City Council Meeting   8/13/2024

I'll open our Tuesday, August 13, 2024 City Council meeting to order.

City Manager Banks.

Here.

Council Member Jones is absent.

Council Member Robinson.

Here.

Chief Tobin.

No.

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

Father God, thank you for this day.

Thank you for bringing us together this evening.

Give us wisdom and guidance as we make decisions for our city.

Bless those who are in the space.

I ask that you help us approach this meeting with a spirit of peace and harmony.

In your name, I pray.

Amen.

Amen.

Remain standing for the Pledge of Allegiance.

Okay, so we have a special recognitions today this evening and we're gonna recognize Caleb Gilbert all-american soapbox derby world champion So I want to ask Caleb to come forward.

I believe you're with your father and they're gonna bring this big trophy

This trophy is bigger than Kayla.

Oh my goodness, don't break it.

Okay, now who's going to speak?

So the soapbox derby, a lot of people think it's the soapbox derby's little pinecars at the Boy Scouts shoes, as far from that.

as you can see Caleb's car.

He's got long hair for a reason.

He also plays guitar on the side.

There's two bands in the area.

Adult bands, I'd say the least.

So his favorite band is Van Halen.

So it was only fitting that we painted his car like any Van Halen's guitar.

So we've raised Soapbox Derby.

He's raised Soapbox Derby for four years now.

Started off in Waynesboro, Virginia as his local

Race track and when it no longer happened we had to go somewhere to represent our area which was Harrisonburg.

So last year we rally raced in soapbox Derby throughout the United States from Florida all the way to New York.

So we had 24,000 miles racing

and Soapbox Derby.

So a lot of people do travel ball.

We were able to meet a lot of friends.

There's a lot of physics involved in it.

Met a lot of engineers that has helped us.

A lot of people think he's just getting a car and going.

Caleb can tell you that's far from it.

We spend a lot of time, blood, sweat and tears, a lot of asking questions to get the car to work.

But he has to drive the car as well to get it where he needs to be.

That's a picture of him after he won his perfect example of

The camaraderie from Friends Over and Cold Pepper that was there for us.

We've met good people in Ohio, Kentucky, who was very good friends with us.

All the way up and down the United States, all the way to the state of Washington.

How we got started came close to ending and not knowing what we were doing.

And a chief engineer from Boeing Industries that works on the airplanes, his son won like 10 championships and he got us to get to the point.

He got us to a point and he announced y'all to figure it out.

So it's a good family sport.

It's a good family environment.

So he's able to get a gold jacket, a gold ring, this huge trophy.

So he's like on his little tour right now.

He's on his little tour.

He's like, dad, how much is this?

I said enjoy it because hard work pays off.

And for our team motto is for me and my children, it's always you as good as you want to be.

How good do you want to be in life?

Because if you're not going to extra mile in life, somebody else may be doing a little bit extra and they're going to get that extra advantage over you.

So life is competitive, we all know this, but it's a friendly competition.

Some of these racers here, the guy on the far left, he's from Colpepper, Virginia, he's another world champion.

So our area also has two world champions this year.

Caleb and Aiden Stewart and

Mr. Paul Bates and Culpepper.

He's in his 80s.

He's guided us and helped us get where we're at right now.

So yeah, these are all the winners that you see right here from all the different divisions and the children with the gold jackets.

Unfortunately, when you win the local championship, they keep your car.

I did.

This is a fun fact.

Because my after-school program on the road, we had a car and so they wanted, Matt wanted me to do, like, ride the first lap.

So, Kayla, you did well because it's hard to actually do that.

So, congratulations.

I'm going to give you an opportunity.

Do you want to say something?

Sure.

Like, tell us how old you are.

All right.

You're 12 years old.

Anything else you want to say?

Not really.

Okay.

Can you tell us about the championship race, maybe?

We're so proud of you and I know we're gonna let's give Caleb and his dad and that big trophy a round of applause.

Michael Parks, are you somewhere around in that little room back there?

We want to take a picture with Kayla.

Yeah, thank you.

We're all good friends.

Everyone close together here.

Right everyone on me?

Alright, let's go to our consent agenda.

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

Second.

Any discussion?

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Aye.

We have no public hearings.

We'll go straight into our regular items.

Have a good evening, Matt.

I don't know, but I feel like our future is in good shape with youngsters like that.

Let's talk a little bit about water conservation here for just a second.

Members of the staff and our felt like we needed to engage city council here a little bit.

We've been pretty active, but I want to talk a little bit about water.

It's a little confusing so I want to try to make it simple here.

We've got three different triggers for very different reasons with regard to how we need to address our customers when it comes to water, water, efficient water use.

The first trigger is totally based on

our capability to deliver our demands, independent of environment locally or anywhere.

The second trigger comes from another source and I'm going to go over each trigger real quickly.

It's environmentally driven, but locally and how it applies to us.

The third trigger

is environmentally, has environmental sensitivity to it.

But it's more local and it's kind of irrelevant to what we do here.

And so all of them come from a different angle.

They have totally different agendas starting it.

So any one of them can throw us into a situation where we may need to ask our customers to do things that we don't normally do.

So I'm going to talk about the first trigger.

The first trigger is simply, it's in our ordinance called the water shortage ordinance, but it's basically, do we have enough water to supply our customers?

And the whole key here is, if you look on the screen, the red line right there is our maximum capability to deliver water to the city.

That's going to change in two years when we go to Shenandoah, upward significantly.

But the long story short of it is,

We can treat about 68 million gallons a week.

And after 68 million gallons a week, if we were to have that back to back, we would start depleting the water in our water system, which we have about 16 million gallons a day in all storage tanks.

And after a period of time, we would exhaust that.

We could not supply our customers.

So what we have here is the red line is our normal water capacity, about 68 million gallons a week.

I can extend that up to about 70, oh just short of just over about 77 but there's a lot of physical financial and social consequences to doing that a lot of risk so we try to stay out of that but if we take a look you'll see you'll see our demand there in the bars and if you take a look at it

You'll see that we're still under our supply, but I want to make a couple of points.

Before the students, when the students left in early April, we had about 60 million gallons a week.

When they left, we went down to 55.

Then it got really, really hot.

The students were still gone.

We popped up to 60 to 62 million gallons a week.

So what we did is, when I say we, non-student users, everybody, residential, commercial, institutional, everybody, replaced what the students left plus added some more on top.

In the meantime our water supply

for the week of the last part of the 28th and the early part of the 4th of August began to drop off.

Something I've only seen twice in my lifetime here with the city.

That was because of all these springs.

Now it has returned with rain, but here's the whole point to this.

If our water supply is at full capacity and our population, we return to

the type of consumption that we've seen since the students left during the hot period of time with the students here and them practicing the same practices that everybody else does we will certainly for the first time in my lifetime see the demand exceed our capability supply so if that's a lot of ifs fortunately our water is returned

Our water supply from Raleigh is returned with the rains.

The manned is slacked off.

In the month of July, I think we averaged about 7 million gallons a week just in irrigation.

So all I'm saying here, this right now probably says we probably ought to be in mandatory conservation, which we have been.

Michael Parks has been very

and putting us into mandatory, I mean, voluntary conservation, but we did not engage city council.

However, if we have to go to the next step, it will require city council and we thought it inappropriate to come here with an emergency declaration versus and have not been here for the voluntary step.

So that's kind of where we are right now.

We're in a wait and see mode.

The question is if that weather that we,

The weather and climate that we just experienced for five weeks would come back with the students.

We could possibly be in a situation where under this particular trigger, we would need to go to mandatory and I'll talk about it.

Let me tell you about the other two triggers for just a second.

The second trigger really is antiquated.

I look around city council.

I don't think anybody was

One City Council in 2018, maybe Mr. Jones at that time in 2013.

We, were you on council?

I was on 2018.

Okay, do you remember us doing a resolution?

Okay, so we did a, there was a state, a state law that required us to do a water supply plan.

We adopted it.

It involved local triggers.

None of those triggers right now are being met.

It's pretty conservative and it needs to be revised.

It was supposed to be revised and bring it back to council in 2023.

But due to laws, due to some introduced amendment to the law that's in place, everything's been delayed.

So in essence, that second trigger really doesn't come into play at this point in time.

The third trigger has to do with our Virginia Water Withdrawal Permit.

And it basically puts us into a situation where if anybody else has a problem in the Shenandoah Valley, we need to follow suit.

And DEQ has declared the Shenandoah Valley, there's three levels, watch, then warning, then emergency.

They put us in a watch because, and they did that in early July,

and they've been in it and that's due to groundwater levels and that's due to stream flow levels now.

And so we've been in that and we have been promoting that on our website and we've met with some local large irrigators.

So anyway, that one, I don't know the potential of it going into emergency.

I don't know, it's completely regional.

So if that happens because we have a water withdrawal permit,

Whether we have water or not and we're in fine shape, we would have to go into the same declaration as that.

So three triggers.

The one I prepared you for the most that I worry about the most is the first one.

If the students return and we get weather like we had the last six weeks going forward, I'm concerned.

I'm concerned that we might have to do some things and I'll show you a little bit about.

The other two, not real sure that we'll get into that.

Now, just as a final note, I just made some notes here.

We said, well, what are we talking about?

Well, the most practical thing under voluntary situations addresses, and Mike's putting together some information to get out to a lot of customers.

