City Council Meeting   5/28/2024

Laura Tuesday, May 28, City Council meeting to order.

Mayor Reed, President.

City Attorney Brown.

Here.

Council Member Robinson.

Here.

Chief Warner.

Here.

Chief Tobias.

If you would please stand for the invocation, if you wish.

Father God, thank you for blessing us with another day.

Thank you for gathering us together in this space.

Give us the wisdom we need to make tough decisions as a council.

Let us stay humble.

Give us peace and understanding as we continue to do what's best for our city.

In your name I pray.

Amen.

Okay, I don't know why the police are here.

Something going on?

I guess, ma'am, we do.

Good evening, council members, Mr. Banks.

I'm very excited to be here this evening.

This is a special day for the City of Harrisonburg Police Department and for our community.

This evening we are going to promote three individuals who have worked very hard in a competitive process to become part of our supervisory team and the future of our organization as we grow in leadership.

So first I would like to introduce to you the newest Sergeant, Sergeant Rusty Driver Rusty, would you please step forward.

Let me share with you a little bit about Rusty.

He is quite the veteran at the Harrisonburg Police Department.

In fact, he has trained many of our current supervisors, if I understand this to be true.

He first started his career in law enforcement with the Rockingham County Sheriff's Department in 2003, he started.

But quickly realized that HPD was his future and he joined with us in 2005.

He served as a field training officer for 14 years, and as I said,

Over two dozen recruits did he train successfully, and they went on to become supervisors of his.

Although I think he may have supervised a few of them, even though they were the supervisors formally.

He also served as a police mentor.

In addition, he served in many of our specialty units, most notably our crisis negotiation team, forensic evidence team, our accident reconstruction team, and our civil disturbance unit.

in addition to our selective enforcement team.

Outside of work, Rusty enjoys fishing and spending time with his wife, Courtney, who is our evidence technician at the police department.

And also, there are two fur babies, Gracie and Callie.

Let me introduce Rusty Driver.

Sure.

Um, wow.

Well, yeah, my wife Courtney, my mom and dad Bob and Julie are there.

All right, rest of your mind, just stand over there.

Thank you.

Thank you all for coming tonight.

The next person I'd like to introduce you all to is Lieutenant John Hancock.

John came out number one in our Lieutenant's process.

John, come on up.

John has quickly rose to the ranks.

He was here not long ago as a Sergeant as they introduced to you.

John joined HPD in 2011.

He spent 10 years in the Patrol Division and he has served also in, well, I'm jumping ahead of myself, he has served in the Community Resource Unit.

You may have seen him around in our

as we did National Night Out.

He was there first as a bike officer, but then most recently he has served the past two years as the sergeant in that unit.

He was also a field training officer at part of our crisis negotiation team and a member of our civil disturbance unit and also a general instructor.

John holds a Bachelor of Science degree in business management from Radner University and he has completed

the prestigious FBI leader Trilogy, which is quite an accomplishment.

In his spare time, John enjoys traveling, playing sports, and being outdoors and spending time with his family and friends.

And I believe a little beagle called Archie.

Archie, yes, yes, Archie, yes, he's in there as well.

He couldn't.

That would have been fun.

He's not the therapy dog.

No.

Yeah, so I'm very proud to say my family came up from Road Oak.

So this is my father, Max Hancock.

Same as I am is my nephew, Jack Williams.

And I started over here from the left-hand side of my brother-in-law, Rusty McCormick.

I'm a sister of Tiffany McCormick.

My niece, Piper Williams.

My nephew,

All right, fantastic.

Thank you all for coming.

John Feud, step aside over there.

We got one more.

Thank you for indulging us this evening.

Lieutenant Brooke Weatherall, please come forward.

You got her being your grandma.

She's everybody's grandma up here, I'll tell you.

Also, Brooke is another one who has rised quickly through the ranks.

She was here in front of you not long ago as being promoted to sergeant.

Brooke is a little humble here in her bio that she provided to me.

But she grew up in Bridgewater, Virginia.

She graduated from Turner Ashby High School.

She started with HPD in 2012 at the age of 20.

She has served in the patrol division, the community resource unit, and major crimes where she really made her mark in HPD.

I know that she received the homicide investigator of the years you know she investigated our serial murder.

back in 2021.

She was promoted to the rank of Sergeant in January of 2023.

She has received her associate's degree from Blue Ridge College in February of 24, an administrative administration of justice.

I understand she's on her way for her bachelor's degree.

I thought so.

She has also served him on the crisis negotiation team for five years.

And in her spare time, she enjoys working on her house, hanging out with her partner, Bell.

and watching every episode of Law and Order SVU.

And we're going to send her to counseling.

Linda Benson is here somewhere.

She couldn't make it.

All my in-laws and my in-laws are here.

My grandmother, my grandfather, my mom, my aunts and uncles, my step-dad.

I'm a little emotional because...

My partner surprised me with all my friends from high school

are here around 20, and so I put all my friends on the back burner, so it's pretty cool that they're here tonight.

And I cried all these things, so don't worry about me, this is normal.

But thank you, Mr. James.

All my in-laws, I don't overhear my partners here, and of course, all my blue team members as well, so thank you.

All right, we'd just like to quickly swear them in.

I'll serve as the City of Harrisonburg Police Department according to the best of my abilities.

According to the best of my abilities.

So help me God.

We can go to our consent agenda.

Any item placed on the consent agenda shall be removed and taken up as a separate matter if so requested by any member of council.

I'll move to approve the consent agenda as presented.

Any discussion?

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Aye.

We're now going to our public hearings.

Yeah, Madam Mayor, just a quick point of clarification.

The public hearing this evening to set the tax rate was advertised over 30 days ago at a time when council's deliberation had not taken place, the budget work session had not taken place.

And so at that time, at my advisement, you all advertise the maximum tax rate that you would consider in this upcoming fiscal year.

Because of the deliberations and consensus, obviously, I believe you all have dropped that.

So just want to be clear.

The public hearing.

The council is not, unless something changes later this evening, establishing the tax rate at a dollar and four cents per hundred dollars of assessed value.

That was simply what was advertised over a month ago.

Any questions?

All right, I will open this item up for public hearing.

If anyone wishes to speak, please leave your name and address.

Hey, you in the wrong seat.

What's that?

Oh, I know.

No, I'm Bill Call, city resident.

I don't know what the rate is that you guys, if it's not 104 and it hasn't been advertised.

I'm not sure what the rate is.

But I just want to thank you for raising my rent.

because that's what it

I'm shocked that it would be 104.

There was a point in the early deliberations of the new high school where a member of the school board asked the question of to have an important company.

Charlottesville has a tax rate of a dollar per hundred.

Why can't we?

Well, apparently we can.

So, thank you.

I am Ed Garrison.

I see Deanna occasionally in the grocery store.

I don't know if she remembers.

I'll echo what he says, and I told my wife when I looked at my tax assessment, I said, I thought we owned this place, but I said, I think we're just paying rent to the city.

But my real concern, more than the tax rate, is the assessment.

We bought our house in December of 97.

And from December of 97 to 2021,

It went up in value 128,000, went from 180,000 to 308,000.

But in the last three years, it has gone up 27,500 one year, 51,300 the next year, and 34,400 the third year.

So that's another $100,000 in three years, over a third of the value, or right at a third of the value.

So when you figure that in with the tax rate, it is a hefty increase.

And I tell you one thing, you know, I hear a lot on the TV and radio about trying to help out the people that can't afford homes.

Well, right now, what my taxes are assessed at for next year,

It'll take $364 a month to pay them.

And I don't know if any of y'all, none of y'all were on council when they decided to pay taxes every six months instead of annually.

I told my wife then, I said, you wait, the day will come when we will pay more every six months than what we're paying annually now.

And that day has come.

I know there's a lot of expenses.

I know the new school costs, everything costs.

I go to the grocery store and I know I'm paying $40 for what I used to pay $25 for.

And you know, at some point in some time, something will have to give.

So it's up to y'all.

I'll pay my taxes as long as I'm looking for it.

My name is Karen Thomas, city resident.

And I'm here also in an opposition of the tax rate.

And no matter what it is, I think we have been taxed to tax to tax

and I think it's enough for your constituents at this point.

I know at one of our spray ground meetings, Mayor Reed, you mentioned that only one person showed up to talk to oppose the tax rate at a city council meeting.

So I'm here to let you know that there are more than one person showing up tonight.

So I ask you all to please reconsider increasing our taxes, real estate taxes once again.

Hi, I'm Ramona Sanders.

I live at 355 Hartman Drive.

My husband has lived there for 50 years.

I have been there for 30.

We talk about

Building affordable housing.

Once we get affordable housing, how can they afford to pay the taxes?

He just wrote a check.

My 98 year old husband wrote a check for over $1,200 to the Treasury Department of this city.

This is getting ridiculous.

We live on Social Security.

We don't have that kind of money.

to hand out to the city of Harrisonburg.

The homeowners insurance that comes to the 8th of June is $902.

The automobile insurance is $916.

I think you can see our dilemma.

There's a lot of older residents in this city.

We live in a nice neighborhood.

but we don't have such nice neighbors.

We're plagued with vultures in our backyard and we can do nothing about it.

Nobody can help us.

My husband, who is 98, says it's a bad omen to have 30 vultures on your roof.

He's scared to death.

Good evening.

My name is Kay Ocker.

I'm a Harrisonburg resident and I did just want to take a moment and some of these people have touched on it.

They are severe and serious.

I know understand personal issues with the finances of an increased tax rate.

but I did want to address this in a little bit of a more broad sense and that is as our community is concerned and that being that if, as the first gentleman noted, if expenses go up for anybody, whether it's a targeted group of people who own real estate or not, that has a trickle down, a filtering down

implication upon our community at large and I feel really seriously concerned about that as our community, a community in and of itself is a symbiotic relationship and there won't be people who can afford to pay, will never see affordable housing is what scares me or the goal is further out if in fact

Costs go up because that trickles down to every consumer and that's every community member we have.

Every consumer will notice it.

There's none of us that will escape that reality and so it makes me feel a little bit disingenuous if we're talking about raising costs that will filter down to everyone and yet out of the other side of our mouths we're talking about affordable housing.

it will impact real estate ownership and or rental either side just as has been expressed here and so I feel like we're a little bit of a being disingenuous in our in our hearts if we're speaking out of both sides we can't make it that way I think increased cost is somewhat difficult it's a bit pernicious and I think to I think we're called to be careful not to be

I'm Diane Perry.

I'm a resident of Old Town in Harrisonburg.

I'm probably not as optimistic as most of the people who have stood up here and complained about the tax rate, especially not knowing what it's going to be.

What I did want to point out is what I see in Old Town and what I see in the City Council.

We have had massive problems

in Old Town with properties not being kept up.

My tax rate goes up, but nothing is enforced.

We have a major problem with students in Old Town, the reaction of them in parties, enforcement of those parties.

