City Council Meeting   2/18/2014

Dede

Mm hmm.

We have a few awards and recognitions and proclamations.

Sure.

I have a proclamation declaring February African American History Month.

Whereas February has been set aside nationally as a time to remember and learn facts about the contributions of African Americans to our country and whereas during February in particular we remember the stories of those who have helped build our nation and our city and advanced the cause of freedom and civil rights and we remember those who helped build our families, places of worship and communities and whereas when we examine our nation's history we discover countless stories that inspire us, stories of the triumph of the human spirit

Tragic stories of cruelty rooted in ignorance and bigotry.

Stories of everyday people rising above their circumstances and the prejudice of others to attain great accomplishments.

And whereas as we celebrate African American History Month, we teach our children and all Americans to rise above brutality and bigotry and to be champions of human dignity and equality.

and where as we rededicate ourselves to affirming the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Now therefore we, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, to hereby celebrate February 2014 as African American History Month in recognition of the struggles and contributions

of African Americans, and to make all citizens aware of the significance of the achievement of African Americans in our community and throughout the country.

And we hereby urge all citizens to mark this month by supporting and encouraging the efforts of all interested groups and organizations.

Thank you.

I do.

I have a proclamation in honor of the Big Read 2014 will be true grit whereas the Big Read is designed to restore reading to the center of American culture and provides our citizens with the opportunity to read and discuss a single book within our community and whereas the Jefferson Madison Regional Library invites all book lovers to participate in the Big Read

that will be held throughout March 2014 wherein the library's goal is to encourage all residents of Central Virginia to read and discuss True Grit by Charles Portis and whereas the novel recounts Maddy Ross's youthful quest to avenge the murder of her father with the aid of a down-at-the-heels federal marshal named Rooster Cogburn and whereas the big read in an

is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest and is supported by the Art and Jane Hess Fund of the Library Endowment.

Now, therefore, be it resolved that... You want to read this part?

Because I think Carla Mullen is here too.

Can we hand the school of Proclamation to the elaborative leader here?

Now therefore be it resolved that I, Satyendra Huja, Mayor of City of Charlottesville, proclaim the big read during March 2014 and I encourage all residents to read two grades during this time.

Hi y'all, I'm Carla Mullen and I'm one of the city trustees on the Jefferson Madison regional library board and as a patron of the library and the board of trustees, I just want to thank the city, both city council and staff members for really continuing to support the library.

and I hope many of you will be able to get out to some of the Big Read events.

There will be book groups and exhibitions and even some taste testings for some kind of cowboy cuisine.

and just all sorts of seminars and lectures.

And it's always a really great time for the community to come together to support Jefferson Madison Regional Library and for the library staff to showcase kind of the programming that they can do in partnership with other organizations around the town.

Thanks very much.

Thanks.

You can.

And how appropriate since I see some of my colleagues from the architecture school here in the planning department and a student and a former teaching assistant, so it's great to see you here.

There will be Oliver Schultz, the Danish urban designer that is part of the roadside Harwell team for the West Main Streetscape Project, will be giving a presentation on international urban design and streetscape design.

In his presentation, he will be sharing a discussion about how we can make West Main a great street for people.

That's going to be this Friday, February 21.

From 6 to 7 is the presentation.

From 7 to 8 is the reception.

And that's in the McIntyre Room at the Central Library.

Now a related event, the Roadside Higher World Team has been hard at work developing three alternatives to the West Main redevelopment.

They will be bringing those alternatives along with some more specific boards looking at design treatments for the corridor.

for the public to review.

That's going to be this Saturday, February 22nd, from 10 o'clock in the morning to 1 p.m. at the Carver Recreation Center at the Jefferson School.

Please visit www.gowestmain.com.

That's all one word for more information.

Thank you very much.

Hope to see some of you there.

Thank you.

I do.

I have one.

that Charlottesville, Virginia has been named a top ten city for affordable health care by livability.com.

Charlottesville has been named one of ten top cities for affordable health care by livability.com, a national website that ranks quality of life and travel amenities of America's small and mid-sized cities.

Editors not only measured affordability, but also took into account survey data on average per capita spending on healthcare and related items.

They factored in the number of area hospitals, the number of primary care physicians and dentists per capita, as well as quality of life.

And finally, they considered data use to determine the top 100 places to live.

We wanted to create a list of cities with quality, accessible, and affordable health care.

But equally importantly, we wanted these cities and towns to be good places to live, said Livability editor Matt Carmichael.

So we were number six.

We were right behind Hartford, Connecticut.

Yes sir, I do.

This is the Household Hazardous Waste Collection Event, and I know a lot of people in town have old paint cans, they have old cans that they don't even know what's in it, so that's what this is all about.

Rivanna Solid Waste Authority will be holding a Household Hazardous Waste Collection Event on Friday, March 14, from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., and Saturday, March 15, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

The event will be hosted at the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority's Ivy Material Utilization Center located at 4576 Dick Woods Road.

The event is open to residents of Charlottesville City and Albemarle County.

For more information and a list of items that will be accepted at the event,

I have a website here but it's much easier to Google the Household Hazardous Waste Collection event and it'll take you right to it.

And last and probably best, the Ghana Association of Charlottesville in cooperation with the City of Charlottesville, the Charlottesville Chamber of Commerce, the Sister City Commission and the Charlottesville Winneba Foundation presents Investment in Ghana.

The Emerging New Market of Africa.

It's a forum on transacting business in Ghana, and it will be held at the McIntyre Room at the Jefferson Madison Regional Library, which is downtown, on March 8th of this year, from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. And this time, now there is no website on this one, but once again, Google

I've got one more.

That's right, okay.

This is food.

Hey, I'm a rookie, okay?

The Ghana Association of Charlottesville presents on 8th of March, One Nation, and it's the Independence Day Bash.

So it is the most important, you're right.

The door is open at 7 p.m. and it's free.

And it says lots to eat and drink.

It's at the Tonsler Recreation Center.

And for more information, you can call 227-7000.

I hope you bring your dancing shoes.

You have good music.

I have one more.

On Friday, February 28th, in celebration of Black History Month, there will be an event entitled All People Matter.

The skin is just the cover.

And it will take place, as I said, on Friday, February 28th at 6.30 p.m. at the Central Virginia Boys and Girls Club.

that's located of course right by Buford off Cherry Avenue there.

It's a free family event which will highlight African American invention inventors, Central Virginia's hidden treasures, that's talents and gifts, Ashton Ryan who is the youth founder of Ashton's Birthday Wish, the Black Knight Steppers, City of Promise will have a youth documentary, Mr. Alexander's Story who is sponsoring this, the skin is just the cover,

and a forum on why all people matter and more.

Any other announcements?

If not, the next item on the agenda is matters by the public.

Please come forward and speak your name and address.

We have three minutes to speak.

Mr. Mayor, Mr. Jones, Members of Council, my name is Roswell Smith.

I reside at 133 Michelin Trail in Rutgersville, Virginia.

I want to thank you for this opportunity to speak on behalf of the Citizen Advisory Committee for the Charlottesville Albemarle Public Defender Office.

You have received many emails, phone calls and documentation.

I'm requesting support for this issue that I'm going to discuss with you tonight.

Our committee strongly believes in the following.

Strong prosecution and public defenders are equally responsible for assuring that we have fair trials and equal justice.

Public defenders and prosecutors should function in equal partnership in the criminal justice systems.

In the city of Charlottesville, the experience, specialized skills, responsibilities, and demanding workloads for public defenders and prosecutors are equally essential.

By advocating for appropriate punishment that avoids costly and extensive confinement,

Albemarle County and Charlottesville public defenders help to reduce local jail costs and even more importantly, help to reduce the risk of reoffending by finding options for rehabilitation that put offenders back on track as law abiding, tax paying citizens.

Second class pay for public defenders make it hard to recruit and retain first class people.

They have lost many hard work and experience and exceptionally talented employees over the years because they can earn higher salaries in other jobs.

For example, attorneys who take, attorneys who took positions at local law firms and or local prosecutor's office.

an attorney and a secretary who took positions in the local federal public defender office, where prosecutors and public defenders pay parity has always been a reality.

Across the board, the city of Charlottesville, prosecutors receive first-class pay, prosecutors

are compensated 25% less, public defenders are compensated 25% less.

For years the city of Charlottesville and the county of Albemarle has supplemented the state pay for prosecutors.

We ask that you consider in your budget for 2015 supplemental pay for our public defenders so that they can truly be equal partners with the criminal justice system.

We are asking the City of Charlottesville and the County of Albemarle to provide a local pay supplement to help close the pay gap between prosecutors and public defenders to maintain excellence in our public defender office.

If you agree that prosecutors and public defenders should be equal partners in the criminal justice system, please support this proposal to promote fairness.

Thank you, sir.

Susan A.

I just want to take this opportunity to thank you for allowing me to come formally introduce myself.

I'm Susan King and I'm with Dominion Virginia Power.

I have met with a couple of you informally, but it's nice to see you all together.

I'm the new External Affairs Representative for Dominion Virginia Power.

People often ask me, what does that exactly mean?

My role is to act as the primary liaison between Dominion and localities such as yours.

Essentially I provide you information, not just during major events, but about any projects, major projects usually that we have going on across your area.

And I'm always here to answer questions that your constituents have about any service issues that they're having.

I've been with the company since 2007.

I've been mostly dedicated to crisis communications strategies, particularly during major outages.

I've been through lots of storms and spent lots of sleepless nights waiting for power to come back on, as you all have as well.

Again, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Yes, and actually I just realized I was at the General Assembly today and I don't have any more cards left.

A public number?

We can always call our 1-866 number.

It's 1-866-DOM-HELP and that's 866-366-4357 to report any outages that you may have.

However, we also have a mobile website that customers can report through.

And that's been wildly successful.

Thank you, counsel at Charlottesville.org.

Your contact information would be great.

Okay.

Okay.

Good evening, Brandon Collins, 418 Fairway Avenue.

I've lived in Charlottesville my entire life.

I have three children who have lived here their entire lives, one who will be an adult very soon and will be of voting age and everything else, and two that are just learning how to sleep through the night.

So that's an update on that.

I've got a lot to say, and I'm not probably going to get it all in.

And now I'm adding to it.

And that is, with the opportunity to hear from Dominion Virginia Power, I think it would be wise of this council

to make the same inquiries of them as you have of the City Utilities Office about how many shutoffs there are of electricity in the City of Charlottesville and what efforts can be made to reduce those or eliminate those entirely.

So that's just my little jab.

But I'm actually here mainly to tell you about our awesome intern program graduates.

and to thank Mr. Jones and Mr. Ellis for attending our ceremony last Tuesday.

We graduated four interns this go around.

We had to scale back and we are going to run a second program back to back so that we can get as many people in in the year as possible.

What Mr. Jones and Mr. Ellis heard was a little bit about the program, and I wish you all had been there to hear some of that, but I think the main takeaway was how incredibly proud and great FAR feels about these interns, their motivation.

Their energy and their spirit were just amazing and probably beyond any other past intern program.

They managed to set goals and achieve them, both personal goals, employment goals, as well as organizing goals.

We talked some about history and the present and the future and they were definitely history makers, particularly when it came to their organizing around RAD.

and it's something that the consequences of are being felt nationwide and showing residents of public housing everywhere that they don't just have to stand by and let decisions be made about their communities but that they actually have a say and there are ways they can make sure they have a say in decision making.

I did want to mention a piece about employment with the program.

This has always been a hot topic.

You know, what does the program do for employment?

We actually bumped up our efforts towards employment this past go around and did numerous workshops, all kinds of in the field things, trainings, job seeking, identifying barriers, of which there are many.

I'm proud to say that all four interns were employed at some point during

the program.

However, there are still a lot of barriers to residence and public housing when it comes to employment and I feel like FAR is doing a really good job of addressing that.