Andy and Amy are heading up, meeting some individuals one on one.

to talk with them, but we're talking about reduction of any kind of lawn watering, only allowed from 9 p.m.

at night to 8 in the morning.

You don't want to be doing that through the day, it's inefficient.

A lot of reduction of using water for like driveways, parking ways, just general cleanup outside.

You're talking about looking at car washes, anything, any kind of car washes, that's a highly targeted.

Talking about any

any ornamental uses, that type, any ornamental uses, talking about focus on swimming pools and we're focusing on restaurants using water without, you know, just voluntarily by asking.

Those are the kind of targets.

Now we don't have any choice on that because that's what our Virginia Water Withdrawal Permit tells us we will do.

So now the only difference what happened is we are there, we're asking

We're out on the web.

We're going a little more publicly and trying to ask folks at this point in time to volunteer.

Should we have to go to the mandatory, I mean the emergency because of the trigger number one, we're going to have to come up with these probably won't be suggestions.

These will probably be cut it out.

We may have to decide who gets water and who doesn't if we were to ever flip and invert that supply and demand.

So that's kind of an overview.

It took us a while to figure this out.

I just, with everybody now, tried to make it as simple as I could.

So I'm going to stop right there and ask Mr. Brown.

I just have one quick question.

How is our communication with the university?

So we've already talked about students are coming back.

that aren't allowed or that's requested.

I expect to see them drop off a little bit in their watering.

So I think they're on board.

Our city schools are on board.

We're reaching out this Thursday to some more folks one on one just to let them know the status because we wouldn't want to, if we were to get into that emergency situation, this is going to be some tough calls.

But I hope I've never been in that.

You know, we're two years away from

being having considerable buffer for that particular ordinance.

Yeah, I would I would just add when Mr. Collins and Ms.

Snyder and I started meeting about this, Mr. Brown, we proactively reached out to James Madison University and the city schools because both of them, in addition to our

Parks and Rec Department are some of the larger users of water for irrigation in the city.

And we already had a pretty good hunch that that was what was driving the demand.

James Madison University has already committed to reducing the use of irrigation across the campus and has been a strong partner through this process.

Mr. Prince was at that meeting and also obligated the city schools.

And then Mr. Mancini and his staff were there as well.

We've already proactively accomplished, I think, some pretty significant voluntary restrictions.

And then I sent an invitation out today to probably eight to ten significant industry users of our water supply as well.

So with JMU, sorry, at this point it's voluntary.

If we go into emergency, we'll have to make those decisions as to whether we can discontinue their irrigation or not.

Not an enviable position I ever hoped to be in, but we're just hoping that we, you know, all the things come together.

I mean, we're kind of, if I had to put a probability on this happening, it's 25% of the debate.

That's pretty high, more than I've ever seen before, but that's still, I don't think that's going to happen, but I don't know.

But if, again, we have what we had six weeks in the next six weeks, what we had in the last six weeks, we could be

and we'll have to decide who gets it and who doesn't.

So real quick, you know, and you went back into the first graph you had there, you know, our student population, you know,

Maybe close to 30% of our total population in the city.

No, out of the 50.

Yeah, I mean, we got some pretty big industry here that's pretty water-consumptive.

And over the years, it's very difficult.

I mean, they don't like paying for water because it affects the bottom line.

So there's always a motive for them to save water.

But some of our poultry industry

have to provide

I've unfortunately been in those situations where I had to shut a day of production down because we couldn't get the water line fixed.

And if it's hot, I could say they could go to 10.

Normally, when they left in April, we dropped off about $5 million a week.

When they come back, I'm expecting the $5 million to come back.

It's like it was the last six weeks that five could turn into ten and that really becomes a problem.

A couple of questions.

If you could go to the trigger number three, Virginia graph, I'm curious about those four squares and it looks like

In the Shenandoah Valley, there are more red squares than anywhere else.

The two right squares.

Overall, Shenandoah Valley was in a warning, member of the three, watch, warning, emergency.

On this date, on August 8th, which is right before it rains, the PRCP stands for Precipitation.

OK, that was normal, at least for the period of report.

However, the groundwater levels were in emergency.

The reservoir levels were in watch and the stream flows were in emergency.

They didn't decide to declare an emergency.

They've only taken it to the warning level with whatever they've chosen.

Had they chosen to make that an emergency level, then we are mandated to do a whole lot more mandatory stuff.

But they haven't.

Do I know where they're going?

I have no idea.

The difficulty with this is, if I'm over this program

It's a little difficult because I may have a jurisdiction up here that's got all kinds of water.

And I may have some, and the whole area might be in an emergency situation, but you've got pockets where, and you're going to, when you declare, everybody's going to have to do that, whether they have any problem or not.

I don't know how much that will weigh into their future decisions or not.

I don't know.

I'm just a follower on Trigger 3.

I'm a decision maker on Trigger 1.

We've all made the decisions on Trigger 2, pre-made them.

Trigger 3, we're not the decision maker.

Perfect click.

Also on the next slide or two with the voluntary, yeah.

I'm curious about the washing or cleaning of mobile equipment.

Well, this is dictated to us.

I think the one I read was, they were, I don't know how you want to force it, but basically we would be forced to try to get them to reduce, unless they have a re-circ system.

If you got a re-circ and you're using re-circ water, you don't have to do anything.

But if you're using fresh water, they're looking for a 10% reduction in whatever practices you do.

Now, it's going to be difficult to measure that.

If we really got bad, I guess we'd have to, you got to shorten your

Shorten your car length for 10%.

Something like that.

It wouldn't be very difficult, but that's what we'd be required to do.

And we don't have a choice on that.

That's dictated in our Virginia Water Drop Permit.

You shall do this.

And also just a couple of comments.

I remember when I lived in San Francisco, I wasn't there during the time of the severe drought, but they told people, you have to take short showers.

You know, it's kind of interesting.

My son went to all school in Orange County, called him up one morning and he said, Deanna, I can't talk.

I said, what do you mean you can't talk?

He said, they're getting ready to cut the water off.

I said, what do you mean you're going to cut the water off?

He said, every other day we get our water cut off from nine to six because we don't have water out here.

So, you know, it's what you get used to.

But that's extreme.

That's not an easy thing to do right after on the street.

A lot of times you'll say, OK, you can water your lawn on even houses, get Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and odd houses.

There's a lot of things you can do.

Enforcing them is a whole other issue, you know?

So that's another issue.

I just have one question and I want to make sure I understood this correctly.

but either one of these triggers can happen independently of the other.

Yes.

So even though your decision maker on number one, we may be riding straight and narrow with no bumps in the road and all of a sudden we could hear something from trigger three people that say, shut it down.

So it's not like you have one, two, three.

You were right on.

They are independent of each and the one that worries me the most

is one.

One worries me the most right now.

Two's a little bit antiquated.

Things are going to get really bad before two would ever, right now two would have us doing nothing.

Three has us doing warning.

So I want to make sure that we're clear.

We need to, this is a, we're adopting a resolution.

declaring a drought warning for the city of Harrisonburg.

And so this needs a, we need a vote on this.

If I could just make one other comment, as Mr. Collins explained under our permit and under the plan, if another locality in our region declares an emergency, a drought emergency, then we have to go into an emergency as well.

Not necessarily and that's something that's a little tough.

I guess we all in the same region, but not necessarily in the same

What I want to alert you to is, I think at the county's next meeting, you may hear that they have declared a local emergency as a result of the drought.

I want to make sure you understand that that's somewhat related and that it's drought driven, but it's not

related to what we're talking about here.

What they're doing is for agricultural purposes, the USDA has now declared Rockingham County and some other counties to be in an emergency drought for agricultural purposes.

And so the county is declaring a local emergency due to the drought so that that can generate some financial aid for the farmers.

But it does not kick us into the emergency drought situation.

They were very clear

And that's a fine job.

Mr. Brown did get that line drawn because we could have been, you know, interpretation of what we have to do.

Okay.

Madam Mayor, I move that we adopt the resolution declaring a drought warning for the city of Harrisonburg as presented

I'll second that.

Any more discussion?

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Aye.

And Mayor, if I could, just we did a lot of talking about drought and water supply and demand under Mr. Collins leadership and previous City Councils now for nearly 20 years.

We've been planning

The Eastern Raw Waterline Project, when that comes online in 2026, many of these headaches are going to be relieved for the next 20, 30, or 40 years.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I will go to item 7B.

Hello, my name is Matthew Houston.

I'm the City Engineer in the Department of Community Development.

And this item is a staff recommendation that Council repeal the erosion and sediment control ordinance and the stormwater management ordinance and replace them with a combined erosion control and stormwater management ordinance.

The city's erosion control and stormwater management programs are regulated by the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality or DEQ.

and the cities required to operate these programs.

In 2016, the state water control law was amended directing DEQ to combine the erosion control regulations and the stormwater management regulations into one set of regulations.

The purpose of this was to streamline, to eliminate redundancy, to alleviate potential confusion.

and DEQ has completed this process and the new consolidated regulations, the state regulations, came into effect on July 1st of this year.

So staff proposed that the city follow suit and combine our ordinances to match the new state regulations as directed by DEQ.

The proposed ordinance is based on a model ordinance provided by DEQ and edited to meet our local program requirements.

The new state regulations make no substantive changes or alter the technical requirements of the prior separate regulations.

