City Council Meeting   3/4/2013

Dede Smith

The End

I'll call March 4th meeting of City Council to order.

Ms. Smith?

Here.

Mr. Huja?

Yes.

Ms. Szakos?

Here.

Ms. Galvin?

We have a number of awards and announcements which I'd like to start with.

I'd like to start with, first of all, an award on budget preparation.

Is somebody here for that?

Ms. Willett, will you lead?

Good evening.

My name is Renee Hoover.

I'm here representing the Government Finance Officers Association.

I have the honor to present to you all tonight the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award to the City of Charlottesville.

To earn the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award, the City of Charlottesville had to substantially conform to the program's demanding criteria

Such a record reflects the professionalism and commitment of numerous individuals as well as many hours of hard work.

It also reflects a degree of dedication and leadership.

This is the 21st time this Charlottesville has won this award and the 11th consecutive budget award.

This award is for the fiscal period beginning July 1st, 2012.

It is my privilege, Leslie,

on behalf of the Government Finance Officers Association to present the City of Charlottesville the Distinguished Budget Presentation Award.

Hi, thank you very much.

I really love kicking off budget season with this award that we get.

And we work really hard for it.

Let me thank Ryan Davidson who's our budget and management analyst who is in the back of the room over there.

And actually there's numerous staff that really helped put this budget together.

The two of us couldn't do it alone.

Numerous department heads, of course our city manager and

and Aubrey Watson, our Finance Director and lots of staff who help build the budget document and put it together for public consumption and hopefully it's a good document that everybody reads cover to cover.

So thank you very much for this award and I look forward to working on the Fiscal Year 14 budget starting tonight.

Give me just a second to get this up

Which one did you hear?

The Planning Commission at their last meeting presented awards for several projects and to several individuals to recognize outstanding planning works for the year.

This is something that Planning Commission has done now for probably the last 10 years and really a highlight of the year.

And we just wanted to run through them for you and for the public to be able to see.

I'm not sure that any of the recipients were able to come back again tonight, but we did want to recognize them because these are, we feel, important awards.

The first award presented was the Eldon Fields Woods Design Professional of the Year.

This year, this award was presented to the UBA Architecture School, accepting the award where Anaki Alde, head of the Architecture Department, and Dean Tanzer from the School of Architecture.

This award was presented to

the School of Architecture primarily for the Belmont Vortex Project that they conducted and the competition that got approximately 300 students representing most all disciplines of the A school involved in the process, 29 teams to reimagine the Belmont Bridge and its function with a larger community.

The workshop was a great success and was the first of what we hope are several and the Planning Commission also thanked the architecture school for their involvement in the community and their desire for continued involvement.

Second award was for outstanding plan and development and it was to sunrise development by the Habitat for Humanity folks.

This in-field development project provides lasting social and aesthetic benefits to its own community, the adjacent neighborhood, and the entire city.

Serves as a model for future projects within the city and throughout the commonwealth and nation.

Sets a high standard for both non-profit and for-profit development.

And Dan Rosenzweig

and Don Franco received the award.

Citizen Planner of the Year was presented to Preston Koiner and Preston's wife, Julie, accepted and this award was presented again to recognize we all know the many, many things that Preston did in our community during his lifetime.

He was honored for his many years of service to the community, for his unwavering passion for architecture and history.

At the time of his passing, he was involved in his last true labor of love, restoring the unique revival of Young Building on Carlton Avenue.

Preston possessed a rare understanding of the value of keeping, rehabilitating and planting livable and meaningful places in the community.

Again, Preston's wife, Julie, accepted this award.

The Herman Key Access to the Disabled Award was presented to Mr. Yuson Wang.

Yuson was a member of our staff and he actually volunteered.

He came on one of the projects as a free intern to the city and did a lot of work and then when he heard that we were trying to do an inventory of all city facilities to update our ADA master plan, he volunteered to come back and do that at no pay.

and the Planning Commission felt like that was a real inspiration and the value of what he brought to us to be able to update that plan was incredible and so they recognized Euston with the access to the disabled award.

The outstanding neighborhood

Effort of the Year was awarded to Bike Walk Play JPA and a large number of recipients there, Kimberly Swanson, Ms. Susan Elliott, Julia Williams.

They were the organizers of the event and they accepted the award.

The Bike Walk Play JPA was Charlottesville's first Open Streets event.

Street Festival held in the Fry's Spring neighborhood designed to celebrate community by inaugurating a new JPA bridge and supporting local businesses, strengthening neighborhood relationships, and promoting active recreation.

And they said as they picked it up, they hoped it's the first of many.

Outstanding Sustainable Development Award was given to the Main Street Market Annex.

This is on the development of Gabe Silverman on West Main Street.

An excellent example of urban redevelopment utilizing the structure of an auto service garage, the Market Annex created a modern mixed-use space appropriately designed to the scale and intensity of the existing structures and uses along West Main Street.

The neighborhood of the year selected was Woolen Mills.

I believe this was their second time since we've been given the awards that they were recognized.

And they were recognized generally just for the overall active communication and participation of the neighborhood in so many planning efforts.

The Planning Commission felt that just their sustained involvement was worthy of recognition again.

And then the final award was the NDS Staff Member of the Year.

was presented to Francis Vineyard.

Francis is

our deputy building official for plan review and it's a new position that he was moved into.

Francis has been with us for four or five years but he solely does plan review now and it's greatly expedited and standardized our plan review process.

Planning Commission felt like every time they come to meetings they see his lights on after hours.

We know as a staff he's here early and they wanted to recognize the outstanding effort and work that he does.

and then we got a great group shot of all the winners.

Are there any of the award winners in the audience?

Let's give a hand to them.

I have proclamation dealing with brain injury awareness month.

Whereas 1.7 million Americans sustain traumatic brain injury each year.

Whereas traumatic brain injury is a computing factor to a third of all injuries related to death in the United States.

whereas the injuries are largely the result of motor vehicles, falls, assaults, sporting events, occupational injuries.

Whereas traumatic brain injury is a signature inquiry of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

presenting new challenges for the members of the military and their families.

Whereas an injury that happens in an instant can bring a lifetime of physical, cognitive and behavioral changes.

Whereas early, equal and adequate access to care will greatly increase overall quality of life and will enable individuals to return home, school, work and community.

Whereas family members, friends and members of this

community can play a central role in enhancing the lives of our citizens.

Whereas the Brain Injury Association of Virginia and the High Street Clubhouse of Charlottesville offer educational and support to families and individuals with traumatic brain injury, with community integration, and to live as independently as possible.

Whereas March has been designated as Brain Injury

Awareness Month to promote public awareness of the extent, causes, consequences, treatment and prevention of traumatic brain injury.

Now, therefore, I, Satyendra Singh Huja, Mayor of Surya Sharasam, do hereby proclaim March 2013 as Brain Injury Awareness Month and call upon all citizens to observe the month by offering special recognition to the Health, to High Street,

Clubhouse, and for invaluable contributions and assistance to families and individuals.

I encourage citizens of Charlottesville to seek information on traumatic brain injury.

Signed, sealed, forced, March 2013.

Thank you, Mayor Huja.

My name is Lee Wayan, representing the High Street Clubhouse here in Charlottesville, and I thank you, Mayor and members of City Council, for taking a moment to recognize the contributions.

I just wanted to take a moment to thank members of City Council that have come to some of our programs and recognizing the efforts, contributions of those people living in our community and those disabled as a result of brain injury.

Thank you very much for coming.

Is there a second to the motion?

I'll second.

Yes, thank you.

I have a really upbeat announcement.

I'd like to read a letter that our city manager,

who writes such beautiful letters, wrote to some children who came and presented to us.

Everyone at the City Council meeting on February 4th was quite impressed with your dedication to spreading the very powerful message that all people matter.

Your presence in the chambers brightened the evening for all of us and reminded everyone present of the importance of treating all of our fellow human beings with dignity, respect, and love.

Our city, our state and our country need to hear and respond positively to the All People Matter message.

We are so appreciative of the time you spent preparing for your performance of All People Matter in both the YouTube video and the presentation in the city council chambers.

You have presented Charlottesville exceptionally well and we are proud of your efforts.

We wish you great success as you spread your good news to men and women and boys and girls throughout our nation.

All People Matter is a video that some of the children came and recited for us, but it is a video that I believe we will have running on our cable access channels.

I encourage you to watch it.

It was performed by, gosh, I can't remember 11, how will you know?

Levener, 14 area children local here.

And it's just beautiful, so do watch for it.

I also just have a short announcement that our next town hall meeting, our town, Charlottesville, will be for the Fry's Spring and Johnson Village neighborhoods on Monday, March 25th.

It'll be at Jackson-Baya Elementary School from six to eight.

Thank you.

Oh, yes.

I have an announcement about the Belmont Bridge comment period.

The comment period for the Belmont Bridge replacement project has been extended until March 31, 2013.

Please visit www.belmontbridge.com for more information or contact Neighborhood Development Services at 434-970-31A2.

And I also would just like to

I want to call the public's attention to these two very good annual reports.

One was done by the Office of Economic Development and the other was done by the Charlottesville Police Department and these are available, I believe, on our website.

They're filled with lots of good information and it's really important for you, the public, to know what your public servants are doing for you.

I just wanted to announce that there will be a special election for the Office of Charlottesville Treasurer on Tuesday, April 2nd.

For more information on the election, polling places, or registering to vote, please contact the Charlottesville City Voter Registrar's Office at 434-970-3750 or visit www.Charlottesville.org slash vote.

And I understand that if you're eligible to absentee vote, if you won't be here on election day or for some reason you can't get to the polls,

Absolutely.

Mr. Jones is the proud father of a beautiful girl.

Thank you very much.

Good wishes to her.

Please make sure it is in the record that she was recognized when she was born.

And send the minutes to Mr. Jones.

Her first official act.

Each one of you has three minutes to speak.

and I have a list here.

There will be 12 people who will be able to speak if there are that many.

First is Greg Robertson.

Please recognize yourself, your name and address when you speak.

My name is Gregory Robertson and I'm here for Stand for the Silent Charlottesville, Virginia.

and I realize I only have three minutes and I'll do my best, but what I have to say is very important, so if I go a little over, I hope you understand.

I live in the city.

I was a student at Walker School.

I'm a straight A student who has won numerous awards, such as a citizenship award and awards in course and science.

I was chosen by my teachers to be a part of the Peace Squad, a club that promotes peace.

Everything was fine at school until I started getting bullied.

The bully first appeared at my house.

He threatened me.

My mom called the police and made a report and notified the school.

At the school lunch line, he threatened to punch me over and over.

Again, my mom and dad talked with the school administration.

My mom was assured that the bully would be kept away from me and that I would be safe at school.

That did not happen.

After being called names and trying to intimidate me, the bully punched me twice in the stomach.

I did not fight back because I knew the school rules were against fights and I complied with the rules.

I had to go to the hospital and had tests completed with the doctors that I had bruised sternum and muscles that I would be sore for at least four to six weeks.

No one from the school called to see how I was except for my music teacher who really cared.

After that, the kids from the school called my house.

They told me not to come back to school because the boy who hurt me was angry and that he got in trouble.

He had a group of friends that were going to jump me.

They called me names that would be inappropriate for me to speak in this form.

Even after the bully had followed out with his plan to hurt me, he still had power at the school.

What I do not understand is that the boy who hurt me is back at school.

He refused a few days suspension and we were not even allowed to know the disciplinary action that was taken.

When my mom spoke with the assistant superintendent, he said that they could not assure her that if I went back I would be safe.

I'm now at home with my mom and she is homeschooling me.

At times I really miss my friends, but I have no other choice but to go to Walker.

I live in the city and I'm not going back to school with kids who are willing to jump me or hurt me any further.

It is for this reason, with the help of my family and friends, that I am organizing a chapter of Stand for the Silent in Charlottesville, Virginia.

You may have seen Stand for the Silent featured on the movie Bully and the Bully Effect.

Stand for the Silent is an anti-bullying group that our family has been a part of for three years.

It is started in Oklahoma when a boy took his life due to extensive bullying at the school.

Like me, his parents went to the school over and over only to be told that they, the school, were doing all they could.

This boy took his life and today he would be right around my age.

There are answers to stop bullying, but it takes a group of parents and kids that can stand for the silent in a school setting.

85% of the kids will stand back and see bullying occur, but only 10% will take a stand against it.

The school must be taken back by kids who know what is right.

There also has to be more accountability in schools.

School administration must be able to recognize and confront bullying.

No child should be hurt due to any reason.

