Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Work Session   3/12/2026

I think would it be helpful for me to just like say like this is what I hope we get to talk about or do you think it's perfectly fine okay yeah okay I always like I didn't want to like

like be like you can't talk about what you can talk about whatever you want but like you know I or like at least it's like if you want direction this is what I was thinking yeah so I'll say that okay well and y'all are invited to lunch if you want to come and get a free lunch even if you just pop in grab a sandwich and pop back out because I ordered I ordered some extras so yeah

and then talking with my admin person for my job to figure out how we can make a donation to CRHA to compensate for your time.

So we're trying to figure out what the legal way of us giving money is going to be.

I am on it.

Hi.

Hello, how are you all?

Fine, how are you?

It's for the housing authority.

The work session?

Yes, the CFP.

Yes, yes, yes.

Yes, you sign in and you can pick up a packet.

So this is for the non-profit?

That has authority?

It's for the budget for nonprofit funding.

but not for the CRHA nonprofit?

Yes, that's it.

Yes, city space.

I only wear one glory.

We are here every year.

I'm like, maybe I say.

Doing all right.

Yeah.

The weather has been so nuts.

My friend called me last night.

Yes.

I said, well, it was windy here, but not tornado windy.

And Mr.

Sales will be on shortly as well.

How are you doing, Maria?

Oh, I'm wonderful.

Thanks for asking.

And so they were like, we saw you on Zoom.

Spring Break went for you because of the week you're doing now?

But we ended the 28th.

Oh wow, because I was about to say, you come back and then, and it is early too.

I don't remember when we ended ours.

I think UVA moved up so like they used to start after NLK Day and now we start the week before so just everything got pushed back because we had that earlier start in January.

Yes because there was a long January I just remember.

Yeah.

But this was years ago.

Yeah.

Like you had a big break.

I don't know.

It's weird.

Yeah because you

Yeah, teaching every day for five hours a day seems literal to me, but I do like being like, okay, thanks.

Like I've done.

That's nice.

It's big.

I mean, that's academia, right?

Yeah, exactly.

And I love it.

I mean, I love the students.

They're mostly really amazing and just very sweet.

What are you busy with?

Lawford did a resolution

I don't remember what recognizing somebody does.

We rushed today and then came back in the snow from Richmond, so we closed an office.

And then always the same stuff, you know.

I got a meeting next week with the board.

you got a fundraiser next month and an open house and then you're still thinking about fall and what summer looks like because you're like I might as well start thinking about it now at the last minute.

We stayed busy and that would have been any other year.

Even if things change every week.

Literally.

It was going alright.

It was very funny.

You could see everybody getting a little bit chipper with the warm weather.

People are having excuses to work on their laptop outside.

It's like, alright, you know, whatever.

It's like, that's fine.

So could I check with the sales or Delphine?

We have two of our current five board members present.

Could we proceed with the presentation on the CFP fund?

Yeah, I think you should be able to proceed.

There's no action items.

This is just a presentation.

And so there should be any issues.

I think Delphine's hand's raised but muted.

That hand raise just came up, right?

I have my glasses on so I can't tell.

Delphine, are you able to unmute?

Delphine has an answer.

She's unmuted, so maybe she's having audio issues.

I'm fairly confident, 100% sure we can start the meeting.

There's no action items.

And so I don't think we will have any issues.

Okay, then that sounds good to me.

If we could call to order the meeting for March 12th, Thursday, 2026 of the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, our work session.

Here.

Present.

Thank you.

Let's take a minute moment of silence.

That was a minute, right?

We can open up to the second agenda item, public comments followed by FAR comments.

Is there, there's no one present currently in the chambers, but is there anyone online?

I think it's all staff members online.

and then I do not see any PHAR representatives either online or in attendance.

So I think we could move on to item three, CFB presentation.

Absolutely.

Thank you.

Let me share.

Oh, I got a request to share.

I sent a request to share while we're waiting on that.

I am Brandon Collins.

I'm your redevelopment coordinator, currently here in Washington, DC.

And a quick note while I'm waiting on the share screen, many of, so one of your board members is here.

We actually found a way for him to attend

a ticketed award ceremony that's going on right now and that's why he's not here and many of your PHAR folks are also at this conference.

It looks like I'm sharing, no.

Well gosh, you guys.

Oh, here we go, now they're letting me do it.

Okay, well I love the Capital Fund plan.

And I love talking to you all about it.