Similarly, the proposed combined ordinance makes no substantive changes to requirements, review processes, fees, or civil penalties.

The proposal is simply to combine the provisions of two coordinate code sections into one and eliminate any redundancies between the two.

One aspect that might look like a change is that staff proposed to incorporate directly into the ordinance

The schedule review fees that we charge.

Currently, those review fees are listed in a separate document that Council adopted separately.

DEQ conducted extensive public engagement as part of their process to consolidate the erosion control and stormwater management regulations.

This included a notice of intended regulatory action, a stakeholder advisor group, a 60-day public comment period, and a written summary of comments and responses.

And for our own local outreach, staff sent a memo to our contact list of local engineers and developers to inform them of the proposed ordinance and to solicit open feedback.

And that memo is in your packet.

One last thing is when reviewing the ordinance, one more time today, we identified a couple of errors on page 25, section 10, 412, A and B. Some of the code references are missing hyphens, and so if you're going to propose

that we adopt this ordinance, so I'd ask that you allow us to make those changes on page 25.

Thank you.

Well, I think anything that streamlines our code is helpful.

It may seem trivial that we're not changing anything substantively, but I think it's actually really important to make these streamlining changes for folks, and it's helpful for folks when they're looking these up in our city code, so I appreciate.

Anyone else?

Thank you.

Second.

Roll call, please, Pam.

Vice Mayor Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Aye.

Thank you.

Liz.

How are you?

Good evening.

I'm Liz Webb.

No, no, not yet.

Give me one second.

Just give me one second.

I'm going to be talking about one of the acronym things that I get stuck in.

All the housing stuff seems to be shorthand, so this one's called Spark.

Oh, that's good.

So this is a program that the City of Harrisonburg is sponsoring for the first time.

It's an allocation of reduced rate funding that Virginia Housing makes available to sponsors.

Sponsors can be local governments, housing nonprofits and housing authorities.

And it helps these sponsors

leverage their existing homeownership efforts and programs by providing a 1% interest rate reduction for the life of a 30-year mortgage.

And so I'm going to show you an example of that.

And this is just a hypothetical.

And so for example, if a house is $300,000 and someone puts down 5%,

the loan amount that they would need to take out and interest rates are already different than they were like a week and a half ago.

So the 1% interest rate reduction in this example comes to about $187 a month which is over $2,000 a year and over the life of a mortgage that's over $60,000 than just this one example.

So it can have a real impact.

The way that this works is that Virginia Housing has an open application period each year and applicants describe the local program restrictions that they might adopt, if any, and then they are responsible to partner with lenders and identify eligible homebuyers

who themselves have to be eligible under the local program rules that are established.

And they also are required to work with HUD certified housing counselors and receive housing training from certified HUD counselor.

And then those home buyers have to qualify for a Virginia housing loan and work with an approved lender on Virginia housing's list.

in those circumstances, then those lenders will request, they request a lock, they call it, on Spark, basically, reserving a portion of our allocation.

And then that gets reviewed and signed off on, but the lender's doing the bulk of the lifting and the city is responsible for checking that it meets these standards.

And so we,

We submitted an application in May, and we proposed some local restrictions, one that we would serve the city of Harrisonburg footprint, that we would utilize this tool to promote local housing counseling.

Now that the non-profit surcap out of Roanoke will soon be sending staff up here on a weekly basis to establish local housing counseling hub,

So we're hoping to promote that availability as part of this.

Looking for a way to align this with fee waivers.

That might be a little more of a stretch.

And we're aiming to serve households at 100% of area median income, which is really right at the margin.

Housing costs right now with interest rates right now

Serving at that level means finding someone who's got high enough credit, has found a house that's in the right price range.

And so this tool can be used to make housing more affordable and it can be used to extend that affordability to people in a tighter margin.

And so that's what we're really aiming to do here with this.

and this this allocation we have is for one for the year.

So if we're gonna that's what we're aiming for.

This is the first time we've done it.

We'll also be coordinating with some of the other regional providers of this spark.

So for example, the planning district has an allocation and then so, you know, we're gonna cross promote lenders when they

try to access this tool, we know about each other's programs and can just coordinate that so that someone who qualifies in Harrisonburg is using our allocation and someone who might be over income or outside of our area can use the planning district's allocation and so on.

So what we asked for, the formula allocation is based on the average

sale price times the number of families you wish to serve, and it seems like a lot.

It's $2,090,000.

Unfortunately, that's not real cash money.

It's a benefit over 30 years for families, so we don't actually have $2 million coming at us, but we have this allocation.

that locks in the benefit for a number of families until we run out.

And we said seven, but it really depends on each individual mortgage circumstances.

So we found out about this last month and we just completed our onboarding.

We're in the process of getting these details sort of

I've written out and started to reach out to lenders.

I've been coordinating with the other agencies that are providing Spark in this region.

And I'm happy to answer any questions.

So the city of Harrisonburg will be the sponsor.

And so congratulations on this program.

It's a use it or lose it that the state has this allocation.

So really what I've been told is they'll call after about six months and see how we're doing.

And so that's where they also give us that flexibility.

If we find that

Our parameters need to be expanded to make use of this, then we can do so.

Virginia Housing is very flexible with this.

The main thing is that it gets used.

So the average home price, which

It seems lower than I've seen it recently over the past year or two, but where does that one come from?

I mean, there were some, yeah, from last year.

It's based on, I mean, it's our application.

I know that when talking to the planning district, the allocation that they got last year, what they'd applied for, they were able to help more families with it than they'd anticipated, just based on, I think some of the families that are seeking this, when you're working with a lender that's knowledgeable of all the programs and resources, if you have Spark and you layer it with down payment assistance and other tools, and you know, in your finding housing that might be a habitat home, you know,

Those layers, it's just one more tool and so it was able to go farther.

Well, and I hope this might give some incentive for lenders to become also a little more creative on their processes.

And we do have a local lender that instead of using a credit check looks at rent history.

for folks, right, that might qualify folks who have been good rent payers for a while, but may not have a credit history and can get them into loan.

And I think the list of lenders, lender institutions that are approved by Virginia Housing in this area, it's pretty long.

And so I've spoken to some of them, but part of the next step is just reaching out to make sure that we're reaching out to everybody.

And those that haven't worked with Virginia Housing, making sure that they understand how to do that.

So for the surcat, the housing counselors, they'll be coming up here.

No, no, they're just, I mean, they separately have resources so that they will be up here soon, I think on a weekly basis.

So that's a significant piece to our affordable housing market to have that type of counseling up here finally.

But the key to that is

is making sure that people utilize the services because we've gotten to a point with CERCAP where that wasn't going to be a possibility because people were not signing up to meet with the counselors.

They weren't utilizing the services and we're losing yearly funding.

So when I think about this overall perspective, I look at you as our dashboard of sorts and really love your creativity

and being able to look at all the resources that are on the table before you and being able to say, okay, you go apply over there.

That opens up the space over here for this person.

Then let me layer that what you have.

Have you worked with Jacob from CRCAP?

Have you utilized their down payment assistance?

Let's pull that into your application because you qualify whereas this person necessarily may not qualify.

So being able to really

I really appreciate what you do

Not only blesses those in town who are searching for homes and trying to get in, it expands outward.

And I don't think people really see that.

Just one more thing.

that it's added to affordable housing.

It's different layers and that's what we've always said, you know, it comes with different layers and this is one piece.

Back to the slide that has submitted application in May.

Just back a couple of slides.

We, and again, numbers are constantly in flux, but we have heard from a couple of local and regional providers of down payment assistance recently that they couldn't make the 80% numbers work at all.

And even like at 100%, it's going to be really tight to see if we can find families where the number where the math works at all.

I mean, that's just

What are the numbers across the top?

One, two, three, four.

I should say Virginia.

Oh, sorry.

I like what you're doing with aligning with the fee waiver program that you've launched to.

Okay, so this is only presentation, so thank you so much.

Okay, now we're ready for ARPA.

Good evening, Madam Mayor, members of City Council.

I'm Luke Morgan, Grants and Programs Analyst for the City.

I'll be presenting tonight with some other members of City staff to provide you with an update on the City's American Rescue Plan Act or ARPA projects.

Starting with a brief background, the City received $23.8 million in ARPA funding in 2021.

Use of ARPA funds is governed by the U.S.

Treasury's final rule.

Most of the funds are designed to replace government revenue shortfalls caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, while some of the funds are specifically designed to mitigate the harms of the pandemic on impacted and disproportionately impacted populations in the city.

Before determining how best to spend the ARPA funds, City Council decided to work with the Institute for Constructive Advocacy and Dialogue

to conduct a months-long public engagement process to hear how the community wanted to spend these funds.

The City heard from thousands of residents who provided project ideas and priority spending areas for the ARPA funds.

Six priority areas consistently rose to the top of all the public feedback we received throughout the public engagement process.

December 2022 City Council allocated funding to various projects across the six priority areas and city staff have been working on these projects since then.

The six priority areas in order of most funding allocated to least funding allocated are enhancing community spaces, other government services, expand accessible affordable housing, improve neighborhoods, increase affordable accessible child care, and invest in community mental health.

Before we continue and look more closely at the ARPA projects, it's important to remember the two key dates and deadlines that the Treasury's final rule establishes for the use of ARPA funds.

First, the ARPA obligation date is December 31, 2024.

This is coming up very quickly.