So to the city and to the schools and to the kids in the city, I am fighting back.

I am fighting back not by hurting or destroying, but by starting a group where kids can turn to get help.

I hope that all kids that are being bullied know that they are somebody, that there are people out there that can help them and understand.

There's a Facebook group called Stand for the Silent Charlottesville where kids can join and get help with bullying issues.

I want every kid to know that they are somebody and that there's a group of people that cares.

There is also a phone number where kids can go to express his or her feelings over being bullied.

Thank you for listening to me and I will be back to speak to you as Stand for the Silent Charlottesville develops.

I may just be a kid, but I am fighting back in a positive manner and I know that I will stand for the silent and fight the epidemic of bullying as best as I know it.

Before you leave, we want you to know we are very proud of you.

You have come and spoken.

And I think the schools will make every effort.

The schools people are here right now in the audience to help you with this problem.

And I'm very proud of you that you are organizing this group.

Thank you.

Okay?

Nivelle Huja, City Council, Manager Jones, and Mr. Brown.

Disgust, aggravation, frustration, humiliation, and intimidation.

These are the feelings my family experience each day, the feeling of hopelessness and loneliness, as if it has become not only us against whoever is involved in the disappearance of our loved one,

but us against you as well.

And even though your actions or inactions as city leaders and administrators have shown that things such as this, the disappearance of our loved one and the attempted abduction a week ago in the UVA area shows your concern of like thereof for the citizens and visitors of this city.

For over two months, we have been dealing with inaction from our police department.

We've come to our city manager.

We've come to our city leaders.

It hurt me most much when we had a program a couple of weeks ago and none of you came.

None of you spoke up in support.

The only one who's ever spoke up for DeShad Smith is Dave Norris.

This is one of your citizens.

We can sit here and we can give awards and we can talk about how great we are, but the fact is Charlottesville has a problem.

Most of your citizens do not feel safe.

Your police department has a problem and I will call it out.

You want to talk about racial equality and all of that stuff?

The chief of police got on TV a couple of weeks ago and was talking about Rosa Parks when it relates to the disappearance of DeShad Smith.

Rosa Parks had no part to play in that and it had nothing to do with civil rights.

We do not feel that this investigation is being handled properly.

We feel that it was handled haphazardly in the first place.

to sit on the phone and do a phone interview with a potential suspect and just think they're going to come in.

There's a lot of things going on.

We've asked for a sit down with Mr. Smith, Ms. Cookie Smith and myself and the police to discuss some answers.

some questions and get some answers.

We want our loved one back.

We want to know that the police department is doing it.

Not wasting funds on a fruitless search which they were told by experts in the first place in the field of refuge that it was going to be fruitless.

That was time, that was resources that was wasted that should have went into other avenues.

And you as the city leaders and the city manager, you need to jump on top of this.

He's your employee.

You want to work for the city?

Then be out here with the people.

And when the people ask you to come out and ask the police department to come out, you need to show that you're big enough to stand there with us and come out and support us.

We pay your salaries.

We elect you.

We expect you to be one of us and to come out there with us.

Hello, my name is Lolita Smith.

I am Desha's grandmother.

I have a big boy.

in my heart because my baby's been gone for over three months.

No answers.

I have no answers.

We have no answers.

We can't give nobody to give us the answers.

So I'm asking

My family, friends, City Council, Charlottesville Police Department to please help us.

We need you all to help and support us.

If we can't come out, then please donate a little something or there are other ways that you can support us.

All you have to do is get in touch with us.

Please don't make us stand alone because that's the way we are feeling.

Whenever y'all see us,

You see me and my two cousins on the TV.

You don't see no family, no friends.

Where is everybody?

Y'all don't care?

What?

I just need to know that somebody cares.

That's my baby out there.

And I want him home.

I need closure.

I need closure.

And you know what?

I've been in Charlottesville 54 years.

This has been my home.

But right now, I really feel ashamed to even call Charlottesville my home, because I don't feel nobody's behind us.

That's my baby, and I want him home.

Good evening, Mayor Huja and to City Council, Mr. Jones, Maurice Jones.

My name is Benichi Hicks, and I reside in Rice, Virginia, Prince Edward County.

And I'm here, of course, with my family, the Smith family, to help

in the investigation and to bring DeShaw Smith home.

I stood before you a couple of weeks ago concerning some of the issues regarding the human rights and how they're kind of tied into helping this case maybe and others that may come up in the future and all of that.

But right now I'm not here tonight to

talk about human rights so far as this case is concerned.

I am really here tonight to talk about the investigation that's not taking place according to what should be taking place.

And I'm petitioning the city council, Mr. Jones, Mayor Huja, and all of you on city council tonight, I'm petitioning you to get on your chief of police, Mr. Longo,

to make sure that he sits down with the family as a whole, not driving a wedge between calling one and calling another one.

The family, we want to meet together so we all can be on the same page.

I don't think this is no more than right.

It's called communication, and it's called working together.

I looked at this manual when I walked in your office the other day, Mr. Jones.

and it says Charlottesville Police 2012 Annual Report.

I read this going back home when I was reading through this manual and some of the mission statements, the overall goals and all of these things I was reading, division statement and it puzzled me because the police is to protect, they are to serve and to honor.

Who?

The citizens, the citizens that they serve.

I was puzzled by some of the things I was reading.

I saw more pictures.

It was like looking through a photo album more so than actually anything else, you know, which is good in one hand, but I want to see not just words, but action.

You know, we've gotten information that, well, the police department, they're praying for the family and all of this.

Wonderful.

I believe in prayer.

I believe in faith.

I have that, yes, but I do know faith without works and prayer without working and doing anything is dead.

You know, the police department has a job to do and we will not rest

until we have this meeting with the police department as a whole so that we can at least get some of the answers that has been put forth to the police department answered to us.

Those that can be answered and those some of them that can't be answered.

We understand that because it is an investigation but that does not warrant not having a meeting with the police department and I don't know what the problem is but we're going to get to the bottom of it.

I don't know if

Regarding the Human Rights Commission, let me tell you how I feel about the Human Rights Commission.

True to its name, it should be about human rights.

If this is set up to monitor the rights of blacks against discrimination and racism by whites, you must consider that a race crime.

However, will this office consider crimes by blacks on whites as a race crime?

If you won't, then this will not be a true Human Rights Commission.

Mr. Norris, I know you're going to jump up and down when I tell you this, but according to my limited research, black crime is three times as high as white crime in this area.

I'm happy to share that information if you want.

Why is it that somehow black crime is a taboo subject and we must be racist for bringing it up?

I would argue that a woman being beaten unconscious and robbed is far more serious than a perceived racial slight.

But this is less about who is committing the crimes as it is about proportionality and priorities.

I have had conversations with many black friends over this and I get

I get it that they feel a sense of disrespect, but it is a disrespect from people like you who want to make them think of themselves as victims.

And from white people, you make us feel as if we're all such racists that you need to protect the minorities from all of us because we can't be trusted to act civilized.

You would shame the taxpayers into having to pay for a human rights commission to investigate discrimination against blacks, real or perceived, with little result and no way to legally force an employer to hire or a landlord to accept a tenant.

Yet I don't see the same moral outrage when it's this white victim of black crime.

The money you propose to waste on these two positions could be better spent by the police chief hiring more officers to protect us all against violent crime.

So stop demonizing people like me

First I want to start by giving you my name, I guess.

Randy Page, 1401 Welford Street.

I want to thank the members of council who gave me their time and I got with and I've been able to discuss the YMCA.

Tonight I wanted to talk a little about the parking.

When the decision on the YMCA was made

the parking at the golf course side was available.

That is no longer available because of an acceleration lane that's going to go through there.

So currently we will have 340 spaces in the park and that includes the 40 that they're going to add when they

do the reconfiguration and put in the pedestrian bridge.

I did not count the area down by the Little League area, so that might be another 30 spaces.

There's a professional parking institute that I had no idea even existed.

and their recommendation for parking for a fitness club, and I understand the why is not only a fitness club, it's more than a fitness club and to me that means more parking because they will be able to hold large family events there.

The recommendation was 7.7 spaces per thousand square feet.

The YMCA, I'm not sure the exact number, I'm going with 70,000 square feet.

They've given different numbers as their plans have changed over time.

That means at 7.7 with no, and this was figured with no adjacent usage by any other activities on this parking,

I know that Charlottesville High School offers some probably areas.

I walked through Charlottesville one day and a policeman stopped me and told me I was trespassing.

I had no idea that during school hours that you couldn't walk across the grounds.

I was cutting down to the nature trails.

So that's one thing we're going to have to overcome.

It takes approximately 10 minutes, if you can get onto Route 250, to get

If you go in front of the Y and look for a spot and you can't find it, it's 10 minutes by the time you park your car at CHS and walk up to the Y.

It's 4 minutes if you park on Rugby Avenue, Sherwood or Westwood.

Those places are going to see a lot of parking before CHS is going to see them.

People like to walk into a building that they can see.

It's psychological.

You park in front of the building, you walk into it.

So I see some real problems and I would ask you all to please consider this.

I know that this is coming to an administrative decision by Maurice, but you guys have some input on this.

I don't see how we can have events in the park like a rodeo for the skateboarders, a swim meet for the Y and other activities.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, I see.

Mr. Mayor, Councilors, David Brown, 1534 Rugby Avenue, and I came here tonight with my friend Randy Page.

Randy and I have disagreed on some things involving the Y. I think it's a great thing to occur in McIntyre Park.

Randy has had opinions that that's not the right place for it, but we do agree on the parking issue.

When the Y was originally approved the site plan called for a rectangular soccer field and I expressed at the time that that use was changed to be softball that there was going to be a lot of people wanting to park to play softball at the same time we're going to have a lot of people wanting to

used the why and we better figure out how to make that work.

And I think the time to figure out how to make that work is now.

I do think it's going to be a big problem and I think some smart thought needs to go into that.

While I'm here, I'd like to thank you for passing the storm water ordinance.

I think that was an important thing to do for the city.

And the third thing I'd like to say is that you guys may have read yesterday's New York Times from Page's story was on how the sequester

it's going to impact Virginia.

Of all states, Virginia is the one that's going to be most impacted.

It's going to affect our economy for people who can lose jobs, assuming they don't solve it first.

And I ask you to just take that into consideration as you do your budget planning for the next fiscal year because the economy of Northern Virginia drives the economy of Virginia.

And I think we could find ourselves with a different revenue picture

I've lived in Charlottesville my entire life.

I have a daughter who's lived here her entire life and two more on the way.

and they will be joining our community and staying here as well.

I am here to talk about the Human Rights Commission.

I feel almost a little bad about being up here and speaking on this subject because I don't know that you need to hear from another white guy about this issue but you know it struck me that this is not just a white people's issue or black people's issue or pregnant people's issue or women's issue.

or a gender identity issue.

It's everybody's issue.

It is a human rights issue and this is something that needs to be addressed.

This city council I've seen over and over again have opportunities to make real change in the world.

And time and again, what I hear is lip service.

And I feel like I had misspoke the last time I was talking about the Human Rights Commission when I mentioned the dialogue on race and that they've become more and more marginalized.

And what I think it's not the dialogue itself, it's that this council, despite concrete, clear suggestions from the dialogue on race, this council has not been able to accept the things brought forward by the dialogue on race.

So now you have this Human Rights Commission once again and FAR, Legal Aid, numerous other groups have called for a Human Rights Commission with enforcement.

We feel that enforcement being removed from that makes the Human Rights Commission almost worthless.

We need enforcement.

We need it to hold employers and landlords and everybody else accountable.

and if anyone can tell me that discrimination does not exist in these number of things, not just race but gender, gender identity, pregnant folks.

And I got to say I'm very pleased to hear you all addressing the issue of gender identity.

I think that's important.

All of this stuff happens now.

Even though there are some laws against it, nobody is held accountable.

Employers know this, landlords know this, and they continue to go about their business.

This Human Rights Commission is worthless without some kind of enforcement power to it.

I support the compromise being floated by Mr. Norris, a hybrid version.

I believe that this idea will satisfy some of the money issue.

and it will give a piece of the enforcement but it will also be able to address some of the systemic issues that maybe there was some concern about and some of those systemic issues concerning juvenile justice, racism in our education system, even in government and at UVA.

in public housing and on the housing authority board where we see a number of systemic problems with discrimination against poor people, low income people, women and women of color in particular.

So I think there are enough reasons to support the hybrid version that Mr. Norris is bringing forward this evening.

