City Council Meeting   3/5/2014

Music playing

Dede Smith

Dede Smith.

Ms. Smith?

Here.

Mr. Huja?

Here.

Ms. Szakos?

Here.

She is here also.

Okay.

I would like to start with a few of them today.

Last year there was a national mayor's challenge for water conservation.

It was a friendly competition between different cities and we're going to hope we can take part this year also.

All you have to do is to go on the website www.mywaterpledge.com.

The site will be available on April the 1st, not before that.

April 1st to 30th.

Idea is to conserve water in our community.

And I hope you'll all take part in that.

It'll be in the month of April.

www.mywaterpledge.com.

You can go sign up there.

Thank you.

Second to the proclamation, the festival of the book,

We're always happy to do this proclamation and I know there's somebody here to receive it.

Nancy, you'll come forward.

Whereas literacy is crucial to our ability to understand fully our world in all its diversity.

Whereas reading stimulates the creative and intellectual growth of individuals.

where the book helps us to explore the past, understand the present, and discover the future.

Where Charlottesville is the top nation among book-reading households.

Where the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities area bookstores, libraries, schools, and other educational institutions, publishers, writers, community activities promote literacy and reading.

Now, therefore, I, Satyendra Singh Huja, Meera Sri, Charlottesville,

I do hereby proclaim Wednesday, March 19th through Sunday, March 23rd, 2014 as the 20th annual Virginia Festival of the Book and encourage community members to participate fully in the wild range of events and activities held during this month.

Of course.

As Mr. Huja said, I'm Nancy Damon, the program director of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

This is the 20th anniversary, so this is very exciting for us that we pulled it off for so many years.

Five days, March the 19th through the 23rd, we celebrate literacy in all its forms.

We talk about books for people of all ages and interests.

There are going to be at least 60 programs in area schools.

and then about 130 programs for adults.

And as I said, topics from A to W. We couldn't find anything for Z, but we have arts, cooking, comics, sports and the W's world affairs.

And this year we have one of the city staff, Jim Harndon, participating.

We also have several students from area schools who have grown up

having come to earlier book festivals who have now written books of their own and are back at the book festival.

So that's very exciting for me.

So thank you very much.

We hope to see everybody at the book festival.

And for coming here tonight, I brought the very coveted refrigerator magnets.

It's Wednesday the 19th of March through the 23rd and the website is vabook.org.

All the schedule's been up since January but things do change and also there'll be a printed version

of the Book Festival schedule and the Sunday, March the 16th, Daily Progress.

So, lots of ways to find out about it.

Yes.

There's your Z.

Thanks for that hot tip.

Zithers, right.

Ah, couple, yes.

Household Hazardous Waste Collection Event.

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 by RSWA'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 on a list of items that will be accepted at the event, please visit HTTP colon backslash backslash RSWA dot AVENUE dot org.

The only other one I have is

This is very dry.

The Government Finance Officers Association, GFOA, Distinguished Budget Award of the United States and Canada has awarded the City of Charlottesville GFOA's Distinguished Budget Presentation Award for its Fiscal Year 2014 Budget.

This is the 21st time that Charlottesville has won this award.

I was acting kind of surprised, wasn't I?

And the 12th consecutive budget award.

This award represents a significant achievement by the city.

It reflects the commitment of council and staff to meeting the highest principles of governmental budgeting.

In order to receive the budget award, the city had to satisfy nationally recognized guidelines for effective budget presentation, guidelines that assess how well an entity's budget serves as

One, a policy document, two, a financial plan, three, an operations guide, and four, a communications device.

If an entity receives a proficient rating in all four categories, an award is granted.

The GFOA's Distinguished Budget Presentation Awards Program is the only national awards program in governmental budgeting.

Award recipients have pioneered efforts to improve the quality of budgeting and provide an excellent example for other governments.

Well, I take exception that it's dry.

But I understand it's not the most exciting thing.

But we get very excited about winning this award each year, and we like using this opportunity to kick off

the official budget process which begins tonight with a little good news and we work very hard all year to make sure that our next budget for fiscal year 15 will also receive this award so Counselor Galvin mentioned the proficient scores and we actually did the best at 14 in terms of our outstanding scores so we are very pleased with that and if we get outstanding in certain areas we'll get special recognition

for capital budgeting, for instance.

So we're always working towards that type of recognition.

We used to get it, we have 100 wooden awards in our board.

The month of March is National Nutrition Month, and we have a resolution for National Nutrition Month and also an announcement.

Whereas food is the substance by which life is sustained, and whereas the type, quality, and amount of food that individuals consume each day plays a vital role in their overall health and physical fitness, and whereas there is a need for continuing nutrition education and a wide-scale effort to enhance good eating practices, including dessert.

and whereas in June 2013, Council adopted a resolution in support of healthy eating, active living, HEAL, committing to put healthy choices within reach of all residents by supporting societal and environmental changes needed to enable healthy choices and whereas the city is working closely with the schools and community organizations to encourage and facilitate meals programs and education to promote good nutrition and health among children and adults and whereas since 1980, the month of March has been designated by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics

as a special time to focus attention on the importance of making informed food choices and developing healthful eating and physical activity habits.

Now, therefore, we, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville, do hereby recognize the month of March 2014 as National Nutrition Month and encourage all citizens of Charlottesville to join the campaign and become engaged about their nutrition and the nutrition of others in the hope of achieving optimum health for both today and tomorrow, signed and sealed this fifth day of March 2014.

And it also is this week is we're in the middle of National Breakfast Week and one of the things that the National Association does is really highlight the fact that

Breakfast are available, well first are important as my grandmother always said the most important part of the day but also are available to our school children in school in all of our schools and children who can't afford necessarily good breakfast or children who are economically disadvantaged can get those breakfasts for free and to celebrate school breakfast week

Councillor Fenwick and the chair of the school board, Juan Diego Wade, and I and anybody else on the council or school board who would like to join us are going to be eating breakfast at Burnley Moran.

We've been invited by Principal Don Locasali to come and eat with the kids.

This should be great.

I wish I could join you, but I will be somebody else.

That's all I've got right now.

Yes, I have two.

We've got one from the Department of Environmental Quality's Virginia Environmental Excellence Program.

We've just received confirmation that we've been accepted as a 2014 partner in their Environmental Excellence Program.

And the program was established to encourage superior environmental performance

It derives excellence by encouraging facilities and organizations within the Commonwealth to have strong environmental records and go above and beyond their legal requirements.

That would be us.

So the Sustainability Partners launched in 2012 is designed to encourage organizations across Virginia to make environmental sustainability part of our culture through leadership, innovation, and continual improvement.

Is there anyone here to receive this award at all?

Sorry, I didn't realize there was an actual award with it.

Okay, really cool things going on.

On March 14th, Friday, March 14th, from 9 a.m. to 4, DMV to Go will be on the downtown mall, right at the

right outside city space actually.

And this full service DMV van will be located on the mall in front of the 5th Street Alley next to city space.

It is a full service DMV on wheels equipped to process all DMV transactions including, you can apply for an ID card which is available to both adults and children.

You can renew your driver's license, you can reinstate driving privileges.

You can apply for a veteran ID card, get a copy of your driving record, obtain titles, license plates, decals, transcripts, order disability parking placards, get fishing and hunting licenses.

Is this cool or what?

Recently moved, you can update your address.

request a personal identification number, search for other state services through their internet portal and much more.

This is really great for people who don't have transportation.

It's hard to get out to DMV, although there is transit out there.

This March 17th to 23rd is Fix a Leak Week and Fix a Leak 5K.

And really, I'm going to read this, but I'm going to do a little video on cvocitizen.com about how to use these packets that the utility department hands out.

And that's about what I'm going to read here.

because it really does make a difference on your water bill.

Fix a leak week is March 17th to 23rd.

Surprised by your water bill?

Leaks may be to blame.

Common leaks found in homes include worn toilet flappers, dripping faucets, and leaking shower heads.

All are easily correctable and don't require a major investment.

For more information on water conservation and fixing leaks, visit shawltsville.org

forward slash water conservation.

And this community is making a heck of an effort in water conservation.

Fix a Leak will wrap up with the second annual Fix a Leak 5K, a race that I will be walking, not running.

It'll be a timed trail race through Penn Park on March 22nd.

The race is family friendly, so bring the whole gang.

To register for the 5K, please visit fixaleak5k.com.

And Mr. Mayor, I have one more.

Many of you know about the Charlottesville Cardinals, the wheelchair basketball team up in Philadelphia.

The 15th ranked Charlottesville Cardinals wheelchair basketball team went 5-0 this past weekend in Philadelphia.

to claim the championship trophy at the annual Carousel House Tournament.

Mike Looney, one of the players, received the tournament's top scorer award.

The Cardinals are now 19 and 16 on the season.

Final seedings for the National Wheelchair Basketball Association's national tournament, which is held April 4th through 6th, will be announced this week.

And the Cardinals are currently ranked

15th in the country.

And one last thing.

Not just city people watch and come into the city council meetings.

Many people in the community do as well.

There's a young fellow named Jason Hatfield who lives down in Nelson County.

And with Cal Tate at Public Access TV, he has started a show called Handy Chat.

He is wheelchair bound and has been since he's been 11 years old.

and his show airs every Thursday on public access TV at 6.30 and it's about disabilities and how members of the community can get more information about dealing with disabilities.

Thank you.

Next item on the agenda is matters by the public.

Please come forward.

Identify your name and address.

You have three minutes to speak.

My name is Amita Sudhir.

I live on 707 Northwood Avenue on the corner of Northwood and Nelson.

I'm an emergency physician and on October 27th of last year I was the first medical person on the scene of the accident that happened on Nelson Avenue right outside my house.

A young child was hit by a car and she did not survive.

Most of you already know about this accident.

Although what happened was ruled not the fault of the driver, in medicine we don't refer to events like these as accidents.

We call them crashes because we believe that there is always something that could have prevented it from happening, whereas an accident is something that truly had no way to be prevented.