This is the date by which all ARPA funds must be formally obligated.

Treasury has defined obligation to mean having a signed contract or a signed grant agreement in place.

Just because you've allocated the funding through a spinning plan doesn't mean it's officially obligated.

Second, the ARPA expenditure date is December 31, 2026.

This is the date by which all funds must be spent.

Failure to meet these deadlines will result in unobligated and unspent amounts being returned to the U.S.

Treasury.

The ARPA projects can be categorized into two main groups, capital projects and then funds.

Good evening, Mighty Mayor, members of city council.

I'm excited every time I come up here because the ARPA projects that you all have granted to us are all very exciting.

And I'm going to do one thing just a tiny bit different.

We've been up here a couple of times and we have two of our projects that are done.

And it's kind of time to put them to rest and not bring them up anymore.

But I'm going to try to explain how these ARPA projects tie in with our staff back here.

And so you all can see kind of a final result on some of the stuff that we've done.

So the first one, this is our restroom.

This is our brand new restroom at the Smith and Athletic Complex.

Most people would be hard pressed to get excited about a restroom, but we are.

So I'm going to tell a story of mine just so I don't have to get permission from anybody to do this.

But my young daughter, everywhere we go, she has to use the restroom everywhere we go.

So tractor supply, gas station, food.

But one of her main places she goes to the restroom is at Smithland because mom comes home from work from being a teacher, picks up daughter, brings them to Smithland Athletic Complex and they play soccer.

And she needs a place to change because there's no time to eat and do that on the way to the soccer complex I'm not kidding about this.

It has come up like three or four times at our dinner table of how clean our restrooms are So and it's not because it's new that's our new one and then about 330 yards or so down the complex There's an old restroom there that we have Michelle long Michelle you stand up Yeah, Michelle's our custodian and

She keeps our restrooms at Smithland Sparkling Clean and I know that we say that about anybody but it's true and my daughter can attest to that and some of the emails and the compliments I get about how clean our facilities are at Smithland is a testament to our staff and it's just one area that makes our Smithland Athletic Complex better than anybody else's and we truly do we have the best facilities at Smithland

She's the main part of the reason she was scared to death to come today, because she didn't know why she was coming.

But I told her just to be here and she'll be very happy about that.

You are an integral part of our program.

And Michelle, we thank you for that.

And the reason I bring that up is because, you know, I'm trying to bring this down to our level that we all do.

We all run home.

We all try to get our kids to eat.

We get them to Smithland.

And there are three, four, five hundred people there daily.

That restroom is not only key because some of the little kids, some of the six-year-olds that play soccer and the five-year-olds,

used to have to run from that football field all the way to the other end of the complex while the parking lot's full, right?

And it's not running to the other end of the complex, it's the safety that they dodge cars and all that stuff to get there.

Councilman Jones spearheaded this a lot, Mayor Reed and everybody on council.

And so we're very grateful that we were able to finish this project.

We're very grateful that we have Michele and it's just one component of our process that's Smithland.

The next is, those are our fields.

and it's amazing because I tell people that we have awesome athletic fields and they don't believe me.

Remember Councilwoman Robinson when you came out to the lights when we turned the lights on for the first time?

I remember your face, you were like, I didn't know they were these, it was this nice.

But we get that all the time.

So to bring this to where we are tonight, you see the lights there.

The lights are an ARPA project.

What the lights do for us is it opens up, especially coming up here in the fall and the first part of spring, about one and a half to two hours of extra practice time.

So what that could do is instead of some of our children being out there practicing once a week, it now lets them practice twice a week.

And it gets them out of the house and it gets them doing stuff construction.

That's what the lights have done.

What the lights have also done is we never had time to bring in a group to provide a

and expanded or an upgraded soccer program than what we run in Rec, right?

So Rec is, okay, have fun.

You have some kids that are really good.

You have some kids that are not so good.

Some kids just like to play.

We now have time to bring in a group that provides another level of soccer that Harrisonburg needs because we have kids playing soccer that no one else does.

No one around here.

So our program got better because of the lights.

One of the components that keeps bringing kids to our program is Todd and Mike.

Stand up real quick.

Those are our field staff largely in charge of the Smithland Athletic Complex.

They won Field of the Year from one of the largest turf associations in the state of Virginia.

We have the football field of the year, and that's that field there that we also play soccer on.

Our grass is cut like this high.

Our lines are straight.

So when I go to another game away, I can't stand it because I want to be back at Smithland, right?

And I won't say other cities because we're the friendly cities, so we want to get along with everybody.

But I sit there and I see lines that go across the soccer field like this I see the referee put the ball down and the ball won't stay still because the field is like this We have to play first thing in the morning because they don't have lights and I hear this is a true story Parents don't know me yet because I'm not really ingrained in the soccer community So I like that because I sit there and I heard people in another city the size of ours talking about the millions and millions and millions of dollars that Harrisonburg City Council gave to

Parks and Rec to make our fields like that.

That's not true.

We did it on a fraction of that cost.

But for finally, for the first time, we're not hearing, well, you got to go to Charlottesville.

You got to go to Richmond.

It doesn't happen anymore.

Everybody wants to come here.

So because of that, some of our travel teams, Mr. Fleming, you've been involved in travel, and some of our intermediate teams above Rec, we're now playing home games at Harrisonburg.

And that's great because that could mean that some of our families don't have to travel.

State Overnight pay for Hotel and Roanoke in place Saturday and Sunday.

We're doing some of that here, so we're making progress.

And the people that have our program going, the last group will share Steve, Courtney Jordan, Matt, stand up real quick.

Some of you know them.

They are our sports division.

They do a fine job.

So responsible for soccer, for football, for everything.

And when you put all of this together and you put the kids in very nice uniforms and different things like that, that is our motto.

People want to come back.

and our sports program is thriving.

We don't have trouble getting soccer kids.

I don't know if I spoke at City Council before about our football numbers, but our football numbers at the lowest levels are now the best of anybody in our league right now.

So we're hoping that that'll keep translating up.

It doesn't happen without the commitment that you all gave us.

And it's a big deal, restrooms, because mom and dad, they bring their kid there.

If they're comfortable, they'll keep coming back.

Restrooms, lights, the field conditions, the programming and Michelle.

Great job.

So I just wanted to kind of talk to you.

So we.

I heard you say that because we have this field, families don't have to travel to Roanoke.

Yes.

So we don't travel as much.

But we still have to be a part of the league.

So in a couple of instances, I'm about to get the schedule now.

Yeah, families will be coming here.

If we can start throwing tournaments, which will be our goal, then we'll have that sports tourism component of it where people stay every night and we'll direct them downtown to eat, sleep, all that kind of stuff.

We're not quite there, but we're getting there.

We're close.

Okay, great.

And I will say, you know, as a parent who's done lots of these travel trips in two hours for us, this tends to be minimal of where you go to from Harrisonburg.

So it's not an inexpensive or challenging venture when you're traveling away.

But you know, when parents travel, they make note

of the facilities where you are.

You go someplace and you say, wow, this is fantastic, or wow, I'm not sure I want to come back here.

Folks now want to come here to these fields.

They want to be here.

It actually makes it easier for scheduling because when local teams have to schedule, they have to get an agreement from other teams to come here.

And sometimes folks can be reluctant if it's not a field they want to go to or they don't feel safe at the field.

if it's bumpy or there's places that kids get hurt with ankles and being twisted.

So, you know, this is a destination place for travel teams now to come to.

Brian, give us a, just real quick, give us some numbers.

I told them I wouldn't call them up here.

Fluctuating anywhere between, it depends on what you have.

We have camps and little kids start smart programs, but probably about

with now SBU, maybe close to 2000.

You know, it could fluctuate, though, year by year or what programs we count on going out there.

Sometimes it's over a thousand just in one day.

When we play Rockingham County in football, you know, we may have on certain scheduled days soccer, play Rockingham County in football, they bring, you know, Broadway, East Rock and all them, they're cheerleaders, and then we transition over to some travel or challenge soccer in the afternoon.

It's crowded all day.

and so it's a huge impact out there.

The parking, we fixed the parking, so it's a total different situation.

We got compliments from the county.

Yeah, absolutely.

No doubt.

Okay, I'll move on.

Thank you for letting me do that.

I just thought that would be a different way to wrap up and show the impact of ARPA.

This is Thomas Harrison soccer field.

This field will look like the other one in about a year and a half.

This is our ARPA projects of our lights and our restrooms also at Thomas Harrison So we're trying to mimic what we have at Smithlin I've worked a lot with Sean on this project So this project I always categorize as having five parts four are done and out of all six of our projects There's only one more that needs to be put under contract Roughly $150,000 to change that field.

We're going to regrade that field irrigated so we can look like the ones at Smithlin

but the lights are done, the restrooms done, the utilities are done and the fencing's done.

If you've driven up 33 towards Garber's Church Road and you look over at Harrison's, my opinion, but it looks pretty awesome from the road.

It's the decorative black fencing now, the lights that go up above the field, the restroom, this brand new that sits there and pretty soon the field will look pretty good.

To me, that's a blessing because I've been there a number of times for athletic events

to have the county come to that.

And it's going to keep getting better.

I believe that that's great for the city because it shows well on the city.

So if there's any questions, oh, and yeah, so the thing that's left is is to redo the field.

The field will get read done next summer on the first week of schools out, and it'll take about six to eight months to take.