Our program gives experience as well as knowledge and training and there are a bunch of groups in the city that do this as well and prepare people for employment.

However, this economy is not providing the jobs to support that employment.

And I would just add that one of our interns had to leave her job because of the cuts to Route 10 to Pan Tops.

And that was very disappointing.

So we're doing our part.

We ask that you all do your part.

Mr. Mayor, can I interject?

Brandon, are the interns here?

Not tonight.

Hello, my name is Lena Seville.

I live at 808 Alta Vista Avenue.

I'm here to talk to you about some emails that have been going the last day or so.

I wrote in mentioning the difficulties I've had finding out information about the place task force.

It's a volunteer group that's part of the city's boards and commissions.

Most of you saw the short version, but the long version has been going on for over a year.

with a page and a half of written incidences of issues that have come up.

So now apparently we're going to be able to be notified of subcommittee meetings.

I think they want staff to do it.

I've had other subcommittees from different departments who have managed to get me meeting information notice within a month of me asking for it and had no problem.

I don't quite understand how this group has time for 10 subcommittees and moderated email lists, but getting information about subcommittee meetings has been difficult.

I didn't realize it would take an act of Congress and have to get so many people involved just to get basic meeting information, but there's more than that.

Agendas are posted in one place before the meeting and another place after the meeting.

Notices of meetings, some of them are on the city calendar, some of them are on their website.

None of them are on both.

It's one or the other.

and Public Materials.

I've been to one meeting that was placed, City Council on Planning, and everything was emailed the day before, so there was nothing for the public to look at.

I've been to meetings where the discussion is, what does everybody think of page 23?

So without the public materials, it's really difficult for people to follow it.

And they're being emailed, so it makes it more difficult.

There are 10 subcommittees now, which is probably way more than one city councilor could keep up with.

So there are other ones.

There is a green infrastructure one.

There is a community engagement one.

But now I'm at the meetings about the farmers market, not the actual farmers market.

I know you're there.

I see you.

Finally, I was going to talk quickly about something.

Bob Fenwick came to our neighborhood association meeting and talked about consultants.

and I would ask you to find out some more information about the past ones, how often they're actually implemented so that we can see if we're getting what we want from them.

Thank you.

Rebecca Quinn, 1044th Street here in the city.

I'm here to ask for some sunshine.

Y'all have had mentioned before you've had this council is known for having lots of closed meetings, and I've noticed that you've had closed meetings before each of the past three council meetings and another one this evening.

The cost share agreement with Albemarle County Service Authority for the cost of the Rivanna Pump Station has been on your agenda for at least three of those four meetings.

I don't know whether to be perplexed or pleased.

If you're holding out for the best and fairest agreement for the city, then I'm prepared to be pleased.

But given how poorly the city fared on the final cost share agreement for the water supply plan,

I don't think I can assume that's the case, so I want to know when will this discussion be brought into the Sunshine?

When will we know what's going on on these multiple occasions?

I also know that from my involvement during the water supply debates, I know that we are party to a four-party agreement that governs an awful lot about what we do with Almonte County Service Authority, with the county,

with Rivanna Water and Sewer.

It has a very clear statement about the basis for cost sharing of new facilities to be constructed.

Because that's clear, I don't understand what's the problem.

What takes so many closed meetings, so much consultation with council?

If you're being pressured to accept a deal that's good for Albemarle County Service Authority rate payers, but not for us, then please remember your fiduciary responsibility to us.

city taxpayers, city property owners, city businesses, all of us who pay water and sewer.

When necessary, your job is to fight for us, not just to be nice, not just to do what they think is fair, but to do what is truly fair for the city and the rate payers.

So again, when will those of us who have to pay the deal know what the deal is?

If there's to be a change, and I don't know why there would be a change, we have a four-party agreement that sets these things forth, but if there is to be a change, then I want to know what is a citizen's opportunity to participate in that discussion, because if a deal that was struck many years ago is now going to be changed, we should know about that as well.

So whatever you're negotiating,

with Albemarle County Service Authority.

Please make sure it's fair to us.

Thank you.

My name is Lewis Schultz.

I live at 1809 East Market Street.

This is the 10th time since October 3rd that I've come to Council to say that I have evidence that City Manager Maurice Jones, Director of Public Works Judith Mueller, and Utilities Director Lauren Hildebrand have violated Charlottesville Code and the Code of Virginia and in doing so have violated federal civil rights statutes.

For more information on what I'm talking about simply search Google for Steep Hill Street along with Seville Weekly or Shilling Show.

I'd recommend both for a fuller understanding.

The background information for item 2 on this evening's agenda, the public hearing regarding blight determination for 201 East Water Street, in particular the citations of city code and the memo prepared for council by the city attorney's office, speak directly to the issues that I have been bringing before council.

Both make it clear that the city's power to seize private property is limited,

that for property to be condemned due to deterioration it must present an identifiable threat to the safety, health or welfare of the community and that there are specific procedures to be followed in the event that the city chooses either to condemn such a property under the power of eminent domain or to use its police powers to abate a nuisance.

In the case of Steep Hill Street,

Those limitations on the power of the city to take private property were simply ignored.

There, the city made no effort to follow the law.

It simply appeared one day and made a claim of right to take that property for a public purpose, despite absolutely nothing existing in the public record to support that claim.

City Attorney Craig Brown has made an attempt to justify that claim by saying that this street has been dedicated to the public right of way.

Since the common law dedication of the street to private use was duly recorded in 1887 in Albemarle County deed book 88 at page 206, there is no doubt that his assertion is ludicrous.

Mr. Brown has also made a feeble attempt at excusing the city's actions by suggesting that a prescription easement, prescriptive easement applies, as if that had any relevance to the taking of a privately built bridge or privately installed sewer line.

Even if those had been built by the city or by Albemarle County prior to annexation,

and remember there is absolutely no reason to believe that they had.

There is nothing remotely adverse or exclusive about any city use associated with them and therefore the test for a prescriptive easement fails.

Further, even if such an absurd claim could be proven, the burden is placed by law upon the city to do so before it acts, since according to the Code of Virginia, any official records of any court of this Commonwealth are regarded as prima facie evidence.

That is, the deed of 1887 that records the creation and dedication of Steep Hill Street as a private road is all that matters until such time as the city successfully challenges that deed in a court of law.

No such challenge has ever even been attempted.

Instead, the city employees that I named earlier, along with others, acted to seize Steep Hill Street for a public purpose despite having no authority to do so and with no regard for due process and thereby acted under color of law to deprive me of my civil rights to be secure in my property.

I made it very clear that I can prove that the allegations that I've made are true and that I'm willing to present evidence and offer sworn testimony in a hearing if counsel would simply schedule one.

Acting under the advice of a seriously conflicted city attorney, counsel has so far refused.

The contrast between that refusal and counsel's willingness to follow lawful procedure in the case of tonight's hearing

show that equal protection under the law is another right of citizens that council feels free to disregard.

Good evening.

My name is Nancy Carpenter.

I'm an Albemarle County resident.

Many times I've come here to City Council to talk about issues that address homelessness in this community.

And there's something that's troubling me.

I'm not sure if you're the appropriate board to look into this, but I am going to raise the question.

I've been watching this for a while and now know that

There is a resource in our community, the Moore Center, which is a substance abuse treatment center.

And I've noticed for quite a long time that even though there are people that who are suffering with homelessness, they are suffering with the disease of substance abuse, they want to try and change their life by getting recovery treatment.

But there are not being any referrals made

from that community into our Moore Center.

That is a community services board.

It's part of the continuum, just as you being an employer is part of the continuum of care of people trying to improve their lives.

I don't know why there's a barrier.

but there just seems after watching and studying the situation appears to be one which also makes me concerned about the future of the inebriate shelter which shares space in that building.

That is a location that individuals instead of using a expensive resource like our jail

can go and sleep it off.

Although I do have a problem, it's only for men, there is no inebriated shelter for women, so they still have to go down to the jail and I think that needs to be addressed in the future.

But there is some concern with what that mission is from my viewpoint and I'm hoping that it's my tax dollars that do

you eventually go in to fund these types of social programs that get funding from the state and certainly the inebriate shelter is funded by the city.

So I'm hoping that this is just an aberration and that there will be some referrals coming out of the homeless community because people do want to make that

major step to try and alleviate a problem in their life.

There are probably people here in this audience who have either struggled with that or had loved ones that have struggled with that and can appreciate how important it is to have a referral when you are ready to go.

Not next week, not in 24 hours, but if you're ready to make that step and there's a space there, you want someone to go into treatment.

So I'm just bringing this to your attention

and hoping that there are some conversations going on and hoping that it does not adversely affect any of the initiative and programs that have done so well from that center.

Is there anyone else in the audience who would like to speak?

Evening members of City Council.

Thank you for giving me an opportunity to talk to you today.

My name is Jim Chang at 1612 Vicki Road and I am president of the Meadows Neighborhood Association.

Excuse me for wearing jeans, but as my wife will tell you happily, I can be rather absent-minded at times.

The reason why I'm here today is I have a petition signed by residents, city residents of our neighborhood, and we're asking for the building of a playground in our neighborhood.

Just to give you an idea of where the Meadows neighborhood is, to the north of us, directly north of us, is the shops at Stonefield and on our southern edge is the Best Buy.

We have a lot of young families that have moved into the neighborhood recently and a lot of small children, but really there's no place for them to go right now.

There's a church in our neighborhood, Meadows Presbyterian, and they have been very gracious in putting up a basketball net in their parking lot.

So for the teenagers and the older children, they have a place to play basketball at least, but for the most part that's the total of our recreational facilities in our neighborhood.

The nearest park is probably McIntire Park, the nearest public park and the nearest playgrounds and fields.

You'd have to go to Greer Elementary down about, say, a mile or two miles on hydraulic road, or you'd have to walk over to Walker Upper Elementary, which would require you going on 29, crossing 29 and going across the bypass also.

We do have children playing in the streets, normally that would be fine, but there's some concern about that also because where we are in a commercial area there are a fair number of cars that drive down the roads and so there's a concern over the children's safety.

So I guess the biggest challenge actually is that it's hard to get out of our neighborhood to other areas of the city because we have hydraulic road on our northern border

Barracks Road on our southern border, Route 29 of Commercial District to our east and Georgetown Road to our west.

To get anywhere walking or biking is very hard to do, especially if you want to let your children go somewhere.

Because of all that, I believe that our neighbors would really like to have a playground and that's evidenced by the petition that I just gave to you.

But just as important as having a physical space to play in,

I think it would be good for our community to have a place to connect with one another and gather and just to build some community spirit.

Thank you.

Is there anyone else who would like to speak?

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, my name is Robbie Savage.

I'm the executive director of the Rivanna Conservation Society.

And I'm here today with Professor Daphne Spain and her class on planning for nonprofits.

They're one of our partners in something that we're calling Go Extreme, the Rivanna River Makeover.

And the makeover is going to take place from April 17th to the 26th.

And we're going to have events through that whole time, which also, by the way, is Earth Week.

And we're engaging our partners and asking for volunteers to work with us and with the city on a number of projects including something you will hear about from Chris Gensick a little later.

I wish it was earlier so all the students could hear him.

Corey Park, you all approved Corey Park.

And so far we've had two cleanups at that site.

It was a mess.

People seem to think that Corey Park was a dump and not a park.

But a lot has taken place in just the last several months since you've acquired it.

We've done, like I said, two cleanups.

We're going to be doing an invasive plant removal there at the creek right by the refreshment stand and then replacing that with native species, so we're going to clean that out.

And I think you're going to be going to the new bridge, so you're going to walk right past it.

We're going to clean that up and make that a very desirable place.

working with our partners at the Master Naturalist.

We're also going to be working with Chris on the removal of the cement bridge.

I'm so delighted that you all are going to be doing that.

