City Council Meeting   3/25/2025

City Attorney Brown.

Here.

Councilmember Robinson.

Here.

Interim Chief Pollard.

Here.

And Chief Tobia.

Okay, I'm going to turn it over to Councilwoman Dent.

We have a proclamation recognizing Arbor Day.

Yay, we like trees.

Arbor Day Proclamation.

Whereas in 1872, J. Sterling Morton proposed to the Nebraska Board of Agriculture that a special day be set aside for the planting of trees.

And whereas this holiday called Arbor Day was first observed with the planting of more than a million trees in Nebraska.

And whereas Arbor Day is now observed throughout the nation and the world,

and whereas trees can reduce the erosion of our precious topsoil by wind and water, cut heating and cooling costs, moderate the temperature, clean the air, produce life-giving oxygen and provide habitat for wildlife and whereas trees are a renewable resource giving us paper, wood for our homes, fuel for our fires and countless other wood products and whereas trees in our city increase property values

enhance the economic vitality of business areas and beautify our community.

And whereas trees, wherever they are planted, are a source of joy and spiritual renewal.

Now therefore I, she, Deanna Reed, Mayor of the City of Harrisonburg, do hereby proclaim April 12, 2025 as Arbor Day in the City of Harrisonburg.

and we urge all citizens to celebrate Arbor Day to support efforts to protect our trees and woodlands and further encourage all citizens to participate in the Blacks Run Cleanup Day on Saturday, April 12, 2025.

Further, I urge all citizens to plant trees to gladden the heart and promote the well-being of this and future generations.

Yes, thank you so much for your support.

We're actually celebrating 20 years of Tree City USA here in Harrisonburg.

So we have a lot of events and stuff planned for the next two months.

So and we will be at Thomas Harrison Middle School planting 10 trees on the morning of the 12th in conjunction with Black Shrine Cleanup Day.

Thank you.

Okay, we now go to our consent agenda.

Some of you all might recall this site.

In fact, this property went through a rezoning process and was approved back on September 26, 2023.

They had a rezoning from multiple zoning districts to the R5C, the R5 conditional zoning district, along with two special use permits that allow for more than 12 units per building.

and for multiple family buildings to be greater than four stories and 52 feet in height.

The application I'm going to be describing to you this evening is really straightforward, a very simple proffer amendment to allow for them to have a bit more flexibility, probably what they intended to do, but the language that was proffered at the time just further restricted them beyond what they were expecting.

So the proffer amendment,

is hopeful to align with the approved rezoning with the definition of the Federal Fair Housing Act for 55 year and older housing communities for that proffer to not have any impact on any changes with regard to all of the other proffers as there were multiple proffers submitted and currently approved for the site so it has no impact on that whatsoever.

or with their plan to build the 164 unit multi-family project which is planned for affordable residential community.

So the site here is at the corner.

It's really a through parcel and a corner parcel at the intersection of West Mosby Road and Pear Street.

So it's on that hillside there as you travel on the southwestern side here of the city.

And it has this particular portion of the property is about 12 acres.

Multiple zoning districts all throughout this area.

And then when we look at the land use guide, we have a medium density mixed residential plan for this area.

You're picking up some of the mixed use areas where we're hopeful to have some mixed use areas that come off of South Main Street and then different densities of residential throughout this area.

And then you can see just portions of commercial there along West Mosby Road there on the bottom page right.

And then the aerial photograph here showing this site contains still predominantly undeveloped some outbuildings that remain on site.

But for the most part, this is an undeveloped property and with their intentions to continue to move forward with this plan of development.

So the property here at 210, 280, and 290 West Mosby Road.

As noted, they were already received approval for their special use permits and rezoning back in 2023, 164 unit multifamily development.

and they would continue to plan for the affordable residential community.

Some of you might recall this.

This was the conceptual plan of development that was shown back in 2023.

And then as was shown in your application package, all of the proffers that were listed, I'm not gonna go through all of them here this evening, just the number three for the amendment, but as you know, there's a number of them that control some of the specifics of the site.

So specifically what we're talking about is proffer number three and the current proffer on the top part of the page here is basically stating that they would have a minimum of 82 units and they would have the age restriction where at least one member of each household must be age 55 or older within each unit and that's really the sticking point here for them because the Fair Housing Act already allows for 55 year and older communities

to have up to 80% be the 55 year and older, which means there remains a 20% that could be not 55 year and older.

But the way their proffer was worded further restricted them.

So they wanted to be able to have that flexibility.

There are specific reasons for that that were explained in the application.

I know the applicant is going to call in here this evening if he's not already on the phone.

And if you have particular questions about that program that he wants to be able to utilize, it would be a good opportunity for you to ask those questions to him at that time.

So the proposal is to get rid of the first offer here, or proffer number three, and replace it with the second proffer, which is very similarly worded, but just basically states that they would meet the federal regulations in the Fair Housing Act exemption for properties intended for the 55 year and older community.

So quite straightforward.

Staff had no issue with it whatsoever as it does not change the dynamic of the actual physical development.

And Planning Commission followed with our recommendation for approval unanimously five to zero.

Thank you.

Do we have any questions?

That's the 811 rental assistance for disabled residents program.

Yeah, I am not an expert on that.

Okay.

Well, so that's just to say it's a win all around.

They found that the market was slim for over 55, but there was a need for the people with disabilities to have housing.

I believe they also changed the count a little bit.

I guess they're actually losing some senior housing by account.

The first proffer stated that every unit would have at least one member be 55 years and older and then the second proposal was to change it to allow for the unit to basically just meet the Fair Housing Act which

There are criteria, as you can note in your staff report, there's criteria that the Fair Housing Act has.

So if you go to page three, there's three bullets there, and it talks to what they're looking at.

So it says at least 80% of the units must have at least one occupant who is 55 years of age and older, and then the two other bullets are speaking to making sure that they publish and adhere to policies and procedures for that type of community, and to also comply with the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development's regulatory requirements.

Basically what it is allowing them to do is they've learned and I hope the app can correct me if I'm wrong.

They've learned that if they can implement the 811 rental assistance program for the disabled individuals that

There will be disabled individuals that are not 55 year and older and don't fit that criteria, but they would still be able to serve those individuals in the same housing where the age restriction is.

So they still have that 20% of the 82 that could not be age restricted.

Any other questions?

All right, thank you, Ed.

This item is now open for public hearing.

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

I'm in Whitestone, Virginia, so on the other end of the state.

I wanted to thank Adam for his presentation and also city council for hearing this rezoning amendment tonight.

The Fair Housing Act provides an exemption for properties intended

and operated for occupancy by persons 55 years of age and older, which allows for up to 20% of the units to be occupied by residents under the age of 55.

However, as Adam stated, the language in the original approved proffer does not contemplate allowing any residents younger than 55 that is otherwise permitted by the Fair Housing Act, and our goal is to bring the proffers and the act into alignment.

Also, as Adam alluded to, the purpose of driving this request is our desire to apply through Virginia Housing for 811 rental assistance for disabled residents for 11 of the 84 units.

Why 11?

That's because more than 11 units triggers additional HUD restrictions that we would prefer to avoid.

This subsidy is available

So while Virginia Housing administers this program for disabled residents, they do so in coordination with the Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services.

DBHDS has indicated that the market for disabled residents over 55 who utilize this subsidy is pretty shallow and that the vast majority are below the age of 55.

Therefore, in order to open the possibility of securing 811 rental assistance from Virginia Housing, we need to first make sure that the underlying zoning will permit us to reach the intended market.

Finally, this rental assistance will allow us to receive

Thank you.

I should ask a quick question.

So you mentioned applying for the 5 million soft funding.

I was actually initially thinking that you might have done this for the 9% tax credit, but are you still making an application for that 9%?

I know you were obviously very close.

Yeah, so we received a 4%

So we still have a little bit of a gap to cover.

Thank you.

Or is there anyone in person?

Mayor Reed, there are no other callers.

Thank you.

Council.

Also, I think this, you know, group really does look like a good partner for the city.

I've been impressed with what they've put together and coming back with this proposal.