If the car had been driving at a slower speed, if the traffic patterns in north downtown had been different, the child might have survived.

the whole neighborhood was very upset by what happened not only because it was a terrible thing that resulted in the death of a child but also because for the last two years we've been predicting an accident due to the traffic patterns in the corner of Northwood, Nelson and Second Street and everyone in the neighborhood has been involved in close calls and we're particularly upset because although we thought that something would happen nobody realized how bad it was really going to be

I've been a physician for 10 years, and in those 10 years there have been many lives that I have not saved.

Of course I regret my inability to save those lives, but there is no life that I wish as hard that I could have saved as the life of the child who was killed that day.

Not just because she was a kindergartener like my own daughter, not just because she was crossing the street where my husband parks his car and my kids cross the street every day, but also because my five year old daughter was standing on the sidewalk and watched as the child took her last breath under my hands.

I have to explain to my daughter what happens to children when they die.

This is something that I hope to never have to talk to my five year old about.

Although I failed to save this child's life, as City Council you now have the ability to save the lives of other people that are pedestrians in Charlottesville by voting to fund better pedestrian

facilities in the north downtown area.

When you think about the budget for this year, please think about what I've just said.

Please think about the other children that live in this neighborhood and all the countless lives that could be saved by having safer walking facilities, slower traffic speeds, stop signs, and avoiding a situation like what led to the accident last year.

Good evening.

My name is Matt Tronbridge.

I live at 702 Northwood Avenue.

I am also a physician in the Department of Emergency Medicine.

I am originally trained as a pediatrician and also most of my academic research focuses particularly on the built environment and particularly traffic safety.

As you can imagine, just like you heard my dear friend Amitha talk about, this was a real tragedy for me personally.

It was also deeply frustrating.

Not talking about a liability, just talking about seeing something, a set of conditions that were dangerous and then having a terrible event happen.

But my point here today was I think two years ago or so I actually engaged the traffic engineering group here for the city and I think they came up with some really fantastic traffic calming solutions because while the crash that we're discussing tonight occurred

On Nelson, if you guys are all familiar with that, I personally really do feel that the intersection that really drives a lot of the traffic flow patterns in that is the one that's just at the bottom of my driveway.

The intersection of Second Street Northeast, Nelson, and Northwood.

It was where there used to be stop signs.

It's a very wide, strange intersection.

An attempt was made to experiment with a traffic circle.

and the stop signs were turned into yields and it has just created a very dangerous, urgent safety condition and it has created a culture of speeding through our neighborhood.

I just wanted to make sure as we were talking about the budget for this year, I know that there's a longer-range plan for multimodal planning and I strongly support that, but in terms of safety, I really think there's a different urgency that really needs to be considered.

and our particular intersection has a really nicely done thought through design on the books by the Transportation Department.

I emailed you shortly before the meeting a PDF that outlines the design but I couldn't resist but it also includes some pictures from not this snowstorm but the one previous

It had a very nice effect of creating a perfect prototype of the proposed design.

Essentially what it means is extending curbs at some of the key apexes and creating more of a T-type stops instead of letting this flow that occurs through there.

and so I meant it as a kind of a fun exercise.

It actually ended up being I think something that I really hope you guys take seriously as a particular area.

I really do think it's an urgent condition that needs to be addressed.

Good evening Members of Council.

My name is Jim Rouncivan.

I live at 1113 Monticello Road.

I'm an architect and was a member of the design team hired by the Director of Neighborhood Services to distill the outpouring of ideas which arose from the community-driven competition to replace the Beaumont Bridge.

As you are well aware, this stemmed from the community's rejection of the MMM-designed highway overpass replacement.

Bound by a contract, the design team was required to develop the best of these ideas, present them to the community and council, guiding the process all the way through a vote and final BAR approval for a community-backed result.

Two complete options were developed, one with the better bridge and one without.

We were contractually obligated to see this all the way through.

We were not, in the words of the director, just hired to get us over a hump.

After a contentious public meeting in February of last year, and despite a later agreement from the director to then pursue an apples to apples comparison of the options in April, city staff this fall instead chose to return to council with the same publicly rejected MMM design bridge along with a schematic underpass concept.

in a transparent attempt to sway the public and council towards a bridge only option, skewed cost estimates, incomplete anecdotal economic evidence, and contradictory testimonials from city tenants were employed.

I'm not alone in my frustration at this kind of heavy-handed partiality by public employees.

So despite having paid for one enhanced bridge design, city staff had held yet another community design work session in January, where again, the same themes were reiterated by the public from over two years ago.

Needless to say, there was a backlash from the community.

Citizens in at least one neighborhood association expressing frustration that city staff is attempting to railroad this decision.

This Friday, MMM will again present yet another bridge designed to the place committee.

60 to 64% of those of you reading the papers favor a solution that honors the overwhelmingly popular competition winning idea to get rid of this bridge.

Out of respect for the majority, a website, SevilleGateway.com has been created for a more comprehensive and user friendly look at this crucial and complex crossroads.

That's SevilleGateway.com.

As a licensed design professional and initial proposer of a replacement bridge, I have come to favor the perhaps more difficult yet elegant design solution that is the underpass because it not only does a superior job of reconciling the public's desire with the circumstance, but more importantly, because it affords us something crucial, a standalone emblematic new pedestrian bridge.

Again, this entire effort simply grew out of the community's clear desire to get rid of this 34 foot high barrier.

For a city whose stated policy is to become more accessible, pedestrian, cycle-centric, why would you not make this alternative design the centerpiece of a new sustainable economic model smack in the middle of downtown?

Yes, it is an expensive and complex solution, but if we are to have the will to build a $34 million overpass on the bypass and live through it, we are certainly capable of a new iconic gateway and to get in line with the competing cities that recognize the crucial economic role infrastructure plays in their vitality.

Collectively, we ought to seriously consider our long-term vitality and not simply follow what's less hassle for city staff.

It's not what we pay them to do and it's short-sighted.

In closing, it's become clear many citizens do not understand how going over with people and under with cars works.

Similar to the corner of Preston Avenue, this is not a tunnel.

It's as open as 10th Street, Roosevelt, Brown Boulevard.

To that end, a Kickstarter campaign is in the process to fund a 3D animation video of the proposal.

Mr. Mayor, members of City Council, Mr. Jones, Mr. Brown.

I'm Fran Lawrence.

I live at 1729 Chesapeake Street, and I'm the current president of the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center.

And I'm here just very briefly to update you.

I apologize, perhaps, for not bringing you up to date more often.

Mr. Huja and I know that Lewis and Clark started in the basement here about 18 years ago, and we've stuck at it.

And I'm pleased to say that we now have

virtually finished, and it's in your packet, an extraordinarily interesting building that not only provides a space for our activities and potential other activities, hopefully city council retreats in the future, but is one of our community's first real contacts to the river.

And that contact's going to be developed with boats and bridges and we're actually part of the James River Riverkeeper system.

I've also given you a package which is kind of like, if I were a clothing designer, I would give you swatches of fabric.

This is kind of swatches of fabric to give you some texture of what we're going to look like inside.

And it's going to be an exciting, wonderful place.

We actually have already secured at least six of the Look 3 banners that feature North American animals, and they're going to be hanging from our roofs, which are 14-foot ceilings.

We have a number of maps that have been done, and we expect to have the walls fastened with lots and lots of natural stuff.

Dede, we're really hoping you'll love it.

Here's the story.

We don't have a huge reading assignment for you, but if you peruse through this, I think you'll see that there's just an amazing number of exciting things that we'll be doing there as we get opened.

And we're glad to have editorial thoughts about this, and there will be plenty of grammatical errors.

From a construction standpoint, we're closing in.

The county has given us their facilities persons, Jack Kelsey and Trevor Henry, to kind of help us work with what has been some difficult issues with the contractor.

And we've been patient about that.

The building is 99% finished.

The site is probably within $50,000 worth of being finished.

And we had a very good meeting last week.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Rebecca Quinn, 1044th Street here in the city.

Last week there was kind of a flurry of activity when Mr. Tolbert came in with the last minute landmark agreement.

And I sensed a lot of positive responses.

Well, I took a close look at it.

And I don't think it's a real good deal for the city.

I like everything that Mr. Dewberry is committing on his side, but I don't like some of the things that he wants the city to be responsible for.

I think his expectations are a little high and I hope that

It's not on your agenda tonight because you're taking a closer look at that.

I also want to talk about the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.

At last week's meeting, the executive director delivered to the Rivanna board a report that had a section on a future bond resolution.

I previously spoke and asked some questions about the cost share agreement for the Rivanna pump station.

Two things.

One, it appears to me that a great deal of pressure is being exerted on the Rivanna board and subsequently on Citi to wrap up your cost share agreement because he's made some nexus between that and the bond resolution.

And yet he specifically says there's no legal requirement

to have a cost allocation agreement before adopting a bond resolution.

But several board members have desired this outcome.

I'd like to know who those board members are and why they're so anxious.

I understand that the cost share agreement negotiations have been ongoing for a while, but I hope that's because the city is holding out for the best possible agreement for the city.

I did look again at all your public notices or notices about your closed sessions on this topic and I discovered, it was a surprise to me last week when I looked into it, that it's not just the pump station that this agreement is about.

It's other capital wastewater projects.

In fact, your announcement for tonight's closed session even omits the Rivanna pump station and simply says, capital projects for wastewater.

So I want to know what's going on.

We have a four-party agreement.

Are you all renegotiating the four-party agreement without actually saying so?

Would that eventually be the effect of what you're doing?

How can you amend an agreement without being forthright about amending an agreement?

By the way, an agreement that seems to have served us fairly well for quite a few years.

So I know Mayor Huja indicated there will be a public meeting on it.

I, like many others, have always concerned that decisions have been made and public meetings tend to be sort of, let's fill some space with the voices of the public without actually hearing the voices.

Thank you.

My name is Lewis Schultz.