It is an impediment to fish and wildlife and we're delighted that that's going to take place.

We're also going to be doing a stormwater retrofit at one of the local churches in the Belmont area very near to Quarry Park.

We'll also be doing a greening of one of the schools, so we'll be working on stormwater and greening up one of the schools.

Another thing that we're doing, and I'm so glad that you all passed the resolution for the Big Read, is we'll be doing a primitive and survival skills workshop as part of the Big Read out at our Shire Nature Area.

We're also having the head of the EPA's Chesapeake Bay Program, Nick DiBesswali is coming on the 17th of April, and he will be speaking at our Brown Bag, which just happens to take place at the library.

And the last thing on the agenda that I wanted to share with you is we're working with a group called South Wings, and they do flyovers for elected officials and their staffs of important water bodies.

So if you are at all interested and would like to learn more about the Rivanna from the air, we will arrange, I'd like to do it in the beginning of the week if you can, but working with you and your schedules.

This is free of charge.

It's a gift to the community that we will do both with the city of Charlottesville and the county of Albemarle.

So seeing our watershed from the air is a real experience and I invite all of you to participate.

Did anybody else would like to speak?

If not, we will close the session.

Would you like to start?

Thank you all for coming.

A couple of people have left who I was going to comment on.

Mr. Smith left.

He was talking about the public defenders and I know that a number of us are really interested in exploring this and it's been a long time coming.

There's been a lot of work on it, a lot of things needed to happen before we could do it.

And I understand it was one of Grace Tinsley's

She's one of the ones who really started the whole movement and she was of course a great citizen of Charlottesville.

An interesting theme and also actually just sort of going backwards this sounds like an incredibly cool Earth Week.

Extreme, I can't remember what the other part of it was.

Extreme Rivanna Makeover sounds great.

Thank you so much for working in our parks.

That new part of Quarry Park is very exciting and I appreciate all your work over there.

I'll be talking to you about flying.

But the other interesting theme that came up was about transparency and I wanted to thank Ms. Seville for coming and Ms. Quinn

for bringing this up and actually it's been a topic of conversation all day long on a number of fronts and I think we have to be very very vigilant about what we do and how we treat our citizens particularly for issues that are of such incredible importance and in some cases extremely financially significant.

and in terms of the wastewater projects, that's one of them.

It's so much money that we're dealing with that we were just talking tonight about we need to start talking publicly about the details of what is being talked about and we'll be doing that really soon.

and in terms of Ms. Seville, great suggestions actually about other counselors getting involved with some of those initiatives because we do need to be sure that even we sometimes are left in the dark.

So thank you.

And then the other really interesting connect was Mr. Collins' suggestion that since Ms. King of Dominion was here that we might be able to work with some data about

the number of families that we have that struggle to pay their electric bills because we know already that in the past few years 10% of our households cannot pay their gas and water and sewer bills.

Again, it revolves back around to what happens with our wastewater bills, which is very dependent on what we do with our negotiations.

So I really liked

the themes that came together tonight.

Ms. King left or else I might have asked her if she would be willing to do that.

But Dominion actually, for all the criticism sometimes we give them, has worked closely with our community on energy efficiency measures, particularly with LEAP.

And I think we're very appreciative of that because that too enables people to be able to afford to live in our city and not lose their homes when they can't pay their utility bills.

and I cannot emphasize enough what a huge issue in our community it is for families who get pushed out of Charlottesville not because of housing prices necessarily but because of utility prices and we need to be ever vigilant about that.

and Chip King is writing, Mr. Mayor, a brief thing on what this group was that just came in here.

So we'll get that to you in just a second.

I also wanted to speak to Susan King.

I'm sure she'll hear this later on because I echo what Dede Smith said about a number of people who have had their electric bills or had their power cut off.

It's been a very trying winter.

We all know that.

And I'd also like to talk to her about something more basic, and that's a telephone pole in the middle of Old Lynchburg Road sidewalk.

So we kind of go all over the place there.

Roswell Smith, if he's still here on the public defender's office, I fully support what that gentleman said.

We have great prosecutors, and we owe it to the citizens of Charlottesville that we also have great public defenders.

and that they're paid on an equal basis with the prosecutors.

So I will do what I can to make sure that happens.

Brandon Collins gave me a list of the four graduates of FAR, the intern program, and I'd like to give them some public recognition.

Sabrina Allen, she is the Resident Commissioner at CRHA.

Mary Faulkner, Christine Hester,

and Jamika Moore, so congratulations to those four young ladies.

Lena Seville, you're exactly right, you should be on the email for all the lists anybody else is on.

It's unusual for a member of the public to be so energetic about being part of city government and keep me informed and we'll get you in as many as we can.

Rebecca Quinn you're exactly right we have to we got the water share agreement we're right in the middle of that and the public should know everything that's going on while they can still make an impact on the decision Jim Chang neighborhood

Playground.

That's a terrific idea.

Thanks for coming down here.

If citizens across the city have a petition that they want to present, I will be looking very closely at it.

I think citizen participation and citizen petitions are very important.

The idea of a petition is very basic to our democracy.

And of course, Robbie, congratulations.

You do great work with Rivanna, and I hope to be working with you soon.

Robbie Savage.

And Nancy, I think the message you were saying was the Moore Center is like a dead end and there's no coordination with anything beyond that.

If I'm mistaken, please let me know and we'll see what we can do about that.

And I think that's about it.

I, too, support pay equity for public defenders and have for a couple of years.

So I think that sounds like it's probably got support from this council and we'll go through in the budget.

Brandon and I just also wanted to congratulate the FAR interns.

I was not able to get to graduation because I had stomach flu and I would have so much rather have been at FAR graduation.

But I know a couple of the folks who were interns and they're really an impressive group of folks and I'm delighted to hear them getting empowered.

I think I'll just share the idea about transparency that we heard and I think that with the cost share agreement that will come to a public hearing before it goes to anything

I just have a question, and I'm not, I don't want anything I'm saying to be construed as a threat of any kind, because it's absolutely not intended that way, but my question is that as Mr. Schultz comes and accuses, you know, as public officials, we kind of, there's a very high bar for slander, but when we start talking about employees of the city,

breaking laws and willfully breaking laws when our understanding is that they didn't do that.

I'm just wondering at what point that does rise to the level of slander because I hate to hear their names continually brought up in that way.

without any response.

Not right now.

The playground in Meadow's neighborhood I think is a wonderful idea.

We talk about being a walkable city and a connected community.

And you all are really landlocked over there.

And so I actually did a lot of canvassing this fall in that neighborhood.

And I noticed that a lot of the houses that four years ago had older couples in them now have families with little kids in them.

And there seems to be a real resurgence of that.

And you all need a playground.

The Rivanna stuff sounds really cool.

Ah, yes.

About, is Miss Smith here?

No, Susan King from, she left because I wanted to invite her to the West Main Street event on Saturday so that she could begin to hear what some ideas might impact or influence their decisions with regards to high tension power lines.

Not sure if we can ever underground them, but if we could at least get her engaged in the conversation, I think that would be beneficial to the whole city.

Mr. Collins, I know that you and I have been exchanging emails trying to get me to a farm meeting.

I am very willing and able to do so.

I hope we had a conflict in March because I'm going to be meeting and talking about the SIA with the NAACP, but hopefully in April we can do so.

I met today with Public Housing Association, PHA, and

We had a very good exchange about the SIA and they are firmly committed to making sure that they replace one for one their 150 units.

So the SIA is actually

almost like a community pact for both the Friendship Court and the public housing community that those units are going to be provided in the neighborhood.

And I really do welcome the opportunity to talk about this with FAR.

I did it once about a year and a half ago and now with this plan I look forward to doing it again.

We've had extensive meetings about getting the Strategic Investment Area Steering Committee up and running.

Again, that's going to be happening and

Other groups I'm going to, let's see, I'm going to be talking to even the Charlottesville Albemarle Association of Realtors about it.

So it's across the board, I'm meeting with anybody who wants to know.

With regards to Ms. Seville's comments,

For the record, I just want to say that the place design task force, which means place making, livability, and community engagement task force, has been in existence for two years.

After its first year, after it met in four subcommittee meetings, it produced an annual report that was presented in public to both the Planning Commission and this council.

It then repeatedly

asked for a hearing, excuse me, a work session so that it could be discussed more fully.

That work session, after submitting the report in August, the work session was held in November.

Unfortunately, it wasn't, the full two hours wasn't devoted to talking about what the Place Design Task Force had presented.

The point being is that the committee was charged by this council to look at all matters related to

public space.

And public space means the street, it means our parks, it means public art.

And so when you're talking about public space that is that pervasive, it's going to keep you busy.

So not only was this group looking at best practices in community engagement, looking at best practices in corridor design by using the West Main as an example, and best practices in small area planning,

as well as Green Infrastructure, all of those mind you have informed staff and informed the way we do things which was exactly what this council wanted it to do is inform

the government agencies about best practices of today.

So we also, that group also was involved with getting out in the field and dealing with crises.

Sometimes it was discovered that trees weren't being planted in locations where everyone thought they were.

So with the landscape architects and with staff and with developers on site, remedies were resolved and are now going to be put in place.

In my mind that's a service and in my mind that's very transparent because it was always discussed in a public meeting.

Now starting in 2014 the plan was to go ahead and move forward with more subcommittees.

It seems that

Right now with the new organization, we've got to iron out some wrinkles, but I've been assured by staff that that's going to be happening.

And no one, no one is intending to keep anybody in the dark.

If anything, this group has been making a conscious effort to get the attention of this council repeatedly.

Thank you.

Before I make comments,

I wanted to recognize the Learning Center group here.

I understand that some of you are going to take part in

Festival of Culture, which is on our city council agenda a little later in the evening.

Some people have to go home because our class finishes at nine.

We will have seen you.

We know you.

We thought we would make an impression on you.

Another representative is coming later too.

As to the public comments, I wanted to make one or two comments also.

I agree with most of the comments made by my colleagues.

I wanted to inform Ms. Quinn about the cost-sharing agreement.

We will be coming forward with a proposal in the middle of March, so the public will have plenty of time to talk and share and give us their opinion before the city council takes any action.

So just for information.

Any other comments from members of the council?

If not, move to the next item.

Next item is the consent agenda.

Ms.

Item C, an appropriation for the City of Promise reimbursement from Children, Youth and Family Services, $10,000, second of two readings.

Item D, an appropriation for asset forfeiture funds for regional firearms range, $971,167, second of two readings.

Is there a second?

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and Council.

This item was placed on your agenda after public hearing at the Planning Commission meeting about a month ago, two months ago.

We had concerns, staff had concerns about the condition of the landmark hotel and had written, following the process under the blight ordinance, a preliminary determination of blight, had sent that to the owners of the landmark and asked them to give us a plan for how they would cure the blight.

Our two main issues were the graffiti that was all over the building and the safety because of access issues.

We sent that letter, asked them to give us a plan within 30 days, which is what the

the law requires we heard nothing from them and so we put together a plan to go to city council to the Planning Commission the code requires Planning Commission to make a recommendation on that determination of blight first they make a finding of blight determination and then recommend how if they find blight how to cure the blight Planning Commission did that had a seven recommendations that were made and subsequent to that we put it on the council agenda and then

I got a call from a representative of the landmark before it was scheduled to be on your last agenda.

That representative said

I'm new to the project.

I've just been hired by Mr. Dewberry.

We're interested in finding out what we can do to solve this problem.

I want to come up and talk.

He was going to come up before the last meeting.

Atlanta had that major snowstorm, and it shut down the airport, and he couldn't get up here.

But he did come a week before last.

We met, had a very good meeting.

He actually met with a structural engineer and a contractor while he was here.

to talk about things and we've been talking back and forth and this morning I received a draft of a proposal from Dewberry to address the issues.

