Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority Board Meeting   4/27/2026

Yeah, John texted me this morning and he's like,

I'm very sick.

And he's like, but I got a Z-Pak, so I might be there.

And I was like, yeah, no.

No.

Please don't be there.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, we haven't started yet.

We haven't started.

I wasn't here last week because I had a, yeah, I didn't want to go.

I was tired.

Awesome.

Yeah, it looks like I've seen it pop up that they seem to be advertising a little better because I've seen the need for a board

for participation for all the boards in a couple different places.

Which is... For location?

You don't need to write anything for location.

We know where we are.

Yeah, so I've seen it for a bunch of different boards, because it used to be...

I don't have time to write my address.

My address has not changed.

But that's fine.

That's fine.

Oh, okay.

Okay, sounds good.

Call our meeting to order.

Oh, you can just sit it down there and we'll pick it up when we get any leftover papers.

Wait a minute, thank you.

Yes, it makes it easier for me.

Yeah, we just got, when we pick the, this, okay.

Okay, we will call the meeting to order.

Commissioner O'Rourke?

Here.

All right, we'll take a moment of silence please.

All right, general announcements.

Our next

CRHA board work session is Thursday, May 14th at 6 p.m. Our next regular board meeting is Monday, May 25th.

That's Memorial Day, so maybe not.

We'll update that.

Yeah.

The redevelopment committee meeting is every first Thursday of the month from 3 to 4.

on Zoom, the Safety Committee meeting is every second Wednesday of the month at noon, and there's in-person or a team meeting, and then Residence Services is quarterly on the second Tuesday of the month from one to two.

Any reminders or anything?

The city is currently accepting applications for boards and commissions.

The current deadline is May 1st, and one of those boards is Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority, this board, for one at-large seat and then one resident commissioner seat.

So if anyone either here knows of someone interested or anyone watching is potentially interested, those seats are open to apply for, again, with a deadline of May 1st.

Hi, I'm Victoria O'Rourke.

I'm an attorney at the Legal Aid Justice Center.

Thank you commissioners.

I just wanted to make a public comment again about the minimum rent and our suggestion that CRHA consider eliminating the minimum rent.

I know this is something the board has thought about before and I just wanted to bring one new angle

about sort of the finances of the minimum rent issue.

There are pending cases right now that CRHA has against tenants who only pay $35 in rent.

And that means that tenant makes $116 a month or less, which is very, very little income.

It's almost impossible that CRHA would ever recover that income from those people through the court process.

Thankfully, CRHA actually doesn't try to garnish people's wages.

But even so, they would be legally prohibited from doing so because those people make so little money.

and it costs $61 for each of those filings plus attorney's fees.

So this is just sort of our pitch to say like it doesn't make sense from CRHA's perspective but it also doesn't make sense from a tenant perspective.

These are people who make so little money and they really need that extra $35 in order to pay for emergency expenses, childcare expenses, things like that.

So we would just urge from both the housing authority and from the tenant perspective to eliminate the minimum rent

and I think it would save a staff burden as well of having to file those UD's, having to appear in court, that kind of thing.

So thank you.

I had spoken to John about that in our 2221 meeting and he had, like we had spoken about maybe kind of CRHA coming, like figuring out if they could run numbers and take those things into consideration so maybe that's

something we can kind of start to think about more over the summer and get a sense of how that would impact the budget and figure out if we can make a good argument.

Awesome, thank you.

Yes.

Fridays after five, that bag check has been an issue for the past two years out of dance concerts.

and I heard, yes, that I wish to secure, yeah, I'm gonna try to get the city manager to show me where to go for dance concerts.

So I don't have to, yeah, and try to bring, not try to bring just my, it's my keys and my money.

my sunglasses I should bring and keys so I can put them I'll try to put them in my bag so they don't get lost this and that really has got to stop and I don't deserve because it's a it's been a safety for guns and weapons and I don't do do that

Okay.

Thank you.

Miss Giles, do you have any PHAR comments this evening?

You might?

Okay.

We'll save it.

Alright, any updates from commissioners or topics for discussion?

Okay, next up is the approval of the board minutes from March 23rd.

and a second.

Second.

All right.

All in favor?

Aye.

All right.

Good evening to the board and everyone that's there in person.

We have a few things.

We sent out a spring reminder notice that contained a bunch of reminders for all the properties, so every family got one.

Reminders of proper parking passes.

We have a few days

Until 5-1, residents have had over two months to now come in and provide their required documents to get their new updated passes.

And we have sent reminders out through TextMyGov.

We are using that a lot more.

So to all partners,

Instead, we are asking everyone to encourage residents to sign up for those reminders from TextMyGov.

It's a much more efficient way to send out reminders rather than posting papers on people's door, which we still do obviously, but we also had our first beautification day last month.

We actually did two sites.

We did an initial run at West Haven and we did Riverside.

It turned out really well.

We were able to

Get that done.