And, you know, I think it's hitting a real need that may not be being addressed really anywhere else.

and any other housing developments we have and so I appreciate the work they're doing.

I think they're mission driven on this and I appreciate that work.

So I would move to approve the request from Daniel W. and Nancy R. Brubaker Trustees to rezone or to amend the proffers for the 12 acre site addressed at 210-290 and 280 West Mosby Road.

Second.

Any more discussion?

Just recently.

Council Member Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Fleming.

Aye.

Council Member Alsadun.

Aye.

Aye.

I present to you the capital improvement program for fiscal year 25-26 through 29-30.

As I usually do this time, I always like to thank everybody who was involved in this process because while you hear me speak about it quite a bit, there are many, many individuals who are involved and that doesn't just include the CFD review committee, which includes the city manager, the deputy city manager, the director of finance, myself,

And this is Sustainability and Environmental Manager.

And this process kind of feels like it's almost never ending.

I think Mr. Hartman always looks forward to my email in the summertime when we begin this process, which is usually around July, and then we really dive deep into it in September, October, and November.

So it feels really good to get to this point.

So you've heard me do this talk before, but I have changed it up a little bit this year with regard to just showing graphics rather than some of the tables.

All of that information, of course, is in the CIP, the draft CIP that was linked in your packet of information.

But as you all know, the CIP is not a budget, but a planning tool.

Every year we go through the same steps to ensure that we are reviewing the projects, reviewing the finances, reviewing the sources of opportunity as we add the new year into the five-year horizon.

So it is a multi-year production and you have to have at least $50,000 of a project to be included in the document itself.

There's been some discussion about whether or not we should increase that amount, but yet to be decided upon, more information to come on that may be in the forthcoming year.

So in the document itself, every project has a project sheet.

There's the expenditures that are planned, and there's also the financing plan that shows whether it's coming from the general fund, whether it's coming from grants or bonds.

All of that information is in there for every single project.

We do really the best we can to put so much information onto one sheet.

Almost every project itself could be, in itself, a binder of information.

It does take quite a bit of effort to really be succinct in identifying and explaining these projects.

As you all know, most likely the funding for each individual project will not occur exactly as is outlined in the CIP or really in the exact time frame, but it does present a picture for us to plan not only for the physical projects themselves, but financially

for the city to be able to look at the landscape to see when we might have higher project needs and higher expenditure needs in the coming five years.

And then every year during the approved annual budget is when the actual commitment is then dedicated to any particular project.

So I have a few slides just showing some charts here.

All is like basically the same data shown different ways, okay?

So what you're looking at here on the screen is the five-year totals for each of the different funds.

Of course, as would be expected, the general fund carries the most demands with many of our public works, fire department projects.

This year, some HDPT projects, but this is to be expected.

Then looking at it in a different perspective, same totals but broken up differently for each individual department.

There you can see which departments are then planning for the particular projects and the amounts for them.

And again, this is for over the five years.

So water, public works, HDPT, transit, fire, and general properties carrying some of our higher amounts over the next five years.

And then, again, same totals but then broken down in each fiscal year over the next five years.

And then, sadly, the sobering slide of showing the reality

of what our demands are in each of the fiscal years and then what is actually available.

So what you'll notice here is these are the total dollars needed once you take out grants, once you take out bonds, all of that.

What's still needed shown in the orange and then what's available in each, which are projected in each year over the next five years.

I will try to answer any questions you might have about any particular projects, but we offer our favorable recommendation to you all.

for approval and Planning Commission did the same, five to zero.

There was one slight error in the staff report.

It was referring to the Planning Commission meeting occurring on February 12th.

That actually did not happen.

No.

Okay, go ahead.

Adam, could you go back to the previous slide again?

So this is what would be needed from the city

Got it.

There you go.

Could we get a listing?

I know all the projects where their grants are listed often have identified the grant source.

Could we get a listing of the federal grants and the federal pass-through grants that are both available and I guess it's fair to say potentially in some jeopardy at risk at some point.

Yeah, I would I would offer I know that Mr. Vandenberg and Mr. Probst have worked on some higher level identification of those grants and funds that are currently coming into the city that could be if necessary I mean if possible put in jeopardy because of some of the things going on in Washington DC I think to Mr. Fletcher's point I think it would be difficult to identify

I have the spreadsheets that show every project that is receiving grants and bonds.

The legwork, which can absolutely be done, is then going into each project, identifying who among staff needs to help understand what specific grants are we talking about, what are those pass-throughs.

Some of the big ones that I think of, especially with regard to pastors, is I guess it's coming through smart scale, but some of that money is going to the state then coming to us.

Is there any way then that, not to cost extra work, Brian's kind of already done that for us, pulled out that information of funding that's at risk.

We asked for that before we went and talked to our legislators, so

Yeah, in fact, I mean we can resend that that information that Mr. Vandenberg and Mr. Propps put together.

Again, that's kind of identifying the current federal and and as Mr. Fletcher pointed out some of the what would on its surface appear to be state funding coming to the city which is in reality federal funding coming to the state equivalent department whether it's VDOT or

And I see that water actually department the amount of money actually that the city is investing and this is I mean a huge investment for the city and I wish like people like the residents know how that actually important for them and how

In fact, you're going to get a presentation this evening from Mr. Collins, our Director of Public Utilities, who's going to lay out the long-term financial model.

And as I say, our Public Utilities Director, he enters the council chambers.

Thank you.

Okay, I will open this item up for public hearing.

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

You all have five minutes.

Thank you.

I'll close public hearing.

I had a question and maybe someone here knows.

I just think about it until after Adam sat down.

But is there a rationale behind why we would consider raising the capital project amount from 50 to 75 or to the next higher amount?

Because he said that

No, and honestly I didn't mean that to be sort of scary in a way that projects go away.

about whether or not the document includes all of the smaller scale projects.

So what you don't see in this document that some departments use the CIP software that we have to basically plan out their projects and some of them don't get anywhere close to $50,000 so they're never included in this document itself.

So there's been this discussion about increasing the amount as things continue to get more expensive and so forth

increase the amount that actually gets included in the CIP document.

And I've just had some casual conversations with the finance director about whether or not we should increase it to $100,000.

So, I mean, in reality, those projects aren't disappearing.

Okay, thank you for clarifying.

Thank you.

Go ahead.

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the fiscal year 2025-2026

Councilmember Fleming?

Aye.

Sorry.

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Fleming?

Aye.

Aye.

Mayor Reed?

Aye.

Council is going to take a recess.

We'll be back in about

Good evening.

Mayor Reed, City Council, Tom Hartman with Public Works here tonight.

No actions needed on this item.

This is more of an update to tell you about some changes we want to bring to the neighborhood traffic calming program.

Then we'll do some outreach and next steps and hopefully again like I'll say at the end we'll be back in the summer with a formal plan that you can adopt that then we can roll out and start to utilize in Public Works.

So briefly, what is traffic calming?

It's a way to make sure we keep our neighborhood streets open the best we can to be multimodal facilities.

So we know that our streets are not just for vehicles, but they're also for bikes, pedestrians, transit buses.

And we want to make sure that they're in fighting environments for all those modes to be able to share the same space.

We also want to encourage appropriate vehicle speeds through our neighborhoods.

So that's 25 miles per hour or less, just so it's comfortable.

And if you are walking your dog or

teaching your kid to ride a bike so that you can do that comfortably within your street.

We also want to reduce the risk for crashes.

So we want to take those touch points and those safety spots, understand them, do things that we can to make them more safe and reduce any type of risk that might be on those neighborhood streets and roadways.

So they are those multimodal facilities where we do feel safe traveling around our homes.

And as you would expect, we receive numerous requests annually.

from neighborhood citizens and groups about their streets, their neighborhoods, and Public Works has a process for us to look through that.

However, it's antiquated, and I think we need to do some updates and changes to it.

So the current neighborhood traffic calming program was developed initially in 2001.

It was last updated in 2012.

And primarily, this is for neighborhood local streets.

Collector roadways aren't eligible.

under the current program, except in a few unique circumstances.

