City Council Meeting (Censored)   11/19/2012

Mr. Norris?

Here.

Ms. Smith?

Here.

Ms. Szakos?

Here.

We have some awards and announcements.

Kathy?

Yes.

The Charlottesville Gas Marketing Awards.

The City of Charlottesville Gas Division was recently presented with two national awards for their marketing efforts.

The American Public Gas Association awarded Charlottesville Gas with their Outstanding Marketing and Sales Award.

This is the second time in three years Shasla Gass has received this honor from the APGA.

The winning entry showcased Shasla Gass's marketing campaign on air gas safety and public awareness.

Charlottesville Gas also received a second place award from the City County Communications and Marketing Association for their most recent gas safety PSAs.

All campaigns were created in-house and produced with the help of a local TV station.

As a result of these efforts, there was an increase in new residential gas applications and the number of residents within the service area who can recognize the smell of natural gas increased by 87%.

That's great.

Now we have a video.

Smell gas?

Act fast.

Leave the area immediately.

Well, pretty much just say thank you to our great director that gave us all the great freedom to come up with these ideas.

And also for all the great talent that we found, the people in the video was just city employees that donated their time to be in the video and their kids.

So I really appreciate that.

Anything else?

Thank you.

This is the Charlottesville City Council Proclamation on the Arts, 2012.

Whereas Americans for the Arts, the nation's leading arts research and advocacy organization, conducted its fourth benchmark study of the national economic impact of the arts industry in 182 study regions across the United States and

Whereas the Arts and Economic Prosperity 4 study found that the arts industry generates 135.2 billion dollars annually in economic activity and supports 4.1 million jobs from large urban to small rural communities and that the arts industry annually generates 22.3 billion dollars in federal, state and local tax revenues and

whereas the Arts and Economic Prosperity 4 study found that the arts industry in the greater Charlottesville area generates 114.4 million dollars annually in economic activity and supports 1921 jobs and that the arts industry annually returns 9.2 million dollars in local government revenue and whereas as demonstrated by the Arts and Economic Prosperity 4 study the arts in Charlottesville, Virginia substantially contribute to the local economy now therefore be it resolved

Hi, my name is George Beller and I'm president of the board of Piedmont Council for the Arts and with me up here is Sarah Lawson who's our executive director and on behalf of our board and our staff we would like to thank the city for this proclamation and we look forward to working with you as we go forward with the strategic plan to enhance arts and culture in our region even greater than it is now

and I just wanted to say that of all cities of our population that were surveyed, I believe there were about 18 in our population, we were second in revenue generated arts and culture.

Only Providence, Rhode Island, which is considerably larger than Charlottesville, generated more revenue related to arts and culture over the year of survey.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, we are fortunate in this community to be served by the men and women of the Charlottesville Police Department who every day put their lives on the line for all of us and led by our outstanding police chief, Tim Longo, who I noticed was not singing along to Flicker the Flame.

I'm very disappointed.

The Charlottesville Police Department is proud to be an accredited agency.

It's actually received its first initial accreditation in 2000.

and this year has achieved the milestone of earning its third re-accreditation and here to present tonight to our police department their third re-accreditation certificate we are joined by Gary Dillon who is the program director and Sheriff Brian Roberts of Brunswick County as the vice chair

of the Virginia Law Enforcement Professional Standards Commission.

Joining them is Deputy Director of the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services, Andrew Molloy, and members of the onsite accreditation assessment team.

My name's Gary Dillon, the program manager for Virginia's law enforcement accreditation program.

Tonight with me is, again, Mr. Drew Malloy, deputy director of DCJS.

Sheriff Charles Jett is here representing the commission.

Sheriff Roberts was not able to make it.

And also from the accreditation assessment team, Sergeant Rebecca Herrera, they're in the back of the room representing the Division of Capitol Police.

And we're here once again to recognize your police department for their outstanding performance in Virginia's law enforcement accreditation program.

All accreditation programs are designed to measure and confirm compliance

of the participating agency with the professional standards in whatever discipline or profession they're involved in.

It's one of the only means by which citizens and government leaders like yourselves can be assured that the agency is maintaining the high performance marks to which the community has a right.

In Virginia, law enforcement agencies can seek and achieve accredited status, but it's not mandatory.

Our program's completely voluntarily that further distinguishes your police department for their participation.

Since the program was started in the early 1990s, out of the roughly 400 agencies that are eligible to be accredited, only 85 are accredited, further distinguishing your police department.

Each agency that participates must meet or exceed the standards.

and the criteria that's contained in their policies, rules and regulations.

Our assessment team comes in and they verify that your police department, first of all, has policies and the second, that they're following their policies and we found that to be true.

In September, a team of assessors came to the city of Charlottesville and they assessed the police department, issuing their report to the commission.

Chief Longo, the department, appeared before the commission on October 11th where they unanimously approved for re-accreditation.

On behalf of the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Secretary of Public Safety, I congratulate the entire Police Department, Chief Longo, Accreditation Manager Harvey Finkel, who is here tonight, to maintain the volumes of files that are necessary to maintain this accredited

Designation.

Harvey did a great job doing that, but it wasn't just one person that did it.

If the department didn't do what they were supposed to be doing, Harvey wouldn't be able to put together these files for the assessors to review, so it was a team effort.

And I like to say, as a former Charlottesville police officer myself, serving several years under Chief Longo, this assessment report and the ones before it come as no surprise to me.

This department continues to excel under Chief Longo's leadership and this fourth accreditation board reflects the performance of those who continue to serve this world-class city.

I would only add that on behalf of Garth Wheeler, the director of the Department of Criminal Justice Services and Theresa Gooch, who is retired, she's also a retired police officer and as is director Wheeler, Theresa is our division director and they take great pride when they can

make an award of this nature to the police department.

And we truly value the partnership we have with Chief Longo.

We've called on him many times and he's always been there to answer for us.

Mr. Mayor, members of the council, if you'd indulge me just for a moment, it's an honor and privilege on behalf of the Professional Standards Commission to be here.

of which Chief Longo is the chairman of that commission, so most certainly closely affiliated with helping law enforcement professionalize all across the Commonwealth.

Twelve years ago I had the privilege of standing here and participating in the first accreditation of Charlottesville Police Department.

That was very significant.

Here we stand twelve years later for their third accreditation and I will tell you that they are in a very, very

small elite group of law enforcement agencies who have been able to sustain those professional standards.

I've known Chief Longo since he took reign here in Charlottesville and I admire him, I respect him, I call him friend.

There are a number of us in the law enforcement community that look upon

Chief Longo's professionalism and expertise in many things we do and I feel that he continues to help us professionalize.

So it's an honor for me to stand here as an aging sheriff from Stafford County, not like that young sheriff that was invited here earlier to participate in this and to just say

Congratulations to Chief Longo and his outstanding department.

His leadership most certainly is felt not only in this city, as a premier city, but also all throughout the law enforcement community in Commonwealth of Virginia.

Thank you, sir.

Mr. Mayor and members of council, you've heard quite enough already and I will simply say thank you for the honor and privilege of being able to serve your community as the chief of police.

I raised my family here so I take to heart the services that we provide not just as a police department but a local government and I hope that long after I go on to other things with my life this department will continue to maintain the professional standards

that we've tried to establish here and I promise you I paid these gentlemen nothing to say those kind remarks.

I also want to thank you and your staff of Police Department on behalf of City Council.

Well, not only does he do a remarkable job minding this store, he does a remarkable job keeping us at task here with our accreditation process.

So Harvey, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Oh, yes.

I just have a heads up for an event coming up in January.

This is your first notice of save the date.

Saturday, January 26th, that would be 2013, the Grace Tinsley Scholarship Bash.

It's a really wonderful fundraiser and a really fun event.

It takes place at the Elks Club Lodge, that's at Dardan Tau Park.

from 7 to 10 p.m. All proceeds go to scholarships for Charlottesville High School seniors.

So it's a really important event.

$35 at the door.

Thank you.

Well, I have an announcement about Neighborhood Leadership Institute, which is the seventh annual session starting January 9th, 2013.

The deadline for filing is December 21st, next month.

If you need more information, you can call Abney Walden, Neighborhood Planner, 970-3182, or you can go to CharlotteSilent.org and this application form.

And I would like to encourage citizens who are interested in knowing about our government to apply to be part of this.

It is free.

but it does involve a different four-month commitment from 6 to 8, 30 p.m. on Wednesday evenings.

So it is on two things I want you to remember.

One, the deadline is December 21st and it starts on January 9th, 2013.

If you're interested, please apply.

Are there any other announcements?

If not, we'll go to the list page.

We'll go now to public comments.

You have three minutes to speak on any topic you like.

Good evening.

You're getting a handout we're going to refer to in just a moment.

We are Catherine Clutsley and Kristine Kasten, extension agents with the Albemarle, Charlottesville, Office of Virginia Cooperative Extension.

We offer a wide array of research-based local educational programs that promote economic sustainability.

We thank you for your support in making our food safety educational program successful.

We'd like to share a little bit about those programs with you this evening.

The Center for Disease Control has identified poor personal hygiene, improper food temperatures, contaminated equipment, and food from unsafe sources as the top risk factors to foodborne illness in the United States.

Our agency educates people who grow, handle, process, prepare,

and serve food to improve their knowledge and skills to reduce foodborne illness in this Charlottesville, Albemarle area by reducing these risk factors.

So you've got a handout.

All right, good evening.

My name is Catherine Kletzle and the program that we run in our office is one of many and the one that we're highlighting tonight is the Keeping Local Foods Safe, which is the handout in front of you.

As Kristin mentioned, this funnels into promoting economic sustainability in our community in three distinct ways.

Expanding agriculture markets, job training and resource amplification.

So I just wanted to talk real briefly expanding agricultural markets.

One of the programs that we're having a lot of momentum and success in is in our farm food safety.

This is more of our buyers in the community are requiring their farms to go through some food safety training.

So this is a way for those farms to

Access Markets, those buyers who are requiring that from them.

As far as job training, Kristin mentioned ServSafe and Safe Food Handler.

Those are some courses that we offer that is a marketable skill that those folks can take and get jobs with.

and resource amplification.

Those are things like us being able to pull in money to support our programs.

We had a $3,000 grant that supported this local foods program.

We have the backing of Virginia Tech and Virginia State behind us that are offering specialists in food safety programming.

And we also do compliance work or

We help to assist some of the regulatory services that the USDA and VDACs, the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health provide in our local community.

Below that, on that first page, you have some what are called impacts and progress.

It just gives you some numbers behind the programs that we're conducting.

One of the ones that I wanted to point out to you is that we just conducted last month our certification gap certification of Maple Hill Farm.

It is connected with the local food hub which supplies a number of our local restaurants and institutions here in Charlottesville in the city and they are serve as an educational model to 75 other farms in the area so we're hoping that they'll be able to follow suit pretty quickly.

OK. And I just wanted to flip over on the back page.

We have some pictures of our programs, so please take a look at those when you get a chance.

Just gives you some visuals of some of the things that we're doing.

I encourage you to contact us with any questions.

John Hayden, Westwood Road.