I live at 1809 East Market Street.

This is the 11th 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.

A letter entitled Notes Regarding Steepill Street, which was given to every member of this council on October 3rd and which lays out those accusations in detail, is available to read on the Schilling Show's website.

Additional information is available on Seaville Weekly's website.

At the February 18th City Council meeting, I made the accusations I've just repeated.

I made it clear, as I've been doing for more than five months, that I have evidence beyond any yet seen by Council, which I believe will prove that what I have said is true.

Finally, I asked, as I have many times now, for Council to open an investigation and hold a hearing where I might present that evidence.

Another citizen made a comment that evening addressing the need for more openness in our city government.

Most, if not all, of Council were moved by that and responded by agreeing to the idea that government should be transparent and open.

What one might not expect from a group so seemingly committed to open government was that they yet again very conspicuously ignored the fact that I had just spoken to them clearly, intentionally, and with absolute confidence to say that I have evidence which I believe proves serious misconduct on the part of city officials and that I would like to have that investigated by city council in a way that leaves the facts they find open to public scrutiny.

Not only did counsel generally insult the intelligence of their audience by acting as though the disconnect between their words and their actions was not obvious to all in attendance, Counselor Kristin Szakos took things further in an attempt to intimidate me into silence when she suggested that she thought some sort of slander case should be brought against me for asking counsel to do its job and hold city officials accountable when they violate the law.

Earlier that evening, not long before I spoke, Ms. Szakos read a proclamation that said in part, whereas in February in particular,

We remember the stories of those who have helped build our nation and advance the cause of freedom and civil rights.

Less than an hour later, she thought it was appropriate to try to silence me in my quest to have my civil rights respected by the city of Charlottesville.

She said that I had accused people of breaking the law when her understanding is that they didn't do that.

What she failed to mention is that her understanding of the situation has been severely limited due to willful ignorance on her part of any facts which might challenge that point of view.

that ignorance can be easily fixed.

Chapter 2, Article 2, Division 1, Section 2-49 of the Code of the City of Charlottesville empower City Council to require the attendance of any person as a witness and the production by any person of all proper books and papers when in any investigation by such body such attendance and investigation is necessary and proper.

Lina Seville Hello, Lina Seville, 808 Altavist Avenue.

I'm here to talk to the council members here but also to speak to the people listening.

I went to the West Main outreach recently and I want everybody to know that West Main isn't, you know,

the University, the Corner, past 10th Street.

They're talking about everything all the way up to McIntyre Ridge and downtown.

And I'm not sure that that's clear to people.

When I first started spending time in that area between the Corner and downtown, I asked people what they called it and nobody really had a name.

So West Main is not just like an accepted terminology for that area as far as I know.

And

You know, west makes you think, you know, the edge of town.

And I know by the grid system it's considered west, but by that standard, you know, downtown would be considered East Main.

It's right in the center of town.

I mean, it's right in the middle of town.

This isn't the edge of the city.

This is, you know, central part of our downtown corridor.

right in the middle of everything and so I want people to know that when they hear talk about West Main that they should participate because this is a central part of our downtown and it's a great place.

I've been calling it Midtown because it's right in the middle of everything.

Is there anybody else in the audience who would like to speak who's not signed up to speak?

Mark Cabot, 400 Altamont Street.

I attended the meeting in which we looked at the bridge concept for the Belmont Bridge.

And I'd just like to say that I would also like to see an opportunity to look at a underpass concept too.

I know there's quite a few people out there that would like to see both aspects of it presented and be able to weigh in on that.

So I would like to see that down at some point.

Concerning the traffic situation that we spoke on earlier,

Back when I was president of North Downtown Residence Association, I did meet quite a few times with people on city staff concerning the traffic situation and there is a plan to take care of that one intersection where we have the traffic circles that are currently painted on the street and I was told a year or two ago that it was a

Dunn.

It had to go for budgeting, financing to be able to do the plan.

And based on that, we probably would be looking at approximately about a year from now before we get done.

I would hope that we would be able to find some money in the budget to try to get this accomplished at an earlier point in time.

One of the reasons this is also important is that with the completion of the McIntyre Interchange, we do expect to see a lot more

Cut through traffic, and this would help with that cut through traffic to keep it calming.

The biggest problem we have is just need to find ways of slowing down the traffic in this area.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Nancy Carpenter and I live in Albemarle County I just wanted to share some to me really good news as an advocate for the homeless that with the issues that the crossings had with waivers and HUD and

having to persevere the last year and a half that finally was addressed and taken care of last month and three additional homeless individuals moved in to their new home.

One who literally had been homeless for 15 years living under the 250 bridge.

a homeless vet who had served our country from 75 to 91 and someone who had been a long-term employee but due to a job loss which is one of the reasons you do lose your home became homeless for several years and to see the grins on their faces you know when you're

when you congratulate them on getting a new home warms even the coldest heart.

And I think that it's a job well done between the city and the county over the last number of years in getting this supportive housing unit built and also to provide 30 units of low income housing.

And additionally, I know you're going to talk about the school budget, but I just saw what I want to call a fabulous video a couple of weeks ago.

It's to the tune Happy by Pharoah Williams.

It comes out of Despicable Me Too.

I think it's Burley.

Doing Happy.

Buford, Burleigh, Buford, well they're all happy.

But Buford is especially happy.

But it's a great video and I think to see staff, support staff, kids, everybody just sharing their happiness.

You just can't help but be happy.

I just want to make this one of the funnest things I've seen that's associated with the city.

I want to say thank you to the kids and the students and the teachers and the support staff and everybody that was in it.

Is there anyone else who would like to speak before we close the session?

Next is the consent agenda.

Having said that much, I'll go ahead and start.

At a recent meeting, and we talked about this briefly, the North Downtown Resident Association talking about traffic issues and both Ms. Sabir and Mr. Trowbridge and also Mr. Cabot were there.

That neighborhood doesn't have more cut through traffic than other neighborhoods, but it does have really fast cut through traffic because of the way that those intersections have been streamlined for cars.

And I hope that we will be able to do something before the CIP process kind of winds its inevitable way toward that neighborhood to really look at some quick fixes as we prepare for some of the longer, more permanent fixes there.

maybe even just some teeing up of intersections and stop signs to just stop people because it's true that there are a lot of parts of that neighborhood that don't have sidewalks and there are narrow streets and people zipping through.

I actually think that when the Meadow Creek Parkway is open, there will probably be less

cut through traffic, but right now there's a lot because people are trying to avoid that intersection.

But be that as it may, there are people zipping through there.

And as we saw so sadly, it can have devastating consequences.

So I just wanted to reiterate that.

The bridge tunnel or underpass thing, I don't have a whole lot of excitement about the tunnel idea, but I appreciate your bringing forward and giving us more history about it.

And I also hear that you and I went to the same college, so that's kind of exciting, Grinnell College in Iowa.

Okay, and so we're kind of coming from the same place, coming in different directions, but I really appreciate you staying engaged on this.

I know, that's why I corrected myself, you heard me.

It's not a tunnel, it's an underpass.

I would also, though, to a couple of folks who went over time, we don't do this three-minute limit for public comment to be mean, and we don't do it to try to shut down public comment.

We have, in fact, whole meetings where all we have is public comment.

But we really do mean the three minutes as a way of getting more people able to talk.

When one person goes for five minutes, it means one other person isn't going to be able to speak.

So as you're coming up, just be aware that that's there not to

to punish or to shut down discussion, but just to urge brevity so that more people can participate.

So, let's see, to Mr. Schultz, as you know, I was not trying to intimidate you or suggesting that we sue you, I was asking for the definition of slander as it regards public employees who are not public officials.

I know that as public officials you can accuse us of almost anything and that's fair game, but to some of our staff

I'm not sure it's the case, and so I'm still waiting to hear the answer for that.

And I'm not quite sure why you continue to come here.

We're not going to have a public hearing.

There's no obligation of us to have a public hearing.

There are other ways that you can go about an investigation of the city that don't involve a city council public hearing or a public investigation.

So, I mean, you can keep coming, but I don't really see that being a terribly useful way to try to get what you're looking for.

And to Ms. Seville, thank you for where did you sit down?

Thanks for encouraging people to come and participate in the West Main stuff.

I think that, you know, things that we think that that other people know, you know, we all have different bodies of knowledge.

And, you know, I think of West Main as starting at First Street and everything that way is West Main, everything this way is East Main.

But you're right.

It doesn't it actually is going to include part of university.

If you look at it that way, it goes all the way down to the corner.

So yes, participate, get excited about it.

Yeah, I'll jump in next.

And thank you all for coming.

And what a tragedy.

I mean, I can't imagine what you all went through.

And I've been over there.

I know Matt and I walked around there.

And it's huge.

I mean, it's just a ridiculously huge intersection.

And there's been some nice models just right next to it of ways that the streets have been narrowed.

It would make a great

It's like our streets and we were reminded of this recently at another meeting.

You can't necessarily do something on one street.

and exactly the same thing on another.

You've got that hill coming up, and we've got so many factors coming in.

And we don't want to just sort of respond to putting fires out, but I do think this intersection in particular has been on the books for a while.

There's been a lot of attention on it, and clearly we've seen the consequences.

Like we might see anywhere, really, but we need to give some attention to this.

Thank you, Miss Seville, for bringing that up.

GoWestMaine.com.

That is the website to go to to find out what's happening.

It's all kind of happening now, so it's very exciting, and I encourage people to get involved, and Nancy

Carpenter, thank you for putting a face on the crossings.

That really helped.

That's very helpful.

And finally, to Ms. Quinn, you're absolutely right.

The scope of the negotiations has changed, and it's reflected in our executive session description.

And we're going to talk tonight about really

what we can safely say without compromising our negotiations.

Dr. Trowbridge and Amitha and Heather and then Mr. Cavitz.