I hope you will consider it and I hope you will take the time to consider the substantial changes that might warrant a separate public hearing.

Thank you.

Walt Heineke, 1521 Amherst Street, Charlottesville, Mayor Huja, Members of Council, Mr. Jones and Mr. Brown, thanks for doing your due diligence on this Human Rights Commission issue.

I know we've been at this for two years.

It's been a long haul and we're getting close to the finish line.

And I appreciate the serious questions that you've asked over the last couple of months about this particular issue because I know it's a serious issue.

but we have been at this for two years and I've seen you pass resolutions and ordinances and other things that have the same or greater price tags with less diligence that you've done on this particular issue.

And I'm starting to wonder as a citizen if this particular issue has something about it that's different than other issues in terms of race and class.

We spent a long time talking about this.

I'm really happy to see that City Manager Jones has put significant light on him in the budget for the Human Rights Commission.

I think that's progress and we're moving along in the right direction.

Your dialogue on race has asked you a year ago to do a human rights commission with enforcement power that reflects the Virginia Human Rights Act.

Your own human rights task force reiterated that same conclusion

right so I think we're at that point where you recognize that there's a problem we all recognize that there's a problem we recognize the severity of the problem now it's time to actually do something concrete about it which is what the promise of the dialogue on race was now

Counselor Norris has offered a resolution or a compromise on the ordinance that we had proposed earlier that now includes study of institutional discrimination, the continuation of the dialogue on race, and an enforcement component which hands down beats whatever the EEOC has promised you they're going to do by coming to Charlottesville for one day a week.

Hands down, right?

All three of those things are in there.

I don't understand now how you can say all the issues haven't been addressed.

There have been some questions raised about, well, there are citizens that live in Charlottesville but work in Albemarle County.

How will our tax money go to help them?

And the answer is very simple.

In cases where citizens live and work in Charlottesville, the Human Rights Commission will have the authority to handle those complaints.

in instances where Albemarle County residents work in Charlottesville, the Human Rights Commission with Virginia Human Rights Act Authority will have the ability to hear their cases.

Now what about those cases of those folks that live in Charlottesville but work in Albemarle?

Well, we can then default to the next position, which is what the chair of the Chamber of Commerce was talking about, which is an advocate position.

In addition to enforcing human rights locally,

the Human Rights Director can help those citizens of Charlottesville who work in Albemarle County to file their complaints with the right person, the right place, the right agency and stay on target with those and get those things completed to fruition.

So I think we have the solution before us.

I hope that you'll support Counselor Norris' proposed amendment and we can get on with this.

I ask you that for, I'm never gonna benefit from these protected classes.

I have no dog in this fight.

I would even ask you to raise my taxes to do it if I could, right?

I'm asking you for other folks, for women, for disabled, for minorities, to do what's right.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Holly Edwards, 917 6th Street, Southeast.

And I would like to add my voice to support the revised version of the Human Rights Ordinance as suggested by counselor Dave Norris.

It is my hope that this will also address systemic barriers that many in our community experience, one of which I'd like to bring to your attention because you are responsible for the appointments

At the last Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority meeting, the public housing residents that served as Board of Commissioners were excluded from the closed session.

It is my understanding that there may have been legal reasons for this and there were legal grounds

But they didn't find out about this until the start of the meeting.

I think there's a difference between doing the right thing and doing things right.

The public housing residents were not treated fairly or professionally.

I am especially concerned about the alignment of public housing residents as credible, professional, and a vital part of our community as plans for redevelopment of the public housing sites evolve and as the strategic investment area plans are solidified.

Accepting federal funds for any reason comes with a double-edged sword.

and the acceptance of federal funds for urban renewal came with a code of federal regulations that requires meaningful resident participation and that includes the Housing Authority Board.

Good evening.

My name is Robert Smith.

I live in Belmont.

I spoke to this issue a couple of weeks ago and several individuals took exception to my remarks.

Speak in the microphone, please.

Can you hear me?

Speak in the microphone.

I am speaking in the microphone.

But I also categorically sometimes feel that this setup is not appropriate.

I should be addressing my fellow citizens here and I think the microphone should be over here.

What I object to, and I want to first say that I categorically support Mr. Hayden's remarks a few speakers ago.

And I participated through all the meetings of the Dialogue for Race and found it a very intellectually bankrupt process.

We were given a very slick publication where most of the conclusion

that advocates for, if you can say there's a human rights position, and I think the most important thing for me to say up here, and yes, I'm looking at you, Mr. Turner.

is that this is a politically motivated idea and that's the problem.

It's politically motivated and there are people here in this audience who I've known for years who are activists and I can't blame them.

This is where they want to go.

But I don't think we get mixed up when people show up and pack a small auditorium

with people, and I've been on both sides of this.

I've been on the green side on issues.

And think that this is what the opinions expressed here represent a majority of people in the community.

I don't really necessarily think it's true.

I would like to challenge anybody to publicly debate this issue and I'll show up anywhere to talk about this.

I'm very terribly concerned that we're losing something.

We're developing, quite frankly, what it seems to me, a nation that has a double standard and we're developing two classes of citizenship.

And I'm very serious about it.

And I'm not going to get to say more than that because my time's running out.

But I think it's very important.

And I fancy this, too, please.

I kind of believe, what good does it do to put

a YMCA and a park if people drive to it.

I mean, this is a city.

It should be an urban thing.

And then people ought to ride a bicycle or at least a trolley.

And forget the parking.

I think every bit of parking in this city is a crime, personally.

I'm dead serious about it.

So there's some other opinions.

And have I got anything left, sir?

You have some tape?

I can't believe it.

I hope I've made some sense to some of you all.

And it is a heartfelt desire to, I must say I feel like it's heartfelt for me to discuss some of this with other people.

I gave it, I was in Group 19 of the Dialogue for Race.

And while I enjoyed the process somewhat and the people, I felt that we were working with materials where the conclusions were foregone.

And we weren't allowed to come to our own conclusions.

Thank you very much.

Anybody else would like to speak?

Yes, ma'am.

Alex Gulotta, 2110 Tarleton Drive.

I'm also the Executive Director of the Legal Aid Justice Center.

I think I would just like to summarize something I said in an email to you all recently, and that is I think that the idea of a Commission on Human Rights that has real enforcement powers is part of trying to fulfill a promise

that we made to folks of color in the 1960s, to individuals with disabilities in the 1990s, and that is that we were going to create mechanisms through government to make sure that their rights as individuals were enforced.

Unfortunately, the mechanisms that were designed to do that, the people who were against the imposition of civil rights, the imposition of mandated disability rights were successful in beating back the funding for the agencies that are supposed to support and enforce those laws, the EEOC and other governmental entities.

So although those laws became the law of the land, they haven't effectively become the law of the land because when people go to those agencies, they can't get real relief because they're so under-resourced and they are so strapped that they have to so narrowly focus their priorities that they can't actually help that many people who've really been harmed.

and that's where the local Human Rights Commission system developed.

That's how this movement started was locality saying, we're going to supplement our Commonwealth's attorney salaries because they don't get paid enough.

We're going to supplement our public defender's salaries because they don't get paid enough.

We're going to supplement what the schools get from the state government because they don't get enough, right?

What the government provides to meet these services doesn't meet our local need.

We need to supplement that to be able to have it be real.

And that's what this Human Rights Commission is all about.

It's supplementing the very poor job that the federal government does with disability and race and other discrimination enforcement because they've been so under-resourced by the people that don't want to see those laws enforced.

Thank you.

I think she seeded her spot thinking there might be another one.

Thanks.

Hi, I'm Susanna Nicholson, 501 Second Street Northeast.

That was a very powerful presentation and I think it really needs to be underscored and underlined.

The publicity that surrounds discrimination debates in the national press often fails to follow through, the journalists fail to follow through on the many cases that do fall through the cracks.

there aren't sufficient resources.

The EEOC apparently has not been able to catch up with a fair number of cases emerging from the Charlottesville employment scene.

As a woman who suffered discrimination, as the sibling of an intellectually disabled sister who has really had compromised civil rights

from age zero on.

I can assure you that this is an extremely important area of law, that it requires some enforcement, it requires some commitment on the part of the city.

Doing without any enforcement mechanism whatsoever means that it just becomes another fair, fine idea in our city.

And I think you all know what I'm talking about.

This is a city filled with many good people and extraordinarily good intentions.

and strong desires to make reparation for the past.

I acknowledge that.

But without the enforcement, there will be no serious dialogue with offending employers.

That's the bottom line.

I was absolutely thrilled to hear about the mediating option.

If I'd had a concern, it had to do with some of the legal repercussions of becoming a kind of quasi-enforcement arm, but I believe that simply referring these matters

to a mediator under the guidance of a lawyer and advice on the federal context for whatever violation is discovered.

I think that there could be a more meaningful dialogue with employers.

The employer, of course, that I'm probably most concerned with is the University of Virginia.

I'm a two-time offender there with degrees.

and I've been very involved in the rally over the summer.

In the course of that I went to the strategic planning meetings and I want to let you know that I heard directly from employees, devoted employees of the University of Virginia

who cannot get any kind of medical care.

Can you imagine the irony?

Here you are working in some support service in the hospital and you can't get any kind of care.

The lines of the free clinic stretch out the door.

the housing issues are extremely serious and we can't fix every problem but let's at least have some form of redress for the most egregious.

If you create a committee that has no enforcement arm

That would be, I think, tragic.

So I really hope that you vote in favor of the Norris plan.

I think it could really work.

Mayor Huja, I have a statement that somebody wanted me to read with regards to the Human Rights Commission and because it's technically a public comment I'd like to read it now as opposed to when we discuss it.

My name is Aldi Perry and I am a local resident and diversity management consultant in Charlottesville.

I am currently on the steering committee of the Dialogue on Race.

I'm a life member of the NAACP and I'm a proud graduate of the institution that gave us Dr. Bill Cosby and the nation's first Ph.D. program in African American Studies, Temple University.

As a local person of color, my intent for wanting to attend was to provide some balance to the debate over the enforcement emphasis of a proposed Human Rights Commission.

Mr. Parrish has told me that he really hoped to have been here, but again, he asked me to read it.

And while many different folks have different and many options, I will choose the presentation of facts that I hope will contribute to the core of decision making.

One fact.

While there was a vote with the dialogue on race steering committee to send a proposal to the council for something like a commission,

There was neither full agreement nor consensus on a particular model.

Two, fact.

There is very little, if any, research that states that the enforcement approach or model brings about genuine and sustained change for addressing discrimination within a community's culture.

Yes, there are enforcement models out there, but we have yet to see research or evidence that they have changed a community culture.

3.

Fact.

Central Virginia has several enforcement agencies, enforcement institutions, processes, and advocacy nonprofit organizations that are, by design and intent, set up to address and confront discrimination experienced by area citizens.

If these existing agencies, institutions, organizations are not working for targeted minority groups and citizens, then should not the question be, why not?

4.

Opinion.

This is Mr. Perry's opinion.

A commission with teeth is one with a central priority on dynamic and sustained institutionalized public learning policies, change organizations and programs, and shared assessment.

That is what is needed to address the unhealthy core of institutional and community isms.

I just want to comment on the courage of young Mr. Robertson who came to us.

I assume that the folks who were here from the school who heard that will be talking probably have been talking with his family.

But it took a lot of guts for him to get up and say what he said, so I just wanted to appreciate the courage that that took and my sorrow that he's had trouble in school, in our schools.

I think that

I'll make a couple comments.

Certainly the first part of our public comment was about violence against our children and this is a really serious issue and

I'm confident that those who heard this will be taking care of it.

I'll comment on the why issue.

We're actually seeing a similar issue over at Smith Aquatic Center where there really isn't enough parking when you've got multiple events and you've got three major

institutions there.

So I think anybody who wants to see what the future looks like for the Y can just see it there.

I would hope that when the Y brings back its financial statement, which is required by the lease, that the council will have an opportunity to have input at that point.

Yeah.

As to the Human Rights Commission, thank you all again for coming out.

We have gotten certainly a lot of wonderful feedback all over the place.

And I think Ms. Nicholson, actually, your comments actually illustrate one of the problems with, and I apologize for pointing this out, but under our local ordinance, in my understanding, we don't have jurisdiction over UVA.

That's one of the problems.

and one of the things that we're juggling in terms of our different options is how much access to various employers do each of them give residents and to whose residents, but we'll be talking about that.

And the last thing is actually, I'm a little worried as we talk about public participation guidelines, the precedent of reading a letter, even though I understand, I think it's maybe something we should talk about at our,

I'll just second what's already been said, Ms. Szakos I think said it very well about young Mr. Robertson and I appreciate him coming forward and speaking out, it did take a lot of bravery for him to do so.