It's May 8th at Mickey and Madison.

OK.

Thank you.

So we greatly encourage all of our partners to, if you can, please come join us in beautifying our properties.

Let's see, we did want to highlight that we have a lot of trainings for staff coming up.

We are really ramping up on training this year.

We do it every year, but we pretty much have the year planned out.

And if there's any trainings that partners would like to see or have, please do feel free to reach out.

and we can talk about and plan those trainings or learning sessions.

I believe that is all I have.

All right.

Thank you, Miss Banks.

Thank you.

All right.

All right, if you look at the Excel spreadsheet we have for the each of you report, you'll see that they're continuing to work on regular inspections and research.

There's currently 623 head vouchers, three stuff, and 66 key straps.

Right now there's two vouchers on the street for older individuals trying to get those vouchers mixed up.

There's nothing major right now for HPV.

We don't plan to release any vouchers at the moment until after the redevelopment units come online.

Sure.

Okay, resident services.

Yeah.

Some of the resident service staff presented at the Virginia Workforce Symposium in Harrisonburg last week on building community resilience to economic challenges.

It's the first time we attended one of those symposiums.

It was a new experience for us, but we think we will return because we're working on building out economic opportunity programs.

We discussed our ongoing work towards defining

more effective self-sufficient programs to meet the needs of residents.

We talked a lot about the importance of wraparound services and the need to prevent the risk of housing instability and that we really need to make sure the individual has housing stability before they can be successful in the workplace.

It was overall a good experience.

There was a lot of different workforce providers there

are often just pushing to get someone employed and maybe not pausing to see what might be happening in the household.

The eviction diversion program continues to be challenging.

We're hopeful to hear, seeing if we're able to get some funding from the city and we appreciated the support on this.

We currently have a resident service position posted.

I did a bit of door knocking since we have an open position right now at six sites and it was really helpful for me to do that myself just to get a better feel for what might incentivize some of our community to come talk to us more and I do think having some rental assistance funds that could be talked about for them coming to me with us would really help.

I'm very excited about the city council approving the nonprofit and are eager to assist in setting up this process and thank you also to the board for supporting that.

Our youth services program continues doing beautification and we give stipends to our young community members at different sites who help with this.

We really feel it fosters pride and connection with our young residents, with our neighborhood and we're continuing to build out that program.

Just a couple of things upcoming.

We hope to hear in the next month or two about our grant application to the Department of Labor.

We will definitely update you once we do hear that.

We're finalizing our draft of the emergency plan and disaster response.

As soon as we have final management team approval on that, we're gonna move to community meetings to review the draft and get feedback

Any questions for me?

As for the nonprofit, does that mean now that we have the city approval that we can file the paperwork with the IRS and like what's the kind of, what's the timeline there now that we've gotten that

The next step will be working with our council, Miss Carnes, who I just noticed is also on here, and I'm not quite sure about the timeline.

Yes, so once we create the entity and obtain an EIN,

We just need to work through the process for the 1023 application, which is the application with the Internal Revenue Service for the formal tax exempt status.

So I will work with John and with Kathleen on the estimated budget for the first year of operations of the entity.

And then we have to also submit projections for the two years after that.

So we'll work on a budget, we'll work on refining the mission and activities, and then we'll submit for IRS approval.

And it takes on average about six months, but that's just an average, that's not a commitment.

It all depends on how many applications are submitted to the IRS and how long it takes them to turn around any response.

If not,

Not a question, but a comment on the eviction diversion

request and topic just that the city has obviously adopted our budget and we had kind of broader funding for CRHA as a fundamental agency as well as funding for capital projects obviously, but unfortunately it was not included in the budget, the request for additional funds for the eviction diversion program.

That said,

It's not the end of the ability for that to be funded because there are both existing surpluses and contingency funds that are available for one-time expenditures, which this would be.

Longer term, there's always additionally the potential for a year in surplus, but that would necessarily be towards

into the year beginning of next year.

And I know the need is more immediate than that.

All of which say if there's any either community members or CRHA board members who would be interested in emailing city council as a whole about why funding that is a priority, I think that would definitely be useful just to try to elevate it as

Well, I know a few weeks ago, Kathleen had emailed out just kind of a one-pager type document explaining the program as well as some talking points.

I think that's certainly a good place to start.

OK.

I mean, in general, obviously, just that it's in the city's interest to not have people displaced and enter homelessness.

And it requires investment and a lot of intentionality.

Great.

Kathleen, would you be able to send that to me, please?

Would you send that to me, please, the one-pager?

Okay.

Any other questions for Kathleen?

No.

Okay.

Ms. Sciles?

No.

In case we can't have a public housing authority on Memorial Day, which is the fourth Monday of May, which...

Yeah, we don't know yet.

I don't know.

We'll have to figure it out.

We'll talk to Mr.

Yes.

And please break these outlets.

Yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

All in favor?

Yes.

Meeting adjourned.

Good night.