And I've also seen a distinct lack of any concerns of the City Council when they are contacted.

There is no response when they are emailed.

There seems to be a total lack of communication coming back to the residents and it's not just me who has emailed you all, specifically you and you, about the issues that we face.

So we've had to go an alternative direction to get resolution of issues.

So I'm sitting back here listening to what you all are saying about raising our tax rate.

I'm also wondering what is the benefit to the Harrisonburg community

of these races and tax rates.

I'm not seeing that.

I'm seeing old town slide downhill.

I'm seeing a non-responsive city council to problems.

And I think that's something that you all need to think about.

You're elected officials and it's not enough to sit up here and budget and send money in different directions where it's going to and decide on tax rates.

It's also your responsibility to be responsive to the public and the citizens that elected you when they need your help.

Anyone else?

I see another person.

Pam, do we have any callers?

Mayor Reed, there are no callers.

I will close public hearing on the side.

Do we vote on...

on the tax increase at this point, or, yeah, I don't think we vote on this at this point, do we?

Well, if there was a discussion on anything, so.

Mr. Brown.

I was just asking Andy if he had that handy chart you handed us last time where at different gradations of values of housing years how much more they would pay

I have one in my notebook.

I just have one copy though.

Oh, apparently he has one.

That's what I'm saying.

We will vote on the adoption of the, which contains the new tax rate.

That's it.

So I'm confused.

Do we vote now on the tax rate or wait till the vote?

You can go ahead and vote.

Well, so before we have a motion, so the, it's listed here as 5.5 cents as the increase, is that what I see listed here?

I thought we said five.

Yeah, the Appropriation Ordinance under 7H includes a five-cent increase to one dollar and one cent.

Right.

Okay.

I'm sorry, I said, okay, 5.5 per cent.

The motion would be to increase the property taxes by five cents to one dollar and one cents.

Second.

Well, I mean, I think

It is true that to keep up with the services to pay for our new high school, we need to increase our taxes.

I think almost every city in Virginia is doing the same thing.

Increasing their taxes, most of it is going to education in cities around the state.

For us, we built a new high school and to staff it, we're having to hire an extra 40

or so at folks in the public school system.

So that's where most of this will be going to support that.

And it is a big hall for a city like Harrisonburg and our residents to absorb this without a doubt.

We are in a city that has a high median income.

And so this impacts folks as we move down the income scale fairly significantly without a doubt.

Not many cities, as a matter of fact, no other city is opening up a second high school.

And no city has done that over 20 years, opening up a second high school in their city.

And with that comes a significant burden financially to support that.

We are the other part of the budget that we're supporting is supporting our staff.

That's the other priority that we set forth in our budget.

to ensure that we can retain our staff who provide the services, which I would say is excellent services for the Harrisonburg and we can recruit folks.

But after that, I think we've done a pretty good job of maintaining and trying to reduce the burdens of the other programs that I think we all recognize that we need to

to work on housing, child care, transportation, our infrastructure needs in the city, which we are taking care of, but we're having to put a lot of this on hold.

So without a doubt, this is a burden on residents.

But this is also an investment in our future.

I think it's the right investment.

Your budget's a reflection of your priorities

and Values is a city and I think this budget shows our values or education in one.

Maintaining a healthy city staff that's responsive and serves our residents, our city infrastructure that we need to maintain.

The cost of doing that have gone up.

And then we recognize housing, childcare and transportation.

all things we need to step into we also know that you know we don't have the funds and we're not you know putting funds toward this that would make big dents in those programs right now because I think as we recognize we can only put so much of a additional tax burden on our residents so I support doing this increase I recognize the

The challenge it is for many folks.

Yes, and I'd like to add to that, kind of recapping what I said before that

Keeping in mind, as you say, the investment in the future, and I also appreciate Councilman Fleming's perspective on how rare it is that a city of our size takes that big leap to get a second high school.

So the high school itself is phenomenal when we have taken tours of it and went for the ribbon cutting.

It's really designed for the future with open, streamlined, collaborative

What do they call them?

Learning laboratories.

They don't even say classrooms anymore.

That's really a mark of the future.

As well as being a pent-up demand from the past for how long it's been that we've needed this with the overcrowding of the existing high school.

So it's the right thing to do, even though it's a hard thing to do.

And I remember when we were raising taxes year by year to fund the construction of the high school.

and now this is the ongoing increase that will fund the operation of the high school.

I think City Manager Banks did a really good job with this budget and the tax increase isn't where I want it to be.

but I'm okay with it because I realized that this is basically a seesaw type compromise where we're really trying to weigh the revenue with services rendered and we really can't say we want to give less services any particular place in the budget so we have to somehow come to terms with having a tax increase

We have really, as a city, been building up, encouraging folks to come live here.

We're a refugee resettlement city.

With that brings in more children.

More children who need to be educated.

So, when we invite you here, we have to have a place to educate you.

So, no, I don't want the taxes.

It will be a burden to even my household.

We struggled with this and it actually started out really at 12 cents and for us to get it to five

took a lot of work for us to even not only take care of the high school, but the other needs that we needed to take care of.

I do want to address something because I know you feel like that we have been unresponsive is what you said about O-Town.

I can't tell you how many parties I've broken up as the mayor.

So much to the point where the city manager told me stop doing it.

Chief of Police was with me when I went up the street here because there was pouring milk down the street right after the council meeting.

I have been to so many parties by myself.

Just a black woman walking up in a party.

I've had a forum put together at Sims where I had the police chief, I had Jammu,

I think you came to it.

The neighbors came out so we could address you were there to address this issue.

I got Tim Miller on speed now.

Every time somebody calls me shows Texas me shows me a picture.

I'm on the phone with him.

I feel like I've been responsive.

I will tell you this.

My parents are 78, 79 years old.

My father walked into his living room at two o'clock in the morning and there was a young man sleep on our couch drunk from a JMU party.

Walked from wherever he was into my parents' house, broke in and parked in the house.

So it affects me too.

I understand we can't we can't have a dialogue I'm just telling I'm just telling you we can talk afterwards that's fine because this is not the first time you've said that but I just want you to know that I know it's I know it's happening in old town in old town but it's happening everywhere else too and I have been there I have walked up in parties like nothing

just because of the phone calls that I've got.

If I may, it's interesting.

God is awesome because I'll put the mayor in my car last Friday or Thursday.

And I said, get in the car.

Where are we going?

We're going to Old Town.

Why?

Because they gonna say we didn't come.

Ain't God good.

I don't tell everybody everything I do.

Because I like to catch people when they're in the act.

I live in Wyndham Woods.

I heard somebody shoot off like 14, 15 rounds of what I think it was a 9mm.

I grabbed my pistol, I called the police.

I didn't call every neighbor.

Maybe a week or two later, I saw Bill.

I talked to Bill about it.

I talked to the lady across the street.

Asked him if they heard it.

I can't remember.

Bill heard it, but the lady directly across the street from me, she heard it just as clear as I did.

It would have caused the creator all types of ruckus if I was texting all of my neighbors at that time of the hour.

We sent 20, 30, 40 police calls to my house.

But it was handled.

But anyway, to my point, we got complaints about another incident in Old Town that is not party related.

I think you might know what I'm talking about.

On a particular street, about a particular house.

Because we get other complaints too.

We drove all through Old Town last month, still thirsty to so I could make sure she saw what I saw so we could see what was being reported and so that we could respond accordingly.

We do the work.

And what we ask is that you respect the diets and so we heard you and so now we're responding.

and no one else in the audience is like talking out because we give the public comment and so now we're responding but that shows the disconnect or I'm not sure what it is but there's obviously yeah I'm not sure what that is but I'm not gonna speak out a turn to you and I would hope that you would not do that for us but we follow up we may not follow up the way

R. R.

Because quite honestly we don't, if you look, quick civics lesson, but we only have out of this thousand employees, technically we can only give a directive to less than a handful of them.

So there's a lot of ways in which government works that I think people just take a lot of assumptions to.

But when I saw young ladies urinating in the street during the daytime on the body cameras, I immediately voted for the noise ordinance.

There's no question.

and it had nothing to do with noise, ironically.

It was just that if the parties led to that level of disgusting behavior, I felt like we needed all the apparatuses we could find to stop that.

But one thing I've also noticed is this.

There are certain people in certain neighborhoods and certain types of people that get the police calling on them and then there are certain people that don't.

As I've mentioned in Old Town and I believe you probably do, some do, some don't.

But for me, I'm calling every time.

And I'm calling as soon as the party start to get a little loud, I'm calling and I'm gonna keep calling because I can't enforce the ordinance.

But our chief of police and our police department, they can do that.

And I think that if enough pressure is consistently and constantly applied, not

saying, oh, but they're nice and sometimes they do this or sometimes they do that.

No.

And now it's almost June.

And so the parties aren't going to be there.

But starting in August, you can train people how to respond.

If you notice, they wouldn't keep coming back if the police were

We need to figure out a way to make sure the police are there so that the parties aren't getting out of hand.

And the only way to do that is to call the police when the parties start to get out of hand.

I mean, that's pretty much all we can do.

We've got the apparatus in place to do it.

You've got to exercise the muscle.

In regards to the tax rate, I agree with the young lady that was in the black.

I love your comments at the end.

because that was the best truth I've heard someone speak.

I agree with everything everybody said.

I appreciate your opinion.

But what she said is a huge truth and I mentioned it two weeks ago.

And I gave an example of a male man, not a male man, but a male, a man who told me when we were discussing the tax rate early on, how he went up $200.

He has no kids.

He actually volunteers to help kids and doesn't have to use or use hardly any of the services from the city nor does he use any of the school services.

Yet his rent is going up.

Everything else is going up.

Now then he has to charge people more money.

Most of his clients are the vulnerable population that we're talking about.

and so it's this constant trickle effect of who's gonna pay it.

But I think we have to have those conversations in the right place.

And while it's important and an appropriate place to have that conversation here, I think it's a miss when we don't have that conversation with the superintendent and the school board early on.

When we were discussing high schools,

options.

We were discussing space options.

People laughed at me because I thought, hey, maybe we should try junior high school.

And they're like, people don't do that anymore.

That's archaic.

I'm like, it doesn't matter what other people do.

What matters is, what can we afford to do if there's a bottleneck problem?

Take out the eighth grade, take out the ninth grade, don't build anything, right?

I'm just trying to think of, I'm a country boy, like a real one.

I'm from Danville, not Rockingham County.

I'm from the real south of Virginia, right?

And so I'm thinking, how can we get practical with our money?

Well, I got laughed at about that.

I got laughed at about an annex.

I remember my old city manager, two city managers, go say, Chris, you know, we control the police.

We can just have the kids go across the street and build a building.

I said, you're exactly right.

We even looked into that.

Got laughed at about that.

Got laughed at about buying the land across the street.