And for the family of Deshad Smith, I can understand their grief and frustration and I can't even imagine the devastation they must feel not knowing where their young man is.

Certainly.

Anything and everything that we can do, I think we need to do to make sure that we bring Dejaat home I had spoken with Mr.

Page about the parking issue with the YMCA I did follow up with Denny Blank and I haven't had a chance to sort of close that circle with Mr.

Page Denny Blank being the CEO of the YMCA who provided some information statistics that I think helped shed some light on how they do intend to deal with the parking issue

He pointed out that they don't ever anticipate having many more than 150 people total inside their building using the Y at any given time.

And so the fact that there are 200 or 300 parking spaces, he feels is sufficient, but certainly it's an issue that I know.

I suspect our staff will be following up on.

And I wanted to thank Ms. Edwards and Mr. Collins for continuing to raise the issue of treatment of low-income people and people of color who are residents of public housing, who are advocates for residents of public housing, who are leaders in the public housing communities of Charlottesville.

You know, I think it's a very...

Some of the incidents that we've heard about are very disappointing and we need to constantly remind ourselves that there's a reason why we have residents on the Housing Authority Board.

There's a reason why we have organizations like FAR who are standing up for public housing residents.

It's because we shouldn't just be paying lip service to meaningful and constructive resident involvement.

It needs to be backed up by real action.

and that's what FAR does, that's what the Resident Commissioners do, that's what FAR's allies do, and if we're not going to actually incorporate and welcome and invite and encourage meaningful and constructive resident involvement, let's just not even pretend that we're doing it.

Yeah, I'll save my comments on the Human Rights Commission until later in the meeting.

Can I just add one thing because we have all these wonderful school folks here.

It would be nice to get clarification on the rules about parking at Charlottesville High School because it may, again, become an issue with the Y.

I was going to suggest that maybe our staff should look into the parking issue.

Maybe our planning department and parks

Any other comments?

If not, we'll go to the next item.

Item A, minutes for February 19th.

Item B, appropriation of Albemarle County reimbursement for the fire protection assessments project, $8,241.78, second of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation for disproportionate minority contact in juvenile justice, $55,556, second of two readings.

Do any of the council members would like to remove any item from the consent agenda?

Next item on agenda is school board adopted fiscal year 2014 budget.

Mayor Huja, Council Persons and Mr. Jones, it is rather awkward here.

Part of me is facing the front and part of me back, so I do apologize.

Before I go into the presentation of our

I'd like to also acknowledge that as a superintendent sitting in the audience, it certainly does touch me and affect me greatly when I have a student as Mr. Robinson coming up and speaking about such pain and hurt that he has experienced, whether it be in our school system, in the community,

Anytime anyone experiences pain of that magnitude, it moves all of us and I will assure council and certainly school board and our community that we take any actions such as that very seriously and will respond in a very firm and appropriate manner to ensure that our students are safe in our school system.

Now, I'd like to present to you our summary of the 2013-2014 budget.

This budget represents the collective thoughts of our community staff members and the endorsement of our school board.

First of all, I'd like to just review very briefly some of the wonderful programs that we have in our school system that we've been able to put in the schools and to continue with the support of city council funding.

One of the wonderful programs is our three-year-old program, and this particular program started back in 2008 through city funding.

We currently have about 60 students in the three year old program and those students are advancing very nicely through our school system and I'll give you some very brief data points on that in just a moment.

We also have our Spanish program, conversational Spanish that started in 2008 in our kindergarten classroom and that particular program now has advanced all the way up to

5th grade and next year it will move on to 6th grade and all of our students will be offered Spanish 1 in the 6th grade which is an enormous feat for a school division.

Again, this is our three year old program.

We have 60 students currently enrolled in the three year old program.

They attend school from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. Monday through Friday with a very rich curriculum that's offered to our students.

All of our three year old and four year old students are involved in a wonderful music program.

That particular program is called First Steps in Music.

It is a nationally recognized program and all of our teachers are trained in that music program.

Our three year old students, each one of them once a month, we give them a brand new book to take home to share with their families.

Those are just a few of the programs that we have in our school system.

Other support that we have from city funding, the support has allowed us to make some capital improvements and small cap improvements in our school division.

Our softball field with our females has been upgraded so that now it actually covers all of the Title IX requirements for male and female facilities.

It now matches our baseball field.

We've also upgraded our orchestra room, which is an exciting place for our students to be and many great activities going on there.

In our gymnasium we have been able to renovate that gymnasium along with our locker rooms and our flooring, our backboards.

It's a very inviting place to be now and creates a sense of belonging and a very exciting culture.

We're also working on our Charlottesville high school stadium.

Not very long ago, about a year ago, we installed synthetic turf and with our city funding we're able now to, we're in the process of upgrading the bleachers that are in the stadium and also the lighting and some of the other areas in the stadium so we have a brand new look

in our CHS stadium.

Great place to be.

Lots of events take place on the field because of the synthetic turf.

some of the data points that illustrates achievement of our students.

Our preschool students, the three-year-olds are given an assessment when they enter the program in the fall called the Berganz.

And you can see the incredible gains that our students have made starting in 2009, coming in 46% of the students were performing where we would have expected them to perform in the fall.

but when they leave in the spring over 81% of the students were performing at or above their expected developmental level.

That progress has continued and our most recent data set indicates that again coming in about 47% and 83% of the students actually exit the 3 year old program performing

on or above the expected developmental milestone level that above.

In our four year old program, as the students from the three year old program progresses, you can see a similar increase in skill level.

They enter the four year old program not where they need to be at that particular time.

and compared to peers who have had much richer environments.

When they exit the program you can see that their performance continues to increase 92% in 2009-10 and then for our most recent data set at the 84th percentile.

So incredible gains and that continues on in first, kindergarten, first and second grade.

We not only address the needs of our students at the three year old level, but we continue to address the needs of all of our students throughout their experience in the Charlottesville City Schools and we are very pleased that as we have worked on issues like bullying,

behavior in our classroom, expected behavior in our classroom, we've seen a significant drop in the number of referrals to an administrator or suspensions.

We've seen over a 2000 incident drop in the number of referrals in our school system, which is significant.

One of the other indicators that we are

on track with the progress that we would expect our students to make is looking at the number of students who enter ninth grade and then move from ninth grade up to the tenth grade level, the ninth grade year when the students are involved in English and

Algebra won our critical years for staying on track for graduation.

And this chart illustrates the progress that we've made in making sure that our students are promoted from 9th grade to 10th grade.

We've gone from 76% of the students who entered the 9th grade advancing to now 86% of those students advancing on.

that is significant in helping our students to graduate high school.

We administered the PSAT test to all of our students in 9th through 11th grade and we want to monitor to see the changes in those test scores.

We've seen an increase in the level of performance for our students, a 2-5% increase between the grades 10 and 11, significant times for our students as they prepare to go off to college.

One of our most significant data points that I'd like to bring to your attention tonight is the increase in our graduation rate.

We have increased in 19, 2008 we had a 78% graduation rate.

Our most recent class, the 2012 graduating class, we had an 89.54% graduation rate.

This is with all diplomas.

If we take out our modified and our modified standard diploma,

and just looked at our standard and our advanced diploma, we still are around 84-85% with the graduation rate.

So significant changes in the percentage of students graduating high school.

As students graduate, we've seen another significant change and that's in our dropout rate.

We've seen over a 50% percentage point drop in the number of students who are actually dropping out of school.

In 2008, we had a dropout rate of 13.2%.

In 2011 that went down to 5.1%.

It picked back up a little bit and we are looking at that and have made some slight changes.

In 2012 it went back up to 6.2%, however still significantly lower than it was in 2008 which was 13.2%.

did not bring, oh this is another good data point, our avid students.

These are students who are involved in classes in which they are taught Cornell note taking skills.

They are taught how to process complex information and prepare themselves for more rigorous course work in the honors and the advanced placement courses.

As of February 13th, we had 65% of the students who are seniors in our AVID program at Charlottesville High School accepted to a four year college or university.

24% of those seniors have multiple acceptances.

That's a significant achievement for our students.

Two other areas that I'd like to bring to your attention is a wonderful program that will be starting at Buford Middle School.

It is the Commonwealth Engineering Design Academy.

That's a program where we are partnering with the University of Virginia, the Curry School and the School of Engineering

to infuse engineering concepts with our science curriculum and more rigorous mathematics concepts at Beaufort Middle School and to start training our teachers on how to teach those concepts

and to have a cohort of students that will progress starting at Beaufort through the seat of the Commonwealth Engineering Design Academy, through the middle school years into the high school years and be prepared for one of our associate degree programs that we will be offering at the high school starting the fall 2013.

Thank you.

What I want to do is take you back to 2009.

It was 2009 when the economy was last in a stable situation and it's been over those five years going into the 2014 budget that the school system has seen a significant decline in revenues and has had to react to that.

So these numbers represent the change from 09 to 14.

On the good side, the enrollment is up 1.26%.

That reverses a better than 20 year trend, and we expect to see that continue going forward.

Two numbers in the middle in red, the state and federal funding.

This has been the obvious big issue that the school system has been facing over those five years.

It's a considerable decline.

The composite index is up, which indicates that Charlottesville is relatively more wealthy

than it was in 09, but there was no way for the city funding to keep up with those significant reductions in state and federal funding, so the school system has been looking at cuts over this period of time.

Again, looking at changes that we've been making in the budget since 09, these are cuts to services.

We've increased class sizes across all the schools.

Following an efficiency study that was done in the school division, one of the big recommendations was to eliminate some of our instructional assistants.

We implemented that recommendation that eliminated all second grade and the one-half media center instructional assistants at all the elementaries.

We eliminated three talent development positions.

and we reduced administrative and support.

Four coordinators, an assistant principal, four and a half custodian in maintenance positions and five and a half administrative technician positions.

Overall since 09, again going into 14, we have reduced 48 positions, about 6% of the school systems workforce.

So it's been pretty significant.

Turning to 2014,

Total budget for 2014 is just over $70 million.

It's a decrease of just about $1 million, down 1.33% from the current year.

The total budget is made up of the general fund and the special revenue fund.

General fund is the largest fund.

It holds most of the city funding and the unrestricted state funding.

Special revenue funds are mostly grants and programs where the revenues that are received must be used for those programs.

General fund, just over $58 million increase of $214, basically flat, 0.38% increase from the current year.

and a special revenue fund significant decrease down 1.16 million almost 8% from the current year reflecting a loss in federal dollars Title I and Title VI primarily.

Breaking down the revenue in some detail, city funding makes up just about 63% of the total budget.

Just over $44 million.

Going into 2014, it's a decrease of $536,000, down 1.2% from the current year.

Most of that reduction is the net of some additional increases that are being asked for from the city minus some one-time funding in the current year.

State funding makes up about 25% of the budget, just over $17 million.

It's an increase of $787,000, or 4.72%.

Most of that increase is from sales tax due to revision in the way sales tax is allocated to school divisions, Charlottesville picking up some of that student count.

Federal funding, about 7%, just over $5 million, a decrease of 1.3%, down 20%.

Again, that was largely from Title I and Title VI funding reductions.

and tuition and other sources, about 5% of the budget, 3.5 million, an increase of about 3.79% up 130,000.

On the expense side, again, all funds, personnel services make up 57% of the budget, just over 40 million, down 422,000, down 1% from the current year.

From the current year into next, we did reduce 19.42 positions, or about 2.5% of the workforce.

Employee benefits, about 19%, just over 13 million, basically level from where we are in the current year.

Contract services, these are items such as transportation, maintenance facilities, Piedmont Regional Program, large contracts, just over 9 million, decrease of 155,000 down 1.6.

And then all other operating expenses, about 10% of the budget, just over 7 million, decrease of 350,000 down 4.74%.

So that's been the picture.

It's been a long five years of reductions in reacting to revenue declines, state and federal.

The city, as always, has really been a big supporter.

Unfortunately, we've had to make a lot of significant cuts.

And hopefully, this will be the last year that we see that.

I have a couple questions.

May I ask?

And I've actually asked this before with your three-year-old program you showed sort of beginning fall at the spring.

And obviously in your four-year-old data there's kids who were in the three-year-old program and there were kids who weren't in the three-year-old program.

That would be great data to get.

I'd love to see that.

Oh, sorry.

So you have 48 positions since 09 that have been cut.

I was just going to say that we have, the public who's here has, this may be the first time they've seen it.