And currently, we have Sunset Heights, Portland East, and the Old Town neighborhood are current or previous neighborhoods that have gone through the entire program.

If you remember, if you've ever looked at the neighborhood traffic calming guide, you know that our flow chart is multiple pages and multiple steps.

And that's one area that we want to try to work on.

We think the process is laborsome.

and it could be restrictive to certain communities or certain households that don't have the resources, the time, the ability to slowly and methodically work through our entire process to do safety improvements to the streets.

So these are some areas that we want to update.

We want to look at the process.

We want to look at the resident effort required to participate in the program and to be an active participant.

We want to look at thresholds and criteria.

Currently,

Thresholds are your speeds have to be 35 miles per hour or greater.

That's 10 miles per hour over the speed limit.

If we would do a study in your 34, technically your street wouldn't qualify for any extra effort from Public Works to be out there.

Volume wise, we need to see at least 600 trips daily on your roadway, or more than 100 in the peak hour.

And those are pretty significant numbers on streets, and we wanted both of those to be met in order for you to even be considered for the program.

to see what measures we could do.

It also had things in there about cut through traffic, which is incredibly hard to detect unless you have boots on the ground watching vehicles drive in and see them exit.

I mean, it's a very difficult measurement to try to get to.

Equity concerns with some of the policies that were currently in there that you had to get a petition signed by 75% of the residents within the neighborhood area.

In some neighborhoods, that's just a very tough thing to do quickly.

So that would draw out the process that we saw numerous times.

And we've had a couple of programs that couldn't make it out of the petition phase, because that was just such a hard stumbling block for them to get to.

And data reliability, as we had a program in, took long to get through petition and process.

By the time we got to do the measure, we questioned whether the data was still relevant.

So we had to go back out.

do more studies, which would take more time.

And also, over the past couple of years, Public Works has taken on a more administrative role in some of these concerns.

So in some streets, especially in the Northeast neighborhood where we saw accidents, you'd see the news, like some of the intersections, cars upside down within two or three within a four or five month period.

We administratively, we just wouldn't fix that.

That doesn't need to go through neighborhood traffic calming.

That's our job.

We need to go take care of those streets.

And we did that.

We raised intersections, did some stop sign relocations,

did some speed tables in the neighborhood and I think some of those problems have diminished.

So since we're being more proactive in that, we thought this was a great time to also look at our neighborhood traffic calming program.

Also, last year we were lucky enough to get a new planner position at Public Works.

We hired, his name is James Paulhamus.

James has done a great job since he's been here in July of looking at our current program, looking at other neighborhood traffic calming programs throughout the state.

and coming up with this refresh or updated program that we'll present to you all this evening.

So the major change is we want to get away from having neighborhood criteria that is very based on you have to meet this threshold or this threshold.

We want to get to a point-based system where we look at more factors than just speed and volume.

And I'll show you on the next slide, next couple slides, what those factors are.

It'll also be a streamlined process where neighborhoods can submit a street within a certain time period.

Once that time period closes, our staff will evaluate, fill out the matrix, and then it'll score and rank the streets that we receive for that request year.

And you'll be able to see your street's concerns relative to the rest of the city.

That's one item that we share with the public frequently when they call in about

My street has a speeding problem.

My street has a volume problem.

It's not safe.

Well, we have a lot of requests, but it's very difficult for us to share exactly how much different your street is versus this street.

This process will be able to put them on a level playing field, so you'll see that, you know, street A might score 90.

Your street, street B, might score 50, which means we probably need to put more effort to help the 90 get better before we work on your street.

It just helps us be transparent to make sure we're spreading the limited resources that we have to the most need.

Also, from our research, over 70% of the localities that have neighborhood traffic calming programs use this similar metric-based approach to putting those solutions out on the street.

So we can't get away from a flowchart.

We love those flowcharts of public works.

This is it.

It's a little cumbersome.

It's not meant for you to digest right now.

This is just kind of the flavor of going from the three-page one down to only one page.

You'll see on the yellow here, the neighborhood group will call us by August 1st and let us know if the street.

There's some eligibility that will determine in the fall.

We'll collect some data.

We'll do some scoring over the winter.

Then as we get closer to budget, we'll be able to create the prioritized list, submit budget requests to help fund those,

then that next fiscal year be able to implement the measures that we feel will address the concerns that we saw.

Much more fluid process, an annual process, a rolling annual process versus having a neighborhood group call us, do some talks, have a neighborhood meeting, come to council to get approval for a study, go do the study, develop the plan, talk to the neighborhood, find funding, implement the plan.

Right, so that was one of my

So some of the streets that most need will receive those improvements faster.

Not to say every street might see still that three, five year process, it's because they might not score as high and it might take time for us to get to those streets.

But the ones most in need will be faster.

We have a sort of a way if you already have something in the pipeline that's going and then you have someone

They get knocked out.

So our plan process, and this is something we'll take to the public and get input on and bring back to you with a final recommendation, would be to have that window close August 1st.

So if you would call and submit something in October, we're going to hold that until the next cycle.

Because there's some work that we have to do to collect data, do the metrics, do the funding, figure out what improvements we would put in place to get that done.

We couldn't allow someone to come in in December and jump the line.

So if you would submit after that August 1st deadline, it would be the next round that you would be considered.

But you got people in the pipeline right now, right?

Right, we have the whole populated, it's 40 or 50 streets that we've already kind of looked at that we're not going to make them re-request.

We know you've called.

We talked about it.

It's sitting here, queued up, ready to go.

Once we get through this in the summer, if you like our idea and you adopt our plan, we'll be ready.

In that first list, they'll be scored then?

Correct.

Right.

It'll definitely change on our approach of how we're going to, which streets we'll touch.

Right.

So the next slide kind of shows you

How the scoring system would work.

So speed and volume are still half the score, because that's still an important metric with the neighborhood traffic calming.

But we added things in like pedestrian generators.

If you're near a school, if you're near a university, if you're near a greenway, where we want you to be able to walk to and from safely, you'll get some points based on your proximity to those features.

Roadway topology.

If you're on a neighborhood street with no sidewalks, you probably need to focus on that street more than a street that has sidewalks on both sides.

Because those streets on both sides have those measures for pedestrians to be safe out of the way of traffic.

Not to say it would preclude them, they're not going to get as many points as a street without sidewalks.

Street density, that was important if you're on a street with tons of homes and entrances, that's something that we need to consider as well as one that might have one or two homes per block.

That's a different feel, different nature of roadway.

And then also we have some additional considerations

based on the LMI areas, the environmental justice tool.

Is there a steep grade on the roadway that would lead to some concerns?

Are there other traffic calming measures in the area that we need to be aware of that might augment or change how we would want to approach that street?

And different things, but this is a compilation of things that James found from other communities and how they included, how they built out their metrics.

So you've done your inversion of smart scale.

Correct.

This is Harrisonburg's smart scale.

As much as we don't like it, it does a good system in some aspects.

So a lot of information there, but again, this is meant to be more of an overview.

So next steps, barring any concern from this evening, we plan to hold an open house in April to share this with the public because we know that the folks that have been calling us, we're going to reach out to them and say, hey, we have a new program that might be better at addressing your concerns.

Come let us know what you think.

What are we missing?

What should we look at?

What are some blind spots?

We'll make any adjustments in April and early May that we find from that public engagement.

Then we'll visit our bike pad subcommittee to get their input on the updated program and policies.

Then in June we'll go to our TSAC to get their vote, adoption, or support of our updated program.

And then the goal is to be back here in July with a full formal program.

Ideas, at that point we'll share the initial rankings of the street for the public so you can see

Yeah I mean I think my only I like the matrix system I do think that my only concern small concern would be that

If people are already in the queue, will they be pushed back even more because somebody else is coming ahead of them?

The main complaint I've always gotten

is how long it takes to get the traffic calming into the neighborhood, right?

It is, and it frustrates the staff as well.

And that's the reason we've taken more of an administrative role in those specific safety concerns.

We can't let the safety problem linger and just say, oh, traffic calming.

No, we're going to go take care of the safety problem.

But it's those, they're doing 30 versus 25.

