously, being detention, detained in jail.

Okay, so.

Yes.

Yes.

Proportionally, yes.

and this is looking at each point sort of on its own.

So obviously there's some kids that get arrested but they don't get referred.

And then some kids that even make it to the referral for intake but don't actually have a formal legal petition filed for charges against them and on and on.

So the next slide actually speaks to this.

So if we have sort of disparities at the front end of the legal system, we wanted to see if we could statistically count for those disparities, right?

Essentially, if you see that more African-American kids are getting arrested and referred, there's obviously more of them being brought into the system, right?

So that's going to create sort of bias and stuff at the end because you simply just have more kids, right?

So the next graph actually just specifically looks at outcomes.

And what we do is we statistically control for the disparities at the front end of the system.

Right, so if we can make those basically two groups equivalent, then we look and we see that white kids in Charlottesville were four times more likely to be diverted compared to African American kids, and then the African American kids were about one and a half times more likely to receive probation and detention.

So would you say this is controlling for, let's say, income, or not necessarily.