I won't take up too much of your time, but I'm here to talk about the CRHA five-year capital fund action plan.

And we'll just kind of go over the basics of that so that you kind of know what you're looking at in your packet.

Here we go.

So what we're gonna hit up is real fast, we'll go through much of this stuff, the activities associated with it, what the plan is, a little bit about the past, a little bit of things that we had to think about, and then we'll look at the plan and take a quick look at the interior renovation project that is underway.

All right, so timeline and activities, getting ready for the plan happened this winter.

On February 6th, we published the draft and published the notice of your public hearing.

And from there, we've been doing polling.

I'm still, I'm getting close to wrapping up the poll of the parallel track folks.

We did go over the plan at the West Haven planners meeting.

as it pertains to them.

We had a scheduled meeting with the Resident Advisory Board, which is PHAR, but they were all traveling in DC, so we may actually have an ad hoc RAB consultation at some point.

And then we've got the work session,

We'll be having in-person meetings with our parallel track sites next week.

And we should be getting written comments from PHAR by March 20, give us a chance to respond.

And then at your next official board meeting, there is a public hearing on the plan, hopefully followed by your approval.

So what is the Capital Fund Plan?

This is annual distribution of funds from HUD for capital projects and it comes in grant form.

So the way I like to explain it is for the most part, public housing has two kind of pools of money.

One is for operations and the other is for capital.

Operations come in the form of subsidy.

Capital fund comes as a grant for which you have to

submitted a five-year action plan.

Fun thing to keep in mind, especially for newer folks, at some point, a few months down the road, there's gonna be a TV announcement that Senators Kaine and Warner have gotten millions of dollars for public housing in Charlottesville improvements.

And everybody's gonna pester you about it, and they're gonna ask you about it.

A year later, they're gonna be like, what happened to that money?

This is the capital fund.

They make a big deal of it, but we do rely on it because we're eligible for it as long as we meet these requirements.

So it's not like extra money.

That's money we rely on.

Though we do have some extra money from 2024 that we'll talk about briefly in a second.

So in order to get capital fund, you have to have the five-year plan.

You have to have a 45-day comment period, which we're in.

You have to consult with your resident advisory board and you have to provide written responses to their comments.

You have to have a public hearing and you have to have approval of the board of commissioners.

So the resident advisory board is PHAR, who's also your resident council.

and you have to consult the RAB and include your responses to any comments that they have when you submit the plan to HUD.

That law is covered under 24 CFR part 903 and then in regulation 964 I believe it says you can

If you have a jurisdiction-wide resident council, which is what PHAR is, then they can serve as the resident advisory board.

So they're serving in their RAB role as pertains to this plan.

All right, so fun thing about this, you never really know what kind of money you're getting.

It's up to Congress and it's up to proration.

and they vote on it, but the amounts we anticipate are kind of based on the past.

So we're anticipating 1.38 million annually for 6.9 million over the five year period that it covers.

Throughout time as we proceed more and more through redevelopment, our capital funds will decrease as we will have

less public housing eligible to receive the fund is associated with it.

Super cool thing to know, Housing Authority has been moving and is very much moving towards becoming a high performer.

When that happens, you get 15% more to your capital fund, which is awesome.

Another important thing to keep in mind that each item in your plan

You have two years to obligate it, which means basically you've set this money for this specific contract and four years to spend it.

So there's always a clock ticking on the capital fund.

We've been pretty cool to find other funding sources.

Affordable Housing Group helped us with exterior improvements a while back.

We can get grants that bolster any of our career opportunities that we're funding with some of the capital plan, CDBG funds if we can get them, and the City of Charlottesville, and they've been pretty helpful in some of our stuff in the past as well.

And you can apply for additional HUD grants.

And we'll talk about the big one for that,

We were able to get extra funding for 2024, which is prior to this five-year plan, as well as additional capital funds for safety improvements.

So any of that extra money we get makes sure we can do bigger and better projects and get them done quicker.

And we have to get it done because the clock is ticking.

A while back, we kind of set a new way of looking at it with Housing Authority.

But now that we've undergone redevelopment on most of our properties, we're able to focus that money a lot better and do big projects.

So one of the first ones was our exterior improvements.

and that work was completed in 2023 for the most part and it was about $2 million.

And along with that, we replaced our playgrounds and other outdoor amenities and our friends at Affordable Housing Group helped us cover a million dollars worth of work for that project.