I'm amazed at the ease with which the City Council seems to be willing to waste our tax dollars.

I'm even more amazed at the lengths the City Council is willing to go to coddle the drunks, the drug dealers, and the troublemakers on the mall.

The very idea that you would even consider a mall coordinator or whatever you call it to in essence hold these people's hands to the tune of $80,000 a year makes me furious.

Realize what your priorities are here.

How many cops could you hire for 80 grand?

How much more extra could you pay the ones we have with that or with this surplus?

Bums on the Mall is not a new problem but you've compounded the problem with your grand decisions.

Let's not be confused about who we're talking about.

These are not poor unfortunate souls who if aren't allowed to panhandle will go hungry.

These are people who made a conscious decision to drink or take drugs or just too lazy to get out and work.

Some of these people

Some of these are people who we taxpayers are subsidizing to the tune of $500 a month for free housing in the homeless shelter and a whole host of other freebies.

I'm sick of helping those who won't help their selves.

How many businesses will have to close before you get rid of them?

This is not a free speech issue.

You already have the authority to control the problem.

if you allow the police to do their jobs.

In the West Haven neighborhood, the police have the power to issue no trespassing warrants to people there who are selling drugs or causing disturbances and ban them from the neighborhood.

The only difference here is these people are holding a sign.

Their actions are the same.

Why can't you use the same authority to get rid of the troublemakers on the mall neighborhood?

If the mall business owners had any guts, they would withhold sending their tax revenues to the city and I guarantee the bums would be gone tomorrow.

Does their free speech rights trump the business owners' right to make a living?

Thank you.

Good evening, my name is Nancy Carpenter, Albemarle County resident, and what I'm about to say is pertinent to both county and city.

Thank you, Mr. Hayden, for those wonderful comments, but to be perfectly honest, I bet more drugs are dealt out of bars on the downtown mall than what you see on a few bricks and on our sidewalks.

One of my main concerns in reference to mall enhancements, the report that you will hear shortly, has to do with the gentrification or the continued gentrification of that downtown space where people seem more concerned with the transformation of space than the transformation of lives.

I think that creating the look of an economically stable and aesthetically pleasing community apparently requires the ridding of space in that space of poverty-stricken persons that inhabit that space and from sight in order to attract new development and from tourists having to see what the reality of life is, what the reality of poverty is, what the reality of being shelter-challenged is.

You may not be homeless, but you may not have a home.

You may be sleeping on somebody's couch.

You may be going from shelter to, you may be sleeping in your car, perhaps in front of Gold's Gym.

So just because you're not in what we consider a home does not make you homeless.

I really feel that what I'm seeing is a Disneyfication of a public space into a private space.

To really look at the new urbanism that's referenced in this report, you really have to look at, one of the things that you look at is mixed use and you also look at diversity.

And that means diversity of people, diversity of genders, diversity of culture, diversity.

The other thing that I think that we need in this community is not calling people bums.

We need to look at our own vulnerabilities.

We need to be able to look at our vulnerabilities with these individuals.

They are just as much a citizen.

They are just as much have rights as I do.

Just because they choose to do something doesn't mean I have to like it.

I don't have to support it, but I don't have the liberty to deny it.

at all.

Just on November 14th, our governor, Governor McDonald, I don't always agree with him on a lot of policies for sure, but he did say that prosperous and healthy communities need affordable and safe housing.

It's fundamental to communities.

so that I think the city and the county have to look to more affordable housing to make those policies have some teeth in them to provide low-income housing for our citizens and perhaps the situations that Mr. Hayden or some of the north downtown residents or some of the downtown business members are afraid of will no longer be in existence because we will be doing something that is just and that is right.

I've been here before.

My name is Lynn Weibert and I live in Albemarle County.

I've been an activist in the homeless community for almost 11 years now.

And listening to Mr. Hayden is the same thing I hear all the time.

They just don't want to work.

They just don't want to do anything for themselves.

I tend to ignore remarks like that because

There's no basis in reality for it.

In any large community, there are people that don't seem to understand what work is.

My mother called it no home trading.

I was reading over the report that's going to be read later tonight, and I was struck by a couple of things.

One was, you want to ban the use of vulgar language.

I don't understand what that is.

I mean, seriously, how do you

determined what's vulgar and what isn't.

Profanity, it sounds like it's free speech issues to me.

And anybody coming out of a bar with a few drinks under their belt's going to say something, okay?

How do you police the entire downtown mall?

People didn't want to see drunks, homeless people, the mentally ill. Just as a side, we rank in all the 50 states

between 47th and 49th and help poorly retreat our mentally ill. We don't have places for them.

You can't send them somewhere.

You can go to Region 10, they'll assess you and then tell you to go back to the street and come back in six weeks and maybe they can help you.

So you- Can you please hold your clapping till the end of the comments, please?

No.

The fact is that Virginia is a commonwealth for businesses and not for people.

And people don't come first, money always comes first.

That's just a fact.

What we're trying to do is find a place for these folks.

They have to live on the downtown mall

because they don't even have bus fare to go somewhere else, seriously.

There isn't a shelter except for the Salvation Army and they've banned most people.

Pacham will take a lot of them, but that's only part of the year.

They don't have anywhere else to go.

That seems to be like something that's missing in everything that's being proposed.

The other thing that struck me is that we're trying to like, it's all, okay, well, I was interrupted there for a while.

We're always trying to legislate denial.

We don't want to look at anything that looks bad.

We don't want to smell it.

We don't want to see it.

We don't want to hear about it.

But this is the diversity of the city.

We are really proud of our diversity.

But that includes everything, not just one thing or another.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Jeffrey Fogel.

I reside at 215 Spruce Street here in the city.

And I came to comment as well on the memo presented by the city manager of the council euphemistically titled Downtown Mall Enhancements.

First, I want to say I'm a frequent walker on the downtown mall.

My office is three blocks from the mall.

I'm there almost every day for lunch.

I go there to get my hair cut.

I go there to go to the drugstore.

I go there to buy cards.

I go there to go to restaurants.

I go there to listen to music.

I go there to go to the movies.

And I have been all the time.

never, never seen the so-called rude, disruptive, vulgar, outrageous behavior that's constantly described to you in this council.

Now, can I say it never happens?

Of course not.

I'm not there all the time, but I can talk to friends of mine and colleagues who also are frequent travelers on the downtown mall, some of whom have businesses there, some of whom have offices there, and they don't see it either.

So what's going on here?

What's obviously going on here is a gross exaggeration of the conduct that may occur on some rare occasions.

And even when this council voted or decided to remove the benches from the front of Central Place because of what they considered ontoward activity there at night, that previous week I had eaten at both restaurants in Central Place outdoors.

I saw people who were frequenting the chairs there and the benches, but I didn't see rude, disruptive, loud, and abusive conduct.

So what's going on here?

It is being exaggerated grossly to you.

Now this council some time ago passed an ordinance prohibiting aggressive panhandling.

That was right.

The only thing wrong about it was that the conduct that was prohibited by that shouldn't be limited to people who solicit.

It should be limited to anybody who engages in that kind of aggressive behavior towards another person in our society should be guilty of an offense.

Many states call it harassment.

We don't have such a statute.

You could, but you decided only to limit it to solicitors.

People can do the most outrageous things here, as long as they're not soliciting, it's legal.

So then you came back and decided to restrict the opportunity to beg on the downtown wall.

There was no real problem there either.

This was again part of a concerted effort to remove what some people considered undesirables from the downtown wall.

Mr. Mayor, you assured me when I opposed that legislation that it would be equally enforced and yet I have a scrapbook in my camera of people standing there, 4th Street, soliciting, playing music.

My bank, which is right on 4th Street with a table out right by the intersection there soliciting signatures.

All the dangers that were supposedly created led you to believe that you had to restrict soliciting within 50 feet are present there and are not being enforced against anybody other than people who beg.

and you won't see people begging there, you'll see other people utilizing that in violation of your rule and not being enforced and being enforced discriminatorily and unequally.

All of which leads to the conclusion that this is part of a concerted effort to remove these people from the law.

There's a recognition, at least on the part of counsel, you can't do that.

The law is very clear.

But if we're going to go to the limits of what the law allows, you're going to align yourself with a right-wing Supreme Court and an even more right-wing Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals if you're going to limit your view of civil liberties for that.

Now the town manager says we have been working with the community for three years.

What community has he worked with?

Only the downtown business association and the north downtown residents association.

Does this mall belong to those two categories of people or is it all of our mall?

Are there people in the community who believe in civil liberties?

Clearly there are, and some of the people on the council have expressed those concerns as well.

But there's a whole community of people concerned about civil liberties.

Why aren't they part of this discussion as well?

Why is it left to only the people who want to rid us of undesirables rather than the ones who want to encourage diversity and to look at solving problems in a manner that's not repressive?

even your suggestion of ambassadors which might have been a good idea had it not come out of this they are going to act as adjuncts to the police department and if you're going to do that you ought to have signal signs on them that say we're on the police department and if you talk to us you're talking to a cop so watch your right watch the fifth amendment and watch the sixth amendment

and everybody on the downtown mall describing their rights vis-a-vis the police and those ambassadors as well.

You're about to talk about spending another $200,000 on this problem, throwing it away, it's going to go nowhere.

Good evening, George Penford, City of Charlottesville.

I'm going to put some light into this evening's discussion by bringing up the holiday parade that's going to take place December the 1st.

And hopefully we can all have some good cheer together, all of us in this community.

The parade will start on Saturday morning.

As I said, it will start at the pavilion and run the length of the mall.

Again, we'll be using electric vehicles only.

And it's going to be, this year we have two marching bands, a whole bunch of new activities,

What day does it start?

last probably about an hour and a half last year we had almost 5,000 people on the mall watching it we hope everyone come back for that too one other thing just to mention I want to thank you all for your support of the gala event I thank everyone who was there I saw a lot of dancing by a lot of the people sitting right up here in front of me and everyone I think had a really really good time we were pleased with the turnout we were most pleased with the diversity of the people that attended tremendous cross-section of our community were there all having a great time

Hats off to you in particular, Maurice, for making sure the Coolant Gang was going to be there and they did such a great job.

And I want to thank everyone who did attend and support the city on their 250th anniversary.

Hello.

Bailey Hampton, 505 Elliott Avenue.

Excuse me if I'm kind of froggy.

I've been sick for about a week now.

I'm here tonight to address the proposed downtown mall enhancements.

The proposal that city staff is making tonight makes me

Sick and excuse my language, but you need to understand the severity of my opposition.

Again, it seems to me that the only thing the city is really interested in is getting unpleasant things out of sight.

The North Downtown Resident Association and Downtown Business Association have had a say in proposed mall enhancements, but where's the voice of the supposed antisocial behavior crowd?

Do they not count as humans because they don't have the money

The city is proposing approximately $1,230,000 in spending to address this issue.

The issue as I see it is that homelessness and poverty are unpleasant to witness.

You could take that money and build a new overnight shelter or open existing abandoned houses

where people aren't turned away for having addiction issues, physical health issues, or any other issue that prohibits them from current shelter options.

New shelters would get bodies off the mall.