Then we finally got to the high school.

and saying, OK, we're going to build one.

We had gotten it to $67.5 million.

No, no, no.

Yeah, 67.5.

I'm pretty sure that's where we were at with Scott and couldn't get the votes.

And so it was interesting that at one point the council was so conservative that they wouldn't want to vote for the school when we all know the price of everything is going up, no matter what, like over time, period.

There's a natural inflation.

And so

Although I'm for education and I'm for creating the space needed, I'm for shrinking classroom sizes.

There were tons of options and tons of opportunities for our community to say, hey, we don't want to pay that.

But unfortunately, it became a thing of some people saying, we can afford to pay it, we'll pay whatever we want to pay.

And then there were people saying, we don't want to pay anything.

And there was never a middle ground.

And I think that's why we're at the place we are now.

where even all of us who value education know we need to build and know we, you know, Monica, Deanna, they work with kids all the time.

I do a little volunteering here and there.

The fact of the matter is we don't want to burden people because my thing is helping business owners and helping people start their business and help people with less, right?

But you can't help people with less if you're hurting them.

But we also have to provide the services.

So we didn't raise taxes on the services side, but the school side still needed

that for operation and to deliver their product.

So at some point, I think we got to have a conversation of saying, are we going to deliver less services?

Are we going to deliver less on the school side?

Or where can and how can we freeze versus making it a political conversation?

But what I've noticed is most people don't want to have a true economic development conversation.

They only want to talk to who they like or what group they're in or if they live in a certain neighborhood or

so on and so forth when ultimately this is an economic development conversation and you know what one of our smallest departments is?

Economic development.

And you know who gets the least probably amount of phone calls is economic development.

We should be having them in the room and when I say we, I'm flipping to the resident side.

I talk to those guys all the time, but we as residents need to probably have a greater engagement of what businesses are looking for, what businesses are coming here that can also help to offset the tax rate.

So, but I really, really appreciate your comments because you're coming, honestly, in Bill's comment too, because yeah, that's what you're negotiating with, right?

It's either your equity and the people that are on the lower tier, because those people are further away from home ownership, right?

So you put them further away because you make them more cash poor.

So you have to say this stuff out loud.

I'm not going to sit here and just act like that's not happening.

So I really respect and appreciate all your comments.

My mom's going on 80, so any senior comment, I totally understand.

But I just hope that we can at some point raise the bar and the level of the conversation because it becomes a thing about who loves the kids, who loves the schools, and who doesn't.

And that's not what anybody's ever saying.

It should be a higher

I think that got lost when all the red and blue signs would pop up in the city.

I don't know if you were here then or not.

But there was a little debate of students over schools or teachers.

I can't even remember what the signs said.

It was odd to me that there were these red signs and blue signs and people.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

That stuff costs more money.

but we needed to do a class and conversation study.

We needed to take care of our employees.

The cost of goods and services that we need to deliver that we owe you costs more.

Our city manager did a good job of balancing that but I think the cost to the schools or something that they couldn't really handle without the tax rate and until the state of Virginia gives the school boards the taxing authority, you'll always end up talking to us.

But I think we can head that off in the past if we say, all right, this is what we want to pay as residents.

But I think we're not having that community conversation.

It happens like too late or it's approached from a political standpoint and not a financial standpoint.

So thank you, Madam Mayor.

Sorry for going on.

But I really want us to raise the bar because if we keep living in a world of us versus them and it's not communal,

then it's disingenuous.

I mean, we just raised $2 million cash for the community foundation.

But then we're saying, oh man, this taxes cost so much money.

Or this, that, and the other.

So people have the money and they're giving it where they want it to go.

So it depends.

So we got to have some more honest conversations with ourselves about where do we want to go, what do we want to fund, and how do we want to see things grow.

Again, appreciate my time.

All right, any other discussion?

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Right vote go to Item 6B.

Good evening, Adam Fletcher, Director of Community Development.

The item I will be presenting to you here this evening is a rezoning at 162 West Elizabeth Street.

The rezoning is to resend the site from M1 General Industrial District to B1C Conditional.

The parcel is about 10,300 some-odd square feet, zoned M1 as you can see on the screen, bounded in blue.

Different zoning classification surrounding, we have the green is R3, that's R3, medium density residential.

We have B1 to the east, which is also the district that the applicant is requesting for the site to be rezoned to.

B1 conditional is directly to the east, that's the hatching area indicating that that property was resented at some point in the past and also has proffers associated with it.

And then we have some more M1 property to the south across west Elizabeth Street.

Long term plans for this area, really this entire block is for mixed use

really planning for the opportunity to have both residential and non-residential uses in this area.

Most folks associate the mixed use area with our B1 district, which is the district that they're applying to be rezoned to.

B1 allows for residential and non-residential uses, and there is no maximum density cap in the B1 central business district.

So the mixed use designation in our downtown anticipates that as well.

We plan for maximum densities in our downtown.

When you see mixed use outside of downtown, we're looking at mid to high, 24 units an acre.

But in this particular case, we anticipate a greater density as our B1 district has the highest density in the city.

And then the aerial photograph showing the site here, it is and has been a paved lot for a number of years and has served

as a

to construct a three-story multi-family building with 15 to 20 dwelling units, where in this particular case they are planning for no off-street parking spaces.

They're hoping to utilize the traditional neighborhood development for the downtown area, promoting biking, walking, and bicycle facilities, and public transportation usage for their transportation options.

But they did offer proffers that I'll go over here in just a moment.

So the first comes upon a recommendation by staff to consider, which they then offered up was to provide no drive-thru facilities for the site.

Our B1 district is really meant to promote for more walkable and pedestrian friendly designs.

And when you create those conflict points for drive-thru facilities and increasing traffic for conflict and with the pedestrian environment, it really creates some havoc at times.

So they have proffered that they would have no drive-thru facilities on the property.

They also proffered that all traffic generating uses would be limited to a combined total of 100 trips in AM or PM peak hour.

There's more details of this proffering your staff report.

But this is the gist of it stating that what this does indirectly does, it controls the types of uses that can operate on site.

So a higher intense use would generate more traffic.

And although they may want to do that in the future, or if they want to do that in the future as the proffered details in the staff report, they can complete a traffic impact analysis or implement other mitigation measures.

and of course the Public Works Department can then waive those requirements if there's any particular need to do so if there's recognized no improvements that would be learned through the traffic impact analysis process.

The third is to dedicate just a small little area, six inches really behind the back of the sidewalk along West Elizabeth Street because their plan here is to create a pull-off space as we now recognize a lot of folks are utilizing

UBER services, they have a lot of drop-off and delivery services and what this is going to do with their plan is to create that pull-off space in front of the building so that driver, the delivery representative can get off of the travel lane and onto the private property.

What this does then creates the need to reconstruct the sidewalk and with this we recognize that they may need to bump back the right of way to incorporate all of that infrastructure into the public street right away.

So they would be dedicating at least six feet, excuse me, six inches behind the back of the sidewalk along West Elizabeth Street.

and then the fourth is for there to be ground floor interior storage of bicycle, off-street parking for bicycles.

One bicycle controlled space per unit on the site is what they have profit.

This is just a conceptual rendering.

This site layout is not proffered.

In fact, aside from the proffers that I just went over, all other B1 uses would be permitted with those limitations.

So it could be all residential, it could be all commercial, but it is the intent of the applicant, and I know the applicant is with us this evening, to build this type of facility where, for the most part, the building takes up a large majority of the property and they're looking to build the 15 to 20 dwelling units.

at this time.

They have ideas that although they don't anticipate providing parking, but there is some slight elevation change to the property.

So if you're standing on West Elizabeth Street looking at the site, you will notice that the site does slope down.

In fact, it slopes so much that you may even be able to build into the site and potentially even have underground parking or I should say at grade parking if their design was to accommodate that.

And the site is

It's essentially wide enough and you can even see in this image the image to the right there has 90 degree parking on the other side of the property there to the east and this property is approximately the same size.

You can see that that could be accommodated if they want to utilize that design on this particular property.

We recognize that this type of development is what we are promoting in our downtown.

We offered a favorable recommendation to Planning Commission.

There were only five votes that evening because this was also during the time when we had one vacancy and during this meeting Commissioner Alcindy was absent.

But Planning Commission then in turn recommended unanimous approval to you all and I will try to answer any questions you all might have and I know the applicants with us this evening.

Thank you.

I will open this item up for public hearing.

If anyone wishes to speak, please state your name and address.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of council, city manager banks.

Todd Ray with Clark and Bradshaw, 92 North Liberty Street in Harrisonburg.

On this application, I'm also the applicant in addition to the attorney for the applicant.

So as my mentor, Henry Clark once said, he who represents himself has a fool for a client.

So maybe this is a little bit of a folly.

But in all seriousness, the city completed a downtown 2040 study several years ago, putting in place strategies to hopefully

double the population of downtown Harrisonburg, to make it less of a place you drive to to park, where you drive through to go somewhere, but a place where you can live in.

During COVID, a lot of people became more self sufficient.

We had the co-op open down downtown, which provides groceries and walkable distance.

And you've got people used to getting things delivered to their house.

You know, they don't have to drive out to target every time they need

Grubhub will deliver food to you.

So it's a lot more convenient to try to develop unique and innovative housing products that don't utilize on-site parking.

That was the genesis for this idea.

We pulled some housing concepts from the Twin Cities area in Minneapolis, St.

Paul.

They up-zoned several years ago and encouraged

Urban Enfield type residential developments like this.

So we're operating sort of off a plan that has worked in that metropolitan area that fits this site.

If you look at that overhead, this is a parking lot that's surrounded by other parking lots.

There are 210

Surface parking spaces immediately adjacent to this parking lot.

A lot of them are utilized by the city and county jail and court system.

That whole lot behind Asbury Methodist Church there is is parked during the weekdays, during working hours with jail employees, but by five, six o'clock at night, that lot's largely empty.

other than overnight staffing.

So there's a lot of opportunity here for flex parking.

People can have a car.

We can work with the city and other landowners to their economic benefit.

If people have to have a car and park, there are very convenient opportunities right next to this parcel for them to park.

But we really would like to encourage them not to park.

We're going to market this property and develop it in a way that people

can be car light or no car at all.

We talk about the cost of living and the cost of things.

Having a car, each car costs about 12 to $14,000 a year based on what the average car costs, insurance costs, your gasoline costs a year.

So they say, you know, hey, well it costs a little bit more to get my groceries at, you know, the place that might not be the lowest cost provider, but that's within walkable distance to me.

Well, that pales in comparison to the money you can save by not having a car and living somewhere where you can walk and bike to work or school and there's enough things happening in downtown Harrisonburg that we think that's feasible.

So we hope for your endorsement.

Maybe we're a little crazy.

I think we're innovative.

I think it's the time for this.

And as the bird district, so to speak, is developing around us with magpie and nest and sage bird.