I feel terrible about what has happened and I understand that

at the meeting that Ms. Szakos attended, that it was obvious that there was still a lot of pain and anguish that just needed to get out, and that I'm really appreciative of you and Mr. Fenwick, you there as well, that some counselors were able to be there to basically hear that, and we need to hear that.

I apologize for not being able to be there.

I did talk the next evening with Mr. Tolbert,

And he did lead me to believe that there were really active strategies in play that are going to be put in practice.

And I'm seeing someone over there nodding his head.

I do think we need to make sure we communicate that to the public as soon as possible.

And we are committed.

We are very committed to resolving the safety issues.

I can imagine that there are near and long term solutions here.

We do need to do something immediately.

but I think there is over time there's going to be more construction of a new street as you talked about the neck downs for example that takes a little bit longer but we are in process with that longer range as well as near term so maybe through the CIP before we resolve this I think all of us would like to hear more details about the resolution and the funding for it so

and about the Belmont Bridge, it's been my understanding, it's always been my understanding, it was the way I understood Council's wishes that we were needing to get a well-designed bridge to be compared with the underpass, that it really was a mismatch, that the bridge that was being estimated was

the Federal Highway Bridge that this community had summarily rejected.

And so there needed to be a better design bridge to get the estimate correct so that we were looking at comparable design and engineering strategies.

It came across the very first bridge design that no one wanted was less expensive.

and that many of us on council expressed directly that night that it was misleading.

So it's my understanding that we are going to then get in April a presentation of both the underpass and a new bridge design that reflects the better intentions of the public based on that charrette that happened several months ago.

But thank you again for bringing this and keeping this on the radar.

Mr. Lawrence, I would love to go.

Is he still here?

No.

Well, can we just go to visit?

Arrange us?

Yeah, good.

It's very cool.

And I think, Ms. Carpenter, thank you for telling us good news as well as bad.

Mr. Fenwick, you here?

Yes, I'm going to need some help with your name, I think.

Is it Amitha Sudhir?

Sudhir.

Sudhir?

OK. And to Matt Trowbridge and also to Mark Cabot.

I was at that meeting.

You were very eloquent, both of you, about how you spoke, not only of what happened, but the frustration of not seeing anything done.

I have been by there several times in the past two weeks and all I've seen done in that amount of time is a blinking light sign.

Is that correct?

Down on McIntyre, but it's not blinking.

It's not hooked up to anything.

When citizens come in front of city council and have a complaint of this magnitude, I am very disappointed when something doesn't happen quickly.

and I'm going to throw in about the roundabout up there as well.

It's not really a painted roundabout, it's a painted drive over.

I sat up there in my van and I think it was seven or eight people, they just drive right over it.

So when I was finished, I drove around it and there was a lady walking her dog and she was looking at me like something strange is happening here.

So I'm

I know somebody is here from traffic and something should be done.

We can do something while these other plans are cooking.

So thanks for coming out here.

It's very important not just for your neighborhood, but across the city.

Jim Brownsville, I think you're making progress, Jim, from the comments this evening.

So stay with it.

It's important that the people have their voice heard, whether they win or not.

You have to be able to come to city council chambers

and make sure everybody's opinion is heard.

Fran Lawrence has left, but I've been out to the Lewis and Clark Exploratory Center.

It's over the crest of the hill in the Darden Town Parks.

If you play softball or over at the park there, it's over the crest of the hill.

It's a beautiful facility.

And when spring finally gets here, it's going to be magnificent because it overlooks the Rivanna River.

So I'm looking forward to a grand opening or really making that part of the community.

Rebecca Quinn and the cost-share agreement, I totally agree.

These decisions by necessity are an executive session because you want to be able to negotiate, but there shouldn't be decisions made behind a closed door without the input of the citizens.

Lena Seville, Lena, are you here still?

I hope you're not only doing well with West Main, but you're getting on the email list you want to be on.

And of course Nancy, thanks for your comments about the homeless.

It is very important, particularly with the winter we've had, to know that the community responds in this way.

One last thing.

A comment was made about the duration of public comment in front of city council.

Some people don't want to talk for three minutes, and I understand that.

comment or complaint or whatever, come down and all you have to do is take 15 seconds, 30 seconds, especially with the budget coming up.

You can just come down and say, I agree with this, I disagree with that.

It's important that everybody's comments are heard and taken into consideration.

I do.

So I just have a quick report about a conference that Maurice Jones and I went to this week.

It was in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, so I don't want anybody to think we had too much fun.

and I've just written it out so I remember what to say.

Mr. Huja has joined 52 other mayors from around the country led by New Orleans Mayor Landrieu and Philadelphia Mayor Nutter to form Cities United, a broad effort by mayors and city leaders to make America's cities safe and supportive for young black men and boys.

This last week, as part of a technical assistance grant, Charlottesville was awarded by the National League of Cities.

City Manager Maurice Jones and I joined more than 200 city leaders in New Orleans to discuss challenges facing young men of color and to share approaches that are working to reduce violence and increase academic and professional achievement.

Every day we see young black men and boys in Charlottesville doing wonderful things and being successful in our middle school engineering labs, in our summer youth employment program, in our university undergraduate and graduate classrooms, in our small businesses, in our churches and community centers, and in our neighborhoods.

But we see too many others who are not doing as well.

Although the high crime and death rates common in some larger cities at the meeting

are not major factors for the young men in Charlottesville.

They are still the most likely to drop out of school, to be imprisoned, to be unemployed, and to die young from a variety of health issues.

If we're serious about making Charlottesville a livable community for all, we can't ignore the fact that it is not doing right by a large segment of our population.

and I don't mean to imply in any way that young women don't face serious challenges as well, but we are doing a better job both nationally as was discussed at the conference and as a city in addressing some of the challenges that specifically face girls and young women.

and of course we have to continue to keep an eye on how we do that more consistently and effectively.

But by all indicators nationally and locally our young men of color are in crisis and the time is right for us to act to address that crisis.

A week ago President Obama during the conference gave an important policy speech on the future of young men and boys of color in America and the impetus of Cities United and our National League of Cities technical assistance grant

give us in Charlottesville the opportunity to move now to improve conditions for young men and boys of color in Charlottesville to create a community where they can be, in the words of Cities United, safe, healthy, and hopeful.

We're already doing many things right.

Our city schools have worked hard through programs like AVID and WOC, better communications with parents, and targeted teaching methods to reach and inspire students to do better in school.

Our three and four-year-old preschool programs are preparing kids to hit the ground running in kindergarten,

and after school and summer programs help kids get enrichment experiences, healthy food and help with academics.

Evening recreation programs and organizations like Hype, the Boys and Girls Club, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, City of Promise, CALM and 100 Black Men put children in contact with adults who can guide and encourage them to stay in school and work hard.

As we enter the budget season, I want to make sure that we build on those gains and don't lose ground.

We need to make sure that we support the programs and staffing in the public school budget and the city budget that are designed to address these issues.

School positions like teaching assistance, practices like small class sizes and enrichment activities, summer camp staffing and class and parks and rec, and three and four year old preschool, community policing and employment programs.

and City of Promise and other initiatives working on the ground to provide hope and opportunity for all our children.

With our National League of Cities grant and with Cities United behind us, we're beginning the process of developing a community-based public-private plan to more fully address issues facing young black men and boys in our community, engaging residents, especially youth and African-American men,

and working with Cities United to explore best practices and resources available to make a real difference.

I just want to make sure that in our budget deliberations that we don't lose ground before we start.

Thank you Ms. Szakos.

I totally support Cities United effort and I think Ms. Szakos has said there are many opportunities for us to work on that and we will I think.

I don't want to repeat the comments of my colleagues in response.

And I agree with most of those comments because time is getting late.

Mr. Mayor, can I respond to one issue that was raised?

And that's the issue of north downtown and the traffic calming.

There are some short-term issues that we're looking to resolve.

We've actually put in more quarters to have these issues addressed.

And of course, as we mentioned, there's the longer-term issues.

I look forward to seeing information.

Thank you.

Next item is the consent agenda.

Item A, minutes for February 18th.

Item B, resolution, LEAP Climate Protection Program Partnership Proposal, $100,130, first of one reading.

I move to approve.

Actually, can I have, because Cynthia Adams is here, would you mind just coming and talking to us a little bit about LEAP?

I'm on this advisory board and it's a really, it's doing such wonderful things and I just, I'm going to ask you to talk about one aspect and that's the work that LEAP does with, you just wait for a second please.

You want to vote on it first?

Yeah.

That's cool.

Any more discussion?

I just see that you're here.

Please go forward.

And it didn't get pulled from the consent agenda.

But you've done great work with, particularly in partnership with our low-income homes, which is particularly important, I think.

Yes, please.

I'll be brief, but I will say a face-to-face thank you very much to City Council for awarding us this grant and allowing us to continue the good work that we are very proud of here in the city.

With respect to the low-income community, we have some funding in the grant for 2014 to work to provide inventory to do direct installs to lower base load for the low-income residents.

We have some funding in there to do tenant education in multi-family properties.

and we are also looking at developing a weatherization service within our own ranks that can help train folks, or teach folks I should say is a better word, on how to do low and no cost improvements of their own.

We intend to look for some matching grants from area foundations to help

Offset some of these weatherization costs that we'd be looking to do.

And then lastly, we have begun conversations with Dominion Virginia Power about how their low-income program might make its way to Charlottesville in the coming 2015 timeframe.

So I think that we've had great success on the market-based programs and we're happy with that.

We want to continue to build on them.

but at the same time we know that we have a lot more work to do with the low-income community and so that's a real good focus for us in the next year.

Yes, and a lot of good work done with AHEP, particularly on the Block by Block program, and then leveraging the city funds for home energy savers, or as we call it, our assisted home performance program, in conjunction with the rehab work that AHEP has been doing, and so we have a very tight relationship with them over the last year.

Yes, you see your phone number on the mic.

Yes, our phone number is 266-4777.

They can, they absolutely can and we do have a website at LEAP, L-E-A-P dash V-A for Virginia dot O-R-G.