I want to ask this question.

If you can't get into a shelter and it's illegal to sleep in a park or on private property or on city property, where the are people supposed to sleep if they have no place to be?

I live here in Charlottesville.

My name is Donna Gassapo.

Big brother is here, Charlottesville, and who better to usher him in than your oh so progressive city counselors and city manager?

Because nothing says progress like kowtowing to the paranoid whims of the merchant class.

Voice them up high, these job creators who are doing such a bang up job of job creating that there are no homeless await.

They're bad.

I'm familiar with all these power players, though.

Remember when the Occupy movement seized the imagination of the world and then took hold of Lee Park?

Remember, too, that it was these same players, the city council, the city manager, the mall merchants, and the North downtown residents, ever privileged, white as the hoods, donned by the KKK at the dedication of the Robert E. Lee statue just down the way.

It was these people of power and privilege who decided the parameters of public space in this city.

It is these same people of power and privilege who will decide the parameters of public space in this city again tonight.

There's a Facebook page for what is being called the Downtown Mall Reclamation Project.

On that page, yucky, yucky people are lamenting that they have to deal with the discomforting visage of homelessness in this city.

That they have to face mental illness when all they're doing is attempting to turn a blind eye to the suffering of other people that they don't care jack.

about in this world.

I mean, don't get me wrong.

Why should people in this city with money, most of whom are white, most of whom are able-bodied, have to see things that remind them that there are those of us who do not have what they have.

Increasing surveillance of the members of this community doesn't make them all safer or feel more welcoming.

Rather, surveillance will make lots of people feel way less welcome and will actually make them all more dangerous, but only for certain folks.

as per usual the folks feeling the brunt of these changes the ones already in place like the misleadingly named Ambassador Program and the ones being proposed here tonight will be the folks already marginalized already with little recourse available to them to address their concerns when they are bullied and targeted in these ways already with too few resources to be deemed worthy to meet their own needs of survival as necessity requires

Criminalizing folks in these ways after neglecting them their entire lives, after destroying their access to the resources they need to survive, and then calling all attempts to quell the discomfort they cause to the well-heeled outrage.

Like I said, screw that.

These kinds of social and economic violences against the historically institutionally dominated are inhumane.

I'm Nina Francis Burke and I live at 817 Henry Avenue.

I want to say that I vehemently oppose the mall enhancement proposals.

I see this not only as a violation of human rights, but also this is a devastating emergence of a culture of oppression on our main street.

I see this war on the poor, denying and hiding the homeless presence on our main street is just as harmful to ourselves as it is to those who need our support the most.

I will read a quote to you from the Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron.

We think that by protecting ourselves from suffering, we are being kind to ourselves.

The truth is we only become more fearful, more hardened,

and more alienated.

We experience ourselves as being separate from the whole.

This separateness becomes a prison for us, a prison that restricts us to our personal hopes and fears and to caring only for the people nearest to us.

Curiously enough, if we primarily try to shield ourselves from discomfort, we suffer.

Thank you.

I live at 713 Hinton Avenue.

I'm really nervous because I don't do public speaking, but being angry makes me braver, so here we are.

Everybody that I've heard speak about

any political policy ever always tries to use logic or a clever argument and it's bullshit.

I mean really, if at the end of the day you win the argument and you're a bad person.

It doesn't matter how good your argument is.

Compassion isn't something that people earn by living up to your arbitrary standards.

Just everybody out there who feels like being kind to people means that they're giving something up.

I would urge you strongly to really consider why that is.

Thank you.

Hi council, excuse me.

Hey, I'm a little hoarse.

And I too am nervous.

It's my first time public speaking.

Could you tell us your name please?

My address is 112 West Market Street, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902.

Thank you all for allowing me to speak.

And if you look at me, how long have I been living on your streets?

You don't know?

So all I want, I want to just have a brief, things that I already have in my notepad.

I have written, I am homeless.

All of you may be about a paycheck away from where I am.

Look at hostess.

And paraphrased in the word of Tupac Shakur, when I ask nicely for a job, you don't hear me.

But when I come through knocking loudly, then you hear me.

We have one more opportunity.

Is there anybody else who would like to speak?

If not, we close public comment section.

I'll begin.

Thank you everybody for coming.

What passion.

It's really remarkable what our city is all about.

And we of course have our much more in depth conversation about the downtown mall, but we really, really, really appreciate all of you.

Particularly those of you who for whom it was your first time public speaking.

It's it's really great to see I will reserve my downtown mall comments for later But I also wanted to thank Virginia Cooperative Extension who I actually I think have left but for coming and just letting us know more about how Virginia Cooperative Extension has adapted to modern times into a more urban

world that we live in here, our urban community, because they are extremely valuable and I think we're still associated with county fairs and farms, but really they particularly, I think tonight they really demonstrated how they've really fit in well with our community.

Yeah, all the public comments had to deal with pretty much the enhancement question of the downtown mall.

I do want to express my appreciation to several of the members of the public, however, that did express themselves in a very civil manner.

Ms. Carpenter, you always do.

I may not always agree with you, but you're always very extremely civil and upfront.

Ms. Wiebel as well, thank you.

Mr. Fogel, very firm and passionate but also extremely civil and professional in everything you do.

Ms. Nina Burke, very heartfelt and again appreciate the tone as did Ms. Natasha Turner.

So with that, I would like to say I thank you.

And there was one comment that Mr. Hayden made that I thought was interesting.

He said, pay police a wage to allow them to live in the city.

Thank you.

Next on our agenda, Dealing with Consent Agenda.

Business as usual has got to stop in this town.

Public housing residents and those that are currently homeless have been consistently left behind through your bureaucracy.

It is time to stop business as usual.

I have two friends who were brought to this town as refugees of Katrina and were left on the streets by the government.

Harassment by police, conservatives, liberals, and rich, mostly white people who didn't want to face the reality of their own privilege was a constant.

You need to wait for your comments.

The thing is, you had every opportunity to say what you just said.

We invited you to speak.

Three minutes ago.

You're not taking all the space, I know.

You're not really doing your cause any favors.

I think you guys, you don't realize you're not doing yourselves any favors.

You're not doing your...

I think you had more sympathy up here than you thought before.

Item B, Appropriation, State Criminal Alien Assistance Program Grant for 2012 for $15,314, second of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation reimbursement for Piedmont Council of the Arts for Celebrate 250, $3,110, second of two readings.

Item D, an appropriation 2012 Edward Byron Memorial Justice Assistance Grant, $28,386, first of two readings.

Item E, an appropriation, Federal Realty Sponsorship Agreement, Police Patrol at Barracks Road Shopping Center, $30,000, first of two readings.

Item F, an appropriation, Charlottesville Area Transit Project, Landscape Performance Bond Release, $13,621.86, first of two readings.

Item G, an appropriation of FY 2013 Transit Grants, $30,153.

$219,728 and $513,713, first of two readings.

Item H in appropriation, Runaway Emergency Shelter Program, $212,444, first of two readings.

Item I in appropriation, 2013 Department of Motor Vehicles Virginia Highway Safety Grant, $18,975, first of two readings.

Item J an appropriation reimbursement to city for Comcast celebrate 250 donation $5,000 first of one reading.

Item K a resolution revenue sharing program application for bridge rehabilitation $500,000 first of one reading.

I think members of the council would like to remove any items from this agenda.

Is there a second?

Second.

Mr. Mayor, Members of Council,

I'm here to present our year-end results and I would like to thank Mrs. Szakos of Valbrant City Council for putting us where we are this year.

I'd like to talk first about our revenue compared to budget.

In fiscal 12 we were $891,000 over budget in our revenue sources.

Meals tax was $625,000 over budget and that was primarily due to an improving economy and several new businesses that moved into the city.

Lodging taxes were $231,000 over budget, and this is the third year in a row where we've seen our occupancy rates actually increase.

Sales taxes were almost $500,000 over budget there again, an improving economy and several new businesses.

It should be noted, though, that in 2008 we collected $10.2 million in sales tax revenue.

This year we collected almost $10 million.

So we really haven't gotten to the point we were worth several years ago, but we're slowly climbing up.

Parking garage revenue was $427,000 over budget.

And there were the major items.

Now we had, when you look at real estate taxes, that was actually under budget, but permits and fees,

What about the same over budget as real estate taxes were under budget?

So when you look at all of them together, our total revenue is six tenths of one percent to budget, over budget, which I think is another good year.

Last year we were eight tenths of one percent.

And I should mention that we meet on a monthly basis as a revenue committee with the Economic Development Office, the Treasurer, Commissioner, the Budget Office and the Finance Office and review these revenues on an ongoing basis.

So for the second year in a row, I think when you look at the original budget put together, you look at the final results, we were pretty close on the revenue side.

Our expenses were actually $2.9 million under our budget for 2012, which represents about 2% of the general fund expense budget.

The primary savings in there were salary savings of $573,000 due to turnovers,

Comprehensive Services Act saved $476,000 under budget.

Social Services was $250,000 under budget.

Recreation and Parks was a total of $342,000 under budget, primarily due to the delayed opening of the Carver Center.

The Detention Center was $246,000 over budget.

One of the items there was we had people transfer from Richmond who closed their detention center that helped out there.

And Charlottesville,

Court, I mean the jail was $183,000 under budget and that was primarily due to salary vacancies and some efficiencies.

If you look at exhibit one, it summarizes the revenue over budget and the expenses under budget and gives us a balance of almost $3.8 million.

The city manager has recommended of that $3.8 million, $674,000 be spent or added to the fiscal year 13 budget.

The two major items there are

continuation of market increases of $200,000 that were actually occurred in fiscal year 12, but were not budgeted in fiscal year 13, and recreation in parks for $157,000, $118,000 for additional rent.

Once you, if you approve those, we're gonna have a balance of $3.1 million, which based on our ordinance would go to the CIP contingency fund, unless council changes that at this time.

Can you just explain a little bit more about the employee compensation and benefits?

Human Resources did a market rate survey back in the spring of 2012 and based on what they found was

They paid, I think, $100,000 from January to June.

Right.

Okay.

Okay.

I just have one clarification that actually I saw in an email but I just want to make sure I understand.

So when you say that by kind of by our code or by our ordinance that this goes to the CIP unless we use it for something else, there's nothing in that ordinance that says how much of it needs to go to the CIP, just that it should be not for ongoing projects, but something that's specific for next year or to the CIP.

There's a gas utilities fund funds to be used for handheld meters but then there's a separate utilities so you sort of there's excess money and then

I mean, they seem to be separated.

The Utilities Fund gas under 4.

I'm trying to figure out which page this is.

They're in the actual gas fund itself.

So the surplus was within the enterprise fund and is being used within the enterprise fund?

I guess I do have one general question.

No, some of them are balances that were on the books at the end of fiscal year 12 that were just continuing, asking you to continue into next year.

Some of them are things like in the city attorney's office, $20,000 for a recodification of a code that was in the 12 budget, but he didn't get to it, so he asked me to put it in the 13 budget.

The $200,000 was just a budget mistake.

It needs to be corrected.

And actually now I have another question too.