They've written it in the form of an agreement with the city.

And it has quite a few points.

And I'll just hit what they're proposing.

First, in summary, to say they have essentially addressed everything that we asked them to do.

If you look at the actions that they say they will perform,

They will hire a local engineering firm to do a structural evaluation of the existing structure and they're going to do that on or before the week of February 24th.

That is a request that the Planning Commission added to the staff recommendations at their meeting.

They're going to clean the ground level and first floor of all the trash and debris that's there.

As you know, if you look through the windows, it's terribly dirty in there.

trashy things blowing around and they're going to get all that out of there.

They're going to secure the east side of the landmark to prevent access from CVS where we believe people are getting onto the building from the CVS side and they've agreed to do that.

They still haven't figured out exactly how they want to do it yet and so we'll still be talking but they want to do that.

Reason we secure all the stairwell access points from the ground level,

Again, it was secured previously and somebody has broken that down now so they want to re-secure that.

Remove and install a new 10-foot fence with the proper supports to prevent people getting in from the ground.

That's the area where we have the fence now.

It's an 8-foot fence now.

We had suggested 10 feet and they've agreed to do that.

remove the graffiti from all the floors, place material over the windows on the north side or on the mall side of the property over the windows so you can't see in.

I talked to them today about trying to do that with some type of art, and they are having conversation with the bridge about that, but they're not, they haven't come to an agreement yet.

but to do something there that we would all would be you know again they say at their discretion but they've agreed to try to work on a solution there that would work and then we've had conversations on and off with them with the bridge without the bridge but if we put the fence up doing some art on that fence and they are agreeable to that they want to they want to reserve the ability to review anything

that's there because it is their property and I think that's, we don't have a problem with that.

They then want us to, I think they're trying to comply here with our request that they sign a trespass letter by giving us the opportunity to deal with trespassers.

We get trespass letters from a lot of downtown property owners now which give the police the authority to address issues when they see them.

The other two that I've got a little issue with the wording and I think we'll go back with those but at this point I think they've met the spirit.

They've addressed all the items that were of major concern to us.

One thing we talked about was the securing of all the

the upper floors to make sure that everything is secure.

He tells me they're going to do that.

They didn't put that in here.

I want that added before we agree to it finally, that they address that and how they're going to do it.

He did tell me in my latest conversation just a few minutes ago that

while they have not, you know, they got a proposal I think you all got a copy of from the bridge from Matthew Slatch, they have not agreed to that because there's a substantial cost involved with that.

They like a lot of the ideas but they think that some of those ideas can be used to secure the upper floors, they just haven't figured out what that is.

So I think that's something that will be a work in progress and we'll continue working on.

So what I'd like to suggest to council is that

that you not take action on these two things in front of you tonight, that we hold off and let us continue to work with this because had they submitted this to us back in October, we would have said, fine, we're good with this and we'll move on.

So I think that if we can, you can not take any action.

I'm not sure, Mr. Brown, if we might just defer action so if they don't follow through, we can bring it back up without having to start over.

I would suggest we defer the item to the future time.

No, it's with a few councils.

I just have a question.

One of the things that the Planning Commission asked for that is not on this, unless I missed it, is security cameras.

That was actually a suggestion that was made in consultation with the Attorney's Office.

It'd be nice if we could get it.

We're not sure that

It actually is something that we could push the issue on and I'm fine.

If they secure it, we don't need it.

I don't feel strongly about it.

That's what the very first condition is aimed at.

The other thing that it seems, right, yeah, that would, and the word weatherize was used

Planning Commission used that language.

And so we can come back if this is not satisfactory or if it takes too long.

There was one other thing and it seems we were advised against having Dewberry select his own

He's not owned it that long.

Well, for two years then, excuse me.

It's been vacant under his ownership for a long time.

He could have come forward with this, as you said, much sooner than now.

So I would support taking out that in his soul and absolute discretion.

There's a couple other things.

Does he have insurance on the building?

I assume he does.

There's been statements attributed to Mr. Dewberry that I

I'm not certain are correct.

I would like to propose a suggestion, too.

Before you guys go too far, because this has been advertised as a public hearing.

Well, I just wanted to wonder if there's a change that could be made.

Well then there's a comment, if I can make this comment?

So the only thing I would suggest on 1.1 to allay some of Mr. Fenwick's concerns is that you would hire a local engineering firm to be selected by Dubre in his sole and absolute discretion to perform and seal a structural evaluation just to make sure that the seal of an engineer is kind of the gold standard to make sure that they are

They are a licensed engineer.

It's just one layer.

That's the only thing I would suggest.

And then I just want to make a comment too that

that I know that it's certainly at the discretion of the owner, Mr. Dewberry, to accept and modify, negotiate with the bridge on their proposal, as well as the BAR has reviewed over the design.

I just wanted to get that out there.

However, I do want to acknowledge the efforts of the bridge to really try to make, as they say, lemonade out of a lemon.

Thank you.

So I would go through the process of public hearing because we have been revised.

Yeah.

Okay.

I'll open the meeting for public hearing.

Anybody would like to speak on this topic?

Y'all have just seen something we haven't seen.

and so I want to speak to that because on the one hand sure removing graffiti is all well and good but I see the top of this building from my front window from my rooftop terrace even without the graffiti it's not a very pleasing visual environment so I want to know okay we're getting kind of what we want

We've got some kind of agreement.

Mr. Tolbert started out saying he wrote it up as an agreement as though that may not have been the anticipated form of this plan.

An agreement usually has two parts.

Each party has to commit to different parts.

I would really like to see what is he asking the city to commit to.

I'd also think while this sounds like progress, how much longer?

Are there some timelines?

Of course it's difficult or appears to be difficult to get financing since he's got two big projects in the works, but how binding is this?

How long do we have to go on even under an agreement before we're back into a situation where there may be some deterioration, we have to go through this again, there may be, whether it's graffiti or safety, I don't know.

I actually have a little worry about not being able to look in the windows because then more things can go on without the possibility of somebody seeing what's going on in there.

You know, if you've walked by, you always look into it.

I wonder if anybody's in there.

Well, if someone was in there, you might catch them doing something we didn't want them to do.

I certainly don't want us to be in a situation where another three or four years from now, you know, they haven't gotten under construction and we're back here at the same point.

Meanwhile, the building's gone through another three or four years of exposure to the elements.

So I hope to the extent that you can or when you can

you will make that agreement public because it affects so many of us.

Thank you.

Robbie Savage?

I'm still on.

Okay.

You said it on the wrong one.

Anybody else would like to speak on this topic?

If not, I'll close the public hearing then.

What staff is requesting and I would suggest that we do that.

We defer this item to a future date.

Well, anything in this agreement has to be related to curing the blight.

And that's making it safe and getting rid of the graffiti.

You know, blight does not deal with aesthetics.

We all know the thing doesn't look good, but you know, that's where

if they can work with the bridge and try to make it look better, that's a side issue that is great.

The blight ordinance deals, the blight code deals with making it safe and secure and any deteriorated conditions and then the graffiti ordinance deals with graffiti.

So those are the two things that we felt like we could deal with.

We cannot compel them to complete the construction.

That's beyond our scope of authority.

We hope they do.

The conversations that I had with them were very encouraging about where they are with that.

That's the first encouraging words that I've had in a while from that.

But that's no guarantee that two years, five years from now, they will be under construction.

I hope they are, and they want to be because they've got a lot of money tied up in it.

In each one of these there is a timeline and it quite frankly is fairly accelerated.

We had talked to the Planning Commission about giving them 60 to 90 days to get started on this work.

They've come back with most everything well within 30 days that they would be working.

I feel like we have in a way two competing urges here and one is to get this done quickly and by them coming in at five minutes before our meeting it almost you know guarantees they get an extra two weeks even though they say they'll do it by March 3rd and by March 24 February 24th and so you know part of me wants to say you know with if they agree to the things that we add on tonight tomorrow that they are

required to have these dates done.

And if they don't do it, then we'll come back next meeting and do blight.

But again, the public didn't see this.

And so I think that the need for transparency goes the other way.

But I think the public would be served to have this done quickly.

You know that the time frame which are being proposed

Well, let me make a comment first, Mr. Mayor.

I would also, I would agree with Kristin, but I would like to push for guarantees, some kind of guarantee with some kind of penalty if the timeline is not met.

and if this has to go to litigation, I want Mr. Dewberry to bear that burden.

I don't want the citizens of Charlottesville to have to bail him out.

So there are several things that I'll be speaking to NDS about that I would like to see in that agreement.

I think as Mr. Tolbert said, we have certain authorities.

Yes, I mean they could start today.

It is their property.

If you declared it blight today, we would send them a letter and give them 30 days to get all this work done or we were going to do it.

Okay, so they still have that opportunity.

And if they didn't do it then, then we have to spend the dollars out of, you know, tax dollars to go in and do all this.

This is probably based on what the first fence costs.

This is $50,000 to $75,000 worth of work to get this done, minimum.

I mean, it may be more than that.

I think it's a win-win for us that we've finally gotten them engaged and they are working with us.

And so that's the reason I suggest that we defer taking the action, but we keep it out there so

if for some reason they don't we can come back in here and say they didn't do it we need you to do the blight declaration pass the ordinance and then we'll write them and say you got 30 days to do it or we're gonna do it and send you the bill so that's the way the code works.

Any discussion?

Can we get, Ms. Rice, can we get this document added to our agenda for tonight?

I know, but we were discussing something that's in public.

Okay, thank you.

Next item on the agenda is the Conveyance of Land, Lachlan Hills Subdusion.

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council, this is a proposed ordinance and public hearing tonight for the Conveyance of Land to Meadow Creek Development, LLC.

It is land located in Albemarle County that actually is a portion of Penn Park Lane.

I think the best way to explain the layout of the property is by reference to two plats that are in your agenda materials.

The first shows the existing Penn Park Lane and there is a piece of property 20 feet in width that has 7,187 square feet and that is a portion of the current Penn Park Lane.

There is also a plat that shows a proposed realignment of Penn Park Lane to provide a new entrance into what will be the Laughlin Hills subdivision that's being built, a portion of which is in the city and a portion in the county.

This property was acquired by the city back in 1955 when the city owned the adjoining property.

and it was acquired to ensure access to that property.

In 1999, the city conveyed 25 acres of property to Meadow Creek Development and I think we thought at that time we were also conveying the right to dedicate Penn Park Lane to public use for the purposes of a public road or street and we also were conveying the easement in that road.

Albemarle County has taken the position that the dedication of the property for the reconfigured Penn Park Lane needs to come from the city.

that is somewhat problematic because you can tell from the sketch of the reconfigured road only the two ends of the city property are needed for the road leaving the middle portion titled in the city and it's my opinion that that's not in the best interest of the city to own that small remnant of property it's about

3,680 square feet between a right of way in Albemarle County, but it still will be open to public use.

There is a letter in your agenda materials from legal counsel for the development group who's requesting the conveyance of the property.

In this case, without compensation, the normal procedure for the city is to require payment of fair market value whenever it conveys land.

I think there are some circumstances here that would justify departure from that rule, specifically that what we would be conveying is what we agreed to convey or what we thought we had conveyed in 1999.

Because of its location and shape, it has no real value left to the city and as with any property that's owned in public ownership and open to the public, there is some liability exposure to retain ownership of this small portion.

The other request from the developer is that the council waive the second reading of the ordinance to allow them to get approval of their subdivision, plat and road dedication from the county.

The city code does authorize a waiver of a second reading.

It requires a four-fifths vote of city council.

Because this is currently used as a public street, the conveyance itself also requires a four-fifths vote.

If council wants to utilize that procedure, what I would recommend is a motion and second approving the ordinance as the first reading

and if Council is so inclined, you could entertain a second motion stating that the second reading is waived and adopting the ordinance as proposed.