So we'll stay off of it.

Dependent upon us not hitting any of those triggers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I sat real close to Mike at a couple of meetings this week.

It is.

It's really, it's really dry.

But that, you know, for parks and rec purposes, you, you want, um, and you can correct me, Todd, but you want like an inch and a half of water per week, somewhere around there.

Yes.

And we got that.

So we're good for now.

We're just praying for some rain in the next two to three weeks and for the whole city in general.

And that's the Thomas Harrison Project.

That's number three.

Um, number four, this is the spray grounds at Ralph Samson Park.

Um, a lot of different ideas on the spray grounds at Ralph Samson Park, but I'm very excited about this.

Um, I've talked with the mayor a few times and driving down Washington from kind of where Gerald shop is and coming down the hill and seeing something like that develop on the on the site of the baseball field, I think is going to be awesome.

I know there's a number of different ideas.

I think they're all going to be awesome, but the one that we're going to

attempt to do for the city.

If we pull that off and we have no reason to think we're not going to, I think this project is going to be fantastic.

The project right now is in the planning stages.

So the site plans and stuff have been submitted to community development.

We're going through all that and all the environmental things that we have to satisfy before we start building.

We think it's going to have a start of around October.

We've found some enough funding for the project that we're going to actually get into phase two, which will be the playground.

And then we have a couple quadrants that are going to be left open for some more community development that we'd like to hear from the citizens a little bit more in terms of what they think may go out there.

But overall, that's going to be a big spray ground.

There's going to be shade there.

It's going to be a great safe place to be.

I saw some faces when you first saw it.

It's more than just water dumping, twirling.

This is a park, right?

And you're going to be able to do things outside of just the spray park.

We're correcting parking.

So when those basketball courts are full and this is full and we have people

you know coming out there that will all be corrected to its we're hoping its proper level when we when we build out so yeah any other questions about the spray grounds or anything no okay I promise you it's moving it's not moving to the site to site but it's moving this is the skate park we're in a great place with the skate park and I think I mentioned this last time but we met with the advocacy groups advocacy groups

and everything is good.

The design was done by Parks and Rec and by the advocacy group and everybody's very happy now about it.

So it's going and it's in a great place.

It's in a great spot.

Everybody knows where we are.

Matter of fact, just a few days ago, I don't remember what day, but I let the group know that it's still going.

Where we are with the skate park right now, we think construction will begin in October.

We are on the list to be next.

They are working on a multi-million dollar skate park in Dallas, Texas.

and that crew, when they're done with that in October, they're supposed to come here.

So right now we're slated for October, so we can at least count on it being in that timeframe.

And it should be an awesome project at Westup.

Kid's Castle.

All right, so this changed a little bit as of like four hours ago, three hours ago.

We now we're under contract, so that is done.

So that's huge because we had to be under contract by the end of the year.

The time frame at the bottom is going to change.

We have been working tirelessly and I have to give credit to the team Vic and I and the team from from Harman Construction and their subs that they're using because they did a lot of work before they even got the contract that they didn't have to do.

Very local company having having some ties to the area taking a lot of pride in what they're doing and

We've shifted gears a little bit to try to make the new one kind of look like the old one as best we can So we think and sometimes I get too excited about the Parks and Rec projects, but we think we're doing I Think we have something that's really really cool.

That's probably going to end up bigger than that That's going to look similar to that as much as it can in modern day playgrounds The problem is because of we've gone through a couple different changes and we're making it more and bigger That timeline at the bottom is going to push out a little bit

The one thing that it does do, it will give us a chance to keep Kids Castle up.

It's the beloved Kids Castle in the city.

It's more popular probably than a dream come true still.

But we'll get to spend a little more time with it and we'll be able to plan its departure in a fun way.

So we can keep that going a little bit longer.

Overall, this is not the 80s any longer and rusty nails and splinters.

Right.

And we're very cognizant of the love that the community has for that.

We really are.

We're working very hard when we present our first idea.

We're hoping that people will really like it because it's going to seem something like that as we move forward.

Kids love that place.

So any questions on Kids Castle?

So it's moving now too.

It'll start to go to the site plans.

Is that a pay raise?

There's no doubt because they know more than me and most of the stuff.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't even bring up the help that Mr. Garber has helped me through Kids Castle and the Spraygrounds because a lot of times

Vic started the paperwork for the spray grounds and getting that that that tough tedious part going and I got to give him all the credit in the world So thank you Vic because he's been a godsend his experience to the department has been invaluable And then the oh, that's it.

I mean we put a lot of money in Parks and Rec for a reason

you all do incredible work you know you know I'm your cheerleader but what we put in Parks and Rec is not it it embraces and it touches everybody it's just not full one section is for everybody and so what you are what you have done with the parks we have the upgrades that you have made are beautiful but this is

going to put Harrisonburg on the map.

So thank you so much for all the work that you do and thank your team.

Thank you all for all the work that you have done.

So thank you.

So we cover a lot of ground.

You know, it's sometimes hard to get around in Harrisonburg East-West.

You know, we don't have kind of the

It was that we are touching, you know, every community because everybody goes to the parks and especially doing COVID.

People were at the parks, right?

They were there, right?

The fresh air just being out.

The parks were a place for families and so I'm glad we put the money into it and thank you for what you're doing because I think it's another destination that people are going to come to Harrisonburg.

It's no longer going to be Charlottesville, Richmond, Roanoke, it's going to be Harrisonburg.

That's exciting to me because I hate hearing when people, well if I hear you go here you go here you go.

We've got that now so thanks for your support.

Good evening, members of City Council.

and I'm the project lead for the presently named Homeless Services Center project, which I'm excited to.

I know you all heard quite a bit about it when I came to you all at the last meeting with the proposed proposal to rename it the Navigation Center.

As a reminder, it's at 1111 North Main Street.

If you are headed out of the city, headed north, I'm sure you see the beautiful building that has risen up out of the ground.

and is at the lovely shade of blue.

So you can see the top picture here is the rendering of what it's supposed to look like and the bottom is what it is looking like.

And it's so fantastic to get to go out there and walk through rooms that are really starting to look like the building.

The Homeless Services Center, I want to credit Nate Riddle who I think is still here with writing this lovely paragraph to describe the facility.

that I have now stolen.

So thank you, Nate.

That it's a dynamic public-private partnership that will be a place of transition for our communities unhoused and a center for critical health and human services for our entire community.

We are proposing right now in a public comment period to rename it the Navigation Center that closes on the 24th at 9 a.m.

Construction is ongoing.

There's drywall up and painting happening and tiling going up in parts of the building and others are

a little more unfinished, but things are steadily progressing.

And we also are in the process of procuring furnishings.

Actually, Nate and I will be meeting right in early tomorrow morning with our vendor to hopefully finalize those selections for the building.

It is on schedule to open by the end of 2024.

However, I come up here, like Mr. Mancini, with some unfortunate news, which is

Currently, the building is not on target to open on the date that we had intended for it to open.

We had in our contract planned for it to open and be in our possession or should say the building to be in our possession and then services to start later on October 4th, 2024.

Our contractor, Nielsen Builders, formally notified us last Friday that there's a critical piece of electrical equipment that was not on a delay months ago, but now is on a delay.

that won't arrive until the end of November and installation would take until about mid-December.

We are furiously working.

There's been many, many meetings and conversations over the last 48 hours and more that are happening tomorrow to look at a couple alternatives to see if either of those alternatives are ways that we can get power into the building and get a temporary certificate of occupancy.

I'll keep you all informed about whether we have an alternative that will allow us in the building before the first of November and before cold weather arrives.

I take it really seriously that this building is critical to our community's safety.

This is where the thermal shelter is supposed to operate and the building not opening

in October could put lives in jeopardy because cold weather will arrive.

So we're, like I said, I'll keep you all informed.

Mr. Riddle and I have been in close communication about this because of the impacts operationally to them since they have a contract with us to operate the facility, but also because of the people that they serve and the lives that they help save with their services.

So we're

We're committed to exploring all options with open doors that could provide an alternative location.

We haven't started that process yet of exploring what those alternatives might be for thermal sheltering because in my communications with open doors, I said, let me get through the next few days of exploring what alternatives there are to actually get power to the building without this piece of equipment.

I think we have a couple viable options, but I'm not an electrical engineer nor am I the chief building official to make those final determinations.

But well, certainly, if we need to explore them, we're committed to exploring them.

Open Doors is our selected operator for the facility, and they've been working closely with us to

prepare the building for operations and also they've been coordinating with many community partners who are going to provide services out of this location as well.

So right now more than five additional community organizations are committed to providing routine services out of the facility, whether it be health care, mental health, housing counseling or services that target our Alice population.

On the right hand of this slide, you will see some of the renderings of what the inside of the building is supposed to look like when it's complete.

And again, I've shared before that our architects approached it from a trauma-informed design perspective.

So the colors that you can see are the ones that actually will be there.

So those pale, creamy whites, the greens, the blues, the yellows are going to be carried throughout the building.

working to try to pick furnishings that will coordinate well with that.

It is going to be really beautiful.

I don't have pictures up here of what the renovated building will look like, but if you'll remember, we chose to preserve the historic structure on the property.

It was completely gutted.

We kept the beautiful grand staircase and the hardwood floors where we could

but we took everything out, read it all the wiring, read it all the heating, put drywall back up and it's at the point now where it's been painted, the floors are being sanded and refinished and that's also going to be an absolutely, I think, beautiful space for administrative offices that both OpenDoors and other community partners will have office space in.