I don't know if you prepared this for us or if Mr. Jones did, but it shows the amount of surplus that we've put into the CIP each year since 2007.

That's exactly right.

You look at it every year this year we just did not appropriate as much as we normally have in past years.

Okay, $143 million.

So this is a really small percentage of that.

Thank you for

I've been hearing for the last couple of days is that reducing conservatism and to give you an example in fiscal year 13 we have actually reduced

the savings we had here of $2.9 million by over $800,000 because we produced Comprehensive Services Act by $300,013.

We've reduced social services by $250,000 in 2013, and we actually increased our turnover by $300,000 in 2013.

So we're recognizing that we don't want to have these, you know, what some people would perceive to be large surpluses, even at 2%,

which, you know, I mean, if you look at GFOA, they're saying, you know, plus or minus five percent.

We couldn't live with plus or minus five percent, especially the five percent minus.

But we've looked at this for the last couple of years and looked at the spending of the departments that have actually been reducing for at least two years what they request versus what we give them based on what they've spent.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you.

Okay.

Will you be giving the sign up sheet?

Anybody sign up for public hearing?

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

Yes, ma'am.

Colette Hall, 101 Robertson Lane.

Good evening, Councillors.

I could say that this is the start of the budget season, but really the budget is an issue that needs work year-round attention.

Leslie Beauregard taught me that when I attended her presentation on creating a city budget.

Every time you vote monies in the consent agenda, council is voting significant sums of money.

Look at tonight's consent agenda.

Ten out of the twelve items are money related and therefore directly budget related.

The city now finds itself with a surplus.

What a blessing.

Most municipalities are bleeding red ink.

So careful consideration needs to be weighed in what to do with this unexpected windfall.

So, some recommendations.

One, pay off bonds by calling.

Another one, give it back to taxpayers.

Put it in the CIP budget, maybe.

Buying new furniture, I don't think so.

This is what I got from the Daily Progress.

Thank you.

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

I just wanted to address an issue that a couple of speakers have brought up about the idea of a tax rebate or returning some of the dollars to the taxpayers.

This came up back in 2007, I believe, when we had a huge surplus one year.

And Mr. Taliferro and I publicly advocated for the idea of issuing a tax rebate to return some of that money back to the taxpayers.

and it turned out that it was such a huge bureaucratic mess and in fact every single taxpayer that we had to send a rebate to we'd have to have them fill out it was a 1099 as if we were contracting with them for employment I mean it was just crazy how much red tape it was actually going to cost a lot of money to return that money

to the taxpayer.

So it's not as easy as you might think it is.

I thought it was a genius idea.

Well, let's just send everybody a $250 check.

Well, apparently, it's not nearly that easy.

I'd like to follow up a little bit on Mr. Norris's comments, though.

And it's when you look at the trend, however, and going back four years,

you do see that there's an ongoing surplus up and down that's averaging about $4.5 million a year.

So I think I would like to propose that we as a council begin to really understand why that is and especially in light of the fact that we're beginning to understand that we're looking squarely in the face at new ongoing needs.

it could be through the schools, it could be storm water utilities, whatever.

But the fact of the matter is seeing a lot, seeing these recurring surpluses to me is an indicator that we need to look at how we're really budgeting each department.

And I've raised these questions over the last week with our staff and I do want to applaud the departments for coming in under budget

and I agree 100% that that's exactly what every department should be doing.

But at the same time, I think the council needs to do a better job of understanding how we can perhaps provide more oversight on those departments, how we can tie the department budgets to our own council priorities and maybe compare them with the P3 scorecard so that we begin to see

really what really is a successful department.

It's not just simply coming in under budget, but it's coming in with really good programming under budget.

So I'm also a little bit concerned about, it's my understanding that we have the 12% of operating budget as our fund balance target adjustment.

Is that something that, I probably should have asked this question earlier and I apologize, but if we add that to the surplus,

It would take I think about $4.2 million to our existing 12 percent to bring it to 15 percent.

I think that's been a discussion that was probably in last year's work session.

And I was just doing some research and there's Irene Rubin from Northern Illinois University who's done a lot of work in budgeting.

She just mentioned that year-end surpluses combined with contingency funds seldom exceed 8 to 10 percent in local budgets.

I think you might be referring to the capital improvement contingency fund, which is a separate beast from the fund you're talking about, which is our

That's what's called the rainy day fund.

That's really for emergencies.

I mean, if something happens and the city cannot collect taxes for three or four months, that's what that would be used for.

That's almost untouchable unless it's an emergency.

Our 12% is probably about half of what a normal AAA city is.

A normal AAA city is probably closer to 25%.

The reason we're AAA is that our debt is much lower than other AAA cities.

So it's kind of an offset there.

This $4 million you're talking about is really out of $143 million, very small percentage, not even 1%, I think.

But it's been up to 3.5% in the past.

Right, but if you look at the trends, because I'm the one that put that information in the calendar this morning, you'll see it started off very high.

I mean, the first year it was something like $10 million.

Real estate market was going wild back then, and it's dropped pretty much consistently then.

Revenues have been less than 1% the last couple of years, and expenditures are also starting to drop.

It was like a million dollars less than last year.

And we accounted for another $800,000 to $900,000 we

Apples to Apples is going to drop in 13.

So we recognize that in this economy, we don't want to have a large surplus.

So we've tried to budget for it.

So the secret is ongoing is in the budget process.

That's when it's time to actually say, OK, this is what we need in the way of expenditures and maybe not have a $2 million surplus.

And during the time several years ago, many years, well, not many, but 10 years ago when there was a consistent

A consistent high amount of surplus every year.

We actually lowered the property tax rates.

They used to be considerably higher than they are now.

That was because property values kept going up.

And so we dropped the property tax at that point.

Then property values went down, but we never raised it again.

To me this looks like really good aim.

that if we came in just 2% under, you know, if we had the kind of ability to see the future, you know, you can't ever really hit it exactly on it.

And this doesn't seem excessive to me at all.

You probably have more control on the expenditure side because there are appropriation controls within the system than you do the revenue side.

We were $800,000 under in revenue.

And again, I do appreciate it.

I just got later, just before the meeting, I did see your charts.

I really appreciate that.

I think if the public could see more of that kind of information too, it would be a lot more understandable to the public as to why we have these surpluses and that historically they have been going down.

Again, in the last four or five years, they were going up and down.

And again, keeping in mind that we're looking at, for example, a school budget that has a deficit that is very similar to the surplus that we have.

We see that surplus amount kind of being the same.

I think it's going to be incumbent upon us to be extremely clear as to where

We intend to get the public monies fund to assist the school division.

And if we start prematurely talking about raising taxes without doing a very good job explaining the surpluses that we have, we're not going to be convincing to the public.

And the fact that we can't use this for repeated funding.

Yeah, I mean you could use it for like a bonus.

So where can we scrub the budget for more?

You know, one that would not add to the base, and the city's done that in the past with, you know, year-end appropriations.

I think Councillor Galvin is correct, and that's one of the reasons that we, a couple of years ago, began doing that scrubbing of the budget

to take a look at the trends that we were seeing from different departments and identifying where we could cut back.

Mr. Ray mentioned the social services.

We were getting hundreds of thousands of dollars back each year for a period of a few years.

So we've met with the folks in social services and we're able to remove a couple hundred thousand dollars from their budget without impacting services and that's what we'll try to do again this year.

We've done that with a couple of other departments over the course of the last couple of years as well.

If you notice, as we're looking at our budgets, it's not always from the same place that we're getting some of these savings and so that's why it's important to look at the trends over the course of the last

three to four or five years or so.

So we have a basic understanding of where we could get without cutting into services because that's not what we want to do.

Exactly.

I mean, information technology is a good example.

They, you know, they had some savings in the last couple of years.

We also have some suggestions for the staff

Can I ask one more question just while we've got Mr. Aap here?

It's in our CIP.

It's in the same one.

So theoretically we could designate some of, since this is

such a larger amount to the CIP than we've been spending.

Sure.

The money is going to the CIP contingency account.

You can appropriate it from that account any way you want to.

We would not advise you to appropriate that money into ongoing operations, but as far as one-time money, CIP,

Yes.

Mr. Szakos had a question, a comment about

I actually did.

There's a 92,101 appropriation that's suggested for Dialogue on Race.

And I know that we're going to be getting a recommendation soon about the Commission for Human Rights.

And it seems to me that we do have a budget for the Dialogue on Race.

And I would like to see that category be a little broader to say race initiatives

And I just would like a little clarification.

So in the event that, for example, the dialogue on race kind of evolves into the Human Rights Commission, is that what you're?

Or whatever.

Whatever it is.

But it's just one item, not two competing items.

That $92,000 would be part of that.

I agree with that.

I do actually.

When the city attorney's office is going to clean up our code, I was wondering if part of that could be looking at our policies and ordinances to make sure that they are gender neutral.

We saw that in the agenda item a couple months ago.

It was saying, he this and he that.

I'd also just like to comment on the fact that the Comprehensive Services Act expenses were

a half a million dollars under budget partly because our social services were able to keep at-risk children in our community and just to recognize that it's even more cost effective to keep our children in their homes and I'd like to applaud the social services department, Department of Social Services

for their efforts and they've made a lot of initiatives including like their family partnership meetings and their foster care to adoption initiative to keep children in their homes.

And we know what a social benefit that is to children but it's also an economic benefit and I think this reflects that.

And I think we'll see later on in another agenda item when we start talking about housing that again,

Is there any other comments before we make a motion?

I would actually like to make one other comment as we're talking about rebating, the difficulty of rebating taxes.

One avenue that is possible to return surpluses to the population is in utilities.

We have somewhere between five and six million dollars in our general budget that is collected through utilities and transferred to the general fund.

I've talked a lot about this before.

I don't particularly think it's fair.

I think it's a really regressive.

There are taxes.

That's a really regressive way to collect taxes.

And it would be one avenue, should we choose to try to return some of the surpluses to our community, is to do it through our utilities.

Can I have just one more comment, please?

And it could be because I'm just, again, this is the first time I'm looking at this concept of appropriating

Monies from a Surplus.

And again, because a lot of the savings came from social services.

Just this past Thursday, I was able to be with Mike Murphy discussing with members of the believers and achievers community.

our efforts to create a transportation plan to get their members and relatives and friends who are having trouble having access to driver's license to get some means of transportation to work.

And it's also related to anybody in the VIEW program as well.

And the question came up about the difficulty finding monies to support

just the person driving it even though the city has a van, has several vans.

So this kind of appropriation is not appropriate for trying to find additional monies that would actually have some direct bearing on material well-being of our citizens.

If they only needed a driver for one year, it would be different.

I mean, if we're talking about a one year, one time expenditure, then we could have that discussion with the counselors and decide whether or not that's something that we wanted to pursue.

Is it viewed as a pilot?

Do you raise somebody's... Well, I guess the question will be then when Mr. Engle presents in December this interim report on the comprehensive economic plan.

And one thing that we could talk about, and I'm not sure that I would promote it, but if you were interested in that, one thing we could talk about is adding to the council priority fund for the year, for next year.

I have supported that idea for some time.