As I said, this is scheduled for a public hearing tonight.

Unless there's a question of technical clarity, I'll open the public hearing.

Are there any questions of technical clarity?

An open public hearing, anybody like to speak on this topic?

Would the applicant like to speak on this topic?

Okay.

Anybody else?

If not, I close the public hearing.

Well, I, just for the purposes of discussion,

Would we make a motion and a second before making a move to waive the second reading?

The procedure that I would suggest is that the council could entertain a motion and second, as you normally do on a first reading for an ordinance.

Is there a second to the motion?

Second.

Any discussion?

If not, let's vote.

Thank you very much.

I was part of the discussion when I used to work for the city 15 years ago.

I'm glad it's funny something is being done.

Next on our agenda is the repair of downtown Mall Crossing.

I'm not sure where my backup is.

This item is being presented to you tonight by, I'm doing the primary talking and Mr. Daley is here since his office does mall maintenance and Mr. Edwards I haven't seen but I hope he's back here, who is our city engineer so I will muddle through this and then when you get into the technical questions I'll probably have to turn to them but

As you know in 2007-2008 time period we undertook a repair of the downtown mall.

The project included replacement of all the bricks except for the drainage runnels on both sides and what are called the soldier course of bricks which are adjacent to the buildings.

The bricks on the mall had previously been mortar set.

All the bricks were set in mortar.

And one of the things we did when we changed was we set them on a sand bed without mortar, but we left the drainage runnels and the soldier course.

One of the reasons for that, primary reason for that was for the drainage runnels was to, you know, to have a surface there that would take water and move water and not have it go down through at those points.

and Edith Brics because the runnels are where the drainage goes.

We replaced all the electrical and utility.

A lot of the utilities were new lining.

We replaced the pedestrian lights.

We added drinking fountains.

We replaced the concrete banding that was in place throughout the mall with granite banding, which had been the original proposal from Lawrence Halperin when he designed the mall.

But for cost-saving reasons, the city decided when the mall was done in the 70s to put in concrete.

We added more flowerpots.

We added more benches.

One of the

driving factors in this.

One of our guiding principles was to try to honor the original design to the extent possible.

We knew we needed to make some changes, but we really wanted to try to honor the design that Mr. Halperin had done.

That was a primary focus of the BAR.

We knew there were a couple of issues that had a lot of discussion.

One was, did we want to use the granite instead of the concrete?

And that was a collective decision of the BAR and city council

that they much preferred to go with the granite, so we made that decision.

Another was the size of the bricks and whether we used 4x8 bricks or 4x12 bricks.

And there was a decision made to go with the 4x12s because that was traditional, they would keep the same pattern

essentially as Halperin had designed and so we went with those.

One of our concerns when we did that was with the longer aspect brick you get movement more easily from that and so we knew that going in but we were willing to take the chance because of the desire to honor that original design and keep it the same kind of space.

I think an important

The factor to remember is that when Halprin designed the mall, it was truly a pedestrian space.

There were no vehicular crossings.

Second Street was added later and then Fourth Street was added much later.

And with that, with the addition of vehicles on the mall, it changed the use there.

And I think that we started having problems on Second Street.

One of the reasons we did this project was we were having major problems with the crossings on Second Street.

back when I first came to town 15 years ago and there were a lot of temporary fixes and for probably five years I guess we had a temporary asphalt fix in there, stamped asphalt for a while and then just plain regular asphalt.

In the course of the planning process, again a primary decision was to keep the

the mortared runnels in place and to use the bigger bricks.

One of the issues in doing that, we talked back and forth with the BAR about, was the concern about the rocking that you get and where you've got the fixed drainage runnel, how that rocking and that loose material rocks there and what it calls the instability that you get.

So that was a concern.

However,

City Council by motion said we want to use the 4x12's we want to go with the design that most keeps the Halperin design and we want to set the bricks in sand so that's some of how we got to the decision as you know now we've got the last several years we've seen a pretty significant deterioration

of the bricks and the crossings.

A question was asked, when did we start allowing delivery vehicles in that area?

I'm not sure the exact date, but it was since I've been here, and it was primarily in response to a concern of one restaurant at the time,

about deliveries to their business and a delivery person that didn't want to have to push things to them.

They wanted to be able to get right up to the door.

So a decision was made to allow those to happen.

We think that having those heavy vehicles has been one of the primary problems with the crossings.

They were, you know, when

They were built, originally they were not designed to support delivery vehicles or vehicles of any kind and then they started getting a lot of traffic.

The automobiles do not seem to be causing a major problem but the delivery vehicles do.

The reasons, if we started doing some analysis, we engaged our city design team, public work, excuse me, park staff that does maintenance and MMM Design who are the ones that did the design for us.

and said, you know, what are the problems?

Why are we having these issues?

And primarily what we came up with was the fact that the drainage runnels were left in place with the mortar joints and the bricks set in sand that adjoined those that causes the rocking.

The longer aspect bricks that we have adjacent to those runnels and the granite tiles that continue to rock and every time they rock and get unstable,

that you get the chipping and the breaking that comes with that.

The use of the granite that is not as durable as the concrete in those areas and continued use of the crossing by heavy delivery vehicles.

We believe those are what have caused the problem that we have.

What we have gotten now is

is two alternatives that have been recommended.

The one that we are suggesting that we proceed with would eliminate the Runnels and use only the heavy duty four by

eight pavers in that area laid on a asphalt sand setting bed.

We believe that will repair, that will give us more stability.

We also know that when we do that by having the continued heavy vehicles, it's not a permanent fix.

We'll have this problem down the road at some point.

With light vehicles, you're gonna get this issue at some point, but having the delivery trucks

the 18 wheelers that come across there, we feel the heavy Brinks trucks delivering money, those things are very heavy and those are going to cause problems.

So we're recommending to you tonight that you allocate

We believe we've got a cost estimate that's a little less than $100,000.

I've asked that you allocate up to $120,000 so once we get bids we don't have to come back and ask for more dollars.

We think that will be a cushion where we can cover it.

and then a couple of other things.

In the recommendation we said that we'd like to eliminate the delivery vehicles.

I think some of you raised some very good points and I think a better course of action is tonight if you're interested in pursuing that, there's enough interest on council that we have a process.

I've had a conversation with the president of the DBAC about it and while he's got a personal opinion,

He agrees that he would help us facilitate that conversation with our businesses and then we would come back to you with a recommendation after having that input and allowing them to have input in the process.

There's a couple of other things that were asked today or this weekend in emails.

One of them was how long will this take?

We think that it would take approximately two weeks to do each one of them.

We would not do them both at the same time.

We would keep one open.

As we said in the memo, we would look for the most advantageous time to try to do the work so that we can disrupt the least disruptive as possible to our businesses in that area.

But we believe it needs to be done because it's disruptive now, as hard as it is to cross them sometimes.

And then there was a question of, well, if it won't support the heavy vehicles, what is the solution?

The solution, we believe, that would be the end-all basic fix, as much as you can make anything, is pull all the bricks out and put a concrete road section in there and make it a street.

That was absolutely against the will of the BAR and City Council before.

I think that it would be the same issue with the BAR in particular.

I can't, you know, I don't know where y'all might be, but we tried an asphalt street for a while.

We know that, again, that with the transitions, it's very difficult, again, with the weight of the vehicles that come across there.

So the solution to fix it would be to

pull out everything and just put concrete all the way across.

Again, we don't think that's the aesthetic.

That's in keeping with the spirit of the downtown mall.

We wouldn't recommend that, but if council wanted to proceed with that, then we would do as directed.

So we, again, in front of you tonight, there's a recommendation that you appropriate the $120,000 are allocated from the council contingency to the parks and recs downtown, the CIP item.

Let me say that I think I'll be totally opposed to not having brick, personally.

I think it will be a disaster to have concrete, totally.

We think this will be much better, but we want to be completely open about it that

Well, there is concrete underneath.

I mean, there's a concrete slab underneath that's the base now.

Following up on Mayor Huja's comment though, there are many places in different cities where there is the surface treatment as a brick but underneath it is designed to hold the loads of a heavy vehicle so there would be a concrete base or a concrete base.

So I just

There is a concrete base there.

Right, but there is concrete.

While he's coming up, I have another question.

And I personally am reluctant to agree to spend $100,000 before we know if trucks are going to be going across it.

Because I don't want to spend $100,000 and then have trucks go across it.

I'd rather take the time, bring in the community, make the decision about the trucks before we decide what to do.

can make an appropriate engineering thing.

But I also, since we're getting the engineer up here after we're done with that question, I'd like to also ask the question about the way that the speed bumps are, because I've sat there and watched trucks come, or even large cars, and they get up on that high speed bump and then it comes crashing down onto the surface of the mall, and that seems to be a time when it really

We actually did modify those.

I know they were even higher before.

Yeah, they were higher before so we actually had to flatten off the peak a little bit.

What I've observed with the current ones is that the speed is the issue.

If they approach it too quickly, then they tend to bottom out.

If they don't, they stop completely like they should, then they usually don't drag.

It's not the drag I'm worried about.

Yeah.

We don't think so.

Under recent studies or papers under vehicle situations like this, the setting bed is a little more forgiving.

It gives you enough cushion there that it functions more like a flexible pavement, like an asphalt pavement does.

And you need that.

Okay, and that way we could still have a brick surface, but it would still have a subsurface that's more sturdy and durable for trucks.

That's fine if you'd like to do that.

Any comments or questions?

Yeah, I said 18-wheelers or nothing.

Or just cars.

What we were recommending was not the large delivery vehicles.

Keep the cars.

I mean, I don't want to fight that battle again.

But the large delivery vehicles,

Mr. Mayor, when I first brought this up I was concerned about the parents coming down, tourists coming down, and the big season would be graduation or kids coming back.

And it seems to me that this will not be done by, say, April 1st or early April.

So I would like to make sure that this is done in an off time because I'm thinking more of the Regal, the one next to the Regal Theater.

Unless you did half and half.

Tonight at the BAR there's a proposal for a new theater group that's going to take that over and it'll be shut down between probably in another month and November while they're doing reconstruction there.

It wasn't so much the Regal itself, it was the free trolley that stops there.

When we've closed it in the past, the trolley has made arrangements to kind of stop at both ends and go around.

We understand that and want to make sure, that's why I say we want to make sure we work with the DBHC and the businesses to minimize, just like we did when we did the mall reconstruction.

And one last thing, Dede, if we're going to do this and it looks like it's going to be a recurring repair, we ought to also fund repair.

I think there ought to be an ongoing repair fund.

We should not have to wait for a catastrophe to replace it.

I agree with that.

I'll ask the explosive question.

Okay, thank you very much.

The next item is the Fort Worth Building Unit Ordinance Regulations.

On November the 18th, council approved changes to both the zoning and subdivision ordinances that allow the city now to adopt regulations to implement section 3412 of our zoning ordinance, which was originally adopted in March of 2009.

and tonight I'm here to ask council to consider adopting the regulations that have been drafted and approved by our housing advisory committee after a lengthy effort and multiple group discussions regarding the particulars of those regulations.

Just to give a brief overview, what is section 3412?

Well, it's a section of our zoning ordinance that deals specifically with provision of affordable

housing units only under certain conditions.

Those conditions are either when a rezoning or special use permit are required and the proposed residential density is equal to or greater to 1.0 floor area ratio.

So a very specific limited instance of when it's actually triggered.

If it is triggered, what does it require?

Well, applicants are required to provide either affordable units, which can be on the same side or an alternative site, or they can make a cash contribution into the city's affordable housing fund.

So why do we need the regulations?

There's no real guidance provided in the ordinance that lets an applicant know what the city expects to comply with 3412.

For example, the ordinance states the housing units have to be provided pursuant to the code

and committed for a period of 30 years, that's a long time, to be affordable to households with incomes at 60% or less of area median.