We hope this is the next addition in what is a growing redevelopment area of the city in this corridor.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

A lot of the lots around there.

are owned by Matchbox and Matchbox affiliates.

They have been redeveloped.

They're all student housing, all that surrounding.

Talk about parties.

There's a party garage back there if you all have ever walked past that.

I walked past it on my way to Restless Moons after work some nights.

But that's a student housing area.

And again, during the summer, people aren't there.

So there's a lot of flexibility and a flexibility of use.

And it's a good place to put some density, because there's already a lot of people around there.

I would say we have had some conversations with other folks.

Yes, but again, our goal is to not have to utilize that option.

Which is impressive.

Yes, I like that idea of starting from the beginning, marketing in that way, because it seems like the city is really pushing toward more walkable, bikeable communities.

And you don't have to carry it upstairs to the stores.

Ease of use.

Thank you.

Casey Kettler, 242 East Water Street, Urban Exchange.

I'm here to speak in favor of the proposal.

Planning Commission and City Council when it comes to rezoning requests are reactive bodies.

That's not a criticism, it's just a fact of what it is.

People come with proposals for what to build, which makes it all the more thrilling when a developer comes forward with as great a plan as this one in so many ways.

What I want to note a couple things about what's going on here.

First I want to start quoting from the downtown 2040 plan just verbatim.

Much of downtown's residential growth has been accommodated through the conversion of older buildings into residential

The downtown is running out of old buildings to reuse and new approaches are needed to create more housing downtown.

Today there are almost 2,600 housing units downtown, 3,400 people, 6% of the city's population live within a 10 minute walk of Court Square.

Though much of downtown's housing is scattered in specific buildings.

More residential density is needed to help downtown feel more like a neighborhood and to support local businesses.

It's on page 16 if you're curious.

It also notes in the downtown 2040 plan that 69 acres of downtown is parking.

This is a lot of land downtown that could be housing.

It's a lot of land that could be business space.

It's a lot of land that the next use could be both.

And with the plan that's being proposed here, I think it's great that we're getting more residential space for folks who can actually walk places.

Speaking as a downtown, depending on if you consider an exchange downtown, but for folks who can live downtown, there's a genuine opportunity to walk to a lot of places.

I go to Court Square to work, I go to the co-op for groceries, and it's very easy, it's easier than driving.

And that's exactly the kind of thing that we should be promoting.

I'm also just pleased to see just the possibility of more neighbors downtown, you know, that it does feel more like a neighborhood and that I do have more people that I can hang out with, go to a bar with and that kind of thing.

The last point I want to touch on is taxes as it connects to this.

We talked earlier about what we're spending on in taxes and the other side of that generating income, which wasn't discussed quite so much.

There's 69 acres of downtown

that could be put to more productive use.

That is important with this proposal is.

So to both encourage more walkability and bikeability, to get more housing downtown and more business for local businesses, to prevent suburban sprawl, I think that's a good set of reasons to support this proposal.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Thank you.

I will close public hearing on this item.

Well, I appreciate that it was a proposal and I agree with the applicants that they've stepped into a spot here that is part of our downtown plan that we know as part of what we want to do as the city.

You know, the downtown land is some of us valuable land.

in the city, and when we make use of it, it is one of our best revenue generators.

So when someone's willing to step in here and put up a project like this, which I'm assuming 15 units could generate $35,000 to $40,000 in taxes, and I don't know if you guys have a figure on that, but it can be a revenue generator.

I appreciate that they're taking the risk at putting together a proposal that isn't offering parking on site there.

Second.

Any more discussion?

Well I love this.

I loved it in Planning Commission too.

The creative solution to repurposing flat asphalt parking into housing and not generating more demand for parking and if it comes to it the flex parking or some other arrangement is really the direction we want to be going and especially with the added benefit or

It's a key benefit really of generating more revenue in taxes without having to raise the rate again and generating more revenue for downtown businesses for people who are walking to them.

This is the perfect project that aligns with the downtown 2040 plan.

It's just what we need, the type of project that we need to make that plan successful in a way.

Repurposing I always think buildings and I've got to get away from that because we have so much concrete that we can Repurpose the reimagined into beautiful building sites.

And so I think this is a wonderful opportunity I love the creativity of it.

I would never thought of no No parking I just wouldn't have thought that I would thought that we would have to do something but to

be creative in using what is unused when students are out of town and then making other arrangements is a win-win for everybody.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Next item is another rezoning, somewhat similar to the previous request.

Not too far from the last property.

This property is located at 415 North Liberty Street, again bounded here in blue and zoned M1 and the request is to go to B1 conditional.

You can see we're really at a position here where there's quite a bit of different rezoning classifications.

beginning to the west to the left in the image here we have our two properties that have frontage along Colisello Street to the north we have M1 and then a relatively recent resound over the past couple of years to be one conditional of a duplex there just to the north and then the other properties you're seeing here that are rezoned to be one that is the properties where mercantile where magpie the perch sage bird cidery the townhomes there just this in the image in the bottom of the image

and then we're also in sort of the northern downtown section of our industrial area, so one of our poultry facilities is not too far away from here.

So a relatively small piece of property when you compare it to some of our larger developments, this property is almost 6,000, so about 5,700 square feet and about half the size of that previous request.

Dany.

a designation that we anticipate for all different types of housing.

So single-family duplex, multi-family townhomes in certain circumstances, and the neighborhood kind of dictates the density.

So a lot of these are older neighborhoods, very well-established neighborhoods, which is the case here with Colosello Street.

and then an aerial photograph of the site.

So this has been undeveloped for quite some time.

A photograph here, I believe, taken from North Liberty Street, so we are looking west here in this image.

What you see there directly to the left is an alley.

It's somewhat of a developed alley, but not developed by the city.

It's just a graveled alley that does go all the way through to Colostello Street, and I think you can see in the previous image.

where you can see where the alley, the right of way there, goes all the way through to Colosello Street from here, all the way through.

And there's also then perpendicular to this alley is one that runs to the north, connecting to another alley.

So these are spaces that we oftentimes see platted alleys from many, many years ago.

In this case, the applicant has offered similar proffers to the previous request.

So the first is

No drive-thru facilities.

So again, all the different B1 uses that might want to accommodate a drive-thru facility could not with this proffer.

The second proffer being that there would be no parking lot between buildings in North Liberty Street.

This is a proffer that we oftentimes offer the applicant to consider because what we're trying to create is that building facade really close to the public street.

So by not having any parking lot between the building and North Liberty Street, you're really pushing that building close to the public street, creating that urban space is what we want to

and Laura Dent.

that could be applied for in a typical B1 property, they have eliminated that opportunity for this particular property, so no gas stations on this property, and also no vehicle repair would be permitted on this property.

The fifth is that no refuse or dumpster storage area, so it would be closer to the public street than any building.

When we get into our downtown space, it becomes sometimes problematic as to exactly where you put that dumpster.

and Laura Dent.

Dumpster facilities located to the rear of the property.

So in this case, it would be no closer than any building that would be built on the property.

And then the sixth is similar to the previous request that all traffic generating uses would be limited to 100 in the AM or PM peak hour.

So it doesn't mean that there wouldn't be higher intense uses that they would have to be regulated at a certain size or scale to maintain those low traffic volume counts.

So in this image, just sort of a hand drawing here looking down from a bird's eye view, so bottom of the screen would be North Liberty Street, what they're anticipating here is to build approximately three, four-story building where they might have ground floor retail or restaurant space in the front part of the building, and then maybe four, one or two bedroom apartments above the first floor.

There was mention there in the previous request about the downtown 2040 plan and this area, this particular property falls within that area that was studied.

And specifically, the 2040 plan speaks to three identified areas in a downtown that is promoted for more residential development.

Of course, all of downtown, we looked for that, but there were three key areas that were focused on in the 2040 plan, those being

The South downtown, so the bottom part of the image here, which really is the area we're in right now, so the farmers market area falls into that space over off of South Liberty Street, just south of the DNR property in the Ice House.

The Court Square, what's called the Flanking Federal, which is just to the east of Court Square, so promotion of, for more residential there, and then in what's just known as the North Downtown, and this property falls just outside of that space.

Really that North Downtown area really is all of Magpie and the Perch, Sageburg, the townhomes that are in that space, just south of the Mercantile as well.

So you can really see that this area is adding to that positive development energy and the revitalization that's really occurring in this area of the city.

So something else that is just important to notice about this property.

Again, this, we staff believe that this was in line with not only the 2040 plan, but with the city's comprehensive plan.

We offered our favorable recommendation to planning commission, which in turn offered a favorable recommendation unanimously five to zero.

Again, one vacancy, Commissioner Alcindy was absent that evening.

And I'll try to answer any questions and we have representatives from the application this evening.

I was trying to backtrack to

Planning Commission, I couldn't find it right away.

When you were talking about no refuse containers, dumpsters next to the street, we had some discussion about up the alley, but that's not really what it's there for.

What was the upshot of that, do you remember?

Could you clarify what you mean about that alley?

Yes, ma'am, it could be.

Yeah, so they would likely end up having to have private pickup, essentially, if they're having a dumpster.

And they could access it through the alley.

But yes, they could access it from the alley.

OK, because there was some discussion about the interlocking alleys back there.

And we've had ongoing or intermittent discussions about alleys, how they can be useful if they're

So that's a good use for it to tuck that away Any concerns though, you know, if there's a commercial, you know activity or retail activity there Any concerns about whether it's an AM or PM business necessarily and we do have a lot of Daytime activity through their mac pies building across the street the loft

there.

You really have quite a different number of businesses that operate at many different hours of the day in this area of the city.

You have a business here to the right in the image here.

You have the industrial complex.

That's just a stone's throw away from this property.

And then, of course, magpie opens up early in the morning.

Mercantile is going to operate during technical business hours on the weekends.

So there's quite a bit of activity in this space, so adding to that, we did not see that as a particular concern.

And if it's a restaurant there, poultry workers who are on break may even pick up dinner there.

You never know.

But downstairs floor.

Any more questions?

Thank you.

This item is now over for public hearing and if anyone wishes to speak please state your name and address.

And I'm Mike Martin from Cottonwood Commercial, so I'm kind of helping David work through this a little bit.

So I don't know, I spoke to a lot of you.

Will we have to answer any questions?

And I'm sending along a rendering that we do have from Engineering Solutions.

So it'll actually be retail on the bottom.

Now that is set up where it could be one

Dany Fleming

loft apartments, so around 550 square feet with the bedroom and then another 300 loft area, hopefully professional office space or something like that for someone to do hybrid work or something like that.

So that is what's going to happen there.

And then the patio seating between the building and North Liberty Street and then big open windows, hopefully they can open up when it's hot.