How many spaces, rooms are in there?

Office spaces.

It's just turning into offices, right?

There are six office spaces and one large common area that could fit more cubicles in it if needed.

so we are so open doors will run out of there and then we'll have other organizations they would like to be there they can be there as well corrects yep and then there are other office spaces that are in the the new area of the building as well so there's additional office spaces some of those might be from my understanding from conversations with Nate might be for like floater offices for

And then did we finalize Centera for having a mobile unit there?

And then we'll have the suitcase clinic.

Yes, all of those are

moving forward, we're still working through some legal agreement things with Centera, but everything is moving that direction to all three of those services on site.

The facility will have at minimum or maximum, Nate and I are still working through this number two.

The contract currently says the census of 72 guests.

It'll have a small clinic.

I've described that before as not

Not a clinic in the sense of maybe what the city schools has at their welcome center, something different than that.

It will be more like what you would think of like a nurse's office, that that's where suitcase clinic will operate out of, to provide just immediate services for acute things to guests at the shelter, but not as a walk-in for anyone from the public.

Centera, however, will have that mobile primary care that would be open to anyone from the public.

The administrative wing I talked about, that's in the renovated portion of the building, and then you all did approve to help fund the kitchen for meal service, so it will have a commercial kitchen in order to be able to provide full meal service as open doors desires with their contract.

and we absolutely, the mayor asked me this earlier, we will have a dedication ceremony once I have an open day.

But certainly want to celebrate this and we'll invite the community in to tour the building.

We have had a lot of interest from individuals who want to come tour the building.

We have been

It's an active construction zone, so we are not able to grant those tours as much as we probably would like to grant them because there's power tools and things that people have to step over.

We haven't talked about security.

What is the... What are we doing with making sure that people are safe?

overnight in the facility.

Maybe that's a Nate question.

I'm sorry.

I will invite the operator up to speak to those questions.

I can talk to it from a design standpoint, what we have built in, but operationally, Nate can speak to that.

Thank you.

Great question.

So we'll have three staff members at all time during operations.

The infrastructure that's currently being installed will allow for controlled entry.

So we will have a doorbell similar, at least is my understanding from the design part.

We will have a doorbell similar to what you see at a school where our staff will be able to permit access in and out.

The facility other than in sleeping areas where there's an expectation of privacy will be under surveillance internally and externally.

And then it's always been our practice to conduct dignified

respectful searches of all shelter participants who bring in belongings to ensure that all weapons are possessed or taken possession of by our program.

We don't store combustibles or anything to that effect, but small pocket knives or something we may store in a locker or in a safe.

We also welcomed a representative from the Harrisonburg Police Department on our board as an advisor and we're working closely with them through

Emergency Action Plans and how the city may respond in cases of emergency.

Since we are on the city system, HPD would have emergency access to the facility without staff being necessary to open the door.

Alright, thank you.

Yes, another good question.

So we use the Homeless Management Information System, which is the federally maintained program, HMIS.

We've always used that.

We have one of the highest local quality rates.

We usually are around 99.

We also use a private case management system through a private vendor which allows us to track a variety of data that's in more depth than what the federal government is concerned with.

So we will track the amount of people that are using the daytime services and the evening services.

As far as their point of origination, the question that we currently ask is the question that's designated by HUD.

and that is what was the zip code of your last permanent residence and so that allows us to see where they last resided.

Can I ask a question?

Are there certain crimes that keep you from being allowed to stay overnight?

Part of the low barrier mission which has always been

and our DNA, but also that contractual is that those things do not preclude you.

So that's what makes our services in great demand is that those with sexual offenses are welcome there.

It's also why we only serve those that are over the age of 18.

So those things don't preclude you.

So we don't have the criteria that you would have at a Salvation Army because you have to pass.

like a drug test, you have to do this.

We don't have that at this shelter.

And that's what we felt like when we were with the stakeholders is what was needed.

The concern that I have, I've been hearing.

So I'm asking you questions that I've been been asked in the public is, well, this is going to bring so many people here right from other areas.

You know, I get that question, you know, I get that all the time.

Yeah, in the past two years, we've increased our questioning and just the publication of that data.

Again, we've always collected it from a federal perspective, but we now publish that.

So the last two years would be available on our website.

It's always a clear majority, Harrisonburg, Aronkingham County.

and second to that would be what I would call Valley communities that are just more resource burdened or there's a lack of resources.

Ms.

Snyder and I have worked up and down 81 in those hot spots to ensure that those communities are taking the appropriate steps to address it in their communities.

And one thing that I often come to the table with is that this is not a regional solution, but this is a local solution.

and so I don't expect that there would be a shift.

Of course, that is a concern, especially of our partners in the county, but historically has been a great majority Harrisonburg and Rockingham County residents.

Can I just say one more thing about the office allocation?

I think there's seven offices in the administrative building.

We are reserving one that will be called a flex space, and we'll have a reservation process in place.

So any partner established or non-established can request use of that facility.

And then we have two partners that have requested a fixed office that's been accommodated, and then plus the clinic who will be reserving the use of the clinic space.

So we want to provide them the onsite access that they like.

A lot of the things that our partners are considering are their current capacity and not being able to grow with the facility, necessarily.

So the shelter component will be seven days a week, 365 days a year.

But the program will only be open from six p.m.

to say seven a.m.

So it's overnight shelter only.

Part of that is just from a financial perspective as an operator, but also with the city's intent of having the Daytime Center being open to the public.

With the design of the facility, it would not be tenable or feasible for us to welcome community members.

Again, the population that we're serving were potentially Stacy and her children are coming to seek services while having 72 shelter residents there as well.

So to allow us to serve the greater community,

Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.

to 5 p.m.

The program for the shelter will remain overnight only.

Thank you.

Any other questions for me?

Okay, great.

So you've heard about two of the categories of projects out of the eight that we have to cover tonight.

So the third one in the ARPA Capital Projects Group is the Neighborhoods Improvement Project category.

City Council budgeted $846,000 for a variety of street paving and sidewalk construction projects.

Looking at the left side of the screen, you can see that Sims Avenue and Myrtle Street were already paved last year.

That Kelly Street and Sterling Street are scheduled to be paved this year.

that will complete the street paving portion of this project.

On the right-hand side of the slide, you can see three sidewalk and trail projects.

The Director of Public Works, Mr. Tom Hartman, presented these projects to you in February of this year explaining how the city faced difficulties securing the right-of-way needed to complete the Sterling Street sidewalk project that Council had initially budgeted ARPA money for.

Public Works identified the three projects on the screen to replace the Sterling Street sidewalk project since it could not be completed.

The first of these three projects is a revised Sterling Street sidewalk project which will complete a shorter segment of sidewalk and Public Works is currently working to secure the needed right of way and easements from adjoining property owners.

The second one of these projects is the Hill Street sidewalk which will construct a portion of sidewalk along Hill Street.

They are also working right now to secure the needed right of way and easements from adjoining property owners.

The third one of these projects

is the Ralph Samson Connector Project, which the design is currently underway for right now, with right of way scheduled to begin very soon.

Do you have any questions about any of these projects?

Yes, this last one, the Ralph Samson Connector.

I heard some questions from HRHA, right, that

This design cuts through that community garden property and might make it less feasible to expand or whatever so as long as you're in conversation with them about what the routing could be that doesn't interfere with their property as much.

I did ask Mr. Hartman about that this morning and that slide is not

So the last major capital project is Fire Station 5 for which City Council budgeted $5 million.

Here on the screen you can see a rendering of what it may look like when it's completed.

We currently have a signed contract for this project and construction again on July 30th of this year.

Construction should be completed by this time next year.

That is all I have for this project.

So that wraps up the overview of the capital projects and brings us to an overview of the ARPA funds.

So there are four ARPA-created funds.

The first is the Small Business Assistance Fund, second is the Housing Fund, third is the Child Care Fund, and last is the Mental Health Fund.

Looking first at the Small Business Assistance Fund, City Council allocated $200,000 to provide grants to small businesses to mitigate the financial hardship they experienced due to COVID-19.

Grant amounts ranged from $4,000 to $10,000 based on the number of employees the business had.

Eligibility was limited to businesses in operation before January 1, 2020,

and that they could demonstrate negative economic impacts due to the pandemic.

Businesses in a qualified census tract were automatically eligible for these grants.

The application opened on July 14th, 2023 and closed approximately six weeks later at the end of August, 2023.

Here on the screen, you can see that 35 small businesses were supported across the city.

These are all sorts of business types.

We awarded $194,000 in everyone who was eligible that applied received grant funding.

I think it was only about four applicants who applied who were not eligible.

Now it's Ms.

Give you an update on the Housing Development Fund.

Okay, so just to refresher, the goals of this $2 million is to develop new high quality rental and for sale units.

with long-term affordability for impacted populations that are income restricted.

The criteria that we set were the restrictions based on ARPA guidelines and a focus on income and affordability, looking for projects where the developers had the experience, capacity, and readiness with feasible projects that could meet our timeframes.

that would also address local needs and show some creativity in their design and some specificity in terms of who they would serve and how they would go about it, and also projects that would leverage funding from other sources to make the best use of resources.

We received 10 applications and selected two projects.