That's clear but it raises a number of questions.

For example, what income information, while income information can be easily obtained from either the HUD or city website,

If housing units are affordable rentals, how should the rent be calculated?

It's a reasonable question.

It's not really covered by our ordinance.

And how will the public be made aware of the fact that these units are available and how they go about leasing one?

As for the 30-year period, the ordinance dictates an extended compliance period, but it doesn't elaborate on who, when,

or Powell will be responsible for tracking and oversight of those units.

Units can be provided either onsite or offsite, but there's no standards in place to require that the units be equivalent in any way.

to the market rate units and have access to the same amenities, for example, storage lockers.

You know, those are nice and sometimes you have more stuff than you can store in your own apartment and you need access to those workout rooms, those sorts of things.

Again, these were details that we wanted to incorporate in the regulations.

As for cash payments, if you make those in lieu of providing the actual units, the ordinance provides this as an option, but it doesn't tell you when you're supposed to pay the money.

So in summary, the regulations are needed to deal with those issues I've described as well as a whole host of others, and you can probably think of some on your own, so that we can provide reasonable requirements for the city to provide an appropriate level of oversight if we're going to require

or ask people, applicants, to put units in place or provide us with money.

Thank you.

Yes, in fact, I guess we went through probably about a six month, Kristin Szakos is the council representative, and went through about a six month process of reviewing various specifics and went through quite a bit of involved discussion.

The regulations were written and incorporated into kind of a standard

operating procedure for the city and then they specifically cover how and when cash contributions should be paid as well as what's expected for the onsite or offsite units, whether the units be rentals or for purchase units.

There are two schedules that are incorporated into the standard operating procedures.

One deals specifically with rental properties, the other deals with for purchase units.

The rental schedule covers things like defining what is a qualified tenant, describing how to calculate maximum monthly rent,

how to market a unit to let the public know that they're available and what the income restrictions are and then the for purchase schedule at the request of the HAC or the Housing Advisory Committee it provides very little in the way of restrictive guidance or guidelines.

It was written to provide maximum flexibility for the owner to arrange purchase and financing of units that's best suited to the situation of that particular development.

In particular, the Housing Advisory Committee kept going back to the Laughlin Hills proper, which set up a kind of a housing trust fund where there was, as opposed to adjusting the price of the unit, what they did is they made a pool of money available to help them afford it.

That's two ways to get at the same thing.

But instead of prescribing a way in which we think that for purchase affordable units should be done, we'd like to encourage some innovation, like what was shown in Laughlin Hills.

Anyway,

I just want to thank you very much, Ms. McHugh, for answering my questions very thoroughly.

Now I very much understand what's been going on and just on the last point, it does

And again, just for the public, it seems that the Housing Advisory Committee has been struggling with this question about how do you actually get the units built.

Well what we're doing is we're in the process of revising what's known as policy letter number one.

There's three policy letters that were adopted by council, and I don't have a specific date in my mind right now, but were adopted to provide guidance.

Guidelines really for for use of our our housing funds what we wanted to use strategic funds that have been set aside in the Economic Development Department and so forth but the first one really deals with how we want to use the housing fund so we talked at length about what was the original intent for the use of the funds was it for programmatic and support type services or was it really to get at that 15%

you know, goal for 2025 and to actually put the money towards sticks and bricks and development type cost.

That's really where we landed after research of the history of the program.

But what that policy letter will do is refine the ways we think that it can be used and try to open up, you know, and even provide some suggestions for what we think.

And for one thing I and we've talked about this before, it's a strategy that's done with the Alexandria Housing Authority, where that authority actually buys condominiums within private projects, and that is used as affordable housing.

and I'm just wondering if that's the kind of thinking, any of that kind of thinking outside the box or is that something that should be done through the CDC or is it something through the Housing Authority?

I think that particular example probably is well-suited to the Affordable Dwelling Unit Ordinance.

It is probably an attempt to provide compliance where, and we talked about this, again, you can provide either on-site units construction or off-site and oftentimes, you know, it's more desirable just to buy something that's already built.

I was just going to answer one little bit as part of the discussion that's been had about an example like that if the housing fund itself were to be used to buy a condo

And then it's just a one to one ratio rather than a seven to one ratio.

Well, I'm just wondering if some of the, you know, the student housing that we've approved on West Main Street, if they had

I don't want to discourage the discussion, but you're getting way off topic.

I know, but there ought to be time for the discussion.

Well, it's only 9 o'clock.

My question is, and you can tell that I'm an editor, the use of ADU to mean affordable dwelling unit, whereas in our code we already have ADU meaning accessory dwelling unit.

But I think that we but the other is already in the code in both ways.

Quick one, Mr. Mayor.

I would just like to take my hats off to the my hat off to the commission.

To many of us, affordable housing is an oxymoron.

And any commission that tackles that question deserves a lot of credit.

at the time of the building permit.

That's what we decided.

And again, that's incorporated into the regulations.

But up until now, it was like, well, you know, five years.

There just is no guidance in the ordinance.

I mean, that's the regulation purposes is to provide that structure.

And I will acknowledge that this is a very hardworking committee.

So is there a motion?

So moved.

Any further discussion?

No more.

We'll keep on working on other items.

We all are.

Okay, it is our two hour point for our yield resolution.

And how perfect with Parks and Rec that we would get up and move around a little bit.

.

?

?

?

?

?

?

?

Yep.

?

Dede Smith

Thanks to Parks and Recreation and Land Management.

I'm going to give you an update on parkland acquisition, urban forest management and tree planting, some of our stormwater management efforts, as well as our efforts to combat invasive plants in the park system.

We have a presentation for you this evening.

It is somewhat lengthy but we will attempt to move through it with as all possible speed and following the presentation we'll be happy to answer any questions or engage in any further discussion that you would like to.

I think we have an interesting story to present to you tonight.

It's accomplished a lot of goals that have been set out for the Parks and Recreation Department over the last several years that we're pretty proud of.

Some of you may recall that in 2006 a needs assessment was completed for city parks and recreation.

And one of the things that came out of that was a development prior facility priority ranking, what people would like to see the most.

And the number, the top four things that came out of that study were walking and biking trails, neighborhood parks, nature centers, natural areas, wildlife habitat.

Those are the top four things that the citizens in the community were looking for.

This needs assessment has informed a tremendous amount of work over the last number of years, and a good portion that we're going to focus on tonight.

Shortly following the completion of this study, we hired a parks and trail planner, who is Chris, again, sitting here.

And Chris has been spearheading a lot of the work that we're going through tonight.

At this point, I'm going to turn

Chris and I are going to tag team this a bit this evening.

I'm going to turn it over to him right now to walk through, um, our land acquisition and trail acquisition easement efforts.

Good evening counselors.

I'm here to work with Brian on this presentation of what we've been up to, uh, the past five, six years with the efforts to expand the park system and the trail system.

When I was hired, it's a dual function that I see myself as the,

off-road trail planner and coordinator as well as the parks property planner and interface with the public and those sorts of things but primarily I looked at the beginning as a trail planning so we looked at where is the Rivanna Trail now and that was a number one priority protect the existing Rivanna Trail make it actually fully legal so we did some analysis of talked with Rivanna Trails Foundation said where do you have easements where do you have letters of permission in that process we determined that

The Rivanna Trails Foundation had two fully legal permanent easements, which is what the city gets.

Most of their trail was handshake agreements, letters of permission, slightly lower than fully deeded in the courthouse easements.

And the city held easements, particularly along what we call the river trail there.

Most of that trail is actually on private property with easements.

So this was the condition when I showed up to start working.

We also took the recently adopted bicycle and pedestrian and trails plan the city had.

We put that into GIS and looked at everywhere where there were trails already in existence that needed better legal protection and or areas that there were trails in this plan that did not yet exist and began talking with property owners about how to

achieved the goals of making these existing trails legal forever and expanding the system.

And that plan also has certain priorities.

Most of the top few are now in action.

Probably the top five or six are either in action or halfway built at the moment.

The acquisitions that we have accomplished in the past few years

again primarily came out of trails discussions you talk to property owners some of them are willing to give an easement some for a variety of reasons would rather separate themselves from that land and they will give it to you sell it to you split their property in half so a lot of the acquisitions you'll see follow the waterways which is where the trails currently exist and are expanding we have other opportunities where we expand existing park lands and we have additional acquisitions that are new park lands new pocket parks that will also cover

This is a general map showing how the city is three-quarters surrounded by water.

We have Meadow Creek along the north side, Moores Creek along the south side, and the Rivanna River as an eastern border.

And that also mimics very closely the shape of the current Rivanna Trail loop system.

This graphic shows what the city owned before 2003 or 2001 in the Meadow Creek Valley.

This is Route 29 and Route 250 for reference.

We've put a locator map on each of these.

So this red circle, when you see it in the corner, will show you where in the city this larger map is focused on.

So we have the gardens at the old fairgrounds, Greenbrier Park.

This is Meadow Creek itself.

And here's McIntyre and Greenleaf.

Through a process of acquisitions, this was a donation by a developer of 13 acres in 2001.

That was the first donation that occurred through neighborhood development, I believe, negotiations before I got here.

That's 13 acres along the right bank of Meadow Creek.

That's this one.

We also, in discussions with the Seminole Square Shopping Center, they donated 18 acres that they owned along, starting from Mickey Drive all the way along the creek and behind the Pepsi plant and Seminole Square.

That's 18 acres that was donated at no charge.

We just worked with Region 10, who owns a building here at the corner of Mickey and Hydraulic.

They determined they did not really need anything on the other side of the creek, and we purchased from them 3.3 acres for $20,000 in 2011.

and the final acquisition in this corridor is from the Hearthwood Apartments and it was a 4.5 acre negotiated for about $50,000 and together those form what we now call the Meadow Creek Valley Park.

Another acquisition that we understand is coming in at any time is the replacement land for the Meadow Creek Parkway.

The deal when that road was agreed to was that land lost at McIntire Park would be replaced

We are getting 59 acres of land, everything from the high school football stadium up to CATEC at Ryer Road.

Much of this will become new parkland and we understand that's going to happen at any time.

Meadow Creek flows right along the edge of a lot of this property and through the southern portion of it.

Two property owners, the Rivanna Trail comes along the south side of the creek, so we had discussions with two property owners.

One of them owned this section, Mr. Wood.

He sold that to us in 2009 for $10,100.

And then next, the other property owner was the remnant of a subdivision that was built over here called Locust Meadows.

And this was a remnant six acres that was donated by the owner free of charge.

So together we got roughly 10 acres of Meadow Creek right down the middle.

And this is Holmes Avenue.

And this is Rio Road over here going through the curves.

The Kenwood Lane acquisition was the burned out house at the end of Kenwood cul-de-sac, which we recently discussed here at council, where we purchased the entire lot, shaved off the back area, lower land for the park and the stream restoration project, retained a pipe stem for pedestrian access, and this lot is in the process of being sold back as a single family residence.

So this graphic shows the entirety of Meadow Creek.

with the acquisitions we discussed.

These lines are trail easements which we'll discuss later.

Now from the fairgrounds all the way through Greenbrier Park down to Melbourne Road, last section before Holmes Avenue and then this is the confluence with the Rivanna River.

We have acquired 97.5 additional acres

for the cost of $135,600.

A large chunk of this portion of the city was donated, which really helped with our per acre cost over the valley.

But we do think that we now own quite a bit of the Meadow Creek Valley, which used to be a single track foot trail through mostly private property.

So we're very excited about the north side of town.

We have also then started the upstream end of Moore's Creek, working our way down Moore's Creek across town.

This is in the Fry's Spring neighborhood.

This is the new collegiate apartments across the creek and the end of McElroy Drive.

This owner had an unbuilt lot adjacent to a unit that he rents.

Again, was more interested in selling it off as a pocket park.