So combining money with our capital fund to get the work done.

and one exterior improvement that needed to happen was the doors that kind of took some time to get to.

And then prior to knowing we would have this extra money from HUD for 2024, we knew we needed to do some interior work and we replaced appliances, kitchen appliances in the homes.

and from there we all sat down, you probably don't remember because you two are pretty new, we sat down and basically put all the money in the HVAC basket and did this historic effort along with money from the city to bring central air and heating and cooling upgrades

to our parallel track homes, 62 homes, all said and done.

First public housing in Charlottesville to have that happen.

So that was the past.

One thing to keep up, well, I'll get to that.

So I mentioned the 2024 money, so at the very end of 2024,

We were noticed that we received an extra one, I think it was actually 1.2 million, not 1.5.

I'm actually gonna fix that right now.

1.2 million for these interior renovations that we had applied for and terribly ambitious.

And when that money arrived, we were pretty excited.

And we'll talk about that actual project we spent the past year planning for and now we're implementing it.

All of our parallel track homes, Mickey Jog, Riverside Avenue, Madison Avenue, and the single family homes undergoing an interior renovation of everything in the unit, replacing kitchens, bathrooms, fixtures, new floors, new paint, new interior doors.

And the idea is we can get in these homes and get it all done.

We wouldn't be able to do that without that extra funding, but it does require multiple years worth of capital fund to get it done.

And it's a lengthy project, and we're just really super focused on that.

But we do want to spend the money quickly.

As you may be aware, had a little scare early on last year.

and that spurred us on to not only spend past money that we had obligated, but it got our whole plan on track.

So we're really just focused on really five to six years of a plan and then we can stick to the plan, which is really exciting.

We will be updating prior years capital fund numbers

to reflect what we've spent and see what kind of savings we have from the HVAC project.

And that will help us determine what's out there for the renovation project as we're putting that all together and getting the real numbers on that.

And this plan that you're gonna see does reflect some of that as we do need 2026 money for the renovation project.

but generally we're sticking to the five-year plan.

All right, enough of that.

Let's go ahead.

What's in the plan?

Basically there's three piles in this plan.

One is authority wide and so that benefits the entire housing authority.

The next is for AMP one, which is West Haven, AMP stands for Asset Management Project.

and then the rest of it is focused into parallel track, amp four.

And you'll see our other properties, amps two and three, which is Crescent Halls, Sixth Street and South First Street have either undergone redevelopment or underway with redevelopment and they are getting brand new homes and we should not have a need to

spend capital dollars on those and they have their own way of handling any capital improvement through other sources because these funds can only be used for public housing and not all our redevelopment properties have public housing.

So if you break these categories down a little bit you can see the total five year here in gray and then each year

You can see we're anticipating 1.38 million each year.

And these are how they're categorized.

But you have to do more than that.

You actually have to line item them.

They call it a budget line item.

And HUD's a stickler for that.

So you need to have both the item that you want and the dollar amount.

There's some fungibility amongst those as you're building your plan and working through your capital plan.

but you can see about a million over the five years for housing authority, 1.3 million for West Haven over the five years and 4.6 million for our parallel track efforts.

So we break that down further.

What's in the plan authority wide?

So these are things that you spend that benefit the whole

Housing Authority.

One of those is you can take 10% and use that as your management fee basically to make sure that you're maintaining your capital fund and other things.

So we take that 10%.

You are also allowed to include career training opportunities for residents.

and we'll be using some for staff training.

So when housing authority gets audited and the inspire stuff and all that stuff, they point out deficiencies or things that maybe you need some improvement in and so we have to train the staff.

So we do have money in here for both resident training and economic self-sufficiency as well as staff training.

I got a note for Mr.

Sales.

Oh, Crescent Halls is now AMP 9.

See, that's why I need to check the regulations.

And we may use some capital funds for Crescent Halls in the future as half of the building is public housing.

All right, so, and if you guys need to stop me, we can, but that's the easy one.

This one's pretty easy as well.

We talked to West Haven residents about this, and they've actually been kind of in tune over this since we began our planning effort with them.

But a lot of housing authorities do this, where they transfer the maximum they can to their operations, and that way they avoid a budget line item.

Our reason for doing this is to make sure we have funds there for capital needs of West Haven as they're waiting to have redevelopment.

As you know, or as you will know, we submitted for a LIHTC application for phase 1A for West Haven yesterday.