Central Valley Habitat for Humanity applied for and received $700,000, effectively a grant for their project, which is 11 units, including duplexes and one, I'm calling it a triple.

That's not like the zoning term.

It's like it's townhouses, but three together.

They're committed to 15 year minimum affordability period and all

Homebuyers are at or below 60% of area median income.

The funding agreement was signed in the spring and the funds have been dispersed.

They've completed two closings in July.

There's two coming up this month.

And then the rest of the units are in various stages of construction.

They did, what was that called?

Dedication.

Thank you.

on Sunday for the first few units and so this is well underway.

The other project that was selected was Commerce Village 2 Annex that the Housing Authority had proposed $1.3 million for 16 one bedroom units at 30 and 50 percent AMI

based on their funding sources.

It would be eight veterans and eight coming from, I believe, chronically homeless referrals.

Eight of the units will be on the ground floor, four of which will be fully accessible, and all the rents will be subsidized with vouchers.

So the people who live there will always pay based on what they can afford.

and the voucher will pay the rest and they're committed to a 30-year affordability period.

That funding agreement is pending.

We are still working out the details with the Housing Authority.

Excuse me, if you could just go back to the Sooter Street for a minute and talk about this later.

which City Council allocated $400,000.

The Mental Health Fund provides reimbursement-based grants to six nonprofit organizations providing mental health, services, and support for vulnerable populations.

The grant awards made through the Fund support evidence-based and evidence-informed programs that reduce barriers to mental health, behavior health, and substance use treatment and services.

In August 2023, the City made awards to six local nonprofit organizations

These are boys and girls clubs of Harrisburg, Rockham County, Community Counseling Center, The Collins Center and Child Advocacy Center, First Step or Response to Domestic Violence, Gmine Shaft Home, and Strength and Peers.

These six organizations have been implementing projects across the city, providing support to youth, low-income individuals, victims of sexual assault and domestic violence, criminal justice involved individuals, and other vulnerable populations across the city.

And I haven't totaled up all the numbers from their progress reports, but it's in the thousands of people that they've served across these six projects.

So the last and final fund is the child care fund.

To this city council allocated $596,000.

The child care fund project was actually split up into two separate project components that we presented to you previously.

The fund itself and the child care pathway to success program, which we previously referred to as the child care pipeline program.

You can see this pathway visualize a bit on the left side of the screen and we'll be covering it more over the next couple of slides.

The primary goal of these two project components

is to increase the number of child care spaces where seats for children birth to age 5 in the city.

Towards this goal, the Child Care Pathway Success Program aims to support the long-term success and sustainability of all child care providers in the city, while the Child Care Fund will provide grants to current and startup child care providers to help them expand capacity.

So looking more closely at the Pathway to Success program, City Council allocated $150,000 for the City to partner with the Small Business Development Center and their early education business consultants to provide industry, specific business training and technical support, as well as one-on-one guidance and coaching to existing and startup childcare businesses.

Looking again at that pathway on the left of the screen, participants started by coming to an informational meeting where they met with City staff and the SBDC staff.

If they were interested in participating in this program, they were invited to meet with the SBDC to assess their needs and then to join a child care cohort to which they received business training and technical support.

And that was from the EEBC.

There were three child care cohorts, the last of which finished up last month.

There were two cohorts for in-home child care providers and one cohort for child care centers.

Following a participant's completion of a cohort, the participant may be eligible to apply for the ARPA Child Care Fund grants, as long as they meet all the other additional eligibility criteria for the grant.

The City Council set aside $446,000 for the Child Care Fund grants.

City staff developed a Notice of Funding Opportunity or NOFO for this grant, and the NOFO was released on May 1, 2024.

The application opened a little more than a month later on June 5,

There's a rolling application deadline, so we're still accepting applications until we close it earlier this fall.

And it's our goal to make all awards by October 31, 2024, which will leave us a couple months before that obligation deadline when we have to have those signed grant agreements.

Today, we've received three applications, and we are expecting more to come.

The review committee is reviewing the applications as we receive them, and we've already made one award.

The SBEC is playing a critical role in ensuring applicants are prepared and have all their ducks in a row when they apply for these grants.

and they'll also support the grant recipients after the funds have been awarded to them.

That's all I have for you about this and the rest of our projects.

Diane from the SBDC is here.

Is there a contingency for these funds if you don't have enough applications to expend all those funds?

Yeah, thank you Mr. Morgan.

Mr. Props and I have already put together some ideas and as we've seen moving into fiscal year 2025 budget, of course we allocated some city funds to act as an ARPA contingency.

several of these projects we're anticipating are probably going to need more funding.

So it's going to be, I mean, it's going to be a matter of shifting if necessary.

Excuse me, you said there's one awarded already.

When do we get to know who that is?

Yeah, just switch it over.

Thank you.

beautiful.

Oh, that's a long time coming, right?

You know where we are.

The address is 111 East Market Street.

It's the little building attached to the Wacobia Main Building.

Our entrance, our official entrance is Market Street, but we're right now using the side door.

So come around to the back.

10.30.

10.30 on Friday.

Congratulations.

Thank you so much.

You all have witnessed this for many, many years.

It's just an amazing accomplishment.

Absolutely.

Are you done?

That's all I have.

So we're at the end?

All right.

Great presentation.

Thank you so much.

Yes, ma'am.

Madam Mayor, members of the council, you have before you a resolution ratifying the city's participation in settlement of opioid related claims with Kroger.

In fact, when you consider one of the supplemental appropriations here a little bit later this evening, you'll see that some of those opioid funds are going to very good use.

So again, the latest is Kroger and we're not sure how much we'll be getting.

It was a $1.3 billion settlement.

But of course, it's going to depend on the number of localities that elect to participate.

Okay, we need to take action.

Are there any questions?

Second.

Any discussion?

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Fleming.

Thank you.

Good evening.

I'm Ton Dang, Deputy Director in Community Development, and this evening the request before you is to appoint

Mr. Tyler Blanks as our new zoning administrator.

The appointment is required by City Code for you all to do it by resolution.

So this is Mr. Blanks and he's been with the City of Harrisonburg and the Community Development Office since 2001.

2021.

When he started with us as a zoning technician in 2023, he was promoted to zoning specialist.

Prior to service here with the city, he comes to us from the city of Lynchburg in the community development office there, also working with their zoning administrator, and he's a graduate of Christopher Newport University.

Hello, members of council.

And I just say, you know, for Tom and Adam, I'm extraordinarily grateful for them to give me the opportunity that I currently have to go all the way from

Yeah, and I'm excited to see where I think we have a meeting on that coming up next week.

We need to try to keep it going.

All right, great Tyler.

So we can have a motion.

Madam Mayor, I move to approve Tyler Blanks as the zoning administrator for the city of Harrisonburg as presented by staff.

Any more discussion?

This appropriation appropriates $200,000 coming from the Virginia Opioid Abatement Authority to the city.

This is going to be funding a partnership between the city and the county who is sub granting these funds to strengthen peers for support of their peer recovery center.

The city conducted an open solicitation process for nonprofits to propose program ideas and this will allow us

to move that money over to that non-profit so that they can be providing that support to folks in our community.

Any questions?

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the supplemental appropriation and the amount of $200,000 for the general fund that's presented by City Manager Banks.

Any more discussions?

Place name or dent?

Aye.

Council Member Robinson?

Aye.

Aye.

Okay.

That was good.

I had to do it.

I didn't catch his face though.

That's good stuff.

Sorry, you threw me off.

Madam Mayor and Council, the second supplemental appropriation before you this evening is to consider a supplemental appropriation coming from the City School Board.

The school board has requested a supplemental appropriation in the amount of $841,860.

for the replacement of two boilers and a hot water heater at Stone Spring Elementary School and for the replacement of an air handler unit at Keester Elementary School for which fund balance from the school operating fund will be used.

So to clarify that, this is not new money.

This is money that has been obligated to the schools, which they have not used in previous years.

And we maintain that as their fiscal agent.

So this is appropriating money to them for these needed improvements that they have already been budgeted.

Any questions for Daniel?

No?

Just a congratulations to you and in all sincerity also just thank you for your many years of service in our classrooms as an administrator.

It's exciting to see you in this new role.

We will see you here many times again, I think.

We're going to actually get you up here.

Second.

Any discussion?

Seeing no one in person.

Vice Mayor?

Okay, well I was just writing down all the various meetings I've been going to.

There's always a lot.

Well, we've had that two-week break between meetings on City Council, so they're mad at me.

Maybe that's part of why.

A couple of weeks ago at EPSAC, we voted to pass the municipal net metering policy

that we've been working on for a while that essentially states that the city can build as much solar as it wants to and does not receive a payback from AGC because that way we're not competing with other residents and businesses for the limited cap that AGC is maintaining on renewable energy.

And I've discussed this with city manager banks that we can

absorb that the city's main concern is more the upfront funding than the payback over time as it would be for say a business so it makes sense and we adjusted the wording somewhat because there was some debate about whether cost shifting is really a problem so we said it may have an issue but you know less forcefully than it was before so we you know modified it to be a little bit more palatable to some people who were

objecting to cost-shifting isn't a real thing, meaning the argument is that non-solar customers wind up subsidizing solar customers, but data from other cities has not borne that out to be true.

So anyway, so we sort of set that argument aside saying it doesn't even really matter because we can do this anyway.

So much discussion and we finally did pass it.

