Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Work Session   3/13/2025

Oh, have you heard from Javier?

If he doesn't come, we don't have a quorum.

Because Wes, Michael, and Laura are online coming.

And I was like, damn it, I wish I knew the answer to this before I left my house.

And actually, normally Earl's already here.

Oh no, Brigid and Earl are signing on.

Oh, well then we still won't have an in-person forum.

It's just us.

Just us?

Yeah.

Just us chickens.

You've got a whole lot of paper out here for us.

I know.

I texted Wes today because I was looking on his socials and I'm like, where is he?

He goes to state.

Where is he?

Well, yeah, I was like, are you in town?

He's like, I'll be back in the next two weeks.

Like, OK, well, good.

Nothing's happening that week.

I thought we were gonna do

You guys are probably like way too young to mean anything to you, but I find it thoroughly amusing as a child of the 90s.

He loves all different things.

I get alerts from Live Nation and Ticketmaster and both Pantera and Cyndi Lauper are on tour this summer.

I was like, what?

It's the one where we were like, I need to take vacation.

I'm kind of surprised they're still alive.

I also heard Metallica's on tour.

I don't know that I can

do a Pantera show at this life stage.

My brother and sister are much, much more metalheads than me.

And my brother actually is still technically in a melodic death metal band.

And he did a collaboration during the pandemic

I don't know exactly, like they all recorded from their respective homes and then- And then like slammed it together over the internet.

He mixed it, yeah.

It's pretty cool.

But sometimes I suspect that it's not that hard that I'm just not prepared for it.

Cause I'm old.

I don't know.

Who's gonna present this?

Brandon.

Brandon.

Oh.

There he is.

I like how he's got Commissioner Hicks as like his buddy in the back.

Oh yeah, I was bumping.

John's around too.

Okay, from a commissioner perspective, Michael has a budget meeting for city council.

Laura's out of the country and Wes is out of town and so I think that you've got who you're getting.

And there's nobody in here but

My pal, Maria, you know, you should sit a little farther from us.

I think that would be ideal.

There's a lot of reserved seating in here, but no people.

So I guess I will call us.

I'm going to call this meeting to order.

Commissioner Rinales?

Here.

Alright, I will now do a moment of silence.

Okie dokie.

So I will now turn it over to Brandon Collins.

We have one item on the agenda and that is the presentation of the five year plan and annual plan.

Awesome.

And we'll try to be brief.

Hopefully, I think everybody who's on the board now was on the board last year.

and kind of has a general idea of what the capital plan's all about.

I'm trying to share my screen, but it says I cannot do so.

Do you know anything about that, Maria?

Are you logged in from the ones I sent you earlier?

Well, can't seem to do it so let me try one more time.

I don't know who's the host.

Yeah, if we have it in front of you, I'm just going off the same thing.

I'll try to be mindful of what slide and all we're on.

So I'm Brandon Collins.

I'm the redevelopment coordinator for CRHA.

Hanging out with me today is Mr. Earl Hicks.

We're hot off the heels of consensus on a master plan for West Haven, which is a topic for another day.

Today we're gonna talk about the five-year capital fund action plan for 2025 to 2029.

And we'll be briefly going over the timeline, brief description of what the capital fund plan is, brief description of what we're currently working on with capital funds, some things we had to consider building the plan, and then we'll look directly at the plan

and I think we can move through this pretty quick.

So timeline wise, we actually started work on the capital plan before publishing the draft, which included polling residents primarily at parallel track sites.

We published the draft on February 3.

In that time, we've done more polling and door knocking

Met with the RAB, which is PHAR.

We've actually met with them twice.

We had time set aside at the planners meeting in February at South First Street.

February 13th, we had a little plan set aside for that.

Just yesterday, we talked briefly about the capital plan with Sixth Street residents.

and we are today having the Board of Commissioners work session.

Next week we resume our parallel track meetings because the weather's good and we're really excited about that and that'll be their official CFP meeting so we'll talk about why the work we do all through the year really forms the plan.

We hope to have written comments from PHAR by March 20, allowing us to respond in time for the public hearing at your next Board of Commissioners meeting on March 24th, hopefully followed by your approval on March 24th.