Like a lot of, you know, some of the breweries and stuff around here do and then

I've talked to Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance, Andrea quite a bit about any local people that want to get in downtown because that's kind of where her it so we could ideally get someone that wants to be downtown that's local

and then I did talk to John Salah today about sitting down with Kirsten and seeing if we can work out, you know, she may have some people that want to be there, but she's just out of space in the mercantile.

That would be complimentary.

So not at the same time as Magpie.

Not because I'm too concerned about, I just think it would be better to have

and you have the wine spot, the part of Mark and Tell and then you got Sage Bird.

So it'll be good to have like that as well for evening hours.

Well the, so it's like a co-op?

The op, well it's an apartment but the loft

I mean, it's not really going to depend on who rents it.

I mean, it could just be some single person that doesn't work from home at all.

But we're trying to set up the loft so that if someone wants to work from home, they'll have a good space for a home office.

So then they could work from home.

If they have a hybrid style of work, like a young professional.

The law of department in total will be around 830ish I gotta ask, but some of these mixed use things don't get built and we've seen a few of them pop up, but I think you can attest it.

There were several back when we first started doing

R8, and this isn't R8, but when we first started doing them, we were approving them and people weren't building them.

And so, are you gonna build it?

We're hoping.

You know what?

I appreciate that answer.

I realized that now I have to.

Well, I know David won't mention this, but I mean he owns Snyder's auto sales, which is very good.

Well, I've been looking at this truck now.

Yeah, listen, he'll help you out.

25% above Lisbon.

Oh God.

So, he has developed some other properties.

So there's a, it's on the corner of

Liberty Street on down right they do an auto reconditioning there Jamie is the guy that owns it I can't even remember the name of the business it's a very big business on the corner there used to be and I'm sure you guys are fully aware of it there's like a not a junkyard but like a pile of cars it's a blue shop on the corner mountain bike you know what I'm talking about so right down from that there's a

Big warehouse, a couple of shops there, auto detailing, he developed all that, sold some of it, leases it out.

So there are some things, it's not his first time, it's just, so I know he won't mention that because it's pretty humble, but.

You know what's just curious, this is a good question.

It was in a lot of these mixed projects and most, I won't say all, but a good majority of the ones that I thought, man, that's gonna be impactful, they never

If you have a retail client there, you know, getting someone in who can rent that space, lease that space on that first floor if that's what you do.

I had a question.

I was just going to say I wish him luck.

When we passed the schematic or the drawing along, there were two sort of glass garage doors on the side.

Would that be for

Thank you.

Casey Kettler, 242 East Water Street.

A lot of where I said the last one applies to this one, so I'm not going to repeat all that.

A couple of things I want to note in particular though, this is an area that I walk to a lot and I'm very pleased with this one for, in addition to the previous reasons, so I'd like to see not as much parking.

I'm also pleased with this particular area because when there's less parking, it also tends to be nicer for walking in general.

Last month, the City Council approved changes to

Sageburg Cider Works, such that they don't have to have additional parking at Sageburg Cider Works, they can use it for other things, like the food truck.

And that, you know, in that intervening time, since that happened, and now, actually, I went to a little party there where they closed it down.

And when they use parking like that for other uses, it's generally nicer for everyone, and I'm pleased to see that that can continue to be the case with this development as well.

Another thing I wanted to know, the first proffer here was on no drive through facilities in this area and I know that was true with the last one as well.

I'm also pleased to see that because one of the most hostile things against pedestrians you can possibly have is a drive through facility where you have that many cars that's just the whole business model having cars going in and out the entire time.

I can only count one that

I know of that exists downtown.

I think that's probably one too many.

And I'm pleased to see that that's not only part of the plan, but part of the proffers in this case.

Thank you.

Mayor Reed, there are no callers.

I will close public hearing on this item.

Madam Mayor, I move to approve the request from Mr. David L. Snyder to rezone tax map parcel 34C2, 415 North Liberty Street from M1 to B1C.

That's presented by the state.

Yeah, one of the things I like about

This and what's happening in this area of the city is folks who are bringing these proposals forward are local folks.

Here's my residents who have done that and we know John Salin and Kirsten have done quite a heavy lift there in developing that.

Of course we have the old Wetzel seed that was done and it is continuing.

and again, this will generate revenue that's not being generated on that property in a way.

We don't know if things will get built necessarily, but when there are folks who are local here, we want to encourage them to do that.

considering we just raised taxes.

We'll take anybody's business, though.

I just want to be clean.

So foreign, domestic, come on in.

But we have that as well now.

That's right.

But all jokes aside, Mr. Stein, I appreciate you having multiple businesses in the city.

I will say this because I've been saying it and I'm going to keep saying it.

It is untrue that it's hard to do business in the city of Harrisonburg and you are a living example.

If it was hard, you would not have come back.

So, I appreciate that.

And when you hear people say that, say, well, no, that's not true.

I got a few of them.

So, I appreciate you.

Roll call, please, ma'am.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Aye.

Good evening Madam Mayor, City Council members, Tom Hartman, Public Works here tonight to present our newly created ADA transition plan.

This plan is a requirement of the Americans with Disabilities Act 1990.

Here is the code of federal regulations that put it into place.

And basically it's a plan that helps regulate or give direction to localities that have public rights of way to help eliminate barriers to travel, pedestrian travel primarily.

So with the infrastructure types that are included in the plan are walkways, which for us are sidewalks and shared use paths, intersections, which include the curb ramps, the pet signals, the pet bush buttons, the crosswalks, every aspect of an intersection allows pedestrians and bicycles to move across safely, crossing traffic.

On-street parking is included, but this is only where we have marked on-street parking.

So in the downtown area where you'll see the white tees,

Those spots apply.

It doesn't apply to residential areas where we certainly do not mark on-street parking bus stops, but only where the bus stop interacts the curb face.

Once we get behind that and get to the bus shelters, that's in the transit transition plan, and that's more in Gerald's shop.

And then work zones, there's rules in there to make sure that we can accommodate pedestrians safely through work zones as we rebuild our network.

So within the transition plan, there's a few required elements that you'll see as you read through it, the plan which was included in your packet.

A self-evaluation.

We've done this over the past two summers.

We've had interns come in from JMU to walk around with their phones and collect data on all our sidewalks, curb ramps, intersections.

Once they collect it, they come back and they put it all into GIS.

So it's all digitized into our databases.

So our crews can evaluate as we update and upgrade infrastructure.

We can put in the system.

We upgraded it.

So it keeps a running inventory of how our system is growing and getting rebuilt.

Also in the plan, we have to identify how we plan to bring our network of public right-of-way accesses to compliance.

So we'll talk about that here in a second, how we plan to bring our shared use pass sidewalks intersections up to compliance.

We have to conclude a schedule.

So the goal is not to do it by tomorrow, but this is a 30-40 year plan to eventually get our city completely compliant, which is fine.

We just want to make sure we have a plan in place for how we're going to get this work done

We have to name an ADA coordinator, which you've already done, and then we establish a grievance procedure.

So if a citizen is walking, biking throughout the city and they experience something that they feel is unsafe or needs to be addressed, there's a place on the website, they can fill out a form, send us the request, we can evaluate it and respond back in a timely manner and let them know about the concern.

And if it's an immediate safety concern, of course we'll go fix it.

I'm a numbers person, so I wanted to share the numbers from all the hard work our interns did.

They evaluated over 84 miles of sidewalks, 6.5 miles of shared use pass, almost 1,400 curb ramps throughout the city and they touched almost every single one.

One thing they did as they were doing this, if they saw a small repair that was needed, they created a service request for our maintenance department.

They made our maintenance department mad.

They created over 500 and we've been a year

catching up.

So if you've seen our crews out and about fixing small little segments of sidewalk around the city, you can thank the JMU interns for finding those little deviations and the height of the sidewalks.

We're slowly knocking out that list of 500, but we have three more interns this summer doing the same thing.

Job security, right?

94 signalized intersections, which I can't, it was 88 when I started here 12 years ago, growing over 330 lane miles of streets and 29 miles of bike lanes.

When they were doing this, we had a condition assessment that they did.

As they were going around, they looked at a condition A, means it's perfectly compliant, nothing needs to be done.

B means, eh, we're close, but there's some little things that are off, but in most parts it's in good condition.

And then C was whether it's not there.

We've all seen the sidewalks that stop at curb, stop at intersection with no curb ramp, they just drop off.

Those are C condition ramps, so those are ones that we put higher on the priority list.

when we need to go and fix.

The heat map kind of shows, as it would make sense, the density of these improvements and impediments all sitting around the downtown area where we get much more dense with our infrastructure, sidewalks, roads are tighter, right away is a narrower, things are older, built with different standards and different roles in place.

So let's see, going from there.

There we go.

So we're moving the barriers of how we do that.

We have four main, well, a couple of main ways.

Is our annual maintenance schedule.

So we're out now replacing probably seven or eight different segments of curb ramps and sidewalks ahead of our paving schedule, which will come behind that later this summer.

Capital projects.

We can't build any capital projects without bringing every component of that project up to 80 compliance.

Snow removal.

We heard some concerns about making sure that we prioritize our sidewalks and intersections the same way we do our streets.

We do our best when we deploy the salt trucks.

We also deploy a sidewalk crew, but depending on staffing, the first thing to go away is a sidewalk crew to make sure we have our truck staffed.

But once we catch up, the sidewalk crew comes right back on board and tries to catch up with the sidewalks.

Luckily, we've had some light winters recently, so we haven't had significant amounts of work on the sidewalks, but we do have crews dedicated to that.

and also with working with community development through site plan development, public access permits.

We make sure that when we do have private entities that encroach on the right of way for new entrances, new construction, they follow our ADA guidelines and make sure they build accessible facilities when they touch our right of way.

Last thing is part of the transition plan.

We hosted two public involvement periods to get the garner information to make sure we're looking at

All the different aspects of what we need to do from an ADA perspective.

We had a focus group meeting actually in this room with We cooperated with Bale to do that and we had folks that actually needed to use our systems and had concerns and brought issues with us.

One interesting thing we learned from that that was kind of a blind spot until we met was special events.

So when we have a special event, we close downtown, we close parking lots to make it safe and what we thought accessible for folks to use the area and enjoy the event.

But we were closing the parking lots where the ADA spaces were that folks needed to park in to be able to use the event.

So since those meetings, we've established Aaron Fisher, who's our ADA guru at Public Works.

He attends the special events meetings now and looks at it through that lens to make sure we're providing that accessibility so that everyone can come downtown and enjoy those special events.

Also some things that we heard, sidewalks, people want more sidewalks, more accessible, safe sidewalks, drivers violating right to yield, which is a confusing thing we work with a lot.

Speedy and Law's snow removal, on-street parking, all those concerns.

But I think they're all kind of built into our transition plan.

So from here, we'll start using it.

We'll start building out as we do our improvements about the city.

We'll follow the plan.

This presentation was more of an informational one for you all to understand.

We have this in place.

And if you do have those concerns or do hear about those concerns, please direct them to our website, to our grievance page.