Well, I'd actually like to just float the idea.

I would support that.

I would just like to say that that would allow for then it to be fleshed out when Mr.

Angle presents in December for the detail, but to be able to put that in a fund at this point as a reserve I think would be

I think that I'll support that.

So I just wanted to clarify, so that would be $50,000 from the year-end appropriation?

Yes.

He'll come out of CIP.

Well, I'll take back my motion and I'll let you...

It won't go to CIP.

So I'd like then, can I just amend your motion?

Sure.

And I'll second your motion and amend it.

Any discussion on the motion?

If not, vote.

Thank you.

Next item on the agenda is a public hearing, a amendment of gas easement and a lot of subdivision.

Mr. Mayor, I'm going to present that on behalf of staff.

Whenever the city conveys or divests itself of an interest in real property, an ordinance and a public hearing is required.

That's what we have tonight on this third agenda item.

what I think is a relatively routine matter.

In 1990 the city was given a permanent easement for the installation of natural gas lines in the Dunmore subdivision in Albemarle County.

That portion of the subdivision was never developed and therefore the gas lines were not installed.

There is now a plan to develop it but with the requirement that the easements be in a different location so the developer will be granting the city new easements for the installation of natural gas lines but tonight the action you're asked to approve at least on the first reading of the ordinance is the abandonment of the old permanent easements that were never used for gas lines

and it is advertised as a public hearing and ordinance is offered for first reading.

If not, I'll open the public hearing on this issue.

Anybody who would like to speak on this issue?

If not, I'll close the public hearing.

Any discussion by City Council?

Is there a second to that?

Second.

Okay, thank you.

Next item on agenda is Public Hearing Ordinance, Ivy Creek Natural Area This is the change in presenters.

Okay.

Ivy Creek Natural Area, Terrence House,

Lease Agreement.

The staff report.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor, members of City Council.

The item before you this evening is a renewal of a lease of the Tenant House at the Ivy Creek Natural Area.

The Ivy Creek Natural Area is jointly owned by the City and Albemarle County.

The lease of the tenant house on the property is for a period of one year, followed by up to four one-year terms following that initial year.

The tenant is responsible for paying rent in the amount of $150 a month, pay all utility bills, and perform a number of caretaking and maintenance duties at the natural area that are outlined in your council item, including opening and closing of gates, policing of the grounds for trash, and mowing and some other activities.

The lease document that you have has been reviewed and approved by both the city and county attorneys.

And as the property is jointly owned, approval of the lease is required by both governing bodies of the city and the county.

The County Board of Supervisors is scheduled to consider this lease at their meeting on December 5, 2012.

And pursuant to the Code of Virginia, public hearing is required prior to entering into this lease agreement.

Any other questions?

I have another question.

You know, you can imagine how well I know this situation.

But I was surprised that there was such an incredibly long lease about paying, but very little about what the caretakers are expected to do.

And maybe that's a separate agreement, any details.

I mean, it's not very detailed in terms of what those caretakers actually need to do and how they interact with, particularly with the Ivy Creek Foundation.

Any other comments or questions on this item before we open public hearing?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

As we mentioned in the report, we've had a series of discussions during the course of the last few years about concerns about the increase in rude behavior on the downtown mall.

We've attempted to address

these issues in a balanced way considering where folks were on both sides of this issue.

We wanted to address the behavior, we wanted to provide some assistance to folks in need, and we also wanted to protect the constitutional rights of folks to gather on the downtown mall, everyone to gather on the downtown mall.

We have on several occasions worked to address some of those concerns.

including changing our aggressive solicitation ordinance a couple years ago to keep people from soliciting near the vehicular crossings and in cafe spaces.

We've increased the number of police officers on patrol on weekend nights and during big events on the mall and we've placed an extra officer in central place on Monday through Friday to help address some of the behavior issues we're experiencing there.

We also agreed to pilot an ambassador's program on the mall to help to not only make people feel welcome when they're on the mall but to also

try to address some of the problems before they become problems.

When folks are getting into arguments and fights, that type of thing, to try to head those off.

If an ambassador were to see that, to call one of the mall officers to try to keep it from becoming a major issue.

The North Downtown Residence Association developed a comprehensive report on some of their concerns that have been identified downtown.

And they also proposed a series of solutions for the mall.

and our staff recommendations, as Council asked, are meant to serve as a response to that report that was done and hopefully serve as a blueprint for us moving forward to create helpful ideas to curb some of the behavior on them all.

One important lesson learned during our research of other communities around the country

who are dealing with similar issues is that this is not exclusive to Charlottesville.

If you look at revitalized downtowns and a lot of places around the country, especially during this economic downturn, they're dealing with very similar issues.

And we researched several cities, Burlington, Vermont, Iowa City, Iowa, Boulder, Colorado, and Ithaca, New York.

And several of those community steps have been taken to address both the human services side of the problem

and also the enforcement side.

With this in mind, we are proposing several options for city council to consider this evening.

One of which is a street outreach coordinator.

Many cities have created outreach teams to engage those who are homeless or soliciting money for money or may have mental health issues that they're dealing with.

Those teams work with agencies to identify those in need and provide them with the help they require in order to move off the streets or become more self-sufficient.

One very successful example of this type of coordination can be found in Burlington, Vermont.

Through a public-private partnership with the City of Burlington and other non-profit groups, the Howard Center, which is a private non-profit organization, has established an outreach team, a street outreach team.

The four-member team assists with folks who have mental health issues, substance abuse, they're dealing with homelessness, and some of the unmet social services needs of some of the individuals in their community.

And the primary goal of their team is to increase access to services for all individuals in their community.

And the team apparently has been of great assistance to the police department and social services agency in Burlington.

Our Director of Social Services, Diane Cucno, visited Burlington several months ago and was impressed by the way they've developed their outreach team there.

We believe

that a partnership similar to Burlington's could be successful here in Charlottesville.

We've had conversations with several nonprofits who have expressed an interest in working with us on this and collaborating on outreach efforts.

And we are proposing that the city fund a pilot street outreach coordinator to help with those issues and concerns.

And they would work with those nonprofits to identify folks who need some assistance

and are currently not receiving that.

We believe that the efforts could begin later on this winter after we get a coordinator hired and working with those other groups to extend outreach not only in the winter but then well into the summer when we tend to see more folks who are congregating on the mall and who may have some issues and concerns that we could help address.

We estimate that the one-time funding for this pilot would be approximately $50,000 to $60,000

including the salary and benefits provided for a long-term temporary employee and that we would evaluate this position a year from now to see whether or not it's had the intended success that we had hoped or would hope out of this program or at least the progress that you would hope that we'd be able to see within a year or so.

There are two ordinance changes that we believe might make a difference in curbing some of the antisocial behavior that we've seen on the mall at times.

One is to prohibit directly lying down or sitting on the mall within 10 feet of a building.

This was an idea that we had seen in several places around the country that we're trying to address this.

It in essence would provide a free flow of pedestrian traffic to and from the buildings.

At times now we have folks who are congregating right up on the buildings and are impeding

the pedestrian access and we'd like to avoid that.

The other proposed ordinance change would include a prohibition on sleeping on the downtown mall, literally sleeping on the bricks.

That's also something that we've seen in other places to try to address some of the concerns that other cities have had.

If the council is interested in pursuing those ordinance changes, we'd bring them back to you individually for consideration in the early part of 2013.

There have been, obviously, as we heard tonight, there are different opinions on how we go about approaching some of these issues.

and some folks have suggested that we have outright bans on certain activities in the downtown mall.

We've disagreed with them.

We disagreed with them several years ago.

We disagree with them today.

But we also believe that some of the things that we've done and especially the ordinance changes that we've made have been made with keeping individual constitutional rights in mind.

This is not an attempt to move people off of the mall.

Bailey, I know that you feel really strongly about this.

You do have allies up here.

It's going to make it really difficult for us to discuss this and hear what you're trying to say if you keep interrupting.

Another issue that folks have asked about is law enforcement and the size of the number of officers that we have in our downtown mall.

As I mentioned several years ago, we took some steps to increase the number of officers that we had down here on Friday and Saturday nights.

We have also, this past year, we added an officer to Central Place to try to address some of the concerns down there.

We believe that making those moves have certainly helped with a presence on the Mall, without overdoing that presence.

and so my recommendation is that we do not add even more officers to the mall but instead utilize the same staffing levels that we used this past year including the extra officer Monday through Friday in Central Place or more specifically an extra officer that we could use at different parts of the downtown mall utilizing a mobile kiosk that would be used by not only the police officers but also by the mall ambassadors as well.

So we don't believe that we need to increase the number of officers beyond what we had towards the end of the summer and into the fall this year.

The police department is also working with Commonwealth's Attorney's Office to develop a pilot interdiction program.

that would effectively address some of the reoccurrence issues that we have with repeat offenders on the mall.

They will be starting that program with just a handful of cases to try to effectively identify folks who are causing issues and work with both human services, social services, and then also with law enforcement to try to help

to get those folks

Downtown Residence Association was the investment in a camera system.

That is not a recommendation on the part of the city staff.

That is simply acknowledging that the association had come up with an idea that has been vetted before by our city council and rejected before by our city council.

And I felt it was important to make you all aware because I think only one of the current members of the city council were actually here the last time

the city took on this subject and considered whether or not we needed a comprehensive camera system on them all.

So I brought that up for consideration if council wants us to pursue that we certainly can, but that is not a recommendation of the city staff at this point.

I'd like to address some of the concerns raised about costs associated with this.

As it stands, the recommendation that I put forth is only recommending $90,000 towards a pilot program, the mobile kiosk.

That would be in addition to any money that we spent this past year, for instance, on law enforcement.

So there's not $200,000, there's not a million dollars of suggestions in this proposal.

Yeah, and the remaining $30,000 would be for any other incidentals that may come up as we're going through this.

That was not a recommendation that was part of this proposal this evening.

When you say mobile kiosks, what exactly are you talking about?

There are carts that folks use in other places around the country that you could put materials on, marketing materials, that type of thing.

and they can be moved from one place to another.

There was a proposal a couple of years ago to have three stationary kiosks on the downtown mall.

We felt that it was not the time nor that we have the money to do something like that.

And so instead we'd have a mobile kiosk that would move from different places.

and it would be stationed, let's say, at Central Place for a week or near the Omni for a week, that type of thing.

I don't believe it will, but I'll check on that.

Well, can I ask a couple of questions?

Sure.

This report that the NDRA, no, NDRA, the neighborhood, the North Downtown Neighborhood Association put together, is it public?

It is not on our website.

Well, I don't think we should.

I think the neighborhood should.

It's public information now.

Yeah.

Do you want to?

Yes, my name is Jim Neal.

I'm a resident of Charlottesville.

I live at 100 West High Street and I'm the chairman of this special committee that did the research and composed this report.

It has always been our intention to work with city staff and city councilors and we have informed not only Maurice Jones but each one of the councilors about the process we were going to use.

I made it very clear that we were not going to go public with this until such time as a report was completed

and Council had an opportunity to respond, at which time we will respond to your response, we'll make that public and the report itself will be distributed to the media.