And does it have a budget for this program?

Luckily for Public Works, a lot of this is just

asphalt, concrete signs.

So we can we do a lot of that in house and then that that budget can be stressed because we're just buying materials and then our staff and equipment and labor are putting those facilities in.

So we're really trying to stretch those dollars as far as we can to make sure we're putting the we can put measures on the streets where they're needed.

But as we get over time, you may potentially see some additional requests.

Our city manager will see some additional requests within our budget over time if we start to find ways

I have no doubt this will work well.

It will help streamline for you guys what's a priority based on criteria you've decided is important to determining that.

So give staff a good idea.

I think it will help for the public.

to add some clarity to how decisions are made and why they're made and I think you'll obviously get feedback in the open house but these categories I think seem fairly straightforward and folks can weigh in on that.

I think it'd just be informative for the public as well to see this and I think this is a great job.

Excuse me.

So, I'm looking at the flow chart here and I know this question is going to come up.

Okay, I make a request.

The request is screened for initial street eligibility and it is determined that we are not eligible.

That's a great question.

And James or Jacob probably know that answer, but I'm not recalling it.

I think we talked about that, whether it be a year off or two years off before we can reconsider you.

That's probably in the, well, a street that does qualify has three years on the list before they roll off.

So that might be the answer that you have.

Once you're deemed ineligible, you have three years to wait before you come back.

But I'll confirm that.

Yeah, that's probably in the guide.

I just didn't get into that.

I don't remember that level of detail.

That's a great question, though.

We talked about is there minimum thresholds that we should imply but then that was we want to just be openly transparent and just even if you scored 10 out of 100 we're telling you you scored 10 out of 100 and this is just where you're at and if we ever get down I would it'd be great if we get down if we were worrying about those type of streets in the city that'd be amazing

No, again that depends on quantity, the volume of the streets that we receive and the measures that would be needed.

I wouldn't even want to speculate at the number right now because I don't want to give anyone a false impression.

I know you might get a little stressed out about funding wise.

I don't know.

Hopefully there will be a few more than ones or twos, but again, it will depend on the measure.

If it's just a speed table and a sign, those go a long way.

But if we're looking at measures as far as speed radar signs or rapid flashing beacons with technology, batteries, solar panels, those dollars dwindle much faster than if it's just a speed table.

Well, I just wanted to echo that I think this is a great idea.

I bragged about it on the radio this morning along with Andy.

What I am concerned about is if a street is determined not to be eligible are we just are we

We didn't get into the level of detail of his presentation that shared exactly what those eligibility criteria are.

I don't think it's very, very hard to be eligible.

What I did like though is that if your street is determined not eligible, you're still getting something because you may be considered for the team up to slow down.

Right.

And we still communicate with Sergeant Westfall.

He's an active participant in this refresh program.

I forgot to mention the Sergeant Westfall.

We brought him out and got his input while we were rebuilding this.

So citizens call him as much as they call us.

So if they weren't eligible and we did team up to slow down, they'd be working with his staff as well to see and have those discussions about what on your street is working, what isn't, why do you feel unsafe, where there is you don't feel safe.

This is part of the Mount Clinton Pike Shared Use Project.

There was a contract with the contractor for $2,431,136.

And long story short, they ran into a lot more rock than we anticipated.

I know the public works department was very careful in keeping tabs on how much rock was being excavated, measuring and weighing and that sort of thing.

There was pretty much agreement on the amount of rock that was removed.

The contract amendment is for $617,727, and in the contracts we always build in an opportunity for change orders to be hit.

If there are changes to the contract, changes to the scope of work, but if it goes over 25% of the contract or $50,000, whichever is more,

Any questions?

Good luck offsetting as much as possible.

All right, 7C.

We're ready to talk about some towing.

Advisory board.

Sergeant Westfall.

How are you?

I'm fabulous.

My car's out there.

There we go.

I have to push the button first.

This is an ordinance, suggested ordinance to deal with private property towing which sometimes is referred to as trespass towing.

The city was approached by some community members in discussing the potential of creating a board to help regulate private property towing and that's where this proposed ordinance came from is to help regulate

the private property towing that takes place in the city.

It's a little lengthy, but so essentially it's an advisory board.

It would be an advisory board to this body.

The would suggest like we do with the law enforcement to what we have now.

This board would be suggesting ordinances that we would be asking the City Council to consider to help.

in essence regulate the trespassing or private property towing that's taking place in the in the city, which is quite a bit on the weekends.

There was a time when the Police Department was taking in all those reports.

When you.

So this would be a board that, a valsary board that we would appoint.

Okay, and I'm looking through this so it seems that it's going to be two representatives from the police department, two representatives from a licensed local towing and recovery operator, and one citizen representative.

The reason why we've come to this is because there has been some what are we calling it predatory towing

So there are some predatory practices.

Not really prevalent, but there are some predatory practices.

There's some current.

Their state code, but state code is very limited code on the behavior and the actions that these towing companies can take.

We've had some complaints about the release.

You know they're towing you.

at 2 o'clock in the morning on Saturday, but they're waiting till the afternoon on Sunday to release your car.

So those are things that I foresee the advisory board regulating and tackling that if you're going to tow 24-7, you're going to release 24-7.

We've had some visitors to the city that get towed and they go to get their car and it's gone.

Well, they need to get back to their home.

And what's the average dollar for a tow?

So like, I mean, I'm hearing $300 maybe, you know, you get a boot, you get a, what were y'all calling it?

A crab call?

It hasn't been used in a long time.

The barnacle.

So fortunately, city staff approached our representative to the General Assembly a few years ago and that was fixed because it was a loophole in the code.

The barnacles weren't defined so they could charge what they wanted to charge and that was fixed to where it's $25.

I believe it's still $25.

So none of these tow fees right now are exceeding much over $200 because of state statutory fees.

that are currently in place and there's a fee in there that's getting ready to expire, which was the fuel and added fuel surcharge of the state code that's getting ready to expire come off.

So that's also one thing the advisory board can do is bring back recommendations to this body to set limits.

I see you're only going to meet once per year.

We'll definitely have to meet more than once a year to get it established and then we'll have to meet periodically to deal with complaints similar to the law enforcement to where we meet when we need to meet.

I have reviewed some other localities ordinances that I believe would, it's not reinventing the wheel.

One of the things that I envision being able to do is creating some consistency between all the companies that are involved in trespass towing or private property towing so that there's consistency across the board also

This is going to bring some of the property owners and property managers are going to have to also be on board and looking at who they're hiring and understanding what the requirements are.

There's currently in state code some protections for residents of these communities already that we want to make sure are also being followed.

Some complexes, if your tags are expired, they're towing you.

Just to be clear, this is this is step one and kind of a multi step process.

Yes.

The city can pass an ordinance regulating telling, but preliminarily you have to pass this ordinance establishing the advisory board.

Yeah, so all the towing companies should obey this board, right?

And if they don't,

I like this.

I think it will, it's kind of advocating for residents.

Like I hear a lot of things, like horrible things like hometowning companies.

Well, I think that was probably the most, you know, alarming thing that was happening is that we would have

business.

The towing companies that are popping into cities and doing this.

I think this is really needed.

Probably can't get too soon where we can provide some protections for folks.

I think it has been predatory at times with some places, I imagine.

Yeah, okay.

Can we get a motion?

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the zoning ordinance enactment of chapter 6, article F, private towing advisory board as presented.

Second.

Any more discussion?

Actually, I do have a slight question, comment.

This is all okay with the Virginia Dillon rule.

They let us do this?

Oh yeah, this is straight from the Virginia code.

Okay, good.

Council Member Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Fleming.

Aye.

Council Member Alsadun.

Aye.

Hello lady.

Hello everybody.

Good evening.

I'm Housing Coordinator Liz Webb here to present an update on residential development in the city.

And this presentation is a joint effort because the data mainly comes from community development processes.

So a lot of thanks is due to Adam and Tan and Nirma in particular.

And Adam has also regularly shared this update since the housing study was released in the beginning of 2021.

And I think we're going to be doing this regularly, I think twice a year.