They can fill it out in public works.

We'll contact them and work through their issue.

I'll just say, you know, we had a budget discussion or a tax increase discussion.

We'll have a budget discussion.

But, you know, one of the things is an older city that increases our budget is making it more accessible, more usable for folks, being a city for all.

In an old city, that's not how it's often built.

So I think when folks, when Vale comes and says, you know, these are the things that we need, they're not here today advocating for the increase.

But I think they would say, yes, we need these.

Dany.

and I think as a city I think we do support stepping into that and make this a better city for folks to get around and have access to the things they need to make a healthy, fun life for themselves.

Thank you.

I'm up next.

Next one.

Quick and easy.

maybe this is another symptom of an old city when there's a telephone pole in the middle of the sidewalk that makes it inaccessible but there's a hard thing to move right but those are impediments that we've been the transition plan have identified and they do need to move excellent we just need to find out that that change moment that makes us want to move that they are I agree they are impediments that's it that was from a different perspective when it was reconstructed that way

So this is a simple amendment to Section 765 of the city code to bring it in alignment with current DEQ regulations.

Essentially, DEQ had changes that clarified, elicit discharges slightly.

There were some lack of definitions in the previous DEQ regulations that left some localities flat-footed when it came to enforcement of

Alyssa Discharge is about what qualified Alyssa discharge.

Firefighting activities had a little bit better definition provided the new gods.

So this ordinance amendment is a simply to bring our city code up into alignment with current DQ regulations as it relates to our municipal separate storms sewer system or MS4 permit that we operate.

Roll call please Pam Nice Mayor Dent?

Aye Council Member Robinson?

Aye Council Member Fleming?

Aye Council Member Jones?

Thank you Madam Mayor, Members of Council.

And this is the first of several that we'll be receiving.

It's an update to our ordinance regarding discontinuance of service for delinquency and payment of utility bills.

There were a couple of changes passed by the General Assembly.

The first is we can't discontinue any residential service.

If the temperature is at or above 92 degrees Fahrenheit within 24 hours following the schedule, disconnection as forecasted by the National Weather Service and also utilities cannot be discontinued to any residential service for non-payment on Fridays, weekends, state holidays, or the day immediately preceding a state holiday.

And again, that's direct from state law.

One additional change that our public utilities department did ask for was to give the director the right to enter into payment agreements in fairly limited circumstances.

We have not done this traditionally, but in the recent past there have been a couple of cases where the director felt that the equities of the situation

He would really like to have the authority to let folks catch up on a bill.

And so we've added some language that would allow the director to permit that with the minimum payback period of three months.

And I think these events usually happen when someone moves.

They're within the billing cycle and so public utilities hasn't picked up but the old address has a balance and then they have a new account and then we realize there's an old account with a balance and they weren't there anymore so they weren't getting the bill.

I think anything that airs towards residents, helping them is a good thing for us to step into without a doubt.

And I don't know how many folks qualify for this, but anything that moves in that direction is a good idea.

Second.

I'm Jenny Burden, Executive Director of the Arts Council of the Valley, but I am here this evening as a member of the Traffic Cabinet Art Wrap Project Committee.

How do I move this?

It's a little challenging, Jenny.

Yeah, I think you might need to move it closer to the pan.

Oh, okay.

No, it doesn't make an acronym, I've tried.

But this committee includes

Representatives from Harrisonburg Downtown Renaissance, who is funding this project.

Harrisonburg City Public Works and Arts Council of the Valley.

This is the proposal that Andrea, Andrea Dono, went before you on February 27th of this year and presented the Traffic Cabinet Art Wrap Project.

which you then authorized pending approval of the selected artwork.

This is the timeline and I bring this up because since the 27th we launched the RFP or the Request for Proposals.

We held an information session for interested artists.

evaluated all the proposals and selected 10 artists' works.

Selection was based on one artistic quality, two strength of the artist's bio and relative experience, three appropriateness for public display, four lack of elements likely to distract drivers.

Consideration of how the design would translate from paper to a traffic cabinet,

and then finally, Creativity.

And each committee member, we scored each of those categories for a final overall score and then the 10 artists were selected.

So it was a process.

But I have the timeline up here because we were not able to get on the agenda two weeks ago, so it's been pushed back a couple weeks.

That's the yellow highlights.

Now, after we selected the artwork, public works matched the artwork to specific traffic cabinet locations.

And let me see.

This was the original slide again that Andrea presented before you.

And the green dots are the 10 locations that we will be wrapping this year.

And if you're ready to see them, the 10 we selected,

This is the first hit.

First of all, it says Gay Street, G, North Main Street.

I don't know how every Ampris and turned into a G, but it did on every one of these slides.

So I apologize for that.

But this is by Brian Luna at the corner of Gay Street and North Main Street.

And then the second one by Katie Cousins at North Mason Street and Gay Street.

Rebecca Gish at Wolf Street and North Main Street Alex Dorney at Wolf Street and North Mason Street Jennifer Cottrell at North Main Street and Elizabeth Street Rachel Bryan

Elizabeth Street and North Mason Street, Rosa Cruz, Court Square and North Main Street, Vera Ixa at East Market Street and North Mason Street, and Lana Lambert, South Main Street and West Water Street, and Melissa Hurrick

South Main Street and Bruce Street.

Now, if approved by City Council, we will notify each artist, finalize artist agreements, prepare artwork for installation, and installation will be in August or September of this year.

Thank you.

Any questions?

It is.

No, I got it in front of me.

I was just curious if you knew about James.

His side set.

They were kind of three separate.

There's three panels and then a picture of where the box is.

No, not a picture of the box on the box.

But thank you, whoever... Yeah.

Oh, I see.

I see that.

I'm not at all sure.

To be honest.

But each artist will work with Public Works, who is working with the company that will actually be printing this on vinyl and doing the raps.

So I'm sure that will be figured out right, Tom.

Any other questions?

All right.

Thank you, Jenny.

Madam Mayor, I move to approve everything Jenny Burton says.

In relation to the Traffic Cabinet Art Wrap Project Committee presentation that will be moved forward and adopted so that we can continue forward with the project.

Any more discussion?

Vice Mayor Dent.

Hi.

Council Member Robinson.

Hi.

Council Member Jones.

Hi.

There you go.

Thank you.

We're gonna talk about cyber security.

That is the goal.

Let's see if I can figure out how to work a computer here.

I actually tried to have my first slide like walk-up music, but then I got one of these from the city manager.

So I am the cyber security specialist.

I've been with the city.

June will be two years now.

So we've matured our cyber program to a point where we felt it was time that we should publicly let people know some of the things that we are doing.

What was really funny was when I first started for the first three months, people thought I was a fake person, like some AI bot that was generated by the IT team just to send out emails to everyone.

So when I was actually introduced at Parks and Rec at the CAC to some of the employees, they were like, you're real?

And yes, I am in fact a real person.

obligatory traffic light protocol.

So everything I'm going to discuss with you guys tonight is TLP white.

So traffic light protocol white means that this is okay for public dissemination.

Obviously, a lot of what I do cannot be discussed in a public forum.

So I can't go into a whole lot of detail about specific controls with you guys.

If you have questions, I brought notepad so that I can write your questions down and then we can go and talk about those things before a lot of the stuff that I do are

things that we don't want people publicly to know because then when we get targeted, we have problems.

So everything that I'm going to talk about tonight is TLP white.

So the goal tonight is to just give you an overview of the cybersecurity program, what we've done, our accomplishments, some of the goals that we still have, things that we're working on now, and then have some Q&A.

Obviously, at any point, I'm more of a facilitator of discussions as opposed to a lecturer.

So

If you want to stop me at any point and ask a question about something, I will do my best to answer it as long as we're following the traffic light protocol.

And I can't give you specific things.

So the real question when it comes to cyber for us is when not if.

And I think we've seen that recently with a lot of the local other local governments around our area.

We since I've been here, I've had no less than four phishing emails that originated from a local government.

email address.

So a surrounding jurisdiction that isn't deploying the same security processes and techniques that we're using for email.

Their email addresses were compromised and then their contact lists were used and phishing emails were sent to city employees here and we've had to deal with those.

So there was at least four

The most recent one was last week.

So that was, I can't remember who that was, but it was an email that was compromised and there were addresses in the city that were actually, things were sent to.

So there's an increasing number of local incidents.

We're finding too that as we look at all the attack data and the breach data, more and more local governments are being attacked because they consider us the low-hanging fruit.

Don't have the money.

We don't have the people.

We don't have the infrastructure to support any kind of security stuff is what they feel the newest thing that we're getting from some of our threat intel sources to is that they're starting to attack utilities a lot more at the local government area and We have a utility so we have a water department.

So We'll talk about that.

I work closely with a lot of those guys over there

We are constantly having reconnaissance attacks against the city of Harrisonburg every single day.

This is just people probing to see what we have available so that they can take advantage of it.

The good news is I'm aware of that.

I see it every single day.

I'm watching it come through as it goes through and no one's getting past reconnaissance yet.

Daily fishing attempts, we've all dealt with email fishing.

It seems to be the biggest thing that I deal with any giving day.

and that's because it's the easiest way for anyone to get into a network is to fish employees and have them provide their credentials.

That's the easiest way to get in.

There's a big rise in ransomware attacks specifically against local governments and now a lot of the attacks are double whammies where they're going to hit you, they're going to ransom your stuff and lock it down but they've also exfiltrated data before that and so you have to pay a double ransom.

Number one to not have your data released and number two to

unencrypted your data once they've encrypted it.

And like I said, that those kind of attacks against local government are on the rise.

So these are some of the terms that I have to be familiar with.

And I just, you may all know these, but I'm just going to go through them very quickly.

First, the diagram is the cyber kill chain.

Our theory is if we can intercept an attack at any point in the kill chain, we kill the attack.

So our goal is to get it at the reconnaissance phase.

So all those recon attacks that I was telling you about, because I can see them, I see where they're coming from, we can prevent those attacks from coming in from there.

So we deal with threats, vulnerabilities, exploits, and then all those, the culmination of those is our risk.

So we determine what our risks are by what threats are out there.

So that's what potentially could go wrong.

A vulnerability is any weakness in our system.

And then the exploit is what's designed to take advantage of those vulnerabilities.

All that, we identify our risks, we determine how we're going to mitigate that risk so we can either mitigate it by fixing the problem, transfer the risk to a cloud provider or some other vendor or third party or we can accept the risk.

We try not to accept the risk but unfortunately as a local government agency we have software that we just have to accept the risk so we understand that it's there, we put other controls in place to try to make it harder to get to.

So remember I said it's a matter of when, not if.

We do our best to make sure that we're not in the news.

That was my prime directive unofficially, is to keep us out of the news.

So as part of our threat identification or risk identification, we do threat intelligence.

So we subscribe to several different threat intelligence feeds.