You know it's just so particularly important and particularly with this really, really cold winter that I think that it's going to be a shock when people start getting those utility bills and we already have such a hard, such a

It's a problem in our community with people not being able to pay their utility bills and they can lose their homes, they can lose their kids.

There's some really devastating consequences in some cases.

So it's particularly important for us with our large population of low income to do whatever we can to help them conserve.

Thank you.

Next on our agenda is presentation of school board budget.

Good evening Mayor Huja, Members of Council, City Manager Jones and the community.

Thank you for this opportunity to present the City of Charlottesville school budget.

The 2014-15 budget is a result of months and months of focused work, collaboration on the part of the Superintendent, the Administration,

school staff and the school board and the community.

Nothing matters more than the education and well-being of each and every student in our school division.

The budget must support the work that is done on a daily basis in order to enhance the learning

and the achievement of our students.

Our strategic plan is the guidance that we use for the resource so we can direct our resources to our priorities.

And those priorities are graduating students who are prepared for post and secondary education and success in a global society, partner with families and community to meet the needs of all students, ensuring that our schools will be optimal teaching, learning environments and centers of excellence

and equity for all and being an ideal workplace that attracts and supports the best qualified teachers and staff.

Given those priorities, the highlight of this funding request will focus on staff compensation, additional preschool classes, support for teaching and learning through professional development

the implementation of an instructional coaching model and maintaining grant funded programs that have been proven to be beneficial in our classroom and one of the rigorous STEM learning activities and materials.

This budget is about learning and achievement of our students who need high quality teachers and staff.

In order to attract high quality teachers and staff, we need to maintain a competitive edge

with the school divisions in our regions.

Teachers and staff need high quality professional development.

We are poised and ready to take our instructional support to the next level with the implementation of an instructional coaching model.

Professional learning is a powerful strategy for increasing teachers' effectiveness and students' learning when it incorporates daily onsite classroom support in the form of coaching

to give educators the skills and knowledge to effectively and efficiently implement those best practices.

Another successful strategy for improving

achievements of our students is early intervention.

Expanding preschool classes ensures that the students are prepared with the basic readiness skills.

These are some of the very programs that you mentioned earlier, Councilor Szakos.

While some of these funds help

provide additional resources.

Many of these projects feel unmet needs.

The Safe Schools Healthy Grant is just one that has been provided as giving a three-year-old class and mental health counselors at this high school and the middle school.

And finally, in order for our students to be college and career ready, we must prepare them for rigorous learning activities and appropriate materials in the STEM class.

Okay, thank you.

So the programmatic highlights that Mr. Way just went through.

I'll give you several slides.

I think you folks have a handout too, so if you choose just to flip through you can do that as well.

The next several slides kind of a high-level view of how all of this translates into the actual numbers in the budget itself.

Beginning with the salary increase, we are proposing a step plus one and a half to all staff.

This would average about 2.7%.

I'm sorry, can I ask one question and I won't interrupt?

Sure, that's okay.

Do teachers, are they the ones that get step?

Well, the majority of staff are on pay tables.

So the majority of staff are those that are eligible for step.

Some have hit top of scale and they aren't.

So those that have hit top of scale would be eligible for the 1.5%.

No, it's all staff.

So that's about $1.6 million.

That's about average of what we're hearing from divisions around the area.

I know it's consistent with Albemarle.

I believe Green's doing something more, something in the order of 5%.

So we're somewhere in the middle.

Has been the case for the last several years.

Virginia Retirement System is a big item that the school division and all participating entities have faced.

This year the proposal is to have the retirement system rate go up 21% from just under 14% to just under 17%.

This item alone adds about $1.2 million.

The retirement system rate is a part of the state proposal from the governor's office, and you'll see later what the state revenues are.

Unfortunately, most of the additional state revenues that are coming to us from the governor's proposed budget are

being used to help pay the cost of the additional increase in the retirement system.

All other salary and benefit changes, now these numbers are for all funds, the entire budget, up about just under $300,000.

All funds, a net increase of $5.44.

Most of that $5.44 is related to the coaching model.

In order to do the coaching model, we eliminated six instructional administrative coordinator positions and used those funds to pay for 10

teacher instructional coaches.

So the total cost of that net of four positions was only about $100,000.

So it was a good leveraging of both cuts, additional positions to get that done for again for about $100,000.

So total budget, total salary, staffing changes, just over $3 million.

Contractual Relationships makes up another large portion of our budget.

These were fairly moderate increases going into 2015.

This is Transportation, Facilities, Comprehensive Services Act, CATEC, the Piedmont Regional Program are some of the biggest ones up under $100,000.

These averaged 2 to 3% increases, not bad really for us.

And then all other operating costs down $246,000.

So net total operating reduction of just over 155,000, total expense changes, salaries operating just under 3 million.

Turning to revenues.

This proposal does contain an additional request from the City of Charlottesville of $1,762,463.

The state, up a like amount, $1,778,860.

Again, unfortunately, a good chunk of that we had to use to pay for the retirement system cost increases.

Small decline in federal revenues.

Federal revenues are still kind of the unknown for us.

We'll pass the budget and then the big revenues from federal government, Title I, Title VI, won't be finalized until later in the spring.

We'll come back at that time and revise the budget based on whatever available resources come from that.

And then tuition and all other sources down, $518,000.

So total revenue changes with that request from the city, the same $2,964,000.

So no budget would be complete without some charts and graphs.

So total expenditures, this pie has not changed much.

The school system is primarily people providing services.

So close to 80% of the budget is salaries and benefits.

And of that operating slice of 22%, 2 thirds of that are those large contracts that I mentioned just a minute ago.

Those two are probably close to 80% people.

So a very large portion of the budget goes to provide services by people and the cost there are salaries and benefits.

So again, not much change in that one.

Total revenues, the trend here has been reductions in the last five years, of course, in federal and state revenue and having to make that up with either additional monies from the city of Charlottesville or, as has been done, some extensive reductions in services and cuts to help balance the budget to whatever revenues were available.

On that note, we've been comparing our current budget to 09 because it was 09 when the last sort of stable economy was in place.

And this tells the picture.

You've got a down four percentage points.

That's a 13 percent decline in state revenues.

Federal revenue is down one percentage point.

The City of Charlottesville's revenue is up five percentage points.

Again, that wasn't enough to help balance the budget in total.

So again, cuts were made to just come to available revenues.

But even with the additional monies from the state that are going into 15, state funding is still down for the school system better than $2 million from where it was in 09.

So it's by no means a complete makeup of the loss of state funds that have been seen since the economy destabilized.

We report to the state by state reporting categories.

These are functional categories.

They're listed on the top right there, instruction, maintenance, administrative, attendance and health, nutrition, non-instruction, technology, and pupil transportation.

The numbers here in terms of the percentages have not changed much.

The biggest change, like most entities, government, private sector, otherwise, has been a larger share of the pie going to technology.

Technology's become a very big part of just about everything that we do, and I think that's how it should be.

Other than that, these percentages have by and large stayed the same.

So that's the presentation at a very high level.

I'll start out.

You say the state revenues are down $2 million compared to what they were in 2009.

What's the overall budget difference in 2009?

So you have $68 million now.

Total budget.

Total budget.

Compared to that $68 million.

Right.

It's up about $3 million.

I think I had that on one of the slides.

$73 million.

$73 million was the total.

Oh, oh.

This year.

$69 million.

Yes.

$69 million.

The last slide was the actuals from two years ago.

Oh, was the actuals 2009.

Yes.

But I did show a couple of slides previous to that that had the total budget on them.

In 2009.

Oh yes, 69 to 73.

Total, yeah, yeah.

You said, I mean states has been the big driver.

So if it's down 2 million in the time.

You expect me to read that?

Oh I see right there.

It's kind of.

Okay.

Right.

Young people print.

Oh I see.

Okay.

Okay.

Great.

And the state funding is actually up a little from last year.

It was down even further and now it's starting to come back.

It is.

Right.

Well, you know, we are too, actually.

Yeah, it's kind of a double-edged sword.

The increase that we're seeing in state revenue that really went beyond the amount that we paid into VRS had to do with the enrollment increase, which brought us additional state money, so that's been a nice trend as well.

And our composite index actually went down, which has been a change.

That's also a bit of a double-edged sword because it reflects the relative wealth of the city compared to the state.

A decline means that we are relatively less wealthy than before, but it does help the schools in terms of state funding.

So the enrollment increase in the LCI helped us as well.

I do have a question on page five.

Am I understanding that the tuition has gone down, that we're getting less tuition paying students?

No.

Where is that one?

I see.

Yeah.

That was a combination of items.

Really what's happening there primarily, the largest impactor on that one is a change in how the Piedmont regional program, we have a new program director, and she's done an outstanding job really of bringing a lot of clarity to how that program gets costed out to the participating divisions, which ultimately affected both revenues and expenditures.

So it had a dramatic effect on that number, but overall it was a very small net increase to us, but it did affect how the monies came to us.

Most of that shifted up to the state.

It's part of what's in that $1,778,000 to the state as well.

It was about a $300,000 decline in local that got shifted to state funding.

We do have a tuition increase as long as we're on tuition for non-residents.

And I just want to add that I believe that was one of the recommendations from the Blue Ray Burn task force that we have such a great product that they say you know you should be charging more for it and we did look at whether we should do it one time increase of ten percent or kind of step it out over five percent over two years and we're going to

I do have another question.

That would be one of my favorite things to talk about.

Actually it served a dual purpose for us.

The coordinator model that we've used over the past eight years has really garnered a lot of success for us and helped us to put in the classrooms curricular guides and supports for our teachers.

Now as we look to move our student achievement to the next level, putting more one-to-one

support in our classrooms and in our schools would allow us to penetrate even deeper for greater gains in student achievement.

So the coaching model allows us to put an instructional coach at each of our schools, one at each elementary school, one at Walker.

We would have two at Buford and two at the high school.

Is it similar training that the two have?

It's a different pay scale.