I told each one of you that when you came to my house, I said that to you on a couple of occasions, Maryse.

The point is, and I understand and I appreciated that you met with us to explain it to us.

Well that's your issue.

If you wanted to make it public before this event took place tonight, you could have done so.

That was never our intent and I made that clear to everybody.

And it's not just the city and the city staff we dealt with in preparing this report.

We dealt with all the providers of services to the homeless.

We dealt with CACI-DIMIC.

No, I think you've done a great job.

because it's our meeting.

And there are public comment times.

But one of the things that I really noticed in the report, which I would be very comfortable with us releasing to the public, I think that that's a good idea.

It's a good report.

But despite the fact that a lot of the publicity about the report has really emphasized the negatives, one thing that I really saw in the surveys that they conducted is that there were a lot of positives and that I think that,

Mr. Jones had stacks of the folders of the people who said that they come to the mall more, the people who say they come to the mall less, and the people who say they come to the mall about the same.

And the more and less were about the same size, and about the same were about three times bigger.

And so I have a hard time seeing this, you know, what the report brought up and all of this stuff as a major crisis.

I think, you know, we saw some areas of concern and I think we should talk about those, but I don't think that we're dealing with a major crisis.

I think we have

unmet needs in lots of our community.

I think we have unmet needs across the city, but I think that the unmet needs that are represented on the mall are less a need for enforcement and more a need of the people who are, you know, who we're seeing on the mall who have a lot of needs.

Okay, so I think it would be no harm in my mind to release the report because now we have received it.

And the public could look at it between now and the next meeting so we can discuss further.

I think they should have the opportunity to have access to that information.

So, Mr. Mayor, are you deferring a decision on this tonight?

We don't have to make one tonight.

We're not taking any actions today.

Well, it's not even a first reading.

This is a report we want to indicate to the staff whether we want to proceed with any of these recommendations.

Well, I'm ready to make some comments to give some staff direction.

And I do want to just acknowledge the work that the ND, North downtown EBITD Association did.

I thought it was a very balanced collaborative approach.

It also did give very fair treatment to the Haven, for example, that it was a, in doing their research, I think that they revealed that

The problem on the downtown mall is not a homeless problem and that it was something that we all need to work together on and I appreciate the work that they did.

Secondly, I think Mr. Jones has given us a nice kind of menu of sorts to look at that

in my mind are predominantly oriented towards the street outreach coordinator and law enforcement and behavioral conditions and controlling behavior, which is certainly a large component of it.

I find the mention of the street outreach coordinator

actually a pretty important piece.

I think it does balance law enforcement with the sensitivity to sensitive mental health issues that may be evident in some of the people that are on the downtown wall.

I am willing to move forward on a pilot like that.

With regards to ordinance changes,

I think it's very reasonable to think that you would not want people lying across your pathways in front of the building.

It's just not good for pedestrian walkways or egress or anything like that.

So I find that a prudent orientation.

I would like a little bit more information about what some of the results might have been.

It was my understanding that there was some

use of cameras at one point on the downtown mall and were they effective?

Did they actually assist in any way?

So then to me I don't see at this point, given that we are willing to put an investment of the ambassadors, the street outreach coordinator sharpening up our ordinances in a fair way, I don't see the need for cameras.

In an email to Mr. Jones' copy to council, I did also emphasize that I do think it's still important that we understand what some of the techniques these communities like Ithaca, like Burlington, used in order to maintain the quality of the public space.

And there was the business investment district.

I know that that's something that was also mentioned in a council retreat.

I think it's important when we look at these issues of

of making the mall feel welcoming, we need to also understand the kind of investment that that's going to need and it's going to be ongoing and it's going to be a shared investment with the owners of the businesses on the mall.

So I hope we do pursue that.

It was something that was stated in a council retreat that we were interested in investigating that.

Again, the upkeep of the mall is critically important.

At some point, I was hoping that we would get a maintenance program and plan from the Parks and Recreation Department because the bricks are breaking.

There is a lot of litter on the mall.

It is something that is just pride of place.

We just take care of it.

Also following up on any citations that might have been issued by Mr. Tolbert on buildings that were not in compliance with maintenance.

That environment matters.

It does affect people's behavior.

We all understand the Landsmark Hotel is a terrible problem right now because it's a dead zone.

Is there any

report on when some activity might be taking place.

Well, I think the owners of the landmark are working on another major project right now and they've indicated to us that once that other project is done that they would be coming back and taking a closer look at this and moving forward.

Sure, I'll just kind of go in a similar format.

The outreach coordinator, I think,

It's an interesting idea.

I've been wondering, is it really something that needs to be a city position?

I would be inclined to recommend that we provide funding to some organization that already has relationships with people, rather than starting a new program.

But that's just sort of where I would come at it.

rather than a pilot, it would be a grant and looking at it that way.

The Ambassador's Program, just to kind of come to defense of my vision of the Ambassador's Program was something that I had actually proposed two years ago that was not at all in response to this report or to people's complaints about conditions on the Mall.

It really was a way to sort of bring some

guidance to folks who are on the mall to have people who are there welcoming folks and not just welcoming affluent folks, but making everyone feel welcome.

And so I think that that's something that I think we really do need in the downtown mall, but not as a police thing.

And I think the only reason that they're connecting with the police is that the police happen to have training capacity that I appreciate, but they're not an adjunct police force.

They're not there to enforce laws.

They may be

I think that the police can do a really good job of helping to train them.

Exactly, yeah, which is great.

The two proposed ordinances here, I actually have a hard time with the sitting down one.

I happen to be somebody who often comes down on the mall and I have my computer with me and I

I want to check my email and I sit down on the bricks and I lean against a building and I check my email and I sit there for a little while in the sunshine basking like a turtle.

And I think that for people like me not to be arrested for that, if that were the law, would just sort of beg for selective enforcement, which I think is problematic.

The lying down one I have less of a problem with.

I think that it is a business district.

It is a place where people are walking.

I think it's not the safest place to lie down.

And I think that if we do have an outreach coordinator who's helping people find safer places to lie down and working with other organizations to try to find housing, that that would be a better way of dealing with that.

So I wouldn't be averse to the ordinance about lying down, but the sitting one does bother me.

And I really just think that I'm also on the jail authority board.

We just got a report at our last meeting looking at some of the statistics of people in the jail.

And one of the things they specifically looked at was people who come in a lot, the people who are frequent fliers, so to speak, at the jail who get arrested a lot.

And one of the things that they discovered is that there's just a small group of people who tend to come in, often, into the jail.

And that in the city, the people from the city that that happens to,

It's gone way down in the last year and they chalked it up specifically to the crossings that a lot of people who were homeless or under housed now have a place to live and that that's one of the best ways of dealing with issues of whether it's panhandling or criminal behavior or drinking in public or any of those things, having a place to live really is key.

As for the street outreach coordinator, it intrigues me, but not to the extent of the way it is presented.

I would agree with the Councilman Szakos.

I would rather spend maybe $10,000 or $20,000 to give to Region 10 of somebody who does that as counseling their job.

And they can approach these people and help them if they need help.

And I would not be in favor of a

a separate city position for outreach coordinator.

I would support the two ordinances for change as to sitting.

I would say I would also support some seating on downtown, where you and I can sit down.

And there will be a better solution than right now.

There's very few options for people to sit down unless you're eating a

in the restaurant, and so it would be nice to have a place to sit down.

I'm not trying to say that people should be sleeping there, but a place to sit down at least.

So I think sitting on the mall itself is not really very conducive to, it does block up the pedestrian traffic, so I would support both the ordinances.

As to question of maintenance of the mall, I would definitely like to see that we maintain our current mall

in good condition.

For example, we put a patch where the broken granite was with the asphalt, which I think is atrocious.

You don't do that in your own home.

And I think we need to maintain that and correct that as soon as we can.

Maintenance of a facility, an asset is very important for our whole community and the downtown.

I also support the law enforcement efforts which we have

Dede.

Yeah, actually, I kind of like the idea of the street outreach coordinator, coordinated or overseen by social services, just because I think they would do a good job and

They're the services really primarily that people will most likely need to be connected to.

That said, I think what we need even more so than that is a comprehensive referral network that anybody can go to and find out what services are available.

And there are a few organizations around town who kind of do this and

but nobody does it comprehensively and nobody really does it such that anybody, y'all, us, could actually go online and just type in a few key things and find out all those organizations, whether they're governmental or non-profit, where people can go.

and it's not that complicated a thing.

We've talked about it.

We've been offered these services by people who can do it.

So that, with or without a combination of a coordinator, I think would take us a long way to being able to help folks.

It's a relatively simple thing to do.

Simple, maybe it's not simple, but it's at least a one,

One time to get it going and then just a little bit to maintain it.

Anyway, so I'm going to push for a referral network.

If we've got some money out there, I think it would really be a great thing for us.

I like the ambassadors.

I've always liked the ambassadors.

I don't think they are the same thing as an outreach coordinator.

I don't think they're the same thing as the police.

It's just recognition that the downtown mall is

a magnet for visitors and for lots of different people and I like the idea of friendly people being able to help anybody who needs help who looks like they need help.

I think it's got to be very upbeat and very friendly.

I think there's lots of little tricks that you can do to make people feel comfortable, particularly if they're not feeling comfortable.

And just as eyes and ears on them all, I think is for anything, whether it's cleanliness or problems or people lost, whatever.

In terms of cleanliness, I'd like to see an ordinance

It's probably already true that you can't throw your cigarette butts down.

Or have more opportunities for people to get rid of cigarette butts.

I don't think we have a lot of opportunities for that.

Something that sort of drives me crazy.

But the other thing that I think is kind of inherent in the design of the mall that leads to it looking a little less clean than we might like is there's a lot of granite.

Actually as part of the year end tonight we had a

That would help address some of those issues.

That would be great.

Have you done?

And that's, I mean, it's very similar.

I mean, Ms. Szakos, you saw the ones they had in Phoenix.

That's similar to what we'd like to do.

I can certainly get your pictures of it as we move along.

It's more than just a cart.

Right.

I have a lot to say, but I guess I'll start by, I think, with all due respect, Mr. Jones, I think your memo to council on your report tonight didn't fully

portray the breadth of the problem.

And if you look at the report, which certainly should have been public, and I'll take my share of the blame for that, but they did a very effective job in terms of surveying people anonymously and otherwise.

And surveys that went out to thousands,

26,000, all right, so this isn't a narrow sampling.

This is a pretty comprehensive survey that was done.

And I guess I have to disagree with Ms. Sakus in terms of your read on it was, well, it wasn't really that bad.

I read it very differently.

And I read, and I frankly found it a little alarming, the fact that so many people here in our community feel unsafe

coming downtown because of not because of you know what they're seeing in terms of you're seeing poverty you're not seeing poverty it's because of behaviors whether it's perpetrated by people who are

We heard that over and over and over again.

Women who feel unsafe coming downtown and that's problematic.

The vulgar language, the fighting, the public urination.

things that are happening and I know they were a little bit, I think one of the reasons, I might be putting words in your mouth, but I think one of the reasons why you were a little reticent to release the survey results is because frankly you were a little concerned about the negative picture that it painted of what's going on downtown.