And he's also updated the format recently so that next time we can provide some more details.

So what I'm going to go over is what we have, which is mostly data from the American Community Survey from 2023.

What's been approved since January 2021, which is sometimes

called Pipeline, and then what's been built since 2021 by looking at certificates of occupancy.

So starting with what we have, owners make up about 40% of households in Harrisonburg and renters about 60%.

That's the occupants.

But when we count all the units, there's a few more.

Now this, the vacant units are not our vacancy rate per se.

I am interrupting sorry but

That 7% then, would we assume maybe based on this 3% vacancy rate?

The census data from 2023, I think it was either two, two and a half or three percent.

And that's always a little behind and it's always a little off.

And that's the rental market.

So in the rental market, we tend to measure it based on

you know an actual vacancy rate in terms of what our needs are and then in terms of for sale we're measuring not just the units but like how long they how long they're on the market so we're looking healthy is based on like whether it's three days on the market average or 60 or you know so we're looking at different things we measure but yeah it's the rental rate is closer to two or three percent okay so that is that's the units in terms of how they're being used

in terms of the units and what they actually are.

And these are the census categories.

I don't know that we would group them the same way.

So we've got our single family detached, our attached, which includes townhouses and row houses, and our multifamily.

And the small versus large is number of units in a building, not in like a whole complex.

No I mean those those large is like ten units or more per building gotcha but if you've got like a big campus of eight unit buildings like

Yeah, so yeah, that's sort of like if it's live like eight units here Those are small the unit the buildings anyway, we've got apartments and townhouses and houses and a number of mobile homes as well Okay, so So we know types of units

We've got their uses.

And then so how did the uses add up by type?

Looks something like this.

And first, with this data here, I want to clarify, we don't think that all mobile homes are owner occupied.

And that must have been a glitch in the census data.

It wasn't that way in prior years.

We know that some

Does that seem low to me?

So it's the census data, and I think it's fairly close now, and I'm going to say that is information that is not because of the, it's not real estate, it's not tracked in community development, it's part of, like Karen's got the date on that, and so,

It has to be accounted for by the assessor.

Right.

And I think we'd likely, I mean, if there's any variance, it would just be probably pretty small.

We only have two large parks, right?

We have the Wendy's and then the one that's off of... Country Club?

No.

So again it's census data and there's only so much we can glean and understand from it so yeah there are there I think it's condos or it could there could there's some rate of error in the data but there are definitely like multi-families that are that are bought you know individually I am not all that

familiar with what makes something a condo or not.

Does that make it always a condo?

We have a lot of students.

And just because something is, you know, not prevalent, but there's like whole apartments that are owned and leased out by an apartment manager.

And then there's,

units, like any units that can be purchased, but then rented out, you know, as a one off by the owner, you know, in their own like smaller portfolio.

And so there's a mix of that.

But, you know, for this breakdown is, you know, owner occupied, renter occupied and vacant.

And so, you know, the biggest number here is single family detached that are owner occupied.

But that's still only about 28 percent of our housing

Which is a lower number than in other comparable sized cities It's like I guess 56% in Rockingham County is the number of units that are single-family detached and owner-occupied In Stanton it's still over 50% and Queensborough too So

So that's the census data.

I'm going to move now into what we've been calling the pipeline report.

But it's really use approved development.

And so for this update, that means projects that were rezoned or got special use permits since January of 2021 when the housing study was released.

It excludes projects by right.

So that's anything that got rezoned before January of 2021.

or things that have all, like that just were allowed by right.

And so to clarify, we call this sometimes informally a pipeline report, but I think pipeline is associated with projects that are actively moving forward through the development process, regardless of details about when a use approval may or may not have happened, well, would have happened.

There's always, it's allowed if it's moving forward.

But this report here, that's in the memo, that is projects that have different statuses and have been approved, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they are actively moving forwards.

So there's a lot of overlap, but we don't have a separate pipeline report.

We have projects that are moving forward, we have projects that you approved,

There's some that are, they're the same.

I'm not doing a good job.

Okay, let me.

Because I think, so I'm interested in something different, right?

Well, yeah, and then this, what the report that's in here is everything that has been approved by council since 2021 and the status of it.

There are other things that might be getting built that aren't in this report because either they already have the zoning for them.

Yeah, if they already had the zoning for them, they wouldn't come through for your approval.

And so everything that you've approved is in this report, but not all of them are moving.

Some are moving faster and some are not.

So we've got all the answers here.

We can answer all of the specifics about it.

You know the answers, right?

So if something got rezoned in 2019, or if something just has a certain residential zoning on it and someone's building on it, it's not going to be in this next report.

And so the numbers in this table are, you know, they're coming from the rezoning.

It can be like the maximum number of proffered or it's tied to the rezoning request, but it's not always the exact number of units that gets built.

And it's also, it's like the total number.

It's not an increase from what was allowed before.

So like with the quarry project, for example, the number that's reflected in the numbers, it's 950, which is how many units are allowed now.

And that doesn't speak to the fact that about 50 acres already was zoned residential and someone could have built something on that without the whole process.

The whole number is in here.

It's not the difference.

I get into some of the weeds here, so bring me back.

We want to make this as useful as possible.

I've called things complete, under construction, or paper only.

Paper only is a lot of categories which community development deals with.

I don't mean to gloss it over.

There's actually a lot of work that goes into getting something from paper to being ready to be built.

And it is in the report, but it's not in the slide breaking out the details between fire review and engineering comprehensive site plan.

And this is where things that are paper only are living right now.

About half of them have gotten council's approval and haven't moved on to the next step.

And then about 30% are in fire review.

In the report it says the last time something was touched by staff which can be sort of a loose guide to you know whether you know how quickly it's moving along but it doesn't necessarily mean something is active or not.

It's basically anything and, you know, yeah.

Or it could be not stalled and it's just not, there's things going on that don't involve working with the city, such as getting financing together.

We don't always know why something is or isn't moving, but we might know some things About some of them, you know and some of its things that you might see a properties for sale or notice that it's you know been sold and things change It's kind of for Adam, but you may know if you actively Reach out to projects that may have been sitting for a while You haven't heard from for a while and just say check in to see what's happening.

Are you moving you stalled?

You done?

To be blunt, no.

Because we're so busy with projects that actually are moving forward.

You know there's always projects that sort of get their use approval and then we just kind of don't know what's going to happen with the project.

Some go from

also works here, the terminology we use, but they basically have to make a positive affirmation moving forward with the project.

The state requires localities to any special use permit for residential projects.

You have to offer three years.

And sometimes they've asked for four years, and I always objected to that.

We need the housing now.

But on the other hand, this process can take a while.

So now it's by default three years by code.

Yeah, and there's so many different reasons.

You're absolutely right, ma'am.

There's so many different reasons as to why they stopped, why they stalled, why they never started.

I mean, there's just so many different reasons.

Sometimes projects will come to you and it's the person with the idea and then they want to sell the idea.

And I've seen land for sale that I know we approved the rezoning for.

And that's one reason why I kind of wanted to see the summary because we have projects coming at us rapidly at times

And I want to see a clear picture of, well, what have we approved?

How many have we approved?

What is stuck, right?

What is being completed?

Yeah, I mean, I'm looking at your next slide is kind of breaking it down.

I think as far as what might be stuck and any variety of reasons, I don't know.

I mean, those are conversations that, you know, if that's the kind of information that would be helpful for me to be bringing to something like this.

Because some things, you know, there are some that we might have

you know just based on the date but there's some that we have other updates on like the one that you just heard from with the rezoning earlier tonight I think they hadn't moved forward yet with their site planning but they just had that updated proffer and they've been working on the financing but if you look at the report the date the last date prior to just now would have been I think in that report was

was the September of 2023, but that I know that they've been actively pursuing their financing just as one example.

Yeah, because I mean, there's a there's numerous projects that I will.

Okay, well, we approved that.

I personally wonder what if everything that's just zoned residential suddenly got built.

Not just things that were approved, but things that are by right.

And we know that that won't happen overnight.

You don't blink and everybody puts a house in a residential zone.