We've seen some of these things before and so that's, if we're not leaping to make a lot of comments, I think we've all made lots of comments during those work sessions.

I just had a question.

First of all, I want to thank you and congratulate you on them.

Things are moving in a good direction over the last five years, and I give you guys and your staff and your team and the school board a lot of credit for that.

I wonder if you can sort of dig down just a little bit into some of the data, just to help sort of illustrate the discussion we're going to have later about disparities in our community.

Do you see the same kind of trend?

I mean, these are system-wide trends.

How are we doing in terms of, for instance, in reducing the achievement gap in our schools?

Are we seeing progress there?

Are there a good number of, or is there a rising number of African American, Latino students getting advanced diplomas?

That's an excellent question.

What I'd like to do is start off by talking about what research says with achievement gaps.

The achievement gap between ethnicities between blacks and whites and other ethnicities is not unique to Charlottesville.

That is something that is happening throughout our country.

Any body of research that you take a look at will tell you that there is a strong correlation between the achievement gap and the socioeconomic level of students.

When students are coming from environments in which they don't have the rich experiences as some other students when they come into school, there is a clear parallel and correlation between the levels of poverty and those achievement gaps.

we're very fortunate in Charlottesville that we do have a three-year-old program and a very robust four-year-old program in addition to that in our school system we have up until this year talent development we have teachers who are extremely well trained in the delivery of differentiated instruction and we can see at the third grade level at all grade levels that we see that students of all races are making

When you say close the achievement gap, does that mean that that gap is starting to get where we want it to be?

Absolutely not.

I think it will take many, many years for the gap itself to close.

but we are making progress.

Our students who are African American students are achieving at levels that they've never achieved in this community.

We're making extreme progress in that vein.

I'd like to address the poverty issue

alongside the academic issue so that we can start accelerating the progress of all of our students and especially our students who are coming from poverty.

We have our AVID program.

We have the high school program, the CETA program that's coming online now.

We have small class sizes.

We have intervention programs throughout our school system that affect and impact the levels of achievement in our schools.

I have heard about the discussions with the Human Rights Commission and the dialogue on race and attended one of the meetings.

I think some very legitimate points are being made by individuals in this community.

I will stand up with my teachers and with my staff.

They do an incredible job.

Are there times that we say things or do things that we should not do?

Absolutely.

I'm the first one to admit that.

And we will respond appropriately.

but do I believe in my heart that in our school system that our teachers and our staff members and those of us who are delivering and on the front lines every day that we are racist people?

Absolutely not.

Our teachers care about our students and they work extremely hard during the instructional day

and during the after school hours to make sure that they provide for our students the highest quality instruction that we can provide for them.

And that is not to say that we don't make mistakes, but are we racist?

Yes, we do.

We started off in around 2008 with 13.2% of our students dropping out of high school.

In 2011, our graduating cohort in 2011, we had 5.1

The dropout rate was predominantly minority students.

That 13.2% represent most of those students were minority students.

So we have significantly impacted the number of minority students who have dropped out of school.

I would also say to the council that that 5.1% dropout and the 6.2% dropout, that's with a four-year cohort.

Those are students who enter ninth grade and graduate high school in four years.

We have students who

And I have a question along those same lines, particularly as it relates to our discussion of the Human Rights Commission and whatever role they might have in oversight of policies of the school board.

How would you address the fact that you cut the Talent Development Program, which serves children who are at risk, I guess you could say, or not represented in Quest, yet you didn't touch any of the 12 Quest teachers.

Well, I don't think that would represent discrimination.

I think that represents that we have some very difficult budget decisions to make.

And I think it represents a reduction in the revenue that's coming into our school system.

And we have to look at the entire school system and all of the programs.

I would never

think about cutting our intervention programs which are designed to actually respond to our most needy students and remediation programs that are in our school division.

I would never think about asking our board to consider cutting the AVID program which works with our students to get them ready.

Fifty percent of the students who are a part of the AVID program must

advance on into honors programs and our AP programs.

Those are significant programs.

The Talent Development Program is designed in our kindergarten and first grade level to help prepare students to be a part of our Quest Program.

It is not a program that is intervention nor remediation.

It is helping to develop higher level cognitive abilities.

And the activities and the strategies that our talent development teachers use, and they've done a marvelous job with those activities, are activities that our

General Education classroom teachers can also continue with when those positions are no longer in our school system.

And just one other question as to when you look at dropout and graduation and moving from 9th to 10th grade,

Well typically the students who come into our school division from outer zone at the 9th grade level would not be African American students.

and would not be students who are at risk coming into our school division.

We look at all of our students.

Once you come into our school division, you belong to us.

and we treat all of our students who are a part of the Charlottesville City School System equally.

But the point being, and you brought up, that they are not going to be in those statistics of dropouts or not graduating.

And so to get a realistic view of our city, because that's what we do, we're city taxpayer money and so we're

also concerned about our city children.

It would be helpful to see a lot of those at-risk statistics without the dilution of the out-of-district kids who we know

I think that's a legitimate point.

I would bring to your attention that back in 2008 when we had a 13.2% dropout rate

that included out of district students.

So at no time when we've done this calculation, when we were at our highest, did we exclude out of district students, nor have we excluded them when we are at a low point with dropout rates.

So at all times we've included all students in that calculation.

So any of the data points that I've given you, be it when we were struggling,

we included out of district students.

One of the things that you showed was that the revenue from out of district students has actually gone up.

I do have a question, and thank you very much for the presentation.

Dr. Atkins, can you please speak a little bit to what the reconfiguration

plan was in terms of getting you to the next step of achievement, particularly for our at-risk children.

And what I'm thinking about in particular was a new model for the Henry Avenue Learning Center and a new expanded version of WALK.

Ms. Galvin, yes, and I know that you recall because you were on our school board during that time after a prolonged discussion with our community, the decision to reconfigure to move 5th grade back to the elementary school and to have one middle school and to allow Walker

to become a preschool center to expand our three and our four year old offerings so that we could get closer to our ultimate goal and vision in our school division to have universal three year old preschool programs.

That would have been a huge advantage.

It would also have decreased the number of transitions that our students would have had.

We would have been able to move our, not would have been, but when that happens we will be able to move our walk program, we'll move our division annex administrative offices out of Charlottesville High School.

and have the space at the high school to expand our walk program.

And our walk program service students in the high school who for one reason or another may not be on track for graduation or struggling with a class, they can go into the walk program either one period of the day

or for the entire day to receive support and the assistance that they need to remain or get back on track for graduation.

Our Henry Avenue program, we're continuing to look at that even now.

I think our community has said numerous times that the location of the Henry Avenue is less than ideal.

That program has been on Henry Avenue now for a number of years

and we are actively pursuing another location for that program or moving out.

The reconfiguration would have allowed us to move out of the central office, one, to move out of the Dairy Road facility, vacate that and move the Henry Avenue program into that facility, which is a much more acceptable location.

Dr. Atkins, you mentioned by reconfiguring you would reduce the number of transitions.

Doesn't it increase the number of transitions for the preschoolers?

Well actually it keeps it the same.

The preschools, that's their first experience in our school.

So either way they had to come into a school.

And our preschool programs, many of our students are not in their home school.

so when they move up to kindergarten they can very readily go back to their home school.

We have five three year old programs and our students come from all over the city who attend those programs.

Clark has three of those programs and the students come from all over the city.

So as you go to a universal three year old, including three year old, or as you increase the three year olds, then you should get more toward three year olds being able to go to their homeschools.

We don't have the three, we only have five three-year-old programs.

We have six schools.

We have staff members that were on a webinar with the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan very recently last week

and the secretary has cautioned everyone not to overreact in the school system because the Department of Education, the USED is not clear yet on the impact that it will have locally.

Even though the Title I budgets may have been reduced by 5% at the federal level, that does not necessarily mean that it will have the same impact at the state nor the local level.

And why did your Title I funding go down so much?

It's primarily a reduction in Title I.

We also were able to take advantage of some carryover dollars.

Oh, so what's coming in from the federal government is that?

Is down.

Overall, no.

Title I, I believe, was something like 500,000 of that number.

650,000.

Oh, and then the Title VI.

Title VI made up some.

And we also had a Teaching American History grant that expired, so that was part of that as well.

About a million.

And so that's not a change in children.

That's a change in funding.

I would also say with the sequestration it will affect our federal dollars coming in, but because we rely on local and state, local state and federal funding, the school system has the potential to be hit in three different ways with the sequestration.

Not only with the dollars that we get from the federal government, but depending on how

Other revenue streams affect the state.

If there are no other comments, let me make one or two comments.

I think as you know that City Council is very supportive of the school system because education is a very high priority in our community.

I want to also compliment the school board members who are here and who are not here for their diligent work in looking at the budget and looking at the well-being of the students as well as you and your staff.

I know it takes a lot of effort.

Mayor Huja, I would like to remind the council that we talked at the last school board city council luncheon about appointing a committee to discuss the Blue Ribbon Commission idea that I floated.

We would look at the systemic issues of the long-term budget problems, both from the operational side as well as the capital side.

So is that something we could... What did it say?

Okay, but it would be great to get that on the calendar.

We could talk about it because we do need to appoint a couple of members.

Any other comments?

Okay, the next item is our budget, city budget.

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council, it's my pleasure to present to you the proposed budget for fiscal year 2013-2014.

We knew that coming into the budgeting process of the fiscal year 14 budget would prove to be an exceptionally difficult budget to balance.

So we did something a little bit different this year and recruited members of the city's lead team, also known as our department heads, to serve as budget reviewers.

The lead team budget review teams, three of them all together met with departments to discuss their budget proposals including new requests and reduction submissions.

They then made final recommendations to me and to our budget team that helped shape this budget.

In addition, the entire LEAD team participated in brainstorming during our retreat in October and again in January for a special meeting to continue to help balance our budget.

So a lot of folks were intimately involved with this budget process.

Of course we also had a series of meetings between the city and our city schools dating back to last summer to begin that process of looking at different ways to provide funding for our school system.

I'd also like to recognize the CIP Technical Review Committee for all of their work in putting together our CIP.

So there are several themes for this year's proposed budget.

We believe that we're continuing our strong support for our city schools, preserving quality services here, especially our core services, focusing on council priorities, and maintaining our real estate tax rate.

We are very fortunate to be able to provide high quality services to our residents, our businesses, and the visitors who travel to Charlottesville.

And our city folks have come to expect these services and I believe we are delivering them in a professional manner that addresses the needs of our community.

Public safety, education, parks and recreation, social services, public works, these are just a few of the services that we are providing to our residents every day.

So what services do our residents want and how do they feel about the current services that we provide?

We've taken the temperature of our residents in a couple different ways this year.

Each year we have our budget survey and our latest budget survey seems to indicate that respondents feel they are getting their money's worth out of the services that we provide and that they pay for.

At 62% they believe that their money is being used in a wise way.

They also have a strong desire to keep their taxes and their services at generally the same level.

And this budget largely tries to do just that.

And of the services they feel most strongly about, public safety, schools, capital improvement, public works, those are all top priorities in this budget as well.

I mentioned another surveying tool that we utilized this year and that's the National Citizen Survey.

Later on this evening we'll hear a little bit more about that, actually go much more in depth into the survey.

But I thought I'd point out a couple of things from the survey that you would like to know about at this point.

Eighty-eight percent of the folks who live in Charlottesville that were surveyed felt good or excellent about the overall quality of life here in Charlottesville.

Eighty-two percent felt good about their neighborhoods and eighty-eight percent felt that Charlottesville was a great place to live overall.

So those are all positive results.

We know that we have challenges in Charlottesville.

We talk about those challenges all the time and we focus on them because they're important and trying to

trying to address especially issues of poverty in our community, but we feel that generally people feel pretty good about where they live here in Charlottesville, even though we may have some issues that we need to work through.

In line with our citizen budget surveys, a number of respondents to the National Citizens Survey feel that they value the services in relation to the taxes that are paid and even in a higher percentage believe that the city is going in the right direction.

89% of those ranked felt that the overall reputation of the city of Charlottesville was either good or excellent.

So we're very pleased with the results of the survey and as I mentioned, we'll hear a little bit more about that later on this evening.

So how does this budget impact our residents?

We are not proposing a real estate tax increase for this fiscal year, and we have not raised our taxes in quite some times when it comes to our rate for real estate.

In fact,

this year as a result of the new assessments, 49% of our residents will see a decrease in the real estate taxes that they pay.

In addition, 51% will see no change in their real estate taxes that they're paying.