In Planning Commission, we had a work session

guided by Tom, everybody's gone.

To update planning commission on the progress of the zoning ordinance update, which like I said to our new zoning administrator, I'm glad that that can now regain some momentum.

We had the, well, steel your thunder.

Chris would be saying this if he were here, but we had the fire station five groundbreaking.

That was a big event, a lot of celebration.

And next I went to the El Gac, they call it, round table.

That was the follow on to the Chesapeake Bay watershed meeting that Keith Thomas and I went to at the

invitation of Richard Ball.

And Richard led that and gave a wonderful expression or description of the overall umbrella of this giant organization that involves five states and 19 federal agencies or something like that.

It's just huge.

And the whole idea is to keep the water clean upstream so that they can have oysters and blue crabs in the Chesapeake Bay.

I mean, so that it gets cleaned downstream.

and we talked about the local issues around here.

For instance, Sally Garrison from the County Board of Supervisors talked about how Ag is really the king in the county and keeping the water clean is part of their mission as well.

We had the national night out where we got on the bus and went around with the police and fire station and barbecue and ice cream and whatnot and visiting various communities

And I think that's a really powerful way for the first responders to be connecting with the community in a friendly way.

So that ideally it builds trust over time and helps with the safety and welcoming nature of the community.

So I appreciate that.

And finally, yes, there was a Souter Street dedication which came up when Liz Webb was giving her presentation.

I spoke a few words how I appreciate the habitat and the collaboration of all the partners that have made that possible.

I was relating that that was the first housing project that I approved in my term as council that I actually got to stick a shovel in the ground and now to see it, you know, parts of it completed and families moving in and the kids riding the bikes up and down the street

It was really wonderful to see a sense of community there.

That's all.

Well, I did something unusual.

I unplugged for two weeks.

It was that hard to do.

I spent two weeks with my son out in Washington state, supporting him and spending time with my granddaughter and

The most I did was almost answer a phone call when my grandsons would say, don't answer it.

Just let it ring.

Just let it ring.

So I literally unplugged for two weeks.

I missed you all dearly.

I'm behind.

I have emails and requests and all sorts of good things that I missed here at home.

But I needed it.

And for those of you who knew I went, thank you for giving me the space that I needed.

I appreciate it.

I really do.

Yeah, so there are a lot of things in the last couple of weeks that have been going on.

In July, the National Likus Cities, we had our finance administration and our government relations committee at one of our meetings.

So we're drafting up a number of pieces of, a number of resolutions that NLC will get that will eventually make their way to

to supporting things in Congress.

One of the things that we've worked on a good bit is grant reform at the federal level.

So we've been supporting and helping draw up the streamlining federal funds or federal grants bill, which is Senate 2286, which will take the

We have an amazingly high number of federal agencies and portals that are required if you want to seek a grant and streamline that, which will be extremely beneficial as cities are sized and smaller.

And then we also had a discussion there.

FAIR has been supporting, or NLC has been supporting the direct pay program through the Treasury that would

offer support credits for municipalities that are doing clean energy projects is pretty significant.

Some of the final details of that have been worked out.

I think later, probably in September, there will be a workshop presented to

I think staff here can participate in to kind of see how that program works and see if it's something we can participate in.

I know something Vice Mayor Dent's kept her eye to a good bit and we kept her eye to to see that it might provide some good incentives for some of our building projects to move forward.

So pretty significant credits you can get 30% to start with.

Building credits that's pretty significant.

We also had a Virginia Municipal League, the Information Transportation and Environmental Quality Committee, which I'll be chairing, but I'm the Vice Chair now.

We had a meeting, and Vice Mayor Dent was in that meeting as well.

A couple things that were interesting that came out of that.

that changes and floodplain regulations that have come down, the federal changes, and we're likely to see some impacts locally here.

I know the line weaver annex project has already been hit with some issues there.

Federal regulations have changed and added an expense to projects, so it's something for us to keep an eye to.

VML is

keeping an eye to that.

And then the other thing that came out of that was we had some discussion about the photo monitoring program that's happening in Virginia.

And I think a little bit like we did in the smart scale program, we're taking a little bit of a lead here and helping organize cities around Virginia who are using this program so we can provide some more informed feedback to the General Assembly as they

We'll pick this up in January.

It was a pretty highly contested item in the last General Assembly session and they kind of punted everything from that.

So we're trying to get ahead of that so we can provide them the information they need so they can make some informed feedback.

I think like we did with SmartScale, we'll make use of our staff here who are very knowledgeable

how the program is being used and can contribute to the larger discussion at the state level.

So I think that's one of the benefits we have when we participate in some of these associations.

We can become a lead agency or lead player in drafting and modifying subject programs that are beneficial for us here.

I was also part of this Shenandoah Valley Clean Water Roundtable with Vice Mayor Dent In one of the projects we talked about there was our Bioreactor Project We have, which is an extremely efficient and effective way, a low-cost way to get some of the nutrient credits that we would like to get

That hasn't been approved for our credits at this point.

We're still waiting for Department of Environmental Quality to approve that.

One thing that did come out of that session is that the Chesapeake Bay committee that was represented there, the ELGAAC committee, issued a statement saying that they believe that the Chesapeake Fund and DEQ should approve

These innovative projects that are going forward, so in essence they kind of gave their imprimatur, their stamp of approval for this type of project.

It's a significant project in getting us credits for nitrogen use.

Continuing work with the JMU Economic Summit that will come up October 15th.

So that will be a full day conference that happens at JMU.

Part of that was an open, an investment in RFP for folks to present at the conference.

So we have at least two from city staff that have been approved.

We could probably approve more, but we can only be so Harrisonburg Center.

So in all of the topic areas, childcare, housing, transportation and workforce development up and down the valley, we tend to lead.

We tend to have staff that are out in front who are doing things that are innovative.

So they'll be presenting this conference.

So we did say we'd like to see what's happening in other areas.

There are some great things happening all up and down the valley, but we just seem to have

and a lot of innovative work happening with city staff.

So manager, thanks.

Good to us to you and the staff.

We had a stormwater meeting this past week, last week.

One of the things that we saw this past year, we have our Harrisonburg, our HCAP program, the Conservation Assistance Program, which provides

money for folks who can take impervious services on their property and turn them into previous services to help with their stormwater.

And we've seen a pretty significant increase in the applications and awards of those funds for that program, so that's good to see.

And then had a Virginia first cities housing

Meeting also this past week, which I'm part of that group.

I'll update some of the legislation that's come out that we're supporting there, so I'll send that to council members to see what's being supported there.

One of the things that we discussed, there are a number of pieces in the general assembly, a number of bills that have been passed around housing that either haven't been funded or have been funded and aren't used.

So there's a housing revitalization rehabilitation fund that was set up maybe 20 years ago and hasn't been used.

So a lot of what we talked about is data, but those funds into other areas that we might make use of, one of them is a urban public-private partnership program that VFC supports, which is for these

Partnerships, it's taking funds, putting them up front in projects to help fund infrastructure needs and water connection and making sites building ready so that you can engage in a partnership, maybe put it out to bid.

So we're looking to get funds for that, hopefully in the General Assembly this next session.

and other than that, there's a couple events with Mayor Reed as well, but I'll let you kind of take those on.

We already talked about Vice Mayor Ray Board of Fire Station.

We had a fire station dedication, National Night Out.

Also attended the Hispanic Festival, which is always a great event.

Probably had 5,000 people there at 11 o'clock when I was walking through there.

They had soccer playing.

It was a great event.

Tools for Schools, United Way.

That was on Saturday.

I attended that.

I think they had close to 2,000 students that came out to get backpacks and school supplies.

Hosted by United Way.

and then I spoke at the new teacher luncheon for Harrisonburg City Public Schools and this morning I spoke at Harrisonburg City Public Schools faculty and staff.

Welcome back with Councilman Fleming attended that with me as well.

That was early this morning.

But it was probably the

They got a lot of people.

I think they had 143 new teachers.

It was amazing.

But it was a good time for them to fill our support.

Also, I know we know this already.

The students are heading back.

M.U.

We had our faculty and staff orientation this morning.

I'm speaking tomorrow at J.M.U.

So the students are will be here this weekend.

Our university students and of course school is starting on what the 19th, 20th.

So we got to get ready for all of our family coming back.

our students and the school buses on the road.

Just a personal note, I recently, as of August 1st, got a promotion at EMU, so I have a new job, position, thank you.

I am now the Director of Alumni Engagement.

So alumni will be hearing from me and community connections.

So very proud of that.

He has already become such an integral part of the team.

I didn't even think of him as being a new employee.

Mr. Brian Vandenberg is joining us this evening as his first city council meeting as our new assistant to the city manager.

And when I say that, I am not lying.

He has already been integral in meeting with the executive leadership team.

He assisted Mr. Collins and city staff in working through this drought management and even the presentation this evening that Mr. Collins put together to try and distill a lot of complicated information into something that was manageable and approachable for people, the public.

So yes, welcome Mr. Vandenberg to the community.

I prepared a motion to move that the Harrisonburg City Council go into closed sessions authorized by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, Virginia Code Section 2.2-3711A under Subsection 3 for the discussion of the disposition of publicly held real estate.

I need to add also, and under that subsection for the acquisition of real estate,

Later motion.

Oh, some moved.

Any discussion?

All in favor say aye.

Aye.