So rather than an easement, we purchased, which is nice that the trailheads to actually own the land if you ever want to put a bench or signage.

This works out as the trailhead property on Moore's Creek.

That's approximately half an acre.

This is McElroy Drive.

Old Lynchburg Road comes through here and goes to Azalea Park.

So it's up in the cul de sac there of McElroy.

The dam is the next property up.

It's probably right here.

This is the Hartman Mill acquisition, which should go to closing tomorrow.

In fact, we would have closed on Thursday, but there was a blizzard

This is Jordan Park existing Avon Street heading out of town and Morse Creek flowing downstream towards the Rivanna.

This is the Brookwood subdivision, which is relatively new.

20 acres for $250,000.

This has the site of the original Hartman's Mill.

You can see the foundations.

In fact, the grist stone, at least one, probably two, are laying in the dirt there, and we hope that this park

Not only is a natural area stream valley and for trails, but we can do some really nice historical interpretation on this site.

Pollocks is here.

Yes.

So the public housing and X is yes.

And we are.

Okay, certain.

This is Quarry Park, which we closed on right before the new year.

It's 12 acres of additional land.

And we imagine we'll have a ribbon cutting for that and get you out there and to see Hartman's Mill in the next month or so.

Both city and county side of the creek, the same is true for Hartman's Mill.

We bought a large parcel so the city does own some parkland outside of the city.

McIntyre Park was outside of the city when we originally got that from Mr. McIntyre.

So that's not necessarily odd, particularly on the city limits like this.

Beautiful cliffs.

And again, the creek comes through here.

Mrs. Savage's Extreme Makeover is focused on this piece of property, particularly along this edge.

They have done the cleanups there.

The old concrete creek crossing we're looking to remove is roughly here.

And the new bridge you'll see later is roughly here.

So these are now contiguous parcels.

We bought the only piece of land in the city south of Interstate 64.

We are working on plans to connect Old Monticello Road, well, what we call Monticello Road, with Old Monticello Road, which comes up to Mickey Tavern.

And it is still paved and laying in the woods defunct up to a certain point.

We've discussed with engineers how to get a tunnel through here.

This is going to be a multi-year project.

But we now at least own the piece of land that allows us to get through the interstate.

and potentially set up our beachhead for getting tourists and others up to Mickey Tavern in Monticello instead of going through this interchange.

So the Morris Creek system again includes, here's the cul-de-sac, a few trail easements, Hartman's Mill, Quarry Park, and the piece south of the interstate, which is now an elbow lake of Morris Creek.

We are working along Morris Creek.

We don't envision that we'll ever own quite the percentage as we do along Meadow Creek, just for various reasons, the way the properties have been cut up.

But we are also excited to see Morris Creek Valley turning green over time.

Along the Rivanna River, we have acquired a few parcels.

One of them is relatively small.

I believe it's in the 7,000 to 10,000 square feet where there's a piece of city land off the end of Madison Avenue.

This gentleman owned this little very tiny house and wanted to expand it.

He also owns this house along the river and said, I'll give you your riverfront that you would like if you give me this buildable lot here.

I don't think it was a full buildable lot, but it allowed him to expand this teeny tiny house.

So free of charge other than survey and we now own river front land and we have some economic development potential on the other lot.

Mr. Cosner, who owns all four corners at 250 and High Street, gave us the land below auto zone at Free Bridge.

So there's the retaining wall.

We did have a trail easement along this.

Again, we prefer property ownership, particularly a wonderful donation like this allows us to get in and deal with trees and invasives more than just the simple trail easement, which is very confined.

This is a donation of two acres right at an entrance point of the city along the river.

We're excited about that one.

Davis Field is known as Davis Field because there is a soccer field on this upper portion that has long been operated by SACA at consent of the private property owner.

It was proposed for development.

That did not work.

We've purchased it now as parkland, and SACA holds an agreement where they mow this field and maintain it, and the rest of it is simple woods.

We've built a trail to connect over to what was existing Northeast Park at the time.

Southern Development gave us a donation when they started building these Rock Creek apartments.

We were in the midst of Forest Hills Park planning.

They determined it was a good thing for them and for the city, and they gave us an acre and a half free of charge to add to Forest Hills Park.

That's currently simply forested area.

The active part of the park remains what we've always owned.

We had two acquisitions near the Fry's Spring Beach Club.

Number one came in first and it's three parcels that were owned by a land trust.

They wanted to make sure this remained wooded.

They said they would sell it to the city so long as we put a conservation easement on it.

So we've noted that there.

That was a below price sale.

They really just wanted to make sure it remained woods forever.

So we got a really nice deal from that group and we now own in that one of the two original Fry's Springs.

When the Old Lynchburg Road project came along, the city negotiated with the Fry's Spring Beach Club to put a stormwater treatment area here.

In those negotiations, 2.5 acres total were purchased for $250,000 and the rest of this other than just the pond area is basically going to be parkland.

We now have a trail that comes all the way through these two pieces right to the crosswalk on Old Lynchburg Road.

and the second acquisition allowed us to buy the second of the two springs at Fry's Springs.

So similar to Hartman Mill, we have a historical element here that is not typical in our parks.

We'll probably put some signage there and demark that.

Thanks, Chris.

As you can see, obviously a tremendous amount of new parkland has been acquired in the last several years, almost 150 acres, which is equivalent to the entire land area of McIntyre Park for an acquisition cost of $1.85 million and an average price per acre of twelve and a half thousand.

In 2001, parkland as a percentage of the city's gross land area was 11.8 percent.

Today it is almost 14% and will continue to grow with future acquisitions.

It does not include parks like Ivy Creek, Ragged Mountain, Sugar Hollow.

This 147 acres does include the land that comes to us as replacement land along the John Warner Parkway.

So those 45 acres are included in this calculation, yes.

There's a listing of all of the acquisitions that have been made, what their general description was, what their acquisition cost, other costs associated with the acquisition of the parcel, whether it be survey work or otherwise total cost.

and management strategy for each of the lands and most of these lands have been purchased with the strategy being conservation and connectivity.

As most of this new land is stream valley or natural area, the largest maintenance expenses we have relate to the maintenance of trails or construction of trails, bridges, as well as corrective or tree work that needs to be done for safety reasons, invasive species management, and trash removal to make the properties available for the public.

Chris mentioned the athletic field portion of the Davis Field property is leased by the soccer organization of Charlottesville and Albemarle.

We've received revenue from them in the amount of $10,000 annually for that lease.

They've been a very good partner in the maintenance of that property.

In general, for these types of lands, costs can average between $350 to $500 per acre per year.

In some years we may not spend any money on a piece of property.

In other years we may spend a little bit more than the $500 per acre.

But they are low-cost lands.

Trees come down that aren't blocking a trail or are not a hazard to public safety.

Those trees are left in their natural condition on the ground to decompose and provide habitat and provide for the natural succession in the forest.

There's a few areas we've been able to acquire trail easements and we continue to do so.

Where the Rivanna Trail may exist, again, we're trying to cover those properties and get them under easement.

So I have a list.

and a map that shows red, yellow, green, whether we have ever talked to this property owner, whether we're currently talking to them or green, we own the easement and it's all taken care of.

So it shows me how to plan for these things.

In the Morris Creek area, this is Jefferson Park Circle and the new Fry's Spring properties and the Beach Club.

There's trail along Morris Creek here.

Through negotiations with the city, we have acquired three permanent easements from these property owners.

We purchased the McElroy subdivision trailhead, cul-de-sac trailhead there, as we noted earlier.

We are about ready to sign the documents on the piece of property these folks own.

We are still negotiating with these owners in the middle to get easement signed for this particular section of trail.

But we have picked up three plus four, and we have a fifth one on its way out of the eight properties in this area.

Further down Morris Creek, this is the 5th Street Taco Bell and the food lines over here on your way to the interstate.

We do have easements from Burger Busters, which is Taco Bell, the Tiger Fuel that was recently renovated.

Brookwood, the neighborhood development, got an easement from them when that was built.

And the Hartman Mill property will help us further push the trail downstream on Morris Creek.

And we continue to work on finalizing the easements in this area currently.

Along Meadow Creek, there are three easements held by the city.

The Brandywine Homeowners Association next to Region 10 was not interested in selling land, but there is an easement on what was an old road bed running through that area, so it fits perfectly to put the trail on top of that easement.

The Niedler property between what we bought here and what we own here, as a Rivanna Trail currently has a fully dedicated easement there.

We are working with the property owner to add a multi-use trail easement, and the Rivanna Trails Foundation

is happily signing over their two easements to the city, one of which is the Needlers and the other one is Locust Meadows Owners Association.

Um, Rivanna Trails Foundation doesn't necessarily want to be legally responsible for trails and they're happy to have the city take these over so long as the property owners are willing to do the same.

And we're currently finalizing agreements with number two and number three here to turn Rivanna Trails easements into city easements.

The other easement noted is the Wildwood piece.

which is technically in the county and there is an easement on that dedicated to the county.

We may transfer that to the city because while we're going to be maintaining all this other trail, we could take over maintenance of that very inexpensively and the county doesn't have to drive mowers from Darden Park all the way over here.

So in easements, we have nine signed new easements since the trail plan was put in place.

Again, we have a lot more new trail than that simply because we've ended up purchasing the land rather than getting an easement.

So we really have more like

30 properties now taken care of.

That's a quarter mile of trail just in easements alone and the cost to acquire so far $12,800 with some survey plat fees around $1,200 for each property.

Also, proffered trail easements come in free.

We got one of those this week actually ready to sign.

And this shows how I look at my world.

This was 2008.

You'll see we had some negotiations here in the Meadow Creek area.

We have some no easement properties down here along Morse Creek, and I think I have the updated map as the next slide or it fades into it.

Now you see all the green that's come along here.

So I know I'm pretty much done on Meadow Creek, and I see areas where we're gonna need to continue to negotiate for trail easements.

This is the Parkway Trail, which we'll soon receive.

That is built on an old railroad, shows a paved trail system.

The Meadow Creek Trail at Region 10 and the Brandywine Homeowners.

This is that old road bed that is a wonderful wide flat natural surface trail.

We also have added a 250 bypass trail through Western McIntyre Park behind the fire station with the bridge coming in, the interchange coming in.

This is part of the connection from Whole Foods and the hydraulic road area back to the downtown mall.

Another piece of that connection to show another type of trail surface we use is the Crusher Run stone dust.

And so three different surface types, natural, paved, crusher run, we can use those in different applications.

We've also worked very hard to make sure all of our parks have an entryway that is not part of the driveway.

A number of our parks, including the very popular Riverview Trail, when you enter the park from the sidewalk, you had to walk where the cars were driving.

So little short sections that we've added to formalize those connections and let the strollers and the kids on bikes work their way into the park to the playground and connect to the trail system.

Another type of trail we're doing, this is the first one I'm aware of, is an urban section trail.

This is a 10-foot sidewalk, which is to VDOT spec for two-way bicycle travel, and it is along Meade Avenue.

This is Market Street up here, and the railroad's up higher and Bierone.

This will connect with the CityWalk project and from the music pavilion to Meade Park Honesty Pool with all the new things that the kids and families love.

We will have an off-road paved urban trail.

and this is all paid for by an enhancement grant.

They are done with Meade Park to Market Street.

They have a little bit of work to do the next couple weeks by the Moto Saloon and then they will build phase two later this summer, get it all the way up to the railroad and connect it into city walks so all that opens simultaneously.

Corey Bridge, one of the things we mentioned with some new parkland and getting their RTF into shape is sometimes there's some pretty old bridges in there.

This bridge was inspected and condemned.

The telephone poles underneath of it were rotting.

It was built by volunteers over an old sewer abutment, which was wonderful.

They did it relatively cheap and made a big connection for a number of years.

It needed to be replaced.