And so we're proceeding, but it's gonna take some time before

we get to actually building new stuff there.

So there are going to be needs there and what this does ensure that we have enough money to maintain a livable situation there until we hit redevelopment.

So this is the fun part.

The slide I'm showing you is the five year numbers in easy form.

So I think in your packet,

Maria sent the actual HUD format, which is just ridiculous to try and look at.

So we put this in a nice easy chart for you.

But what I actually want to do is skip to the past.

What you're looking at here in orange is 2024.

So we actually, we got the 2024 money and we got that

as we were building the 2025 plan, last year's five-year plan.

And it wasn't really reflected.

So we really have to look back to that because it was such a substantial amount of money.

And it's what led us to be able to do our interior renovation project all at once, but in a sense.

So you can see 2024's money, 2.3 million.

We're in the process of updating these numbers.

The entry doors and storm doors were completed as was the HVAC.

So that's actually just a portion of the HVAC costs.

There were prior years to that, to do that.

And then you can see the beginnings of the Interior Renovation Project for the parallel track.

And you can see we have it, the extra money for 2024,

and then you can see in 2025, this is what we presented to you all last year and going into 2026.

So we're using, you can see the categories and the dollar amounts.

And so what you're gonna see as we look ahead, it's important for us to update those and know where we're realizing savings and realize where costs are going up.

basically the plan takes a chunk of money from each year to get there.

And then we had looked ahead to the next five years.

So for the plan that you'll be voting on and hopefully support, you can see 2026, it's got the remainder of money that's needed there to complete the interior renovation.

And then what we've been

Working with residents on and with some other understandings is that after that lengthy process is over, we'll be kind of returning to hit up some of the exterior items that residents had wanted that weren't such a high priority at the time, but go back and do some of the things that we had talked with them prior to that.

And then, you know, some of that would be

fairly expensive.

And then we will be preparing to replace all hot water heaters in anticipation of a half bathroom installation project in some of the homes, which will be a big, complicated and expensive project followed by exterior parking improvements in year five.

We're sticking to the general plan as far as we know.

John's clarifying my money.

It's 1.4 from 2024.

That was extra for our capital fund.

So that really is the plan.

It's really that simple.

So we're gonna complete the interior renovation project

moved towards some exterior improvements, including fence replacement.

We're gonna be working with residents about awnings over their front porches versus possibly a full front porch.

Just doing the awnings would be cheaper and quicker.

Something more substantial might be cooler, but it may take us longer and cost us more.

And then the rest is really gearing us towards some

to more efficiencies with water, but also to support that half bathroom, which residents are really excited about.

And those homes were built very strangely in the 1980s, especially at Mickey drive and finding room for a half bathroom where you don't have to go up the stairs is kind of a necessity.

All right, I think I talked enough about the renovations, but I wanted to just kind of walk you all through it.

And if you have questions, John or Quentia can probably answer them.

This was an original idea before we got into the HVAC and all that.

And at some point we thought we would be able to do these renovations and it would take us a number of years

and we would kind of replace floors one year and then do the bathroom the next and all that.

But this extra funding really put us back on track to saying the general plan is the family will be temporarily moved from their home to a newly renovated home on their site.

And that's called the hotel unit.

and it's fully furnished.

I've got a massive plan for controlling pests and moving everything.

Our relocation coordinator is working with those families and they will be moved into that temporary unit for about two weeks.

Some homes are gonna get done faster.

Others, we're gonna find other issues and some may take a little longer, but we think it's going to take two years

and hopefully all 62 done by 2027.

The one in single family homes, which is a duplex has been completed already, which is pretty super exciting.

And like I said, that includes bathroom remodel, kitchen remodel, new floors, interior doors, paint, repairs, fittings, fixtures, and of course relocation.

So relocation is a cost and we are using capital fund money for that effort.

Here is the sort of design scheme.

Am I on the right slide?

That we've been working with residents, been back and forth all year long.

But I think we came up with something really great.

So you can see the colors there, you can see

Brand new stuff on the floors in particular, LVT, which are kind of standard at this point for everything we do, integrated lighting, which means they're kind of attached to the unit, they're LED, and you won't have to worry about changing light bulbs, they will last at a long time.

You can see bathroom, this one's kind of a little copy paste job here.

Shower wall, you can see this sort of modern gray theme moving throughout.

Fixtures, everything, lighting, again, integrated lighting.