And these folks are ones that are like playing around on the dark web all day, pretending to be hackers and gathering intel on how hackers do their thing.

And then they pass that information on to us.

They also gather.

all the global breach data and put all that stuff together.

So we are members of the NSISAC.

It's just an information sharing group that is all state, local, tribal, and territorial governments.

We have monthly meetings.

They send out stuff every single day.

When you get the email from me that says, hey, you might want to update your Apple products today, that's usually a notice that I get from the NSISAC saying, hey, we've identified this.

You might want to do that.

So that's one of the big things that my end users will see

come from this.

I have started a regional information sharing with some of the other local governments.

I do not like the old school IT way of thinking where we keep everything secret.

At the end of the day, we work for the same people, like the same team.

So, Augusta County, Rockingham County, Waynesboro, Stan, the school divisions, I have created an information sharing center where we can all get together.

and we share information about what we're seeing, what tools are working for us, what tools are not working for us.

I feel the better prepared we are, the more information we have, the better off, the safer we're all going to be.

And again, at the end of the day, we all work for the taxpayers, so why not be on the same team?

Virginia has a fusion center that's run by the state police.

We are required to report any incident to the fusion center within 24 hours, but they also send out a lot of threat intelligence data for us as well.

and then I use the Verizon Data Breach Investigative Report.

These numbers are going to become very important when you figure out the why of what I do, when 74% of all breaches involve something that a person did and most of that is compromise credentials.

You're going to see why the password policy is as awful as it is now because that's what people are after.

So that's the why of what I do.

So the things that we have done, just a high level overview, one of the biggest things that I came in knowing that I needed to do was a human risk management program.

So human risk management is simply just preparing people to be attacked.

That's all it is.

We know that the weakest part of any network is the people on the network, not the actual computers themselves.

So I've started doing in-person training sessions with most departments.

The fire department was one of the first early adopters I can say.

I have trained every firefighter in the city of Harrisonburg in cybersecurity, basic cybersecurity principles and basic incident response from a cyber incident.

So I've trained every single firefighter.

I've done improved security culture within the city.

One of the coolest things that I heard was

I sent out the little videos and most of you probably got those little eight minute inside man videos.

I believe in short and sweet because we all know what happens with online training.

We hit play, put it at two times speed and we walk away.

So that is not going to do anything effective for my cyber posture or my cyber culture if people are walking away from the videos.

are not participating in the training.

So it was a great show that people got invested in during the October that year during Cyber Month.

I only released two or three episodes a week.

Now I know the power that Netflix has because I had people calling me saying, hey, are you really going to make me wait until next week to see what happens?

And I was like, okay, I'm not going to be so mean to Netflix anymore.

The chart that you see here, and I actually have an update as of today on this, so I do simulated fishing attacks where I will send fishing emails to city employees.

And it's not an I got you, it's nothing like that, it's just a training so that they can see things.

When I first started, we were somewhere in the range of like 12%, 12.3% was our fish prone percentage.

I can

coming to the city that's been a benefit is that the employees have been super supportive and understanding of a lot of the things that I've tried to push and the things that I'm saying.

And if they're not, they're extremely professional communicative about, hey, these are the problems I have, what is this?

I explain things and we are happy and we move on.

So it has gone down, it's 1.16% as of today.

So we hired someone to hack our network last summer.

Where's the mouse button?

This is why I use a clicker.

So we hired an internal pen tester to hack our network last summer.

The big takeaways from that pen test, he was in our network for 10 days.

Our password policy was garbage.

Of the 800 and some employees that we have, 462 of those accounts were compromised, including several high profile members of the city government.

And some of the IT staff.

So we identified.

We may have had a secret conversation, me and some of the staff members about passwords and how we should do better.

So we discovered that the password policy was terrible.

I didn't say anything.

Mr. Jones, I didn't say anything.

You didn't have to.

So we identified that the password policy was terrible, so we changed that.

One of the other things that we were weak on is a vulnerability management program, which is a way that we as individuals or as an enterprise identify what's weak so that we can actually go through and patch things and fix things.

We were horribly behind on a lot of our patching and scheduling, so things were really, really vulnerable prior to two years ago.

We've taken a lot of steps towards making things more secure and harder to get to.

Those weren't the only things that he identified.

There were a couple of really, like, nerdy things that we fixed, but those are really nerdy, and Mr. Banks told me I wasn't allowed to be nerdy today.

So the other thing that we did as part of the vulnerability management program was a cyber this is one of those mouthful things that make people sound really awesome is the cyber asset attack surface management program basically this is just identifying assets from the point of we purchased it and it's here on site we're inventory tracking it we know what's on it

and we track it the whole way through until we destroy it.

And everything is there.

We scan it for vulnerabilities.

We check it out.

We remediate the vulnerabilities.

I double check to make sure that they've actually been fixed.

and then we move on and we document everything as we go through.

So we just recently finished this entire process and so that was really cool.

We've done a lot of policy updates.

The acceptable use policy was extremely out of date.

So this is the policy that tells people to act like adults when they're on our network.

And we included some things like you will do training, stuff like that in it as well.

Our bring your own device policy,

is basically, please don't.

But if you have to bring your own device, we have a policy for that.

Obviously, the password policy is the biggest one.

That made me everyone's biggest favorite as person in the entire city.

Let me tell you, that was a great, that was a great week.

And then our instant response plan, you know, if something goes wrong, having a solid plan in place to handle that is vital.

So we now have an incident response plan and my incident response team actually includes members who are not nerds that are non-IT staff.

So Mr. Banks is on it, Mr. Brown's on it.

There's a lot of other people involved in it because I am going to be doing nerd things and I can't do Mike Parks's job and call the media or Mr. Banks's job and call the fire department, things like that.

The really fun thing that I've gotten to do too is add additional tools to increase our network visibility.

We had some blind spots where we couldn't see what things were going on.

We can now see those things.

We've implemented a vulnerability scanner and everyone's favorite tool, dark trace.

That's the other thing that made me extremely popular across the city was dark trace.

So dark trace is our email security program.

So I know we've had some conversations about AI

I'm

Whatever they do, I respond with, well, now this went wrong too.

So what are you going to do?

So we've made it very adaptive.

We've also done a lot of modernizing of our infrastructure.

We had some very, very old things across the city.

And so we've went through and we've started the process of modernizing the entire infrastructure and securing it a whole lot more, taking best practices as we implement things.

and then I'm proud to announce, I don't even know that Mr. Banks knows this yet, we are actually PCI DSS compliant now.

But before we were never able to pass those scans and now that we have someone whose job is to make sure we pass those scans and everything is secure, we are PCI DSS compliant for credit cards at this point.

So as of February of this year, we're PCI DSS compliant.

So that was pretty cool.

So some of our goals, the things that we're hoping to work towards

I'll make sure those get put in for you.

So we want to try to make sure that we have a consistent schedule for our IT and cyber security policy reviews.

At times it seems like things just sit and no one's watching that.

and then policy gets stagnant.

As technology changes, we're going to have to do things.

One of the big things, I have to say that again, it's AI.

We're going to have to release a policy on AI usage in the city of Harrisonburg and what our employees can and can't do.

It's going to have to be sometime in the next six months to a year.

So that will be coming.

I've been trying to cross train IT staff into incident response and security.

So we're trying to break those traditional roles of

These IT techs are only going to do this, and the network techs are going to do this, and the MIS people are going to do this.

We've been trying to cross train people, so when something happens, I can say, hey, I need you to go gather evidence off of this machine, and then they can do that.

So we're trying to cross train some of the IT staff.

I told you about the utility stuff.

We are doing a lot of things to try to make the industrial control system and the operational technology security of the city a whole lot more secure.

Their guys and I, we work together.

The water guys and I, they call me when they want to implement things.

We go through best practices together.

We're working on some grant funding to try to get us sent to joint training and industrial control system cybersecurity so that we have some teams together for specific incident response for an industrial control system incident.

And assuming the budget gets approved tonight, we will have 24-7 monitoring.

of our security infrastructure.

You need to come in and take care of this.

So we do not have 24-7 monitoring right now.

We will in a few months.

Our long-term goals is to integrate our cybersecurity plans into our business continuity plans.

Those are up for review in the next year or so.

So we're actually going to incorporate the entire incident response plan into the business continuity plan.

We are taking some steps to increase network visibility even more so we can see the different types of flow and traffic that's out there.

What's making me really popular with all the departments right now, especially finance, is the third party vendor verification, where I ask the hard questions to the companies that we're proposing to go to about, hey, what are your cybersecurity practices?

None of them want to tell me what their IP addresses are and what nerd things they do behind nerd doors.

They're getting a little hostile about that in some places, but they're going to have to do it.

Ultimately, we want to try to align what we do with CISA and NIST frameworks.

And part of that is making sure that the vendors are secure.

That will prevent the third party supply chain attacks that you keep hearing about in the news as well, where someone upstream gets hacked and then everyone downstream is getting hacked, like solar winds a few years ago.

So the key takeaways for what I've did, over the last two years, we've really increased our cyber resiliency.

That's the goal

We have achievable goals.

We have a staff that is willing and receptive to change and understanding the threat landscape that's out there.

And I'm not talking IP staff on this one.

I'm talking our regular city staff.

They're receptive.

They understand that the world out there is changing and that we're going to have to do things a little bit differently to accommodate that.

I get a number of phone calls from staff members saying, hey, I got this on my personal phone or I got this on my email.

I don't mind answering those questions.

My opinion is if you're safe at home, you're going to bring that over to work.

And if you're bringing safe practices into work, that makes my job a whole lot easier and that's a whole lot more secure.

And then from an IT standpoint, we have a team that is seriously dedicated to keeping our citizen data safe, our employee data safe, making sure that everything is secure and everything functions as smoothly as it possibly can.

So that was really quick and fast.

Ish.

I don't.

Hold on.

I bring different devices.

Any questions?

From my seat as vice chair of the National Legal Cities Energy and Environment Natural Resources Committee, we once had a joint session with the IT Committee talking specifically about what you are very aware of and I'm glad to see that of potential attacks on utilities, especially water utilities and how you protect against those.

It's one of the biggest threats on the horizon for local governments.

There are entire units, I guess the latest one, this is public information, the latest one is called Volt Typhoon is the group and they're loosely affiliated with the Chinese government and that's their goal is to destabilize local government agencies by breaching the water systems.

So that's their entire focus.

Yeah, I don't practice cybersecurity from a fear-mongering perspective.

So I don't like to... I mean, there's just small things that you can do to be safe.

But yes, those things are out there.

It's reassuring.

Thank you.

Everyone knows where my office is.

I'm a real person.

Can I just say besides doing a great job of what he was explaining, but that's also a wonderful resource for a lot of us who are looking at contracts and things like that.

I have a colored past, so it's yes.

I've lived many lives and done many things before I was doing this.

That's supposed to tell too much.

You're right.