It also helps us as council members to answer the questions that we get when people are saying, y'all are not doing anything about housing.

But once we approve them, it's out of our hands, basically.

So, you know what I mean?

I do.

Yeah, and so these are the numbers from the last time I was here on this, which was in September.

And you can see, so,

This is now.

Well, these are actually numbers from February.

And they've moved around since then, but they're sort of frozen on the slide.

Break this down a little bit, Liz.

So you're saying, just to break it down, be clear, for example,

Paper only is 54 duplexes and there's only four that's under construction and then 14 have been completed.

So, you know, I've looked at this nationally and kind of looking at, you know, you have a pipeline, you have some of you have approved.

But naturally the number is probably just below 50% of projects that get approved that go towards completion.

And it varies from place to place.

And we're certainly way below 50% at this point that get approved that go to completion.

But that's kind of a going rate.

In most states in Virginia, that's about where we are.

The challenges with supply and with interest rates are not local to, I mean they're national, so yeah, I think some of the challenges, there might be some nuance here, but those delays or stalling out projects are happening, I'm guessing.

I think that's been kind of historically,

A lot of projects get approved, only some come to fruition.

So that's good to know that even when we approve something there's any given thing, there's a 50-50 chance it may or may not get built.

But of all these we've approved, which half will be built and which won't?

I don't know if I would look at a project in

Yeah, that's a good point that when we're approving, I mean, I like to say, are you actually going to build the thing?

How do they know?

But gauge my approval in part based on how committed they appear to be to actually build the thing.

Liz, were you able to find out why these approved housing are not being built?

I don't think... I mean, I know there's a lot of variation.

Some ultimately maybe, like there are some that just didn't seem to pencil out after a certain point based on just changes in the market.

I can think of probably a couple where it seemed too daunting for someone.

Maybe, I don't know.

I think those are the kinds of specifics that we can find a better way to present.

Because I'm just pulling from memory here, and I don't want to give any information that's not really on the mark.

But it can be anything.

I think a lot of it's just been the market lately.

And because you can see some of the ones have started to move, I think there's just an, okay, these are the rates.

Let's get going.

I think the challenge for a developer at that point is

It's hard for them to get secure funding if a program hasn't been approved by a city, right?

So the number of milestones you have to reach often when you're kind of doing a development to get funding, even if you're doing an affordable housing project, for example.

I think that, for those, the funding often is competitive.

So whether you get it or not, you won't know at that point your weight against other projects.

But to be able to move down that, what they call the capital stack line to build those funds, you have to be a certain stage of approval within the city.

No one's going to commit money to you if you haven't been approved.

It's the complex nature, especially when they're affordable, of putting together multiple avenues of funding.

But at least can they get a pre-approved and something that we can see pre-approved and then after getting all the approving from the city then they get final approved.

And of course for council, when you do the rezoning analysis, it really is based on is this the proper use or a proper use for this piece of property and it's very difficult.

Yeah, the reason I'm saying that, I'm echoing Mayor Beatt about people when they ask you, we approved many, many housing projects.

When you come to reality, I mean, there are these numbers, as if we didn't do anything.

But we can assure that they will continue.

That's the scary part.

It's like our intentions are on track.

I feel like we're looking to see the types of housing we need in the city and we're really voting to kind of eliminate all those barriers for different folks to find housing.

But then once we approve it, then we kind of hand it back over to them and say, now go get a shovel.

And so they can take their time getting that shovel.

And as Liz pointed out, too, a lot of it is it's not bad faith on the part of the developers.

They move slow because the process moves slow, but those seem to be moving along at pace with, you know, they're moving along at their pace.

I can't speak to the market rate ones as well, but they either seem to be moving or not moving.

You know, and there's some kind of moment where somebody says, okay, we've hit this point, like it's a go or no go maybe, but I mean, what you're doing when you approve them is

is effectively saying, okay, now this is allowed here.

Just to say, you know, Nasser, so if someone wants to spend, you know, it could be hundreds of thousands on an engineering report, right?

They really can't do that until they can, you know, they know that it's approved to move forward.

You wouldn't spend that money until you knew it was approved and those engineering reports can probably be pretty expensive for someone.

And so

Then why should we count them?

Understand what you're saying, though, Nasser.

In a way, it gives you a false sense of reality because you think this is actually what's going to happen and it's going to happen right now.

So it seems like it's a bit misleading.

That's great.

But what do we learn?

Now from these numbers, do we learn a lesson?

What do we learn?

That this is just what happens in a city.

This is kinda, from what I've been reading, I don't know, I don't wanna act like I'm an authority, but it just seems to me like this is the way that development works.

In some places it moves faster, some places it moves slower,

But we can't control the rate of the movement.

That's the sad part.

The only thing we can control is whether or not we approve the development.

But we can't say we've approved this now.

Show us what you're going to do now.

I mean, we just have to have faith that they will make it through the paper only stage and that it will keep moving.

Yeah, I mean, I agree.

I mean, we should like also like sit with them and see if like there isn't from them, from their part or is there something that we can't fix.

So we need to know like we can't like just keep that number increasing, increasing.

We have to sit together with them and maybe they will say, oh you guys you are making it harder on us.

Then we can, I mean, we can work.

Or if we find out that

I mean, the reason from them, because they are not securing that amount of money, then we know.

So when we talk with people, what they ask us, like Mary said, we know how to answer.

That's that.

If I might add just some thoughts.

So always keep in mind that all properties in the city of Harrisburg have a zoning designation.

All undeveloped residential properties have a potential for an amount of units that could be built on them.

If we take a piece of property that's zoned R3 and let's say there's 10 acres, they have the ability to build single-family homes, duplexes, and townhomes by right.

Oftentimes you will see me here talking about townhomes because they're asking for a variance to build private streets.

and then you have to apply for a special use grant for multifamily.

So there's already a today potential.

The reason why I think that we put emphasis on these numbers is one, we did the housing study to understand what we need.

Two, when these people come to

When they've invested so much time, effort, and money to get to this stage, clearly there's a desire to do something with this property.

They have put up quite a bit of energy to make this happen.

So it is more likely that they will move into a different stage of development than those that already have by-rate permissions and no one's talking about them, right?

Because a lot of people always kind of forget, like,

It always depends on who owns the property because the property owner may not want to develop it.

They may like the property the way it is.

Some of the on paper, so the data I have is shown a little bit differently, but I can speak to some of these numbers of like, so when Liz is talking about on paper only

Like we have 7% of the units that you've given use approval for that are in the engineer comprehensive site plan phase.

11% are in the notice of site plan acceptance phase.

We have some that are released for construction, some that are under construction.

Maybe in the future we could present this a little bit differently to give a slightly different picture because in this pie chart that I have, in fact, Amy and I at our Homelessness Coalition meeting last month, I had discussed this.

When you have an individual who has gotten to the point where they're in the engineer conference or site plan phase, it is a higher percent chance that they're going to be actually going to construction because that phase is when they're really, really dropping a lot of money.

and it just takes time so as Liz was saying these numbers are fluctuating recently they've been fluctuating almost daily or I should say probably weekly like just today learned that there was a nice notice of site plan acceptance for the second phase of the Lucy Drive apartment so you saw some construction going on with Lucy Drive second phase of that was approved so there's 108 total units that

All indication seems that they're moving into the under construction phase.

Just last week, Bluestone Town Center's first phase was issued a notice of site plan acceptance.

So they are moving, and it takes time once they get those indications to do that.

And something else I thought of is that

I'm here presenting rezonings and special use permits because the zoning doesn't allow what they want to allow.

And somebody said earlier when they were saying, OK, yes, you've given the approval.

Now that thing that you want to do is allowed there.

So at least if I were to answer a question of what are we learning, I think that we are continuing to learn that Harrisonburg is a desirable place to be, to live, and to build in.

So I guess for me, and this is more like a one-on-one, me and you sitting down, because I'm thinking of projects that we approved a couple of years ago that just never... I could tell stories for many of those.

Right, right.

And so that's, I want to know, you know, I'm thinking about, you know, the theater project that we had, right?