And we are not proposing any reductions in our core services.

We believe this budget reflects responsible budgeting in difficult economic times.

In addition to our support for our schools, we are living within our means, we're planning ahead for anticipated future costs, we're meeting our community's needs, and we're reflecting the council's priorities and our vision.

In many ways, we believe this budget represents the values of not only this organization, but this city.

So let's move on to the details of the budget, which, by the way, you can find all of the information about our budget online at www.Charlottesville.org.

Either on our home page, you can click on there at our top banner, or you can go directly to Charlottesville.org slash budget.

Let's take a quick look at the changes in the general fund over the course of the last 10 years or so.

As you can see, the robust economic times that we experienced have settled into a new era of fiscal restraint.

Our proposed budget is 1.14% increase over fiscal year 2013, and that's less than the percentage increase from the previous fiscal year.

We are experiencing some positive trends, which makes me cautiously optimistic about the near future.

Sales, meals, lodging are all heading in the right direction, those tax revenues.

We're experiencing a great deal of new investment in the city and redevelopment projects and new construction.

There are a number of major projects already underway or close to breaking ground that are very, very positive for the city of Charlottesville.

Our revenue picture is diverse, which leads, we believe, to a well-balanced budget, and we believe our budget is focused on addressing the challenges that we face as a community while remembering to stay within our means.

The big question mark, of course, and it's been mentioned already tonight, will be the impact that the state and federal budget cuts will have on the city into the near future.

and of course the overall economic status of our nation as well.

So this graph gives you a good sense of where our general fund revenue is coming from.

Of course local taxes are the largest piece of this pie, accounting for 65% of our revenues.

Revenue trends have been mixed.

Some areas, as I mentioned, are doing well.

One area that we are seeing a decline, a continued decline,

and we'll talk about this a little more as we go through the presentation is on the residential real estate assessment side.

That decreased by 2.44% in calendar year 2013.

This has been a small but steady decline over the course of the last couple of years.

However, with that new construction I spoke of and commercial development, total assessments are increasing by a little over 1.3%.

So that is offering some good news as the economy picks up again in our area.

This budget includes several new fees and enhancements to existing user fees and program charges.

As you may recall, we presented some of these ideas to the City Council back in January.

After hearing back from you, we've reduced some of the fees and have made some adjustments.

One is a large item pickup.

We are proposing that we move that fee from $25 for two pickups a year to $35 for the first.

$50 for the second and $100 for each subsequent pickup.

While the fee does increase, it's a more enhanced service since a resident can receive as many pickups as necessary during the year rather than being limited to two.

And this proposal also helps recover the cost of providing this service, which is estimated at $108 per trip.

This budget proposes increasing fines for parking on a street over the time limit from $15 to $20 and the fine for illegally parking in a handicapped space from $100 to $180.

And that's expected to generate, both increases are expected to generate approximately $70,000 in new revenue.

Parks and Recreation is projected to increase their fees, their income by $299,000 and a majority of that increase, $187,000 can be attributed to revenue generated from offering additional or enhanced programs but there are also some fee increases that are a part of that and a complete list of these changes can be found in the budget document and online.

In Virginia every circuit court is required to provide secure remote access to land records according to the Virginia state code and the clerk of course is preparing a request for proposals that will replace the city's current vendor for this service and administer a subscription fee for the use of the service.

The principal users of that will be attorneys,

paralegals, title companies, banks and mortgage companies and many who live outside this area so it's actually an enhanced service that we anticipate the system will be online and ready to use in January of 2014.

Overall, as I mentioned, total real estate assessments in fiscal year 13 are projected to increase by only 1.35%, with a decline in the residential assessments being the main driver behind this.

It's not great news, and if it continues, it will have an impact on our future budgets, but we fared, obviously, a lot better than a number of localities around the state and around the country during the course of the last five years.

The new construction site, as I mentioned, and commercial assessments are doing quite well, driving the revenue projection up for fiscal year

So folks continue to invest in the city of Charlottesville and we're actually seeing a lot more movement there.

We'll talk about that a little bit more when we get to building permits in just a moment.

But it shows that people are excited about investing in our city and that's a positive trend.

Another important indicator is the sales and use tax.

This revenue stream has started to see some improvement over the last few years as consumer confidence improved and we were able to bring in more businesses like Whole Foods into Charlottesville and you can see a significant move in the right direction over the course of the last two years.

You'll see a slight dip in the meals tax.

That really doesn't assess the performance.

It's still strong, but rather it addresses a one-time revenue windfall that the city budgeted in our current fiscal year by changing the date that businesses submit their meals taxes to the city.

So fiscal year 2014 does take this into account, and while it does show a decline, this revenue continues to be a strong performer overall.

Similar to the meals tax, the city realized a one-time windfall in the fiscal year 13 transient room tax or lodging tax as a result of changing the dates of the businesses submitting their taxes.

So building permits and building and other permits is, as I mentioned, a very positive area for the city.

We recognize and see the benefit of the positive development that's going on here in Charlottesville.

We've seen that over the course of the last couple of years, and that trend continues with projects like the CFA Institute, which is now at the former Martha Jefferson Hospital site.

the Waterhouse project downtown, the City Walk project which is about to begin near downtown and student housing projects throughout the city on West Main Street and also near the University of Virginia.

So a lot of promising redevelopment projects here in Charlottesville.

The General Assembly has ended their session with a second year budget that has been approved.

A new transportation plan and direct aid to local government have remained pretty much intact, which is good news.

Probably the biggest news was the removal of the state flex cuts, which had been proposed several months ago and made it through the General Assembly.

So we're excited about that because it is a payment that we don't have to make back to the state.

We talked about our revenues.

Now we're going to focus on how we're spending our money, the schools.

As you would expect, our largest expenditure coming in at 32.56% of our budget.

The City Council has historically strongly supported our schools and its operations and capital needs.

I believe our budget continues to do that.

Public safety and justice, police, fire, sheriff's office, courts make up nearly 26% of the operating budget, followed by healthy families and a community at nearly 19%, and infrastructure and transportation at 10%.

Let's focus a little more closely on our schools.

You can see from the chart here, since 1994, and then really dramatically starting in fiscal year 2008, state funding for schools has decreased as a percentage of the school's budget from 35% to 21%.

And conversely, our local support for our schools as a percentage of the school's budget has increased from 65% to 78%.

So we really stepped into the void to help our schools become whole.

and unfortunately we don't anticipate that this trend will be reversed in the near future.

So our total funding for schools for this year will be about 44 million dollars

This takes into account a reduction of over $3.2 million that we had in one-time funds for fiscal year 13.

That was $1.8 million in city funds plus $1.5 million from the school's capital budget.

And so we're putting an additional $2.6 million, which has no new long-term funding source behind it.

I stress that.

And it gets back to what Councilor Galvin mentioned and trying to find a more sustainable way of funding our schools in the future.

Compensation and benefits.

The city's retirement fund, much like those across the country both public and private, have seen an increase in contribution requirements over the years.

While this increase is not as dramatic as previous years, it continues to be a major driver in the city's budget.

Healthcare does not decrease or change what's offered to our employees this year, but the increase will be fully absorbed by the healthcare fund, that's the 6% healthcare cost increase.

It continues to, we also continue to emphasize our wellness programs, which I think really help us when it comes to keeping our increases down.

The city's costs have been low the last few years, and we're not sure if that trend will continue, but we certainly hope that it will, and we wanted to take advantage of that.

We are proposing a 2% salary increase for our city employees.

The city has not provided a salary increase in our current fiscal year.

We've provided a bonus this year to our employees.

In our determination to provide this or propose this increase, we recognize that neighboring localities and the state are providing salary increases in fiscal year 2014 and we felt it was vital to remain competitive by offering a 2% increase ourselves.

So how do we go about balancing this budget?

A couple of different things that we did to try to get us within balance.

Our city department identified over $500,000 in recurring budget reductions.

Many of those reductions were identified by carefully reviewing our past year actuals and spending trends, or in some cases, recognizing that an expense could be delayed a year without significant impact.

The city's debt service payment is decreasing by half a million dollars but continues to fully fund the city's obligations towards past debt issuances, ensuring that the city maintains a debt service to budget ratio of eight percent or less.

That's our guideline.

However, this is a one-time savings and in fiscal year 15 we will probably have to identify half a million dollars to put back in to the fund to make it whole.

We have proposed to terminate the contract with Greyhound.

The city entered into this contract in fiscal year 2004 and since that period of time the operation has run a deficit each year.

We had anticipated revenue growth and that has not occurred so we felt that it was in our best interest to end our relationship with Greyhound.

The staff members who are currently employed by the city are all temporary employees that work for Greyhound at this point, but we also believe that they will continue their service here in the city of Charlottesville and will probably hire those employees for those positions.

This results in savings of approximately $62,000 to the general fund.

We are also proposing to eliminate the first e-golf youth program with a net savings to the city of approximately $38,000.

Since 2006, the city has subsidized this program with over $283,000 through fiscal year 2012.

That's an average of $35,000 per year.

First Tee, we felt over the course of the last couple of years City Council has indicated that they wanted to move in a different direction with First Tee that the original intent of this program was not being reached and that was to reach a lot of kids who are from at-risk families to get them involved with not only golf but the character training that's involved with this as well and unfortunately those numbers just have not

Materialized and so council over the last couple of years have indicated that they wanted to to move away from funding first T So we're proposing that as part of our budget for this year

We're also working to make sure that we are prioritizing with what City Council has indicated are very important programs to them.

We have included $180,000 for the establishment of a Human Rights Commission.

The proposed budget covers these positions and other expenses that may come about as part of this.

Of course, we'll know more about that this evening, I believe at least next steps, and whether or not

we will have this funding or need this funding in the future to what extent we'll need it.

We are also making strides to enhance the experience for visitors to our downtown mall.

The city council approved a downtown mall ambassador program last year which is a pilot program which is up and running and will be up and running during the spring, summer and fall.

This pilot program is being funded out of the strategic investment fund and will be evaluated in the fall of this year.

We're proposing to include $71,000 in the fiscal year 14 budget to cover the cost if the city council decides to continue the program.

As part of the agency budget review team update given to council last summer, city council decided that they wanted to invest in a human services needs assessment and so we are doing that as well.

We believe that it will be $50,000 to do that.

This budget also includes

$25,000 for a homelessness collaborative request for proposals process that we hope will address some of the homeless issues in our community in a more comprehensive and strategic manner.

This budget provides funding for several new council initiatives begun as pilots during fiscal year 13 but were either funded with one-time money at the time or as part of the fiscal year 2012 year-end appropriations.

Bank on Greater Charlottesville coming home to work and a second summer youth program administered by the Boys and Girls Club are all part of this process and its proposal.

The total new funding for these new initiatives is approximately $141,000.

and we also are funding several new outside and nonprofit agencies and programs that align well with City Council's priorities and with new funding in the amount of close to $91,000.

The fiscal year 2014 budget continues in much the same way that it has in fiscal year 2013 when it comes to our CIP program, maintaining what we have in place with just a few new projects.

The list that's shown here are some of the major projects that make up the $11.18 million CIP in fiscal year 2014.

You'll see the school's capital improvements, facilities improvements for the city, Azalea Park renovations, Lee Park and Belmont spray ground repairs, new sidewalks, storm water initiatives, bus replacement proposal to put up a traffic signal at the intersection of Mickey Drive and Hydraulic.

and our affordable housing appropriation rises to $1.52 million in our CIP for this year.

So as we look ahead, we'll continue to keep a close eye on what's happening with the state budget cuts and of course what's happening on the federal level.

We do have a series of major capital needs that are looming on the horizon that require us to do some prioritizing.

and we anticipate doing that over the course of the next six months or so as we go into the next budget season for next year.

We recognize for the foreseeable future that one to two percent increases in the budget is probably the new normal if we're going to see increases.

We continue to see a flat or declining real estate market and if we see cuts from the federal and state budgets, that will probably bear out in the near future.

On the schools in particular, the city council and the school board, as Councilor Galvin mentioned earlier, have made a commitment to working together after this budget is done and start looking at fiscal year 14 and beyond to identify ways to find more sustainable funding for our schools.

So on a positive note, we've mentioned a couple of things this evening.

The regional unemployment rate at this time last year was about 5%, and it's down to 4.4%.

So it's going in the right direction.

We are traditionally lower with our unemployment rate than many places around the country in the national rate, but we also know that that just tells part of the story.

It's not always about unemployment.

It's about underemployment and poverty in our community.

And we've got to find other ways to try to address that.