Thank you, bud.

Good evening, Mayor, City Council.

What you have before you is a resolution from the Middle River Jail Authority to refinancing bonds.

Recently they came across an opportunity through the Virginia Resource Authority to refinance those existing bonds.

They're looking at saving about a million, 1.1 million in total of that, about 130,000 with a crew to the city.

These bonds, in no way is a city liable for any of these bonds.

This is all on the Middle River authorities books.

So you're asking us if we would approve reducing the debt payment we have to pay?

That's right.

Council.

Second.

Any discussion?

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Aye.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, members of City Council.

At its regularly scheduled meeting on February 27, 2024, Council voted unanimously to decline to adopt an ordinance permitting collective bargaining by employees of the City of Harrisonburg.

Council further instructed and authorized me to create one or more committees to enhance communication and collaboration between Council

the city manager's office and city employees.

And so this evening, what's before you is a resolution and procedures memorandum to do just that.

The resolution would confirm council's prior vote and the procedures memorandum lays out a pattern of creating a citywide employee team that will meet routinely with the city manager, the deputy city manager and others.

These would be frontline employees, not supervisors, directors or deputy directors, but frontline employees meeting with me to share improvement ideas and opportunities to better our organization.

It took me a little bit of time working with Mr. Brown and Ms.

Snyder and Mr. Props and others to put together the right fit for this program, but I'm really happy with what we've done because it builds on the high-performing organization philosophy that we've adopted

and creating interdepartmental teams and opportunities for employees across the organization to commit into the buy-in of the organization and help make it better from within.

And so I can try and answer any questions that you may have.

Mr. Brown has obviously been also working diligently.

In fact, has had the lion's share of the work on this, especially putting together the resolution.

I just, you know, thank you for doing this.

Well, I appreciate the opportunity to take a look at this.

One of the other elements of this that I didn't mention is twice a month we have orientation of our new employees and I go over to each of those orientations and welcome our new employees, our newest employees to the organization and share some thoughts about the importance of public service.

And one closing comment that I usually make is my door is always open and so

Instead of just telling them, I'm also going to be setting up regularly scheduled office hours for members of our organization, across the organization, to find a time on one of those office hours, sign up and come in and chat with me.

I need to stop telling them that the door is already always open.

Andy, well, let's be good.

Yes, in fact, that's what I was referring to about interdepartmental teams, so our Harmony Equity Committee, our ambassadors team that takes a look at ways to show appreciation for our employees, as well as our deputy leadership team, which is the leadership team made up of our deputy directors and then our executive leadership team.

So these are teams that bring people and leaders across the organization together, thus improving the cognitive diversity.

and improving the solutions that we're bringing to the challenges we face.

Cognitive diversity.

That's why we hired them, folks.

Cognitive diversity.

Never heard that before.

Madam Mayor, I move that we officially ratify

Second.

Roll call please Pam.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Fleming.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

This evening 7H is consideration on adopting the fiscal year 25 budget and approving the appropriation ordinance.

I understand and I first off want to thank you all again for letting me step out during a very important budget work session in the May 14th

City Council meeting so that I could attend my son's receiving of a Bluestreak Excellence Award.

So I really appreciate that.

I understand from my deputy city manager, Ms.

Snyder, that there were a couple of outcomes from that that City Council did propose and adopt, reducing the real estate tax rate from eight cents to five cents per hundred dollars of assessed value, which we discussed earlier this evening during the public hearing.

that did create a small deficit on the revenues and expenditures, but I think we have also found a way to accommodate that.

Both the city schools have reduced their proposed FY25 budget and we have reduced our FY25 budget to accommodate that deficit.

And then City Council wanted staff to look at the opportunity to create a new entrepreneurial program

and I believe we can also accommodate that in the existing budget with one time funds and then what we can do as staff comes back to you with these opportunities and ways to pay for them if that program is successful, then as we approach the FY26 budget, we can have further discussions on how we would fund that going forward into the future.

And I can try and answer any questions.

Mr. Props is here, Ms.

Snyder is here.

Okay, I'm looking at the page where, like the second to last page where, in my meeting with you, with Andy and Chris Brown this afternoon, you pointed out the original that said a dollar and four cents and the amended that has a dollar and one cent, which is with the five cent increase.

I also noticed the big bottom line just above it went from 404.901, you know, almost 405 million dollars

down to 403088.

So that's what the accommodations you're talking about, right?

Well, for one, the deficit that we were covering, I'm not exactly sure Mr. Props can come up and share.

He and Tracy Shaver have been talking about the school side.

But one, we saw opportunities where vehicles were being proposed in the FY 25 budget that we eliminated and are trying to accommodate in this year's budget still.

So you're referring to the total budget went from 404.9 to 403.

Yeah, so that's that's a combination of everything that happened.

Reducing tax rate increase.

What's that meant?

Art transfer the schools.

Decrease dramatically.

And then the combination of the 140,000 deficit that Dany spoke.

Just on the budget, I want to thank all my colleagues here for stepping into this.

I think it's a difficult discussion to have when taxes get raised.

I appreciate the hard work everyone did here.

and stepping into this and addressing the priorities we've identified as a city council in the city.

Also want to thank city manager banks and staff for the excellent job they did in balancing meeting the needs with trying to limit the

The additional debt we have to put on residents.

And I think we know that, you know, two major banks that you said, you know, that for this year, you know, taking care of our staff is really a priority for the city.

And, you know, it's interesting when we have, we had the Virginia Transit Association conference last week when we're in front of other cities and they hear what our staff are doing.

Without exception.

We get comments about the quality in the work that's done by our city staff.

And so we want to retain them.

And this is one of the ways we do it, is keeping a healthy organization here.

So I appreciate that.

You know, I know there's, we hear discussion about, you know, are we managing the city well?

Is the city being run well?

Are the resources being used well?

One of the ways that we measure that is, you know, our creditors.

You know, assess the city.

Assess the finances.

And we have a credit report.

And we have about as high a credit rating as it's possible given our income and revenue generation of our city.

But from their credit report, you know, what they say is their opinion is

Very strong management with strong financial policies and practices under our financial management assessment methodology.

Strong budgetary performance with operating surpluses and general fund.

Very strong budgetary flexibility.

These are things that the folks who analyze how well the city is managed and how well the finances are managed.

They've got no pony in this race, they have no dog.

That's right.

They're just assessing that.

So we want to give credit to our staff for being strong in our financial management because it's hard in a city where we have a lot of residents who are struggling, but we also need to keep up with the services and meet those needs.

I'm very grateful for the staff who step up in a big way for that.

I'll move to approve the fiscal year 2024-2025 budget and the approving appropriation ordinance as presented.

Second.

I'll say let's keep in mind the folks that will be, you know,

Karen the burden of paying the fees, as well as keeping in mind those that will be paying it to rent and other services through that trickle down.

But let's also remember if we don't keep the services up, and I like the business, Dany alluded to it.

Councilman Fleming when he mentioned Boxer, the governor announced today jobs that are being created but manufacturers and companies and businesses and even the Mr. Sniders of the world don't invest in places where education isn't a priority where safety isn't high where quality of life isn't high and where service delivery isn't high

and so right now we still deliver premium services, we're a high-functioning organization and I know that's a fact because people are investing millions and millions of dollars into the city of Harrisonburg every day and so while I know it's important that we manage our money and that we tighten the belt and that we don't spend every dime that we make in

is important that we spend money to make money so that we can continue to move forward and thrive.

We can't be stagnant because if we're stagnant, our property values don't grow.

If we're stagnant and you live in a place where your taxes aren't going up, most likely you don't have the services that you need.

Most likely you don't have the clean water that you need to drink.

Most likely you're using aging pipes and aging trash trucks.

and other men and women that are working those jobs aren't as safe as they could be so just remember that it's a balance and I know it's a tight balance and let's continue to have these conversations so I appreciate all the folks that came tonight that said hey this is too much but also and it still amazes me that I live in a city where when I knock on people's doors some of them say raise their taxes it's just shocking and then I know that there are some people who don't even own a door

and Nasser Alsaadun.

and to Dany's point I can say this there's not been a year that went by probably not every two or three months I'm sending something that we've done in Harrisonburg to a city two or three times our size so they can figure out how we did it or an ordinance or an idea or something of that nature because we really are advancing the ball for the west side of Virginia but overall for Virginia overall I think Harrisonburg is

is great.

It's an awesome place to live.

And I promise you, if you don't like it and you leave, we'll sell your house real fast.

Somebody else wants to move here real, real soon.

I think it takes like three, four days, maybe less than two weeks.

So that should let you know, although the taxes are going up, this is an extremely popular and valuable place to live.

And I appreciate each one of you that are here that are paying the taxes that are paying the rent.

Because also you being here makes it that much more valuable.

So I appreciate you.

I got four kids and they ain't cheap and stuff ain't either, so I empathize and sympathize.

Alright, roll call please Pam.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Aye.

Aye.

Okay, you have in front of you the first one is a supplemental appropriation for the construction of Fire Station 5.

As we know that was ARPA funded and those numbers were several years old now and as we know things have increased.

So this is an additional 2.7 million and I believe that will get Chief Tobia the funding that he needs to build his fire station.

and the funding is going to come from a million, 1.6 million interest earnings from this year and 1.1 million from speed cameras.

That's bad.

That's nice to come behind and take money to make money.

I appreciate y'all.

We need that fire station.

Thank you, Larry.

Second.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Fleming.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Aye.

These are requesting to be appropriated various grants and donations and other sources of revenue we've received throughout the year that was not budgeted.

I'll just point out a couple of the more significant

We received an extra 900,000 from VDOT for highway maintenance funds and Mr. Hartman is planning on using that to replace the traffic light at East Market and Reservoir and just to shout out to him because I have heard this probably every year since the beginning of time that

Andy, that's the last single span traffic light, not in the city, maybe downtown.

Anyway, so we won't have to hear that anymore.

And then using 460,000 of speed camera phones for barricades for downtown events.

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the supplemental appropriation for various departments as presented by staff.

Second.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Fleming.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Aye.

Part of Mr. Mancini's project for the Smithland Road, Smithland Athletic Complex Lights came in under budget by almost 100,000.

This is the last time you're going to come up with extra money?

This is him.

This is him, Larry.

This is the most I've seen Larry laugh.

The budget has passed.

Look at you.

You're happy.

Any discussion?

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the reallocation of ARPA funds

Any discussion?

Roll call, please, Pam.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Jones.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Thank you, Larry.

Thank you.

All right.

Comments from the public, limited to five minutes.

All matters not on the regular agenda.

Anyone who wishes to speak,

Please speak.

Say your name and address.

Is there another person?

How many folks attended that?

The presenters were awesome and entertaining.

And I just really appreciate that staff and deputy manager.

It's now time to put that together.

for folks who are trying to get their child care center set up in Harrisonburg.

You know, there's support available and out there to do this.