And you know, and then some others.

Just like, like what is happening with those.

So you've seen the Wilson Avenue project that's under construction.

A lot of people have noticed park apartments under construction, but see that one doesn't get counted because that was prior to the housing study.

And so that was sort of already built into the pipeline.

In fact I went back to a spreadsheet that we gave to Mullen and Lonergan when we were doing the housing study to see which of those projects did we tell them.

These are projects that are in the quote-unquote pipeline, and many of those didn't get built.

And Park Apartments is one of them.

And so there have been some, and actually when you look at the years, I think Liz even has a slide showing the years, like 2021 and 2022 were getting units built that this body had nothing to do with.

There was no rezoning proposed or anything like that.

We're starting to pick them up in 23 and 24.

You're getting smaller projects like the Fully Road Project.

You're now seeing Wilson Avenue and things like that that are being constructed.

I'm trying to think what larger scale projects might fall into that category.

Nothing is coming to mind right away.

But I mean, park apartments was a big one.

The Edge.

So there's two projects that are owned by the same company.

The Edge might be for, this is me speculating, so could be sort of like their next project that they might want to move forward on.

They were focusing more on the project that's down near the railroad tracks and because of the bridge construction and all of that, that has stalled them some.

So it

They can't move forward without the bridge project being completed because VDOT is down in their space utilizing for temporary construction easements, lay down areas for the materials.

I know they're working through some floodplain matters with FEMA, so there are things that are happening, it's just that a lot of those things also take time.

The Armada-Hoffler project that you referred to for the Regal Cinema site,

I'd be surprised if that project actually moved forward.

I'm not quite sure what I can say publicly, but I'd just be very surprised.

That project was known as Nerd Apartments.

It was like a 15-16 unit.

That one actually has moved.

Yeah, Liz, I'm sorry.

I think with the way that Adams pulled together some of this data just recently that didn't make its way into this presentation, I have a really clear sense how we can present some of that and track how, you know, show you like

sort of a time lapse of what is and isn't moving, you know, that speaks to some of these questions and draws out some of that information about, you know, the rates that things progress or don't progress.

And for the specifics, you know, a meeting would be great.

Okay, so just so you know, again, what is needed, this is from the housing study.

It was a projection for what would be needed by this year.

We haven't yet updated these numbers moving forward, but this is what was said in 2021 would be needed by this year.

And these are the certificates of occupancy through the end of 2024.

So we're not, we're not close to that number yet.

I like to get the data.

So I looked at what's happening in other cities.

So I can't see the certificates of occupancy there, but I can see the building permits.

And it's pretty close, right?

And Housing Forward keeps that list of what's being built.

And so they have us at 226 building permits.

So we're just at 212 here, so from 21 to 24.

So that's for Harrisonburg.

And you know, we're consistently one of the fastest growing cities Another one of the fastest growing cities is Winchester And so over the same span They've done 627 and they're even a smaller city, right?

Stanton has double us 445 over the same period

I'm sorry.

Because we issue many, many more building permits than 200.

Yes, yeah.

Waynesburg was 522.

Charlottesville 385, so a little bit lower.

So they kind of, you know, probably mirror us in some ways, the challenges they face there and have some lower income.

Lynchburg in 1082.

And in Virginia, the Harrisonburg-Rockingham area is the fastest growing by building permit year over year in the state.

So last year, this year, 46% was the rate of change of Rockingham County and Harrisonburg together.

So Rockingham approved 2000, or issued 2405

new building permits, right?

And so we're 212.

So we are significantly lower in what's getting built, what certificates are getting issued.

So we do need to find some way to open this up.

And Nasser, I think this gets to a little bit what you were relaying to earlier.

What is it?

Why are we that much lower?

What's happening here

that's not getting the shovels in the ground for us because it is happening and it could be any number of reasons.

The big projects in particular have very complex funding threads and of course some of them are moving forward and may see building permits issued two or three years down the road from now.

But those numbers to me speak to something that we're not getting done here for some reason.

I was just going to say, I think Mr. Fletcher clarified that the 212 are certificates of occupancy and that we issue many, many more building permits.

Well, the building permits, the new building permits, at least by the Housing 4 was 226.

Oh, I see.

So these are new permits.

And so, you know, so Virginia is seeing growth in housing.

It may be very complex to figure out what that is, right?

Finding our folks not able to put together the capital stack for whatever reason.

you know there are the loan amounts out there.

Many of these other places, you know, there are these CTFIs, the community-developed financial institutions that exist.

We don't have much of that activity here.

That helps on the low, on the affordable housing scene.

But there is something, Nasser, kind of to your point, really of trying to understand, because people do want these built, right?

They do, you know, people are investing, they do want to get them completed.

So there's something that we need to

I think it's important though too when we use language like we are behind.

You all are doing what is within your authority to do.

The private sector is the one that is perhaps lagging in their step of developing this housing.

Yeah, when I say we, I mean it is a community.

So I didn't mean to identify the specific part, but just kind of Harrisonburg is a community.

And I just want to reiterate one last thing, and then is just what Adam said.

In terms of the numbers moving,

Just recently like in the last few weeks since you know these numbers were received like there's a lot of activity happening right now.

Well we've said yeah I mean Blue Stone, Lucy Drive, there's projects that have just recently opened up.

Like there's a lot better.

I mean our average permits over the last two years have increased.

Any other questions?

Thank you, Liz.

Thank you.

All right, Mike, come on.

I thought I skipped over you.

How are you?

Thank you.

Thank you, Mary.

City Council, Mike Collins, Director of Public Utilities.

Let me begin by just reading a couple sentences from your memorandum.

Council memorandum's summary was HPU Director Mike Collins will make a presentation reminding City Council of the methodology that's used to plan water and sewer rates, presenting outcome of the most recent analysis, and elaborating upon the inclusion of the recommendations into the fiscal year 2026 budget.

One thing about reminding council, I know that Mayor Reed, Councilman Dent, Councilman Robinson, I believe, have had this presentation before.

However, I believe we have two new ones who have never had this presentation, so I'll try to break some kind of a balance here between too little and too much if I can.

This is always a challenge.

This is a challenge of critical infrastructure funding versus affordability.

So we'll jump right into it for a minute and let's just talk a little bit about where we are today and why we're there.

Probably the best benchmark for affordability in my industry is 5,000 gallon a month, which is typical residential family of four.

We use that as a benchmark.

In Harrisonburg in fiscal year 25, that cost is

In my industry, just some references to affordability.

This requires someone working at minimum wage post taxes to work five hours a month to pay your utility bill.

One of the thresholds is generally used by bonding agencies and affordability is your monthly, your annual salary, your annual utility bill should only be no more than 2% of your annual income.

That would be about $38,850 a year.

And then more importantly, when you look at our rates, we're about 59% of the state average.

And I just passed something around for your own information.

You can find that on the internet.

I'm not going to get into that.

I give you the averages there, but you can get on the internet in a heartbeat and see who charges what.

There's about 100 utilities listed, so I thought I'd provide that.

So having said that, let's talk about when a customer or our citizens ask us, where does the money go?

I'll draw this to you.

of the monthly bill goes towards operations.

What am I talking about operations?

We have five disciplines of professionals, about 65 employees, put out three billion gallons of water a year.

That's a B, billion with a B. We care for over 17,000 accounts and we care for $877 million worth of assets if we had to replace them today.

We do that for 32% of the monthly cost is dedicated for that purpose and I'll circle back around to that in just a second.

Another 27% of that bill goes to HRSA.

Harrisonburg-Rockingham Regional Sur Authority, you appoint members down there, that's for their operating costs, their debt, their pretreatment, and their construction.

12% of the bill is transferred to the general fund for support or

9% is in debt and 20% is capital cash funding.

There's two numbers there that are in red that I'm going to circle around that are going to be the focus of my presentation.

$877 million in assets to take care of and we've got 20% of our monthly bill going to that particular topic.

When I walked through the door, I didn't do that, but I was out there, I heard him say it, so I walked through the door.

The speakers out there are very, very good and I was just sweating.

We'll circle back around to the capital CIP plan in a minute.