But it is good to see that the unemployment rate is coming down.

Our commercial residential permit requests continue to climb.

Our retail vacancy rates have gone down throughout our corridors, our business corridors, and that's a good sign.

And as I mentioned before, several significant projects have started to work or are under construction or on the drawing board.

So we've taken some steps, we've talked a lot about this over the course of the last couple of years about our triple-A bond rating and making sure that we protect that.

And it's not just because it's great to be able to say that we have a triple-A bond rating, it's also because it saves us money.

It saves our taxpayers money to have a triple-A bond rating and we've had one.

with S&P and Moody's for decades now going back to the early 70s and late 60s.

But we want to find ways to help make that stronger because one of the things that we learned over the course of the last year or two with the national economy

that it does have an impact on us and the national battles that are taking place in Washington right now over issues like budget cuts and the debt ceiling.

That had an impact on us because when they were battling on Capitol Hill over the debt ceiling,

All the rating agencies started to take a closer look at what everyone else was doing, including AAA bond rated cities and municipalities within the state of Virginia.

And so we had to go through an extra process to meet with the folks in the rating agencies to once again prove why we are AAA worthy.

and I'm proud to say that we made it through that process pretty well.

In fact, I do believe we are the only AAA bond rated city in the state of Virginia right now.

So that's something that we want to maintain.

So we've proposed that the city increase, that we would utilize money that we have set aside in an economic downturn fund, a little over 9 million dollars, about 9.3 million dollars

to utilize some of that funding to shore up our fund balance.

So we are proposing to take a portion of that $9.3 million and increase the city's minimum fund balance from 12 to 14% of the general fund budget.

This will provide the city with sufficient working capital and a margin of financial safety to address unforeseen one-time expenditures or emergencies that may occur in the future.

We are also asking to take a minimum or to maintain a minimum downturn reserve fund balance of no less than three percent of the general fund budget.

So we're taking a little more of that downturn reserve that we had to shore that up.

We just believe that generally this puts us in a better position and is viewed favorably by the bond rating agencies.

In either case we would

In either case, if we were to draw down on those funds, the city would be required by our policy to replenish those funds to their minimum required balances within three years.

We believe that this makes us stronger from a financial standpoint.

So as we're moving forward, this is just another important step in this process.

I was about to say this begins our budget process, but as we all know, we've been working on this since the summer of last year.

So this is another important step in that process.

And we have many more steps in store for the city council and the public as we move through the course of the next month and a half or so.

We have a budget work session coming up on March 14th from 5 to 7 p.m. in the basement conference room here at City Hall.

The public is invited to attend that.

We do reserve a period of time, 15 minutes at the end of each work session to hear from the public.

We'll have our first public hearing on the tax levy and the budget right here in City Council Chambers on March 19th.

And then on March 20th, we'll have our community budget forum at 7 p.m. in city space.

We'll have our second work session coming up on March 21st from 5 to 7 p.m. in the basement conference room.

and then we'll have our third work session on March 28th from 5 to 7 p.m. also in the basement conference room.

On April 1st, we'll have our second public hearing on the budget and our first reading.

Once again, right here in the city council chambers.

On April 4th, we'll have a work session

from 5 to 7 p.m. in the basement conference room at City Hall.

And then on April 9th, we'll have our budget, final vote on our budget at 5.30 right down the hallway there in the second floor conference room here at City Hall.

So with that, I'll end my presentation and answer any questions that you may have right now, knowing once again that we have a long night ahead of us and a long budget process ahead of us as well.

Thank you for your presentation.

I respect the fact that we're going to be spending a lot of time over the next month, so I don't want to get into it tonight, but I do

I found it intriguing the comment that you made about First Tee that you were sort of getting the signal from council that we wanted to move away from funding First Tee.

I don't ever remember council saying we wanted to zero out funding for First Tee.

I know council has said we wanted the county to step up, we want to see them get more outside grants.

I just don't remember us ever saying outright

Well, that was the hope.

I mean, when we started this discussion with First T several years ago, and then including last budget cycle, the council seemed to make it pretty clear that you were concerned about subsidizing kids who were not from the city as part of this process.

We've left open the possibility of doing that, if the council wanted to, to actually subsidize

City kids who were involved with this, but there was a concern about subsidizing kids from outside of the city in this program.

And so, and I think the message that was sent to First Tee was that the foundation that they had set up needed to step up and raise more money.

A couple of comments or questions.

And then my second one is, we got an, I think we all got an email from Jim Hengele about

the public defender salaries and there's quite a gap right now between what we pay our public defenders, what we pay our Commonwealth Attorney and his staff, the prosecutors.

Mr. Gulotta mentioned earlier in his remarks that there are things that localities can do to supplement existing institutions and infrastructure to support justice in our community.

And mentioned we provide supplements to public defenders.

And we actually don't provide supplements to public defenders.

I know that he has been to the county and asked them the same question that he's asking us, so I know they're considering it.

And they had it on their budget work session yesterday and I haven't heard how that discussion went.

I'd just like to have the discussion.

I was actually going to ask that same question, so thank you.

65%.

And so it was about

$51 million in property taxes.

And of that, what proportion is residential versus not residential?

Two-thirds residential.

Okay, thanks.

That's ballpark is all I was looking for.

Yeah, Mr. Jones, thank you.

And again, kudos to everybody for keeping us with the AAA bond rating, especially in this environment.

And it struck me, though, from 09, I guess the schools said that they had lost 49 positions.

Just off the top of my head, I don't think we've eliminated any as part of a budget reduction.

Other comments at this time?

If not, we'll have another chance very soon.

Actually if I just make one comment that it doesn't seem like as long as we're doing okay, as long as our real estate taxes are going up, that the fact that our assessments are going down are making our city a little more affordable.

There is that positive.

Gretchen Ellis, who's our Human Services Planner, who we brought over after CCF was dissolved last year, is my cohort in this effort.

So I'll be doing the first part of the presentation and then she'll be taking over the next part to talk a little bit about the needs assessment and how this will help feed into that process.

So this is the first time we had done this survey.

This is the ICMA National Citizen Survey.

Many jurisdictions across the country do this survey.

The interesting thing about it is the ability to benchmark with other jurisdictions.

And so that's what makes it a really nice tool to use.

I hate having my back to everybody.

So we mailed out

1,200 surveys and about 315 were actually returned.

And so the key to this presentation is that an arrow going up that's green is a positive response to the question.

Neutral is two arrows pointing in either direction and then a negative is down.

And then there's another key.

We were benchmarked against about 500 other jurisdictions.

The bold is above or much above national benchmarks.

The non-bold is

at the national benchmark and italicized in bold is below or much below.

So hopefully that won't be too confusing.

Yeah, so it depended on what the measure was, but they were looking at different averages.

So they were looking at how the responses were provided from all these, feeding from all these jurisdictions to a particular question and then how we ranked on that scale.

How would you describe it exactly?

I would call it a meeting.

Yeah, thank you.

So in most of the questions, in all the questions, 29 of those we were much above the benchmark, which is really good news.

In 23 we were above, so majority of the questions as citizens responded were either above or much above.

Six were much below and seven were below.

So that's pretty good.

That's very good actually.

So general view of the city was we have a very good overall image or reputation.

Our quality of life is perceived as very good.

Good Place to Live, Sense of Community, Civic Participation ranked really well, Overall Direction the City is Taking, which speaks to what we're talking about with the budget tonight.

One thing that was interesting is services to low income people and while that scored in a more negative light, it still met the benchmark when you looked at it in that perspective.

It could be also, let me just say right now, before I go on, we seem to get, we think, we're not positive, students who responded, I mean UVA students who live off campus, it didn't capture people that live on campus obviously, it's students that live in apartments that live in the city limits and when some of the people answered the questions, we think maybe they were thinking more regionally than city, so some of the responses kind of had a regional twist to them

that maybe they were thinking about something going on in the county rather than just the city.

So when we do the survey in 2014, we're going to try to improve on that, asking them specifically, like, are you a student, for instance, and trying to really isolate the group so we can better understand who's responding to the survey.

so in this chart you see the forty seven percent said we're a great excellent place to live and forty one was good so that's that's good uh... again that's all great news in terms of economic sustainability which starts getting into council's vision areas most of these were seen as positive such as retail growth, quality of businesses, great place to work on the two ones at the bottom employment opportunities and job growth

Those were seen as negative, but actually they shouldn't be, but they were still above the benchmark.

So we were better than our peers, our other peers, but it was still seen as a negative indicator when the results came back, which is interesting.

And then in terms of council specific priority of reducing poverty,

Again, most of these were seen, Charlottesville's a good place to work, educational opportunities are numerous, employment opportunities were kind of seen as neutral.

And again, I think the last two are interesting, affordability of quality, affordable housing, and percentage of residents who experience housing costs.

Those were well below the benchmarks for those two at the bottom.

In terms of the Center for Lifelong Learning, again, educational opportunities were high.

Value of services for taxes paid to public schools was positive, but it was right at the benchmark.

It wasn't above the benchmark.

Adequacy of school facilities in the school division was neutral.

And we think the reason, this is interesting, because 79% of our respondents did not have school age children.

So part of this could be that they don't know.

I mean that they didn't really have an opinion about the schools and so they really couldn't answer these questions in terms of the school facilities and how the schools were, the direction they were taking.

and I think that also gets to, you know, maybe the job the school division is doing in educating all the students.

Use of libraries was interesting because in another slide you'll see that people perceive libraries as a great service but they don't use them.

And so, and we were well below the benchmark for that.

So while they're not visiting libraries, they value them, which I thought was interesting.

And then childcare has always come up as a high priority in this area when we were well below the benchmark on that one as well.

Again, this aligns directly with council's priority of providing the comprehensive support system for children and this pretty much reiterates what was on the last slide.

Quality housing opportunities.

We've already talked about this a little bit.

We're well below the benchmark for those first two and right at the benchmark for housing options.

So I think it's something like this where you have this type of result.

You do have to wonder, are these students answering them?

Are they responding to the high rent that they pay?

Are these residential property owners?

So you kind of have to dig a little bit deeper to figure out what could the reasons be.

But I think they produce a lot of good questions and could give council some good direction going into a strategic planning process, which we've been talking about, on how to address some of these issues and see if they really do align with what's really going on in the community.

And this is interesting.

I think this is an interesting chart.

So for those who responded, housing costs were 30% or more of income.

That's a huge number.

So a lot of people that responded to the survey are feeling housing, stress of housing costs, personally.

We were much higher in the benchmark for that.

So again, it's another area to pay attention to.

civil arts and culture generally this was good again here's the conflict here public library services perceived as great really good we're right at benchmark but it was perceived as positive use of public libraries though well below benchmark and people just weren't they didn't respond that they were going to the public libraries necessarily

but they like them.

Maybe they don't have kids and that's why they don't go but they want to have the public libraries in the community.

A green city, this got a lot of great scores.

People think the city are clean, the air quality is good, recycling is good.

They like what they were doing with natural areas and with environmental hazards including dealing with toxic waste which

hopefully nobody ever deals with that and then there was good perception of utility services and we were right at benchmark for that.

America's Healthiest City, again most of these were positive in terms of health services, having quality health care, good ambulance services.

The ones that weren't so good that got a little more negative were violent crimes and feeling safe downtown after dark and we're actually below benchmark but I don't think that's anything you haven't heard

before and I think that's also where you started to address some of the strategies like the downtown ambassador program and some of the things that are going on in the downtown mall too and make sure people do feel safe at night.

And then this was really interesting, use of recreational facilities.

That was not seen as positively, it was right at benchmark.

People felt positive about the recreation programs, they go to city parks, but they don't use the facilities.

And again, we don't know if these are what they're responding to and we think

We didn't ask about city facilities in particular, and maybe they're responding to something else at the university, if there's students responding, but again, it's something that this seems odd, given the amount of money that the city's put in, and the fact that a lot of people are using Smith, and now that we have Carver, so maybe this response will be different in a couple of years when we do it, but this one was surprising to us.

Connected Community, this is another one that had interesting results.

People like walking, they like the trails, they like transit, most people have ridden on a bus, we were above benchmark for that.

Street Repair Cleaning, people felt kind of okay about that.

But look at car travel, they don't feel like it's easy to travel by a car, a bike, traffic flow's not that great, signal timing is not that great, traffic enforcement or public parking.

And we were all well below benchmark for each of those.

Here's an interesting chart, which was very interesting because 46% of those who responded do go to work by themselves in a vehicle, but that is much less than the benchmark still.