But I think we have to be very honest about the fact that a lot of people are perceiving downtown in that way.

And again, so the focus has to be on behaviors.

Again, it's not about rich, poor, black, white.

It's about behaviors.

I don't care who's doing the public urination, whether it's somebody coming out of a bar two in the morning or somebody who's homeless or anything in between.

I think we have to focus on the behaviors.

We also have to keep in mind is that

So our role as city councilors is to balance interests, balance public interests.

And so the reality is that there are a lot of people who have interests downtown, not just the business owners, they definitely have interests.

but the people who come downtown, who work downtown, who shop downtown, people who live downtown, people who are currently sleeping downtown, everybody has interests that we have to balance.

And I think right now what this report said to me is that in some key ways things are out of balance.

I think some of the recent changes that we've made, what we've heard from some of the merchants is that some of the recent changes we've made, as you said, have certainly helped.

But I, for one, believe there is more that we need to do to address, particularly on addressing some of the behaviors.

I think Mr. Fogel made an excellent point.

I fully agree about how they have to be consistently enforced.

And he showed me some of those pictures that he's talking about.

and it's true.

It's absolutely unfair that we're only moving along people who are panhandling but not people who are soliciting money for other causes or playing music.

That ordinance has to be consistently enforced or we just have to throw it out.

And so I think consistent enforcement is absolutely important.

I think some of the specific suggestions, I tend to agree with Ms. Szakos and I think Mr. Huja on

I like the idea of doing more proactive street outreach and meeting people where they are, getting them connected to services.

I don't think that needs to be a full-time city staff position.

I like the idea of working with existing organizations that are already on the ground, already have relationships with the homeless population and with service providers, and doing it through a grant rather than creating a full-time staff position.

Many of these organizations already have outreach components, and so it's just a matter of making sure those are all working as well as they can be.

in terms of the idea of a referral network, that's exactly what The Haven is working to become, sort of the central intake site and the one-stop service site for anybody that's homeless that needs services they know that can walk through that door and I know it's a work in progress, but that's, so I hate to recreate that somewhere else when there's already an organization that's working to create that in our community.

I'm talking about online.

I know, I know, I know.

But in terms of helping homeless people get access to the services, I want to just encourage them to use The Haven and keep working with The Haven to make sure it's becoming that sort of one-stop network.

Let's see here.

All right, in terms of ordinance changes, I'm not real big on prohibiting people from sitting down on the mall.

I think that's going too far.

If there's an issue with people lying down in the middle of pedestrian paths, I've got to think we already have provisions in place to keep the paths clean where we don't need a new ordinance to do that.

So I would think that's probably a little overkill.

I do wonder, though, on the

the harassing behavior that is causing some of the problem, the verbal abuse, the sexual harassment.

What is it, and maybe there's a question for Mr. Brown or Mr. Long is not here, but what is it about our current ordinances regarding whether it's vulgar language, whether it's harassment, what is it about our current ordinances that

the city or the police feel aren't enough to help people feel safe.

I probably should talk to Chief Longo to give you a better answer about what, since they're out on the front lines, so to speak, about what they feel are the inadequacies of what we have now.

Certainly there is concern and understandably so about the level of profanity.

That's very difficult to regulate from a legal standpoint if it's not in the context of threatening language or what are commonly referred to as fighting words.

It's just a regrettable, in my opinion, a regrettable aspect of modern life that we have to put up with a certain level of that.

If I may, let me talk to the chief and get a better understanding of their perspective on

And there was also a suggestion made about potentially reframing that ordinance to address one of the constitutional issues that's been raised, and I hope you'll include that in your conversation with Chief Lott.

Do you know what I'm referring to?

I'm not sure I understand.

There was a passage in this report, which unfortunately none of you have seen, but there was a passage in this report which talked about the issues about enforcement of that specific

of that kind of behavior, threatening abusive vulgar behavior that currently we're not able, apparently we don't have the tools to address.

And I hope you look at the proposed language to see if that's something that we can take a look at.

One of the issues that is often raised, and this is something I really struggle to get my own head around, is, well, one thing to keep in mind, as many of you know, is that many of the people who panhandle on the downtown mall are not homeless, right?

And so we often conflate the two, but the reality is they're not always the same, and there are people who panhandle, many of the people who panhandle are homeless, but there are, perhaps as a minority, but there are minority people who

are panhandling as a commercial activity.

And if you're a vendor downtown and you're selling things on the mall as a commercial – for employment – as a commercial activity, you have to get a permit.

Now, I wouldn't go so far as to say that we should require anybody soliciting money to get a permit because then you're going to throw out – then anybody who wants to play a guitar in the mall, they'd have – again, it's about consistent enforcement.

but if anybody has any ideas on if there is any way in terms of people who are pain handling as a commercial enterprise, and again, I don't think it's the vast majority of them, but we know for a fact there are some, and is there any way that we can regulate that the way we regulate a vendor who's also engaged in commercial activity on the downtown mall?

and then let's see another suggestion was made is about making sure that police are more aware of what the rules are regarding solicitation and have better training for the police I fully agree with that the interdiction work that's underway of support that the

I like your idea about stepping up the littering and cigarette butts.

That was also mentioned in the report.

There was a suggestion to have some kind of an ongoing oversight committee or some kind of an ongoing dialogue group that should include representatives from the homeless community and homeless service providers and others.

to continue this dialogue in a constructive way so we don't end up doing what we're doing tonight.

But I think the speakers who said the homeless people should have been involved in this conversation, we need to create mechanisms for that to happen on an ongoing basis so that people feel like all voices are being heard.

and I'll just leave it there.

Oh, one other thing.

One last thing is staff last year had come forward – maybe the year before had come forward with a suggestion that – so right now we have at least one mall owner, maybe more, where the city has leased them the five-foot buffer or leased them the space in front of their property.

so that they can control it and manage it for the city.

So they do the plantings there.

They do – they take care of it for the city.

To anything.

You know, it also addresses the other issue that we keep coming up with.

You know, we've got businesses that have, you know, for instance, the shop that has that beautiful butterfly chair out in front of their shop, which is being told they have to get rid of their butterfly chair.

And then they would also be able to then ask people to leave?

I have one more, a couple more comments if I may because I wanted to make sure that I got this in there because as we increase the presence of ambassadors and outreach coordinators, I do want us to begin to reintroduce the chairs.

It really is killing that area as a public space and I understand why we had to do that, but as we are introducing and gradually seeing how things unfold,

I would love to start also returning that amenity.

With regards, I mentioned a few times, introducing more food carts.

It's the more activity, the more opportunities you give for people to earn a living.

The CIC graduates have several food carts.

It also will enliven that space.

With regards to the street coordinators, could we use that as another vehicle for

for hiring a re-entry population.

Just wanted to, as I listened to all of you, as you talked about different issues,

It seems to me that we are supportive of the ordinance changes.

Basically, those two at least heard the majority of them.

I also heard the seating, the majority of people saying some kind of seating being reduced.

I also heard that I didn't hear the majority for outreach coordinators and independent entity, but some funds as a grant to somebody who's doing that already.

in that sense.

And also pursue the idea of what Norris said, people who are abusive, harassing, and how we can control that through ordinance if need be.

One on the benches, we do plan to actually add more benches for next year.

We're looking at different types of benches and where to put them on the mall.

So that is something that we're already looking into.

We'll bring back the ordinances for your consideration as well.

I assume with the grant what we may end up having to do is considering doing an RFP on this, setting aside a certain amount of money that we would then do an RFP that agencies could apply for and go that route.

We'll look into if there's more that needs to be done for the ordinances.

You know, with some of the activities that we've heard about, some of the concerns that people have had about behavior, some of those things are already in law.

Do we need a new ordinance or should we just better enforce the ordinance we have now?

One thing, as we asked you, if you release the report of the New Orlando Association,

So other people can have access to the report?

Sure.

Okay.

I just want to say that in my mind a work session is when staff is in a point where they haven't really formulated a policy and we're talking about a subject to inform staff who then creates something for us to respond to and so Mr. Jones gave us something already to respond to tonight

That was the product of multiple conversations, which added up to the same essence of a work session.

But I don't feel the need for a work session because you gave us a product to respond to tonight.

Okay.

Thank you.

Jim Tolbert?

Oh, I skipped, sorry.

Sorry, I'm sorry.

You're right.

Thank you.

Some of you have seen this presentation or portions of it before.

I'm going to try and go pretty quickly so that you can ask any questions that you may have about this particular project, which is hopefully going to not only assist our

taking care of our river that goes through the city of Charlottesville, but also assist in a lot of the planning efforts that are already underway by the city and its partner, the county and the other two counties.

The other two counties that make up the Rivanna Watershed.

I'm just going to talk a little bit about this thing that we're calling the Rivanna Snapshot.

Sure.

Yes, my name is Leslie Middleton and I'm the executive director of the Rivanna River Basin Commission.

And to talk about two projects that we're involved in.

One is called the Rivanna Snapshot.

The other is called the Rivanna Action Plan, or Rivanna Watershed Action Plan, and they're very closely related.

You may have seen from a variety of different groups public and private things called River Report Cards.

In a way, that's what this snapshot is.

It's going to describe a snapshot in time, existing conditions of the river, and its entire watershed using a certain number of metrics.

It's not, however, going to be a report card in the sense that we're going to be giving grades to

particular localities or the relative success.

We don't have enough information at this point to be able to give those kind of grades and we think that that's probably not a really good approach.

What we will do, as I said, is talk about existing conditions and everything from the resulting quality of the water with a number of different ways of looking at that, and also how well are we doing in planning for good quality water in the way that we do our development, in the way that we do our redevelopment, particularly important for the city, and also how we are

managing the entire watershed, planning for land use within and between the different localities that have ownership of the Rivanna.

And this gives you a little feel for who's who and what's what here.

The column on the left talks about the number of acres that each locality that overlaps in some way with the Rivanna watershed has.

and yet on the column on the right you can see what the percentage of the watershed that is.

So interestingly, Charlottesville has no choice but being in the center of the watershed and 100% of its land mass is contained by the watershed, which is not true for any of the other localities that overlap the watershed.

So it's 100% contained, but it actually only impacts 1% of the land mass.

Okay.

Does anybody have their packet?

I could just speak to the packet.

I'm happy to do it.

Oh, okay.

Okay, I'll still keep on talking.

So we're going to talk about things, everything from public access and put some numbers to that all over the watershed, talk about the existing aquatic resources, which are really important for people who enjoy fishing, boat landings, that sort of thing.

This is one way of looking at watershed health.

This is using the metrics that are designed out of the Clean Water Act and implemented through our state agency, Department of Environmental Quality.

This is one way of looking at water supply.

There's a lot of different ways to look at water supply and the way we intend to do it as we move into watershed planning is to look at it comprehensively from the top of the watershed all the way down to Columbia where the Rivanna enters the James.

This particular graphic shows, based on the information that was provided by all the localities, including Charlottesville, how well we're doing in managing our stormwater with things that are called best management practices or stormwater best management practices.