All right, so what is the fund?

The easiest way for me to describe this is in public housing, and this is just the public housing program.

There's basically two,

funds.

One is your operating fund and the other is your capital fund.

So operations covers your day-to-day salaries, all that stuff, day-to-day maintenance, just the general operation and that comes in the form of a subsidy.

The capital fund actually comes as a grant from HUD that you have to be eligible for

but we pretty much rely on it and every year there's going to be a thing on the news and people will call you and be like, man, I heard the senators got us another million dollars for public housing.

We rely on that money and what they're talking about is the capital fund plan.

So we're eligible.

There's things we have to do to get it.

One is you have to have a plan.

You have to have a five-year plan.

You have to have a four to five day comment period, which we're in.

You have to consult with the Resident Advisory Board, which is PHAR.

You have to provide written response in the submission to HUD to the RAB comments.

You have to have a public hearing and you have to have Board of Commissioners approval for your plan.

cool law that 24 CFR part 903 pertains to PHAR that they are the resident advisory board.

And that's where those rules it's very similar to annual plan rules.

And it's the same laws that govern that piece.

So we think last year we got 1.27 million.

So that's what our anticipated amount is that is how we built our budget.

over five years at 6.36 million.

However, even though we budget that way, we do anticipate because of our redevelopment efforts, because the amount awarded is based on your public housing units in service, we will over time see a decrease in our capital funds, which is why we want to maximize the amount of work we can do sooner than later.

If you all can move to a high performer status the way Mr.

Sales is feeling confident that we're headed that direction, that means we get 15% more capital funds, which would be huge.

We could do a lot with that extra 15%.

And then each year of funding through the capital fund, you have two years to obligate it.

and then four years to actually spend it all down.

Otherwise you can't draw down the money.

Can I ask a question real quick, Brandon?

Yeah.

How do we get to high performer status?

Like, what does that mean?

So the high performer status looks at your

It looks like your overall grading, your score, so it's looking at your physical conditions, it's looking at your operations when it comes to lease up, and it comes from rent collection, and it's also looking at your financials.

So whether you have two months worth of operating reserve, so it's looking at all those factors.

And the only item that we had, well we had two hang-ups.

We had the physical and we had the tenant accounts receivables.

and so physical we've taken care of that with 90 at West Haven, 90 something at Crescent Halls, 80 something at South First Street and then we got a 40 and four like weighs out based upon like average scoring so it's going to weigh them out and

will have a passing score for physical.

The financial will have a passing score on that.

The tenant accounts receivable, we will not do so well with that, but the months of operating reserve will pass that.

Yep, okay.

Still, we were like,

Thank you.

I should have known what that was.

Once you started talking, I was like, oh, yeah.

All right.

So super fast, what are we currently doing?

You know, the current plan.

The strategy was really kind of formulated in 2022 when we made a five-year plan that we really worked with residents with a real strategy.

In the past, CRHA had really kind of just kind of winged it and there were a lot of just

Everything was falling apart, so money was going everywhere.

John really got everybody focused around a plan, even though we had multiple funding and projects from different years.

We set a strategy in 2022.

We've basically been tweaking out that strategy since then.

And it's mainly focused on the parallel track, which is our scattered sites, AMP4,

and on other sites have moved you're allowed to move some for operating expense for some of the other amps that are undergoing redevelopment so long story short because these bigger sites are going to be seeing redevelopment we don't need to put a lot of capital dollars into them and we can focus more of our capital money on the scattered sites that won't be undergoing redevelopment and do really big

life changing projects for those residents.

Let's see, I mentioned the part about the past there being different years of funding that we finally kind of caught up on the projects in the year, the dollar amounts that were lingering.

So we're really looking at 2024 onward

in terms of our capital plan and being caught up with spending and projects.

In 2023, we spent over $2 million on exterior work for the parallel track, roof siding windows.

We now have doors.

We did playground improvements and that was funded almost entirely by AHG.

So those were playgrounds and other outdoor amenities.

And that's a really good example of like when we can come get other funds to supplement the capital fund, we can do things faster and we can do bigger and better projects.