The showers are gonna be absolutely beautiful.

And kitchen, you got copy and paste in one of our appliances that we already replaced in, I think we finished that up

2025, early on.

Kitchen counters, cabinets, lighting, residents are real excited about this light.

And again, the floors and this countertop in particular is gonna be really beautiful.

So that's the plan.

I love that one of the paint colors is agreeable gray.

That's pretty great.

It's so agreeable.

Yeah.

It's really flexible.

I mean, you know, we talked to residents, you know, about not everybody has their same style of furniture.

Yeah, everyone's excited to go away from antique Hawaiian.

I would just add just a little statement at the end saying everything that's in the plan is what we are looking at over the next five years.

As we get closer to the budget year and when we receive these funds, we do have some reconciliation that needs to happen.

with the 2024 money because we did the Madison HVAC job in-house and we budgeted like $600,000 for that job.

I think we got it done for less than $300 and so there's about a $300,000 savings that we can put into another project and so there's some money that needs to be shuffled around there.

And so that should reduce what we need to bring forward in these upcoming years on that big remodel.

And so we may end up moving the hot water tank replacement up because I think we've replaced six of them this year.

and so it'll be good to just go ahead and replace all of them so then they're all on the same schedule and we can plan it accordingly going forward in the future plus we should see some savings and costs because we were going from a combo hot water tank that also produces heat to just a regular standard hot water tank

and so right now we pay about three thousand dollars for those Polaris tanks, hot water tanks.

When we do the conversion to the tank list we should have a savings of about a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred a unit plus our staff is able to install them and so we should see a really good savings both on operations and on maintenance long term.

because those Polaris hot water tanks are really expensive to replace.

And when they go down, you lose your heat and your hot water.

But we no longer have that issue because we have central air now at those sites.

It's the first meeting in April.

Great.

Yeah, no, that's great.

Cool.

Well, we're not done with the capital plan.

At your March 23rd meeting, hopefully you'll approve it.

I personally think the plan that

kind of spurred on by Mr.

Sales and working with residents three or four years ago has been really smart and it's been super effective and residents are super appreciative.

So just throwing that out there.

We will be doing, like I mentioned, I'll be finishing up the poll to kind of gut check that we're right on this plan with residents.

sort of a sneak peek at polling results.

Yeah, we are.

And we'll be trying to reschedule a meeting with PHAR and get their comments in by March 20th.

And then you all will have public hearing and approval on March 23rd.

And then we send it off to HUD.

and who knows by that point we may have begun the first family's work at Mickey Drive.

We're that close to getting that all the way started.

That's all I got.

And Mr.

Thank you, Bernie.

I just want to just echo this one statement at the end saying,

Thank everyone involved.

I know it takes a lot on the REIT development team.

Capital Fund is, I'd say it's like one of our most important funding sources because it really is how do you ensure that the building stays functional, livable, and that the residents are getting what they need.

And so it takes a lot to get into it.

It's averting a little bit of money.

compared to our other redevelopment projects that cost like 45 million or 50 million.

But these are the projects that are impacting the folks that are living in the units like right now.

And so just like the property on Ridge Street, us, the redevelopment team working on that and being able to move the resident that's in those units.

And that resident now gets to see a brand new unit.

And what,

they should have been receiving at the very beginning and so it takes a lot of work and oftentimes it probably is not recognized as much because it's so small but this has will have one of the larger impacts because it is staying public housing there's no loss in public housing units with this redevelopment work that's happening at this site unlike what's happening at some of the other amps

and so these sites, due to the work that's happening now, really will have the ability to stay as public housing units into the future and while taking care of public housing units.

So I just want to say thank you to the redevelopment team.

This is something we have to do annual, but it's not easy and it takes a lot of work and typically you really don't get to see the reward.

Awesome.

Thank you guys so much.

It's really heartening to hear that we're keeping the same number of public housing units, public housing.

That's fantastic.

Yeah, I think it's worth highlighting that

We're looking at a housing authority trying to find solutions, trying to figure out what timing, and then also doing that very difficult thing where it's the realities of you're trying to do redevelopment, but also listen to the community.

So it's kind of cool.

Over a year, I could use a better adjective, but over a year seeing what the progress is in my short time here.

Well, if there's nothing else from staff members or on the CFP plan, we can hop into item four, public comment.

Again, I see nobody in the chambers and then there's nobody online.

Motion to adjourn?

Thank you all so much for all your work.