The instructional coaches will be on the teacher pay scale.

We will move from having a T20 contract, a 260 contract, to a 220 day contract.

So they work 10 months out of the year?

They will work about 11 months.

But that's 11 Kochis, sorry.

I'm a math person.

And so it's not a cost saving because it actually costs.

It is, right.

So I'd like to actually just refer to what has been called on your website Mr. Gillespie's favorite report.

Mr. Gillespie also says that the benchmarking report is not to be overly because it's metrics that we've put together to try to internally assess

How is our investments different than other divisions that have like demographics, like certain things?

It's not complete, and it's a little difficult to get good information because everybody's reporting a little differently.

I think it makes some good points and trends, but when you get to a specific data point, you've got to be a little careful.

So I'll just point that out.

May I say, I have a question to ask of a point of kind of protocol because the benchmark report is not in our packet and none of us have this report.

OK, well, maybe we could work it.

It was still part of the Blue Ridge, the Blue Ribbon Commission as well.

OK, well, the point being that that in, you know, the city's

which is often cited to add five more positions to a system that already is way over the top in terms of comparables for positions.

Can we maybe kind of question the characterization and also whether we need to go into this detail tonight on this budget.

But I think that if you look at per school, we're hardly over the top.

I'm happy to answer the question.

What that report I think says is that Charlottesville is very heavily invested in small schools and small class sizes.

and you've got a full complement of staff in each of those buildings.

It makes us very heavily invested in teachers and instructional assistants and staff at the building level and that's really what the takeaway on that report is.

So this is additional, the conversion here is removing administrative positions and adding more instructional positions in those buildings.

I think it's an investment that I think Mr. Wade would agree is what we hear from the community by and large is that you want your heaviest investment in the schools in the building supporting the teachers and or direct services

such as counselors, teachers, IAs, and so on.

And so Charlottesville staffing is definitely heavy.

We have a heavy investment in that and there's no question about that.

I think another point to make with that would be that with the instructional coordinators, they are listed as division level positions.

With our instructional coaches, because they're on a teacher pay scale, we have the option of listing them either at the division level or we can list them at the building level.

And in essence, we could take 10 positions out of the calculation on how many administrators are at our division level.

We're leaving them there for full transparency to say we do have this support, they do report to the central office, they're supporting the schools.

So we want to make it clear

who we have on staff.

We're not trying to shift around positions.

Right, and that wasn't actually my point as to the administration versus building.

My point being is that in

Sorry, I thought that was so cute.

Right, and if you look at direct instruction and if you do another calculation on it, you can get that adult per student ratio.

What's interesting is if you actually again just do a very quick sort of we look at the at the numbers you can get the actual number of bodies of adult bodies equalizing for population for the student population and it averages a hundred.

We listed the budget book every location, every school, exact positions, exact counts.

So all of that is definitely in there.

Absolutely.

But there's about, for the nine different comparables, and you know, it was a hundred, was the average, extra adults.

So when, I was just saying that, so we really do need to just say out loud, when you're adding five more adults, we're so adult heavy, and your graphs, and I know from being on the school board, it's so heavily

During the Blue Ribbon Report, they noted that we are doing right in the middle of

other localities as far as our staff personnel.

And one of the things that has been said over and over with this community values is small classroom and our neighborhood schools.

And that's something that we're not prepared to change and that's where the funding is going.

And I think Ed mentioned that it was never an intention of the coaching model to reduce or for cost savings.

It was never that.

What we're trying to do, what we want to do is that we've been comfortable with the coordinator positions, but we need to take it to another level.

And we believe that having the staff at the building level will allow us to do that.

We're excited about this budget and we hope that you will support us in the effort.

We've had a ton of meetings.

We have long meetings.

We don't look forward to your upcoming meetings, but we've had ours.

So we felt that this had a lot of public input.

We've had a lot of input on it.

So our questions about budget will be useful to have.

Just general questions.

The coaching model, is that a tutor?

The coaching model is a teacher type position in which the person will have an expertise in reading or mathematics or one of the core curricular areas.

They'll be positioned at the school to provide one-on-one support.

Yes, both the student and the teacher.

The focus with the teacher is to help the teacher deliver that good first instruction.

And you had expansion of four-year-old class, that's pre-k.

Pretty excited about that, two classes.

We have about

We're going to be able to serve 32 more students with the two classes and we probably could add one or two after that.

Okay, so the waiting list would be?

About 30, 32.

We have in this budget you will notice that we have absorbed the cost of one three-year-old program that was covered by the Safe Schools Healthy Students grant.

So we've moved that into the operating budget because that grant is going away.

And how many three-year-olds?

We do have three-year-old classes.

Okay.

Probably – Plus or minus?

If we matched it with our four-year-olds, about 100.

And one last question.

The people have been talking about what the governor is going to, how he's going to boost state funding, and is that that $1,778,000?

That is from the governor's budget.

I have a question.

You're requesting more than the city has budgeted, so what is the process for that decision?

I mean, do you want us to

We just for public benefit just indicate what amount we're talking about, because people who are listening don't know what amount we're talking about.

The one staff is 1.5, I think.

That's right.

Yes.

That's about $237,000.

How much more was the city or the county school budget than what the county had?

It's like the $7 million.

Yes.

Right.

So we're pretty close.

Yeah.

And I have one other question, because we usually, again, we'll probably get in a work session or something, this, usually the line item expenditure thing.

I just wondered what the preschool shift was.

That's how we added the two new classrooms.

It gets a little tricky.

Because of the cuts in federal funding last year, we picked up four-year-old teachers and IAAs from Title I into the general fund budget.

That qualified as local match, which now this year lets us leverage Virginia preschool money, state money,

to the tune of about another $192,000 to pay for half of the cost of the two classrooms we're now adding.

So it was our way of leveraging the Virginia preschool state money with the fact that we're now using local dollars to pay for preschool classes that we weren't before.

We appreciate you presenting the budget.

And I want everyone to know, those are healthy cookies.

No hydrogenated oils.

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council, it's my pleasure to present to you the proposed budget for fiscal year 2014-2015.

As you may recall, last year we developed internal budget review teams to help us comb through the departmental budget requests and to look for efficiencies, and we used that approach once again this year.

We had three teams made up of department directors who are listed on the screen.

We had them meet with the departments to discuss their budget proposals including new requests and reduction submissions.

They then made final recommendations to me to help shape this budget that we're presenting to you tonight.

In addition, I'd like to recognize the CIP Technical Review Committee who took a significant amount of time and effort to review the capital request to provide recommendations for the budget as well.

There are several themes for this year's proposed budget.

Continuing our strong support for our city schools, preserving and enhancing quality services, our focus on the city council priorities, especially with some of our new money on design issues and workforce development, and maintaining our real estate tax rates.

at 95 cents per $100 of assessed value.

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

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

Social services, human services, public safety, parks and recreation, public works, those are just a few of the departments in this organization that are serving with distinction every day.

So what's the impact on our residents?

I think the two main impacts are that we are keeping our real estate tax rate at 95 cents and in addition we are maintaining the quality services that we've had.

And we've been able to do this despite going through some very difficult budget times over the course of the last four, five, six years or so, we haven't had to make significant cuts in our services.

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

It highlights our support for our schools and ensures we are living within our means.

In many respects, we are meeting the needs of our community, and we believe it reflects the City Council's priorities and your vision.

So let's take a minute to dive into the details, which, by the way, you can find all of this information at our website, www.Charlottesville.org slash budget.

and you'll see all the information up there throughout the budget process including all of our work sessions and the like.

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

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

As you'll see, our proposed budget is a 1.65% increase over fiscal year 14.

and our overall budget is $150,611,000.

Overall, the revenue projections are heading in the right direction.

That's positive news.

We've witnessed some similar trends in areas like the meals tax and lodging tax.

This year, we experienced a rise in our real estate assessments spurred by commercial increases, new construction, and a slight uptick in our residential properties.

Now this, we believe, demonstrates that the residential market is once again growing here in Charlottesville.

Overall, we believe we have a diverse economic foundation that has served us well in robust and in sluggish years.

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

Of course, local taxes are the largest piece of the pie, accounting for over 66% of our revenues, and we've seen the personal property sales and meal stacks all trend upwards in recent years.

Overall, total real estate assessments in fiscal year 14 are projected to increase by 3.4%, which is very good news compared to previous years.

And this budget keeps the real estate tax rate, as I've mentioned before, at 95 cents.

Folks continue to invest in the city of Charlottesville, and that has kept the overall assessments from falling even more dramatically when we had the real estate market drop, the residential real estate market drop.

Personal property is up 6.4 percent.

This increase could indicate that people are getting a little more comfortable financially coming out of the recession and are purchasing new cars again, which increases the assessment base.

This is a good indicator of an economy that's starting to mend.

Another important indicator is the sales and use tax.

This revenue stream has started to see some improvement as consumer confidence

improves, and as we bring more business into the city, you can see a continued move in the right direction over the course of the last several years or so.

The meals tax is once again up at 6.72%, continuing a steady climb.

This revenue continues to be a strong indicator of the economy, starting to see some signs of improvement.

We've seen this the last couple years.

We had a dip in 13

but we're climbing back up again and that's good news for our economy.

The transient room tax, also known as the lodging tax, is expected to be level this year.

There are a couple of user fees and revenue enhancements that are part of this budget.

The cigarette tax is being proposed to be increased from 35 cents to 55 cents per pack.

As you may recall, the council was approached last year by a group and encouraged to raise the cigarette tax in an effort to help curb teenage smoking here in Charlottesville and we've responded with this proposal.

The adjustment

is expected to bring an additional $265,000 in revenue into the city.

False alarm fees, while the city currently has in place a fee structure, this budget proposes putting in place better, more efficient ways to track false alarms and pursue those who do not pay the fee, therefore improving the cost recovery for this service.

What counts as a false alarm?

Is that a 911 call?

It tends to be fire alarms and alarm, general alarms.

that will go to our police department primarily.