Last year, you may recall this picture.

I know y'all can't see the screen, but the HVAC basket with the eggs in it, we built the plan last year

to maximize the amount of money we could put into making the HVAC project a reality, and it is indeed a reality.

And we'll get into the specifics of that shortly.

So in your packet, you're gonna see some cool pictures.

So we're currently doing right now, we are, the HVAC,

Project at Riverside is complete.

There's some sort of wrap up work that needs to happen there, but it's pretty much done.

And those folks have central air conditioning.

It's a truly historical thing for the city of Charlottesville public housing to have that.

And we are moving through getting the electric supporting work for that at Mickey Drive.

You may recall that

The funding for these projects is coming from different years so we didn't sign a contract for Madison from 2023 and instead have 2024 money going towards that, I think I get that right.

So we are lining up, we're like moments away from signing a contract for the electric work that supports the HVAC for Madison Avenue.

That'll be happening super soon and John will be coming to you.

Oh, John won't be coming to you with...

Under 100,000.

Under 100,000, there you go.

And then the actual HVAC piece and the switch over to the HVAC is going to be done by our crew.

We have some really skilled plumbers and other folks who are able to complete that work, which helps us realize some savings and we think that we can get it done, probably done at the same time as Mickey Drive, maybe sooner.

along with that we finish up some work on the entry doors and storm doors or security doors putting the door sweeps on and at the same time getting porch lights up at the parallel track sites and then like I mentioned earlier we'll be starting up our resident meetings next week and continuing polling for

parallel track and interior renovations which is the coolest thing and John's already told you about this but after many tries we received extra funds from HUD through the capital fund an additional one and a half million to 2024's allocation so that's money that's there available to us

right now and it's for specific projects and what it does, it puts us back on track for our original plan which was to at some point relocate families, get inside their apartment and renovate the bathrooms, the kitchens and everything else in the apartment, new floors, new paint, new interior doors.

So that's super excited.

We had been planning with residents for bathroom renovations

and then we got this money and residents are super excited to know that we're actually gonna do the full apartment with this additional money.

We want to spend this money as fast as possible so we're gonna be working double time with residents on those sites to identify materials and colors and all that stuff and we think we can do that quick and then a lot of that work will be done by our CRHA crew

which some of it contracted out.

So we're super excited.

So even though today we're looking at 2025 to 2029, we're keeping 2024 on the charts because it is a big piece of the actual plan and we just want everybody to be aware of it.

So other things to consider when we're putting it together, the kitchen renovation, we've already done the appliances.

We've already started planning on the bathroom work, so that's exciting.

We do still have money in 2024, not just for the new money from HUD, but to get Madison HVAC all done.

You will see later on down the road in the plan, the ideas of downstairs half baths.

It's going to be a major expense

but what we determined was it won't require an actual redesign of the architecture of the kitchens which will allow us to plan and renovate those kitchens faster and with less expense.

Previously residents had swapping the old plan 2028 with 2027 because priorities were a little higher on walls and floors and

Now you'll see that's actually moved forward as part of the interior renovation.

We are very aware that there's uncertainty with the federal government.

Mr.

Sales is doing a really good job making sure our money is gonna remain accessible, but we do wanna get this work done.

And then as I mentioned, potential reductions in the CFP a few years down the road as redevelopment proceeds.

All right, enough of that.

Here's the summary for 2025 to 2029 over the five years.

So we're setting aside almost 900,000 for authority-wide.

So those are things that benefit the entire housing authority, not just the specific amps.

and generally that's not like true capital projects and HUD allows you to use certain amounts for certain things and we'll take a look at that.

Amp one is West Haven over five years, 1.2 million.

We think this will get us to the point of beginning the breaking ground on at least the first phase of West Haven but this will take care of needs while we get to that part.

Crescent Halls, we're not putting any money into it, newly renovated, has its own funding streams, won't need capital funds for a long time, and basically the same thing for 6th Street and South 1st Street.

6th Street, the 19 remaining units will be undergoing a redevelopment, but the needs of that site are needs that can be met through operations.

and then 4.2 million for scattered sites, single family homes, AKA the parallel track.