It should be no surprise that you'll see that most of them are located in the urban areas, and that's certainly a very good thing.

And so all BMPs are not created equal.

So part of what we want to be doing in the planning part of this exercise is really looking at what are the best management practices?

Where do we get the most bang for the buck?

A lot of this is emerging understanding.

Some of it is very well known.

We know certain kinds of BMPs have sort of lived out their useful life in terms of being able to handle both quantity and quality of stormwater.

In the snapshot we'll talk about several of the different agricultural BMPs.

A lot of this information is hard to find or is not accessible because of the need for privacy around who is implementing practices and it's not required that the agencies that manage some of these things share that information with us.

But we have some numbers and they will help us as we go forward to look at how things change over time.

Riparian buffers I'm sure you have heard a lot about has to do with the land immediately adjacent to the river.

It's kind of the last line of defense.

And that is something that we really need to look at.

Both Charlottesville and Albemarle have water protection ordinances that protect these sort of last lines of defense.

And there's more that can be done in terms of really building up the integrity of these riparian buffers.

We've got some metrics that are pretty interesting about the conservation lands, how much is protected by one means or another.

It's about 19% of the entire watershed, which is something that we can feel good about.

What's not so well understood or known is how well are we protecting particularly sensitive lands.

Land use planning, whether it be for the city or for the outlying counties, is also something that people tend to try and give report cards to, but the eye is certainly in the beholder as to what's the most effective way and who's really doing a good job.

Several nonprofits recently have put out publications that rank the different localities in the watershed about how well they're doing in land use planning.

Again, I think what we can be doing that will be helpful for all the localities is pointing out best management practices.

I call your attention to a recent report.

It was put out in late 2011, and it probably didn't get as much press as it really needs to.

It's by our very much appreciated local nonprofit, StreamWatch, that has been assiduously sampling for the benthic macroinvertebrates in the Rivanna Basin for almost 10 years now.

And what they have to say is not startling from the standpoint of stream ecology, but what's of great value is that this is our own data.

It really speaks to what's going on in our streams.

and what we know from their study is that forests are the highest and best use if all you are doing in your community is trying to protect water quality.

Well obviously, we're trying to do a lot more.

We're trying to provide homes for people and ways of getting around and having vibrant communities that have a good economic base.

So there's a lot of balancing that goes on.

What is important about what StreamWatch discovered in their process in which they were able to craft a model based on extensive data that actually predicts what the watershed health will be or the water quality will be in certain streams and that

That is that it takes very little disturbance before the aquatic resources become quite compromised.

And this model has been excellent in predicting particularly those areas in between the city and the rural areas.

They're called exurban or partially rural or almost rural depending upon who uses the terminology.

And in fact, what we can see in our watershed, and it's borne out by this model that StreamWatch has created, is that over half of those streams are failing what we call the biological standard.

That tells us that the bugs in the stream are not living well.

That says that the fish that eat them aren't living well.

It says that the critters aren't.

And it really does say something about our quality of life as well.

This is a little bit more about the StreamWatch report.

It's available online at their site.

We link to it from our site.

But they also go further to say that if you take this model as being an accurate characterization of what's going on in our entire watershed, it says that about 70% of our streams really are not healthy.

And the model is useful to predict and give us some sense of reality.

It's important to know what the problems are before we can really make the hard decisions.

Because the model also predicts if the build-out happens throughout the watershed,

then we're looking at increasingly unhealthy streams.

So I don't know, I was struck by the comment about the downtown mall and the oil on the granite pavers and I wasn't even thinking so much about the pollution as to say that is a marker of something in the same way that this study is a marker of things aren't going so well with our area streams.

The watershed planning process will commence as soon as we've published the snapshot.

And this watershed planning process we hope is really going to be very helpful to the city, to the three counties.

There is a plethora of studies out there.

Some of them have been required from a regulatory standpoint.

There are more requirements coming up with the new stormwater regs and the

One of the things we plan to do with this planning process is bring all of those plans together with respect to looking at ecological health of our landscapes and water quality.

so that we can look for the places where there is consistency and we can look for the places where there's inconsistency and there is one controlling, I use that word loosely, but one comprehensive document that pulls all these things together because it is getting, even for those of us in the business, quite confusing.

We will take the kind of work that we've done in the snapshot, which you'll be seeing in a couple of weeks, and we're going to go down to the sub-watershed level, which is what all those different colors are on that map of the Rivanna.

And at that point, we're able to start really looking at at the landscape level, what is it that we really want to protect here?

Because we can't give equal protection to everything.

The county and

Albemarle County and the other counties are following good planning principles by dedicating growth areas and trying to make sure that that's where growth is concentrated.

So if that's to happen successfully, then there is room for identifying places where we're gonna put extra protection.

There's a number of tools that we envision coming out of this planning process, as I mentioned.

We need to have in place some kind of template or accounting procedures as we and local staff are confronted more and more with options being promoted for offsetting stormwater management in, say, an adjacent watershed, which is starting to come to fore.

And we'd like to be positioned so that we can say,

No, that's not acceptable.

Within the limits of the stormwater regulations, we need to know what's our highest priority so that we are not trading away the best and the brightest, so to speak.

There's also, our vision is that the planned process and the resulting document will be adequate

to satisfy what EPA calls 319 or non-point source pollution funding.

So because those kinds of funds are only released if there is a watershed plan in place.

So having this watershed plan in place will enable all four localities to be more effective in going after specific funding for stormwater management.

We are going to be part of First Fridays.

We are sharing city space with some wonderful quilting organization.

It's going to be a wonderful mix of different cultures that I am quite inspired by, actually, because after that, on December 7th,

we plan to go to the other three localities with the results of the snapshot and use those events as a partial way to interact with the public and get some sense of what the real vision is in addition to as you know the city is engaging in a visioning and a charrette process in January

which will look at the corridor right between Charlottesville and Albemarle but there's more corridor to be talked about as well.

All the counselors are invited to the event on December 7th.

I hope you can come and you certainly would be welcome at any of the other events.

So is there any hope if those streams aren't healthy?

that said that 70% of the exurban streams were not healthy.

Or that's not 17.

That's an average.

That's an average.

So there's a couple of things that are really important.

One is to remember that a lot of it has to do with where the forest and the trees are in relation to the streams.

So yes, there's a lot that can be done.

I think it's a wake up call to say, again, it doesn't take much clearing of land.

It's sort of death by a thousand cuts is what's going on and our streams are starting to feel it.

Another thing that I put up there is that the streams in our cities are not going to get appreciably worse with more development and that's actually good news because it says the only way is up.

I really think that is optimistic.

It's not that they're so so bad, although they're failing standards for the most part, but the city with its partners has done a tremendous amount of work and is really poised to keep on doing that kind of work.

So results will be seen.

You had a bullet point that kind of goes to the urban streams are already in poor condition and do not respond dramatically to additional development.

And what that says to me is that when we start talking about density and we start talking about concentrating growth in urban areas rather than spreading them out across the fields and woods, that that's an ecologically healthy way to develop.

Oh, I know they do.

But I think we also know that our city is doing really concentrated things on trying to deal with drainage and stormwater, and we have the infrastructure to do that in the city, I think, in ways that some exurban areas might not.

There are parts though of Moore's Creek in the DEQ's report, Healthy Waters.

There were parts of the city's Moore's Creek that were actually quite healthy.

and other parts that weren't.

That was the River Basin Commission and it was a study that we did with Virginia Commonwealth.

If it used the term healthy waters,

Well, they looked at different parameters, such as like macro.

So, when we're talking about our urban streams,

Okay, let me back up.

How many spots within the city's waterways are monitored?

I can't give you that number right off the top of my head and partly because I don't hold those numbers in my head, but the other reason is there's monitoring and there's monitoring.

Our stream watch organization has

a series of sites that they have chosen based on a way of gauging watershed health by coming in at certain points in the stream system.

Our DEQ, Department of Environmental Quality, has another, and in fact all the stream watch data goes to DEQ and they fold that into their assessments.

Our Department of Environmental Quality has another way of monitoring.

They take the information, for example, from StreamWatch and they say, okay, that looks like that's a hotspot.

And they come in and they check and often those places end up on the so-called dirty waters list.

But Department of Environmental Quality also is testing for the presence of bacteria.

which is again what some of our streams are unfortunately impaired for and they are doing chemical or ambient testing and that kind of testing goes monitoring is done on a cycle by our state agency.

So they come into certain areas and spots on a predictable cycle.

So at any given time, I would say that we may be monitoring anywhere from 10 to 35 sites in the city.

Probably not the higher end.

But if you're looking at long-term monitoring, I can get you that number.

Right.

Like on the Stream Watch's annual report,

I think there might be one or two that actually are reported and one is right by the wastewater treatment plant and it's always black.

I mean these impairments didn't take overnight to happen.

I just want to say real quickly one of the things I admire most about the work that you do is the fact that it is just the regional scope of it and the fact that you're acknowledging how interconnected this entire watershed is and the whole system is and that's something that gets lost sometimes when we're looking

through the lens of our own jurisdictions and it's so critical and I keep thinking about the example that Lonnie Murray brings up all the time about how in New York City when they were looking at very expensive ways to treat their water, I mean we're talking maybe billions of dollars if I remember correctly,

Instead, they chose to invest a smaller amount of money in preserving the watershed upstream in upstate New York.

It didn't cost as much and ended up doing just as much to clean the water and keep the water in good shape and had the added benefit of improving the quality of life for the environment in upstate New York.

I think we are fortunate to have this Revera River Basin Commission to look at the situation in a regional fashion.

Now, to street sidewalk rivers.

First one is on 815 Rockland Avenue,

Thank you Mr. Mayor and Council.

Mr. Lusko was supposed to do this one and he wasn't able to come so you get me tonight.

This is a sidewalk waiver request.

This is the second one you've had since we changed the code where, based on the lawsuit from about a year ago, these used to be made by me and if I denied it they could appeal to the Planning Commission.

Now these are made by you

This one is at 815 Rockland, a single-family house that was built there.

The applicant asked that we waive it for a couple reasons, one of them being that there's not a lot of room to build it between the existing utility pole and the street.

The street's too narrow to put it in the street there, so

Our staff looked at it and our engineers recommended that we there's no other sidewalk on the street and It's not anywhere near the top of a priority list to build sidewalk there.

They recommended that our recommendation be to you to approve this and

and the primary reason they felt like that building this piece of sidewalk in isolation would create drainage problems for the next door property downstream.

It would concentrate water on that property downstream and there's not a good way to deal with that through the construction of the sidewalk.

So they felt that you'd end up creating a hardship for the people next door by building this sidewalk and it really wouldn't do anything at this stage except be a 50 foot section of sidewalk that didn't lead from

The word I got was there was none anywhere on the street, period.

We try to look at them individually and

I don't remember all the circumstances with that one, so I can't tell you how it's different.

Again, we try to be as consistent as we can, but realize that there are individual circumstances where there wouldn't be a waiver process.

And that was one thing the Planning Commission actually debated, was whether or not we just say there's no waiver, but then realize that there are sometimes circumstances where you might want to grant a waiver.