That's what this is for.

We there are a number of times in which we have repeat offenders.

Mainly it's mainly it's where commercial businesses.

OK, so if they've had a series of false alarms and we've contacted them, made them aware of it and they haven't changed the problem or fixed the problem, then we may impose a fee on them.

So earlier we showed you where our revenues are derived.

Now we're going to explain how that money is spent.

The schools, as you know, are the largest slice of our expenditure pie coming in at 33%.

This city council has traditionally strongly supported our schools in both operations and capital needs, and I believe our budget continues to do that.

Public safety and justice, police, fire, sheriff's office, courts make up 26%.

Excuse me.

of the operating budget, followed by healthy families and community at nearly 19%, and infrastructure and transportation at 9%.

So let's talk a little bit about our funding for our schools.

As you can see from the chart, this has changed drastically beginning in fiscal year 08.

State funding for schools has decreased, as we previously discussed during the schools report, and is projected to comprise just 24% of the school's fiscal year 15 budget

that's down from 29% in fiscal year 08.

Conversely, our local support for our schools as a percentage of the school's budget has increased by the same percentage points and will be approximately 76% of the school's budget in 15.

We don't anticipate this trend will be reversed in the near future in terms of state spending versus local spending and the expectations that come along with it.

We have proposed

We've proposed providing the schools with $45.6 million in fiscal year 15.

This represents an increase of $1.5 million, which is above the 40% formula we have for all new money generated from the real estate and personal property taxes.

That would have been $1.1 million.

As you know, and we talked about a few minutes ago, the schools at first were seeking an additional $2 million, but when they passed their budget last week,

they lowered their request to $1.7 million and we will obviously have discussions about that gap during the course of the next few weeks.

Turning to compensation and benefits, we are proposing a 2% salary increase on July 1st for eligible employees of the city.

We've checked with neighboring localities in the state and they're providing salary increases in about the same range for fiscal year 15 and we believe it's vital to remain competitive

and to maintain the investments that we've put into our employees and to reward them with the hard work that they do for us and for this community.

There is a 3% healthcare cost increase that we are proposing that the city absorb the employees side of that.

We feel we can absorb that with our healthcare fund without affecting that negatively.

We have a very healthy healthcare fund in place.

So we believe that this will not be difficult for us to accommodate in our budget.

This budget also fully funds the city's requirement towards our retirement fund as well.

City departments identified over $400,000 in recurring budget reductions.

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

and we don't believe that this will negatively impact the services that we offer to our residents here in Charlottesville.

Citywide we looked at how we can better manage computer and server space and we were able to save $18,000 on the future purchase of additional servers for our technology needs and we also addressed fuel markup issues that's been reduced back for several years now in order to save the department's money and to also better align our markup with best practices of other fleet management services.

that we've reviewed.

We've added two new expenditures to this budget that we believe are directly tied to the city council priorities.

The first is an urban design planner who will be housed in neighborhood development services and provide in-house expertise on design elements for major infrastructure projects and assist with our complete streets and small area planning projects which we feel we desperately need as we are

are seeing significant change in our approach to these issues in the course of the next couple of years.

Our workforce, our downtown workforce development center, satellite center, which has been proposed, which will be housed in the central library, and will provide assistance and training to folks who are searching for employment in our city.

We believe that one-on-one assistance will go a long way in helping residents who've had a difficult time finding a job in this economy, and also not just a job, but look at careers as well.

This is in keeping with the city's commitment to help provide a path to self-sufficiency for those who are struggling economically in our city.

Moving on to our capital improvement program, we have $16.5 million in projects for fiscal year 2015, we have $2.5 million allocated to the schools for capital improvement, $3.5 million to public safety and justice,

I'll just touch on a couple of these.

Tonsler Parks renovation, $750,000 for that.

As you may recall, we put a new playground equipment in Tonsler last year.

We had a master planning process and we're ready to move forward with that.

We'll have $450,000 that'll go towards the master planning for McIntire Park.

Currently we have $750,000 for the West Main Street streetscaping project, an additional $200,000 for a bicycle infrastructure,

and $1.5 million for the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund.

We also have $300,000 in there for the SIA, for early work with the SIA, the next steps there, and then also $300,000 for small area plans.

So as we look ahead, the biggest issue that remains, we believe, is school funding.

We do have a series of major capital needs that are looming on the horizon with schools that we'll need to address and then also operational needs in the future.

We recognize that the one to two percent increases in the budget that we've seen over the last couple of years, it's kind of become the new normal as we continue to see

Real estate markets inch-long and we are concerned that that may not be enough in the future to fund our needs as we're going through this the process of trying to decide what our needs will be in the future through our strategic planning process.

So out of that plan we'll have a better understanding of what some of those immediate needs will be.

and we'll continue to talk about that and how it's going to impact our budgets in the future.

The use of one-time funds and this in previous budgets is of concern to the budget team.

We've seen a significant reduction in the use of that money and what we use now I kind of call it quasi one-time money where it's a transfer from funds that are actually doing very well and we feel as though we can take those one-time

contributions to help balance our budget.

We've reduced this type of funding utilizing this from $4 million just a few years ago to about $750,000 for this year.

However, we feel that those funds, although they're healthy now, at some point in the near future or in the next couple of years, they could be tapped for other things, and we will be in a position where we'll not have that as a resource to pay these ongoing costs.

So we do need to find ways to try to address that.

both in the short and the long term.

On the schools in particular, the Blue Ribbon Commission on Sustainable School Funding, they came back with a very thoughtful report that we will continue to review during this budget process and following the passage of this budget as well.

A lot of short term and long term opportunities for us to investigate and come up with some solutions for.

There's some positive news if you take a look at some of the things that from an economic standpoint drive business in Charlottesville.

Our regional unemployment rate is trending downward, has been for the last few years, continues to be below the national and state average.

Commercial and residential permit requests continue to climb, which we think is a very positive thing.

Retail vacancy rates remain steady at 3.28%.

Downtown it's just a little over 2%.

Several significant projects are under construction and will be completed in the next year or so.

Many of those have come before you in the last year or two.

And so we're seeing those projects occur and they're gonna be contributing to our overall budget.

So there are some really positive things that are happening in our community as well.

So speaking of moving forward, tonight begins a series of meetings and work sessions for the city council and the public to hear more about the budget and to weigh in.

I'm gonna go over the budget calendar with you quickly.

We get less than 24 hours and we're back at it again tomorrow evening from five to seven at City Space for our work session on revenue and expenditure overview.

On March 13th, we will be back at City Space from five to seven to talk about the capital improvement program.

On March 17th, we'll have the first of two public hearings right here in the city council chambers on the tax levy and our overall budget.

March 19th, we'll have a community budget forum at 7 p.m. at City Space.

March 27th, a work session from 5 to 7 at City Space on outside and nonprofit agencies.

April 7th, our second public hearing on the budget, first reading 7 p.m. right here in the city council chambers.

Then April 10th, a work session from 5 to 7 on a budget wrap-up.

And then on April 11th, we will approve the budget at 1 p.m. in the second floor conference room.

here in City Hall.

As I mentioned before, all of this information can be found at our website, Charlottesville.org slash budget, and I will take any questions that you may have at this point.

I'd just like to say thank you.

It's really easy to understand.

Really appreciate that.

And just a couple overall concerns as I've looked through it, read through it, made all my little notes, are a couple places where we're saving money this year, but it's a delay.

It's because we can delay things.

And so I think we need to be careful about how we spend that money.

because if it's something that needs to be spent ongoing, then we're just delaying the problem.

My other concern is that in the request from the schools, their cost of living increase is greater than our staff's.

I'm concerned about that, particularly since we're the ones sort of scrambling to find the money.

I share the concern about the delayed expenditures.

I think that one thing that when we did get the report from the Blue Ribbon Commission that they were saying pretty clearly was that we need to be looking at new sources of revenue and this budget doesn't do that except for that small cigarette tax.

and I think that that's something we should probably have conversations about as we move through this process.

I just have, and I know we're not doing line items, but a constituent asked me today and I just wanted to check in.

Can I ask one other question again?

I don't know when we'll get to talk about this, but I'm sure we will.

We just had our first CAT advisory board meeting.

Lena was there.

Charlottesville Area Transit.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Sorry.

I know you don't like those.

I noticed that there's a rather large drop in general fund support for CAT.

I know that is because of increased, I don't know if it's state or federal, I can't remember, but there might be a match for that.

So that's another concern I have.

In other words instead of it just being an outright that in fact it could require more funds coming.

So I just wanted to sort of put that out as a cautionary tale.

Well, I'd just like to thank Leslie and her staff.

I know it's been a lot of work.

We've got a lot to do yet.

On this side.

With that, we'll close this item.

Are there any new business you'd like to discuss?

This is a PowerPoint presentation.

Just to introduce myself, my name's Gay Perez and I am the Associate Dean of Students and Executive Director for Housing and Res Life at the University of Virginia.

Just to give you a little background, I did graduate from the university in 1987 and then again in 1992 with my master's degree and then I embarked on a 20-year career at five different ACC schools, all in housing and residence life.

and when I returned to the university two years ago, a question was before the university about student housing.

And as a result of that, we engaged a consultant to help us determine our future progress with the residential experience on grounds.

and so Brailsford and Dunleavy, we employed them about a year ago in the fall and so I'm just going to briefly go over some of the key findings that I think is applicable to what the city and the West Main housing project, how it overlaps and how it's going to impact future decisions with respect to the university.

As you can see, this is our occupancy information.

So about two years ago when I got here, when we were trying to think about what we needed to do for the future, one of the only points of information that we had was our occupancy rates.

And as you can see, we have about, for on-grounds, if you take off graduate students, we house about 42% of all enrolled undergraduates on-grounds in our housing complex.

Well, I did this at the Planning Commission about a month ago or something with David Newman.

This is something, yes, that it's actually already a PowerPoint.

Yes, absolutely.

And this compares to other institutions nationally.