So 46% sounds high, but it's still lower than the benchmark of the five other localities that we were compared with.

And actually, if you look at the numbers of people that take bus, primarily walk and bicycle, that's not too bad.

Right, so we think people, yeah, so they're thinking they live in the city but they're thinking outside the city of their experience, which makes sense because everybody does that.

You don't necessarily speak of your city boundaries.

Under community mutual respect, these were all very positive.

People think they feel like they have a sense of community.

They want to retire here.

They want to raise their kids here.

They feel like there's openness and acceptance of community towards diverse backgrounds, which you are going to be talking about next.

So I think this is all really good information to have in terms of what that discussion might lead to.

under smart citizen focused government.

This is also very good.

I think our employees should really feel good about this.

People like talking to our employees.

They appreciate the feedback and response they receive.

People like to volunteer in this community.

There was a huge, that was really strong that came out loud and clear in the survey that people like to volunteer and help their neighbors in this community.

They feel good about their police service, fire service.

People want to use city parks.

Again, I think the land use planning and zoning one, I think this might be another one that maybe has a regional flavor to it, because we're not growing.

So I think people might have been confused thinking kind of the city, what they hear about the county growth issues and what's going on there in terms of what's going on in the city itself.

Okay, and Gretchen is up next.

Before I go on, let me just thank two people.

Ruth Emmerich from Neighborhood Development Services and Matt Regis of Human Resources put this PowerPoint together for us and they did an amazing job, so Gretchen and I are indebted to them forever and ever.

So we had the opportunity in this survey to ask some open-ended, we did ask some open-ended questions, but we also had the opportunity to ask some

questions that were just for our priority questions, customized questions.

So what we did is we asked people about 13 areas of priority.

And these are the areas that were used in the 2002 Human Services Needs Assessment, which is going to be repeated this spring and summer.

So we would be able to benchmark not only against peer localities, but also over the past 10 years.

They also were asked to indicate whether the city was making progress in addressing these goals.

All 11 goals were rated as high or moderate priority by more than 80% of the respondents.

So in some ways, I think it says that the citizens want to see the city do all of these things.

Looking at your priority areas, under America's Healthiest City,

was rated as the highest priority, 78% rating it as high, and 97% rating it as moderator high.

And 83% identified progress.

Access to healthcare services was rated as sixth.

77% identified some or significant progress.

And we saw the same thing when we looked at healthcare in the benchmark areas.

real positive for the city.

Center for Lifelong Learning, children being successful in school and prepared for adult life was rated as the second highest priority and 77% identified some or significant progress.

Children arriving at kindergarten healthy and ready to learn, there's actually a typo here, was the fourth highest priority with 72% identifying as high.

Again, over three quarters of people identified progress with this.

Community of mutual respect, this was the actual third highest priority.

76% identified, some were significant progress.

Economic sustainability.

This was rated fifth as a priority.

It was rated last in progress with 31% identifying little or no progress.

I mean, 59% did see progress, but it was the area that was weakest.

Connected community was ranked as the seventh highest priority, even though we saw lots of complaints about traffic parking and that sort of thing.

And interestingly, parking was the only indicator in the entire survey that was rated as poor.

And 70% identified some progress in that.

Quality housing

It was rated 8th highest priority, although we heard a lot about it in the rest of the survey.

And in this one, 38% identified little or no progress.

Seniors living as independently as possible is rate temp, and 81% identified progress.

Residents in crisis having their needs met, 9th.

and children having access to out of school activities was the lowest priority with 37% identifying as high and 82% identifying as moderate or high.

But again, almost 80% identified progress.

So this will give me a lot to think about and work on as we go through Human Services needs assessment.

When people are seeing so much progress, we're really going to have to ferret out where the unmet needs are.

We didn't understand that one.

Yeah, we'll have to explain that.

You want to talk about the wordle?

Yeah, so this is the wordle.

So what we did was there was a question in the survey that asked, what do you think are the top priorities for the city in the next few years?

And when you put those responses in, this is what came out.

It's called Wordle.

It's online.

It's really cool.

It gives you a visual of words.

And so you can see where the big words are, obviously, is where people saw what they said was important or said the most or written down the most.

So city was a big one, housing obviously, and we talked a lot about that already, people.

And then when we asked, what do you think is the single biggest issue facing the city, a lot of them were really close, but economic development and employment barely came out on top, followed by traffic and affordable housing.

And then the last one that was a double digit percentage was growth management and planning, which again we think is maybe more of a regional issue, because we really don't have issues of growth in the city per se, a lot of those issues come out.

and the county and so we think that's more people thinking kind of up 29 and down 29.

And then you can see where the other areas fell.

All the way down to schools and education funding which got 5% but I think that again reflects maybe he responded to the survey as well that 79% of them don't have school age children at home.

So in summary, the strengths.

We have a great reputation.

We have numerous educational opportunities.

Community engagement is going well.

We have lots of cultural opportunities, quality of life, health care services, a sense that city government is addressing areas of highest need.

Areas of concern, obviously, if safe, affordable housing came out loud and clear, traffic and parking, safety downtown after dark, employment, equity in public education.

and I think you can read a lot into that and put a lot into that package of concerns which I think is

You know what Mr. Jones mentioned earlier is that we do a lot of good things in the city but we're working harder to make the things that aren't going as well as we'd like even better.

I think the survey gives us a great tool to start addressing some of those issues and so we'll be doing the survey again in 2014.

So it'll be interesting to see how those results change over time with what's been happening in the city.

But this is a great start so I'm really pleased we did this and we'll now answer any questions.

and take any feedback.

What were some of the peer communities?

I'm just curious who we were being compared to.

That is a good question.

I don't think I have it by jurisdiction.

I have West Coast.

They have a percentage here.

South 26%.

of our benchmarks came from what is, you know, the south, southern states.

The next was west, 20%, west coast 17.

Oh my goodness.

Okay, I thought they were trying to cluster us with a... That is an alternative option that you can actually purchase with the survey if you want to get it to a very specific geographic area, but we didn't buy that this time.

I mean that's something we could purchase next time we do the survey, but for now we just went with what they do, which is this is the standard benchmark analysis that they do.

I just remember when the schools did the MGT study for the management efficiency, the schools were benchmarked with certain jurisdictions based on size.

I must also say that the goals section, as you do the presentation, was least helpful to me personally in terms of giving any insights.

I didn't quite catch anything.

Okay.

Well, it was a lot of material to absorb.

Well, we could have paid them to do it and it was several thousand dollars and we chose not to do that and just to try to do it ourselves.

They're all online on the budget website.

I'd have to look.

I can't recall off the top of my head.

I want to say with the options we got, which included the geographic subgroup, which we did by zip code, which is kind of useful, it was about $14,000.

The base survey was $10,300 with the few ads we put on.

But I would have to look.

I think it was a couple thousand dollars to add that on.

I'm guessing the answer is no, but was your sample size large enough to, let me finish, to provide for any kind of meaningful demographic breakdown in terms of the responses?

Can you track responses based on race, based on income?

The sample size was statistically significant.

We would have liked to have seen about 200 more, but it was statistically significant.

We did look at demographics and there was, I think there's a report online that shows the demographics.

In our report we got a comparison of the demographic.

So it skewed a little bit younger.

then the overall population and we do think we got an excessive number of students and we're going to account for that in the next round.

I actually had two questions off of that chart of demographics that just, as I was looking over it, struck me as strange.

One was that the length of residency, in the survey sample, 19% had lived in the city less than two years, but in the city of Charlottesville, demographically, you have 32% have lived here less than one year.

Was that in the?

That probably includes students.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Does that make sense?

And that's the U.S. Census?

That's what we pulled off, yeah.

I'm guessing it's 5.1% who are Hispanic.

We'll look at that.

Yeah.

Because I'd be really interested if only if a third of our residents have lived here a year or less.

But the question is at your current address.

OK. Yeah.

That's a major demographic thing for us to be aware of all the time.

Yeah.

Other questions or comments?

Lawrence, thank you very much.

Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor.

Is it a PowerPoint?

No, not a PowerPoint.

Good evening City Council.

Before you have the human rights, the ordinance that establishes the Human Rights Commission with the focus on examining systemic issues of discrimination, engaging the public and initiatives and continuing the work of the dialogue on race.

The Commission's enforcement duties are in the ordinance but they are set out in the future and would need to be voted on by a future City Council for that to happen.

Sure.

If you look at Section 2-431 under unlawful discrimination prohibited, we removed Section A pursuant to the authority granted in the Virginia Code.

We added Section B

As used herein, the term discrimination on the basis of sex is defined to include but not limited to discrimination on the basis of gender identity, transgender status, or sexual orientation.

In section 2-432, we included consistent, excuse me on the second sentence, commission consisting of no less than nine members.

We also included that the commission be broadly representative of the city's population with consideration for racial, gender, including gender identity, transgender status, and sexual orientation.

We included socioeconomic, geographical neighborhood, and age groups within the city.

Also in there, we included at least three

members shall be appointed for terms of two years and at least three members shall be appointed for terms of one year.

On Section E, we actually included Section E, the commission may in its discretion delegate any of its duties or responsibilities hereto a panel of not less than three commissioners.

We included the phrase full time for director.

We removed

I have a question on that.

What does advice and consent mean?

Advice and consent.

So they would speak with the

Section 2-433, we included identify and review policies and practices of, we struck out advice,

and we included the last sentence that are related to human rights issues.

Section 2-434, Duties and Responsibilities, Systemic Issues.

Council wanted that to be a little more robust.

What we struck out was

may not constitute unlawful discriminatory.

We included the word be, so it now says may be practices.

We struck out but nevertheless and included the word which produced disparities that adversely affect removing the word impact, individuals on the basis of, and we included a status of such as,

and then we also included on the last sentence, criminal record and income.

On section C, we included the commission may conduct its own research and review existing studies and literature, collaborate with other research organizations.

We didn't want them necessarily to duplicate work but to be aware of the work that's out there and actually partner with other organizations that may be looking at similar issues.

If you turn to page 5 and go into section E, that section was included.

In order to fulfill the requirements of this section, the city manager is authorized to contract on behalf of the city with any person, partnership, corporation, or other entity qualified to assess allegations of discriminatory conduct as prohibited in section 2-431.

This is actually in the future.

This is the future.

We also included under Section 2-437.2, Section B, the last sentence here, the Director shall prepare a written summary of the evidence on which the determination of probable cause is based and shall recommend appropriate remedies for the discriminatory actions in a report to the Commission.

Section C, we included the sentence, the Director's summary of evidence and recommended remedies.

and we included Section D whenever the Commission has reasonable cause to believe that any person has engaged in or is engaged in any unlawful discriminatory practice.

and the commission after a good faith effort to obtain the data and information necessary to determine whether a violation has occurred, has been unable to obtain the information, it may request the city attorney to apply to the judge of the circuit court of the jurisdiction in which the respondent resides or is doing business for a subpoena

Deuces Tikum against any person refusing to produce such data and information.

The judge of the court, upon good cause shown, may cause a subpoena to be issued.

Any person failing to comply with such subpoena shall be subject to punishment for contempt by the court issuing the subpoena.

Does this language come from enabling legislation?

Yes sir, it does.

This is an authority that the State Human Rights Commission has in the event that their investigation is hindered by someone not cooperating or providing information.

If you turn to page 8, under confidentiality,

We included after employee the word contractor.

Further down towards the end of that paragraph we included with respect to a complaint and struck out and in front of investigation.

I have a couple things.

Actually, on the first page under section 2-431C, the new C, when it talks about paragraph A of this section and any other ordinance, then it uses the word or.

And I wondered if it shouldn't be and.

You want to trigger the commission's jurisdiction in the event that there's a violation of any of those particular categories, not all of those categories.

That's cool.

And then something that actually I had

talked to Mr. Brown about on email.

I would like to see the commission, under its responsibilities for systemic issues, have public comment as we do at city council.

No, but is it as an amendment or was it something that was reflective of the changes that were done at our last meeting?

Oh, no, it's an amendment.

Okay, so how should we, can we have some clarification on process here?

Oh, okay.

I'm happy to make a motion for an amendment, and I'm not sure this should be the exact language, but the commission shall provide public comment per council guidelines at the beginning and the end of each public meeting of the Human Rights Commission.

But the reason I say that is because I think the commission is going to need some avenue for the public to

inform the commission as to what the concerns are out there.

Oh, and so, as I say, I think the first point it could go in is under D, somewhere I think between C and D under that section.

It struck me when I heard you describe this that paragraph D on page 2 talks about

Let's do as we go along.