The next page after that is gonna be just your totals by year.

And let's just go through.

So authority wide, we're allowed to take a management fee of 10%, which we take.

and then we've got career training opportunities and this is for residents, this is gonna supplement all of our training programming for residents, it's gonna support our section three efforts, it's gonna support job readiness.

And then staff training which you're allowed to use capital funds for when it pertains to things that HUD has found a ding on your housing authority, you can use capital funds for training

to address those items.

Amp one, we are just transferring all the capital funds that we get for amp one to operations and you're allowed to do that a certain percentage.

That allows us some flexibility.

We're not gonna plan any major projects for the full site because it will be undergoing redevelopment.

However, there are capital needs

and some examples of that are concrete repair, occasionally somebody might need a roof, street lighting, things like that.

Mention Crescent Halls and South 1st Street and 6th Street will not be putting any capital funds towards those camps.

All right, there's the old plan you can look at if you want.

and then my favorite slide of all time, this should be in your packet, Page 23, general picture of parallel track but this includes 2024 and it spreads out to 2029 and what you can see, so we got the additional money from HUD for 2024.

some of that was entry doors and storm doors and that work is underway and then the HVAC which is the money for Madison basically and we'll probably realize some savings there and then the rest is to begin pooling for bathroom modernization and kitchen modernization and that combines with the relocation that will be required

more money for kitchens, money for interior painting.

And then you can see also moving that forward, it's 2026, a little over half a million for flooring replacement and replacing the interior doors.

Now this effort, we're gonna be moving families out probably for about a week into a hotel and then we come in and get all the work done.

while they're at.

So that's why we need relocation dollars in there.

HUD allows you to do that.

The other thing to keep in mind is we don't have to wait until 2026 to start this work.

As long as things are categorized and the money is updated, we'll be able to begin these projects sooner than 2026.

And we will hopefully wrap up sometime in 2026.

So we're talking about

a good chunk of work.

So then the next thing would be, okay, what's the next big project once we're done with the interior renovation.

And we're looking at it and this seems to meet resident priorities through polling, awnings and canopies and background fences being high priorities for residents.

So we're gonna look at it as sort of a return to some of the exterior improvements, which is,

providing awnings and canopies on porches, maybe upgrading the porches a little bit, and then replacing back door fences and playground fences.

And that'll be an expense, and the awnings are spread out over a couple years.

And then we'll start pulling money together for the half bath,

Now it's a big project with a lot of complications.

It's going to cost a lot of money and we're not sure that we're actually ready to put that closer in than four or five years out.

So this gives us time to plan and really understand what we're doing and we're going to need a lot of money and probably some additional funding to make that happen.

So you're basically looking at

Right now let's get planned out for interior renovations then we're going to go back to the exterior and then we're going to get into the half bath and again anytime we can get extra money for these projects we can do them sooner and faster.

and then you have a slide of just 2025 to 2029, which is really what you're supposed to be approving.

And that is really all I got for you all.

Which... Well... Or is it everywhere?

You know, there's a lot of desire for it.

They would be downstairs.

So we have a lot...

Oh, parallel track.

Okay.

Oh, okay.

I got it.

And then we're also looking at Eltham, Hinton, Ridge, and Montshallow, but they don't have the same needs.

all right questions no no this is great Brandon thank you very much and then yeah just next steps your next meet your actual board meeting we'll be having a public hearing and hopefully followed by your approval of the incredibly smart and so glad we're caught up on past years with extra hud funding as well capital fund it was a lot because

That's the official title of it.

Thank you all.

Okay, well, y'all go ahead.

I think, well, that's everything.

All in favor?

Aye.

Office colored paper.

No, no.

I think they came from, the ones I have came from Target and now I'm boycotting them too.

There's never left to go.

I really did have like a whole, I was like, where am I supposed to go?

There's not a logo for me to go to.

Right, I'm not supposed to do that.

It's very stressful, these times that we're in.

It's amazing.

My daughter wants ice cream and now there's no reeds.

And I'm like, who has it?

I don't want to try anything.