It's about 43 percent of their undergraduate

is a good target rate for universities to use.

And then the graduate, we're a little low, we're currently at about 6%, and the national average is more around 8%.

So taking this information, we also enjoy every year our total bed counts.

In the fall we generally open

at about a 99% occupancy.

And then the spring, it dips just a little bit.

That's more from graduation as well as study abroad because the university is very encouraging of our students to have a study abroad experience.

And if they live on grounds with us, we release them from their contract without any financial commitment.

So we do provide that flexibility and nimbleness.

So Brailsford and Dunleavy came on campus for multiple visits with key constituent groups, not only administrators but some graduate students and they did focus groups with our first year residents as well as upper class residents who live on grounds and then those that also live off grounds.

And as a result of that, at that point in time we were asking three major questions.

Is there unmet demand for on grounds housing?

And that is just simply taking our individual inventory that we currently have and then asking students that if we built what they wanted, where they wanted, would they make the decision to remain in on grounds housing?

Then what factors did the students apply in their decision making on where to live after their first year?

Because they really have no choice their first year.

It's all totally random.

It's a single rate structure, so they're just in first year housing.

And then more importantly, what are students looking for in their living space?

and so one of the things that was, one of the main things is we asked to describe their current living condition and where, how satisfied were they?

And so if you look at our data and this survey went out to about 9,000 undergrads and graduate students and we got a 28% return rate so about 2,500 students responded to this survey and if you compare it to

and other institutions.

Chapel Hill had done a similar study and they got about a 16 percent.

So we were pretty happy with our response rate.

So as you can see, 88 percent of our students, whether they lived on grounds or off grounds, were satisfied with their living conditions.

And that pretty much 80 percent

is the, there's no real national average of student satisfaction because of the differences in location of institutions and city and all that kind of stuff.

But if you can piece together some of our peer institutions, well we're close to 90% of moderately to very, most other institutions around that 80%.

And then our very satisfied is at 45 where

The other peer institutions are more like 36.

So our students are pretty happy, which makes me happy.

And then what the consultants did, which is one of the most exciting slides, is they took the density of where our students were living, both on grounds and off grounds, and they triangulated it with their level of satisfaction.

So obviously the bigger the circle, the higher the density of students residing in that area.

The green is off grounds and the red is on grounds.

So the big green one over there is the Rugby Road, the Wortland Street, the corner area sprinkled with the lawn and all that kind of stuff and then the other areas you get into.

the first year area, JPA and things like that.

The darker the circle, the higher the satisfaction.

And so our students' perception is if they are perceived regardless of whether it's reality or not, central grounds right there, they want to be within 15 minute walking distance, so the farther they are away, their perception of that, their satisfaction level goes down.

and then just to give you a nationally, this is a student housing continuum in different types of apartments or suites or traditional style.

Generally, institutions are building, if it's for a first year, they're building the more traditional double loaded corridors with double rooms and a community bath their first and second year because they're transitioning, they're community oriented and they're trying to get engaged and then as they get older,

that's when you get into the more suite and then apartment style.

And our current inventory at Caroline, or sorry, I worked at Carolina before coming back to UVA, but at UVA we're more bookend.

We have a lot of inventory with the traditional doubles because of our first year areas.

And then we have a pretty national average with our apartments, but we don't have the in-between, the semi-suite singles and things like that.

And this I think is very important and I shared it with the neighborhood associations and all of the off-ground landlords and developers is back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, the prevailing trend was the single

room with a single bathroom.

So it was a one to one ratio and what our students tell us is if they had a choice on where to live in their preferred living environment, they would choose the four bedroom, two bathroom apartment.

and so that's very important because it's from a building perspective it costs a lot more to build a bathroom to every bedroom and if the students are saying hey we don't mind sharing a bathroom you know it lowers the cost and the cost point all the way around for building and things like that.

And so in decision-making factors this is very unique to UVA because the number one

Decision is again the proximity to Central Grounds and that is a perceived circle of a 15 minute walk to the Central Grounds area.

And then the second one is the most, I think, telling for the Charlottesville community is the ability to choose roommates.

On a national average, our consultants were telling us that if you ask students, they were like, yeah, I might have one friend that I met that I want to live with the next year.

Well, we have groups of six.

So we have six bedroom

six person units, three bedrooms, double.

And they fill up first.

So Lambeth is one of our most important.

So for our students that social connection and the ability to choose who they live with is very important.

Then the private bedroom.

Obviously the days of telling first year students you have to share a room, but as soon as they do that one year, they will always select the private bedrooms.

Not the bathrooms, but the private bedrooms.

And then cost becomes a factor for the undergraduates.

Now as you can see,

it's very different for our graduate students.

They will prefer the efficiency, the studio, the one bedroom, but they need to have that kitchen facility.

And then their cost point is a lot, they're much more conscious of the cost of where they're gonna live in the utilities.

And then their private space, they do not want to live with more than maybe one other person.

And then the proximity to grounds.

And I think that's it.

That's what I had.

Real quick, you know, I like your color-coordinated...

I like the color-coordinated reports and all, but I'm colorblind.

So when you say red and purple and blue, I have no idea what's what.

The darker the color, the higher the satisfaction.

If you could ballpark, if a student were to go out to the community and rent a room, they'd be anywhere from $500 to $800 a month.

Yeah, we just got our rates approved and overall there was about a 3% increase, a 3.8, but what we did is we collapsed some of the rates and ours is based on an academic year so they're not tied to a 12 month lease.

It's under $700, it's more in the $500-$600 all-inclusive.

Okay, well I'm sure also you know that we've had an explosion of development from West Main.

Yes, yes.

Which I characterize as dormitories.

It doesn't because we did this report and then the introduction of these three projects that I think are going to add up to fifteen to eighteen hundred

And one last question.

I'm sorry?

Is that growth?

Yes, well, it's not specifically in there, but we have our current construction on Alderman Road,

the fact that in 2008 we converted Gooch-Dillard what used to be upper class to all first year students so we have been able to maintain and provide inventory for that first year growth.

But after the first year there's no requirement to live on grounds and so

That's why it's a balancing act.

Well, thank you for coming down.

No, you're quite welcome.

Well, actually, I didn't until Bob asked the question.

So it's 500 to 600 for a shared bedroom?

Well, we have different rates.

So we could collapse from 14.

So it's a range.

It's obviously the single bedrooms in an apartment are the most expensive.

And they're under 7,000.

They're like 6,000 something.

We actually decreased that rate by 9.8% in the collapsing of the rate.

But then Lambeth, which we have zero vacancies for next year,

with the second year.

And BICE is all double occupancy.

Faulkner and Copley have the single occupancy in the apartment style.

So in doing this study, was UVA contemplating increasing?

Are you

Sure, we were always looking to, because we always got the question, well, as you're increasing the first year capacity, you know, in displacing more students, are you going to get to the point where we want to keep a certain percentage, which 42 is pretty good nationally, you know, could we get up to 45%?

You know, sure.

So that's what kind of the impetus was and so I advocated for asking the students because they're going to be the ones who make the decisions on where they live.

But you're saying that's on hold now that there's... Yeah, there's no rush now.

So we're just seeing what our students are going to do and then if there's available dollars, you know, my preference is to refresh our apartments.

I just wonder if there's some way that we could

have kind of closer communication of your plans and what's going on in the city.

Because I know that when we were being faced with a decision to approve these three student housing developments, there was concern that was EVA already building these?

Was there going to be kind of an oversupply of units?

So would that be something that we just get through the pack?

Is that how do we keep this?

Sure I mean the way we tend to make the decision you know David Newman it's a it's a office of the architect and that's how I was able to share this with the planning commission but I believe that those student housing

projects were well into the approval process before we were brought in.

But we've shared the report.

It just came out a year ago, and I presented it to the Board of Visitors in April of last year.

And then I believe that we gave it to the Daily Progress.

No, this is great.

It's great.

I just appreciate that exchange.

Other questions or comments?

You're quite welcome.

Well, I would like to mention one thing, Mr. Mayor.

After we get through this budget process, I would like to have an accounting of the McIntire Park interchange, how it's going, how much it costs.

Are there any cost overruns?

OK, thank you.

I do have a request, and it's

I'm hearing great things about the progress on the East McIntyre Park and so I think the general concern I'm hearing from the public is that they just want to be informed again about the various

stages in the design process.

And so as soon as we can get that information out, the better.

I would I would love to get an update myself as to what's going on with the East McIntyre Park process.

And I believe that there's a some individual bridge design that has been approved.

We saw it at the last presentation for Mr. Daley.

We just awarded the design to a couple of different groups.

I saw that and that was great news.

We sent that out to the media and then also sent it to city council.

And as part of that, Brian Daley and I have had discussions about next steps in that process from a public perspective.

That'd be great, because I think we've gotten great feedback on that West Main project.

Yeah, I would just like to add one thing.

As you all know, the state legislature has been considering whether or not to expand Medicaid eligibility in the Commonwealth.

And cities around the Commonwealth are taking a stand and asking their legislators

to support it.

Our legislators do, but I wondered if you all would like to – I know we did, but just to ask them to kind of reiterate our – and I've told our legislators that we have done this, but just to kind of give an extra push, and also to the folks at home if you're interested in seeing Medicaid expansion.

I think it's a great idea.

I'm fine, why not?

Just keep sending it over and over again.

Any other opportunity for public comments?

Anybody would like to speak?

Motion for a City Council closed session.

Pursuant to section 2.2-3712 of the Virginia Code, I hereby move that City Council close this open meeting and convene in closed session for one, discussion of the annual performance evaluations for the City Manager and Clerk of City Council as authorized by Virginia Code section 2.2-3711A1, and two, consultation with legal counsel for legal advice

regarding the negotiation of the terms and conditions of a cost sharing agreement with the Almonte County Service Authority for the cost of capital waste water projects as authorized by Virginia Code section 2.2-3711A7.

You vote?

No, I can adjourn.

Thank you.