We bought the bridge that sat by Dirty Nellies for two years while they replaced the railroad, the street,

So we got a discount on the bridge.

It was moved across town and we hired people to build new abutments.

This bridge used to sit down here.

It had abutments in the creek.

Those are now all gone.

The new bridge is a clear span.

It's higher up.

It's straighter.

It's more visible to park users.

And we're really happy that this is going to get more people to the other side of the creek into the woods from what's now mostly the baseball fields and the concession stand there at Corey Park.

This is a bridge that has also been funded by transportation enhancement grants.

It will connect the current golf course.

This is the skate park under construction and the future botanical garden park on the east side of McIntire with the ball fields and everything else on the west side of McIntire.

This is a 3D rendering.

If you're interested, I have a walkthrough that is animated that shows you actually walking over this bridge.

We've had a discussion with the public.

This will probably be a different color steel.

We've made some design adjustments based on public comment.

We hope to wrap the planning up, submit this for construction, get it under construction this fall, and see if we can't have this thing built by the time the interchange is complete and open it all up at one time.

This shows a summary of some of the things I've been discussing.

Here is the 250 Bypass Trail section that's built.

This is the bridge at McIntire Park that will be built.

The interchange is under construction now.

So is this trail.

that will continue down Skanks Branch to the downtown mall.

This is City Walk coal tower trail and this is the Meade Avenue trail.

So to show some of the

Higher class, multi-use paved type circulation systems.

We really are starting to see options for longer distance commuting in the city.

Not necessarily, nothing wrong with the beautiful river trail, but it's probably not going to get to you to work.

These are more of the working trails that are bringing everybody into the city and letting the families get out to McIntire Park, get down to Meade Park, hopefully to the river trail someday.

Maintenance costs for trails, nature trails are pretty low cost.

We use mostly volunteer labor to clear them and rake them.

Multi-use trails, once you pave them, you do have to sweep them, do some weed control on them.

We just repaved sections of the river trail that had made it 10 to 12 years and they get flooded all the time, so that's probably the worst environment down there for repaving.

Bridges, we're getting into more bridge work, and that'll probably be one of the more pricey pieces of maintenance over time.

We estimate right now we're at about $25,000 in annual maintenance costs.

Thanks, Chris.

Moving on to some other kind of improvements that have been happening in the park system.

Talk about some green infrastructure efforts from stream restorations to biofilters and rain gardens, tree planting and acquisition.

The Meadow Creek Stream Restoration Project which took place from Hydraulic Road to the Norfolk Southern Railroad tracks was completed last year.

The project was funded by the Virginia Aquatic Resources Trust Fund to the tune of just under four million dollars.

The entire complete natural channel stream restoration.

Just here two weeks ago this project received a merit award from the Virginia chapter of the American Council of Engineering Companies and actually received

and award in the mail today, which we'll be bringing to the council here on a future meeting.

A very exciting project.

Over the years, we have through a combination of contract work, in-house staff, constructed biofilters at our shop, the primary parks maintenance shop out of Penn Park, Greenleaf Park, Meade Park, Forest Hills, Starr Hill, Smith Aquatic and Fitness Center, Azalea Park,

and at Reeves Park, which is undergoing renovations currently, there will be some bioswales and other biofilters included in that project.

Again, also, biofilters have been constructed at Charlottesville High School in the primary island in front of the Martin Luther King Performing Arts Center and at Greenbrier Elementary School.

And our horticulture staff have assisted in providing plant selection and maintenance in those facilities too.

At Azalea Park as part of the master plan implementation, we did a couple of rain gardens in the front part of the park, adjacent to the parking lot to capture and treat that rainwater before it gets into Morse Creek.

And then in the back of the park is a stormwater wetland that was constructed last year.

on the east end of the park that treats a pretty large drainage area, over 25 acres I believe, of that water coming into the park again before it gets into Morse Creek.

Move on to urban forest management.

This has been a significant effort on our part over the past several years.

The city received a Tree City USA designation from the Arbor Day Foundation in 2006.

Our urban forest management plan was adopted

in May of 2009.

One of the outcomes of that was the establishment of the Tree Commission.

We have an urban preservation and tree planting fund and we've been focusing on the areas of the city lacking tree canopy and I want to explain how we've done that.

In 2006, the university did a tree canopy study that used GIS photography and gave a basic picture of what our tree canopy was in the city.

This study came up with a total tree canopy on average of 31% of the total land area being tree canopy.

At that point we took that information and kind of went a little bit farther with that and had a leaf on aerial photo analysis done.

through the Virginia Department of Forestry and Virginia Tech.

This imagery was taken specifically for this process, for this project, and was actually captured tree canopy information at the parcel level.

So if someone would like to know what the tree canopy calculation is for their specific parcel, we have that information.

All this information is now in GIS.

So if you look at the image, the darker the color, the darker the green, the higher the tree canopy.

You can see in the center of town where the images are lighter, and that's the downtown area, West Main Street, along McIntyre Road, and where you can see the main railroad corridors and the street corridors where the tree canopy is less.

So this information, along with the next information, which was a physical tree inventory that we conducted in 2008,

We actually inventoried all the public trees on public property in parks, in the streets, in the right of ways, and at the schools.

We got information about diameter of breast type species of the tree, the condition of the tree, if there were hazards close by, power lines, other things, and identified in GIS specifically where each of those trees are.

For forested areas of the park system, we did plot samples to kind of extrapolate those values.

Inventorying every single tree in the forest was just a bit too cost prohibitive.

But that information then, along with the tree canopy information, has guided a very strategic effort over the last several years of where we're going to plant trees.

Back up to the next one right there.

If we look at this map,

and see where those images are lighter, where the tree canopy coverage is less than 20%, less than 30%.

And we begin to walk through where we've planted trees, that is where we have been planting.

We've taken advantage of areas along right-of-ways, in parks, and in other places where there's been opportunities to make our tree planting efforts very strategic.

And so that we're not planting, we're taking our resources and applying those trees in places where they really, really are needed.

This is a map that was developed by Neighborhood Development that you've seen in a Planning Commission presentation not too long ago.

It kind of shows some of the pockets where our trees have been planted over the last several years.

So we look at a GIS map.

This is Fifth Street, Fifth Street, and the median along Fifth Street.

The existing trees are shown in GIS in one notation, and then where we've planted, we have that information in a different notation, so we can begin to fill in these gaps.

This picture's a little washed out, but any tree that you see in the city that has a green, what we call a gator bag around the bottom of it,

which is a bag that we fill with water that gradually filters waters to the roots.

Any one of those trees that you see with a gator bag that's on a road or a piece of public property is a tree that we've planted either ourselves with our staff or through contracts.

Over the past five years we've planted over a thousand trees and the trees are not saplings, these are bald and burlapped, two inch DBH minimum.

and trees that we know we can keep alive.

We really believe strongly that survivability of these tree plantings is critical.

We plant the number of trees that we know we can keep alive over the course of the year through regular watering and maintenance.

You can see again, this is just a different map, the tree canopy in green and then locations where our tree plantings have occurred.

since 2009.

This is a close-up of Old Lynchburg Road here, where a number of new trees were planted as part of that project, and then here in Azalea Park.

In the last six months, we've planted, I think, 67 trees in the park and over 50 were planted, I believe, in the

Actually, more than that, we're planted in the wetland area.

So 100, thank you, Chris.

The blue represents new plantings.

The red represents trees that exist in the park.

And then this wetland area now, which we don't have a map just yet, would show, again, how that tree canopy's been expanded.

We're here, again, along Fifth Street, where we begin to fill in these gaps with new trees.

And our tree plantings are,

Very specific in terms of species selection.

Just for example, at Azalea in the wetlands, the following trees were planted.

Red maple, black gum, bald cypress, London plant sycamore, swamp white oak, river birch, willow oak.

And those types of native species are the trees that we've been planting all over town.

And if you're interested at some point over the next couple of days, we can get you a detailed list of where those trees have been planted since fiscal year 2010.

Last but not least, we, as you know, have a pretty big problem with invasive plants.

This is not a unique thing to Charlottesville or Central Virginia.

It's a problem across the United States.

Back in 2007, we had an invasive plant survey conducted of our public properties to give us a sense of, all right, how bad is it and how bad is it and where?

We took that information to begin to start to tackle how we're going to address these invasive plants.

It's, I think, probably impossible to think we can eradicate them all.

We have some areas of infestation that are so significant that the invasives have taken over the entire habitat.

But we've also been attacking this in a variety of different ways.

In the summer of 2008, we had an AmeriCorps team of volunteers that were here for six weeks that did a tremendous amount of invasive removal, and we've maintained those locations since then.

We have numerous volunteer groups that help us work areas to remove vines and trees and all kinds of other stuff.

The Nature Conservancy, as part of the stream restoration area, is monitoring the invasives in the Meadow Creek Valley for 10 years.

and we use a variety of methods to deal with invasive plants, both mechanical, chemical, hand labor, contractors and we had some goats help us out at Penn Park a couple of years ago and they were very effective.

So that's our update.

I hope it's been informative.

Have you trained your sights at all on the Pollux Branch Parkway, Greenway from the strategic investment area?

Because I would love to see that kind of become part of your game plan.

We have.

There's some internal discussions going on.

I think the strategic investment area report kind of informed some things for us.

I just have two questions.

The last one was just from that last slide.

Are the goats coming back?

There's a lot of places that are goat appropriate.

I think they had the dual effect of not only getting rid of invasive species but really kind of

making parks seem accessible to people and people came just to watch the goats do their work and it was a nice way of getting kind of some buzz about the parks.

The other one is, this is a constituent was asking me about the railroad, the rail line that goes from the public works, the city yard across behind Bodo's and off back in there.

We do, but it would have to be a rail with trail.

As we understand, southern states gets a few deliveries a year on that track.

So we've looked at that and talking with the county.

I mean, the county trail planners offices right there, and we sort of looked at that as a possibility.

I don't believe we've

It's almost another commuter line trail.

Yeah, I have a few.

Thank you.

It's so cool.

It's so cool to see the whole picture.

I think it's quite amazing how Parks and Rec is playing such a large role, not only in our providing recreation and parks, but connectivity and the cultural resources are just phenomenal.

And it's just so exciting to see.

dispute your contention that Riverview Trail is not used for commuters, or maybe it won't be as major a commuter track, but I see people commuting on it, carrying their bags from that pan tops.

Center.

So it's all just very exciting.

I will ask, because it did come up at public comment a meeting or two ago, about whether or not with some of the vines in particular you are using a very controlled herbicide, perhaps a painting.

Herbicide guy or girl could be applying.

I could go to Lowe's and buy Roundup and spray it in my yard all day long.

I can't do that on public property, so you have to be a certified pesticide applicator.

We have a number of certified pesticide applicators on our staff who can supervise others who can get varying levels of certification.

If volunteers have that level of certification, they can work with us.

We do, as Mr.

Page, when he was here a couple of meetings ago, had obviously some very big vines, and there is a way for us to coordinate those activities and make sure that there are volunteer groups that can come in and do the mechanical handwork, and then staff will follow behind them to do what herbicide treatment that may or may not be necessary.

and it depends upon the plant, the size of the vine, where it's located, as to what type of application.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah.

Now just to see, now it was questioned whether it was a budget issue.

Yeah, no.

We do where we can.

The money that we had in the FY14 budget

This current fiscal year for contracted invasive work was eliminated as part of last year's budget reductions.

Okay, and this was a big issue when I was out at Ivy Creek Natural Area because herbicides were not

I was pretty against them, but particularly along trails that people and children might use.

But there is a time and a place and one of the big debates we had was that balance between getting rid of invasive plants and wildlife habitat.

I mean, we dealt with this a little bit in the stream restoration project.

There were some concerns on the part of some folks that we were taking away habitat for birds by eliminating all the multiflora rose that was all throughout the stream valley.