But I wanted to talk just a little bit about operations.

And I personally love to benchmark our utility against Western Virginia Water Authority.

No particular reason other than they've been in operation for 20 years.

They are governed by a board that's interests are

undivided to the utility.

They were formed from a situation where one jurisdiction had major, major water problems, one jurisdiction had major, major sewer problems, and they just have certain assets and things that I would love to have but don't have, so I've bent myself against them, or ourselves.

Whereas our average bill is $52.90 in somewhat of a less, a more, a market that's a little bit less costly than us, the average water bill down there is $77.40, so we're significantly cheaper.

What I was trying to focus on here was the cost of operations.

You're paying $44.60 for operations a month down at Western Virginia Water Authority.

Here you're paying $32.79 and that includes the taxes.

We're very very very proud of how efficient we are as an organization of running so that doesn't become a focal point at all for me going forward in the finances it takes us back to the capital now I will say one thing if you jump on the internet and you

You want to take a look at Western Virginia Water Authority's 2026 budget.

They will tell you that they're looking down the road, they're expecting a 4% water rate increase from 2025 to 2034 and a 5% sewer from 2025 to 2034.

That tells me, and we're going to get into the methodology here just quickly,

That tells me they kind of know what they're doing and they're really looking far enough ahead.

And I'll kind of explain that as we move along here as to why I feel that.

So now that I feel comfortable in telling you that I am very, very proud of the operations component and efficiency of our water department, let's talk about the problems, the area that's given us problems.

You can get on our internet and our website and there is a document on there under our department called SAMPS Strategic Asset Management Plan.

A comment was made recently about the CIP.

There's two words that are very, very important in my organization.

One is expansion and the other is ACSO, ACSO.

Expansion is new stuff.

We don't have a lot of that anymore.

We are a mature utility.

We're going to get into the axo, but I will tell you about just a couple things about new capital that's in that capital plan and really affects this budget and our rate planning.

We're going to have two major, major debt

Undertakings in the next 15 years between now and 2035.

First one will be in a year.

It's for $10 million to put intake screens at North River Drive, all three of our intakes, to protect fish larvae and fish juvenile from getting into our water system.

It's mandated under our Virginia water withdrawal permit will cost us $10 million.

The other one's gonna be about a $15 million bond in 2035, and we're timing that because we're timing it to 2035, and I'll explain what that is in just a little bit.

It's up 33 West.

We're timing it at such a time that other debt drops off so that it has minimal rate impact.

And on the sewer side right now, those are two major debts in one water tank later on down the road.

Those are our water debts.

our water capital that's going to be funded by debt in this plan.

We don't have anything on the sewer side in the next 15 years except to keep an eye on what happens with the Harrisonburg Rockingham Regional Sewer Authority expansion on their interceptors.

But that being said, I want to get into AXO and talk about this and make sure you have full understanding of this.

ACSO stands for Annual Cost of Sustainable Operations.

And if you look at that little graph down there at the bottom, that's one of the eight CIP funds that was presented to you earlier today.

That particular one's called Water Distribution.

Handles only the water lines, the fire hydrants, and the valves.

We have other funds for the tanks, the pumps, the water treatment, and all that.

But what you see there in the bars

is the amount of dollars we need to spend in that one fund based on those assets retiring.

Based on, you know, if you had a set of tires on your car and you knew when you felt like you were going to need new tread, that's a projection of all those assets.

We do that for every fund, put all those funds together.

But we can't adjust our rates like those bars flow.

So what we do is we take a 25 year average and say, okay, we need to average this out over 25 years so that the rates will be consistent.

Make a long story short, in the water fund, we need $5.5 million per year over the next 21 years, which is $115.5 million to replace retiring assets that began in 1870s.

I'll get it out a little bit.

We also need $2 million per year for 21 years or $42 million to take care of the same problem on the suicide.

That's a lot of work, a lot of asset management to get to this point.

Now I just want to give you a little history here real quickly.

You know what we're doing.

You city council are following and we are following the footprints.

If we could turn back the hands of time to 1870 to 1915, we were building water lines around Court Square.

and we built from Court Square out.

You tell this story all the time.

Yeah, I don't want you to ever forget it.

They haven't heard it.

So anyway, that's what happened and then we went all the way to Raleigh Springs.

And what you have in front of you is one of the major driving, one of the two major driving forces for capital outlay in the next

15 years.

Over that time, we've got $32 million.

We've got a $14 million death coming, as I explained.

What we've got there is a 10-inch line from 1890 that we're going to abandon, a 12-inch line that was stalled in the 1920s that we're going to abandon.

We've got a 16-inch line that's in raw water status that we're going to convert to potable status to take the place of the 10 and 12, and a new 30-inch line to fully utilize that water to the extent possible.

That is partially completed, but as you can see I'm looking at 14 million dollars in debt and a million and a half dollars over the next 2026 to 2038.

So that's factored into this long term model and your CIP.

The other scenario is we're also going to build the city out from Court Square outward.

And I've got listed several projects there.

that are already in the hopper.

If you go out to Wolf Street right now, you'll see our crews doing a lot of work.

You'll hear Tom Hartman talk about replacing and doing a raise grant on Liberty.

There's a lot of old utilities under there that if we put that new stuff on top, we'll be digging it back up.

So we've got the plan for that.

But we're gonna be building from the city out, and that's gonna take about 3.3 of that $5.5 million a year over the next few years.

And I just wanted to show you something here.

Anybody got an idea why I got that in there?

See that fire hydrant there?

Right around here to the north that water lines are four inch water line in areas and it's an 1870 water line It's one of those projects that we're getting to in the next few years.

Okay around the south end is an 1898 10-inch water line That's the kind of challenge we have going forward

And, you know, here's the you know, we had we went through a COVID year and a lot of people slowed a lot of things down.

You know what?

We didn't slow down the physical deterioration of those assets under the ground.

No matter what we do every year that happens.

And if we don't address it, you know, you hear this thing, America's infrastructure is crumbling.

You tell them not in Harrisonburg, OK?

Now, the other thing I'll just quickly jump into so I can get you guys out of here.

I'm jumping over on the sore side.

These are two major interceptors coming down.

the north side, east and west sides of Harrisonburg.

Capacity issues are a concern there for build out.

Also, when you leave the city limits and go all the way to the Harrisonburg Rockingham Regional Service Authority, they have a plan in front of them that's going to replace and enlarge those lines.

And of course, we burden 83% of that cost.

It's a $100 million project.

They already did the work from Stone Spring down to my building and then they plan on doing the rest of it over the next 20 years.

But they're also trying to match that with debt dropping off at the Sur Authority so that it doesn't affect rates.

But we have our own problems in the city.

And instead of doing a comprehensive replacement of pipes, millions of dollars,

Right now, we've got about 757 gallons a minute too much when our city builds out in a location about near Wolf Street.

And the other one is right by Bridgefore Stadium.

That's going to be a problem when we build out.

So instead of doing a massive, massive replacement of pipes, we are trying to go into sections and rehabilitate

and upgrade sewers to the point where rainwater, runoff, stormwater, housing, sump pumps, everything like that.

We think we can get that out and not spend millions of dollars.

So we have great challenges for us and this slide right here kind of shows you a subsection.

We in the next four to five years will be in there extensively.

It's kind of a little hard to see exactly where it is, but you can see it's a little bit north of Court Square and extends.

I can get something, but this is not real to find there, but we know exactly where it is.

We're gonna be in there doing everything possible to get extraneous water out so that we can free up that capacity in that interceptor coming through the city before growth catches up with us.

Okay, and I'm telling you that's a challenge.

That's a challenge, but we're gonna do it and it's gonna save millions of dollars on our part.

That being said,

We now get to the financial model, and I'll quickly go over this, but we use a model by Waterworth.

I've had it several years, they market it.

But I was involved in the development of it many years ago, and here's what we do.

And I'm happy to say that Mr. Banks and Amy and Larry from Finance Department are familiar with this model.

They've test driven it a little bit, right?

And so what we try to do is we try to put, and you can get online if you want to see all the details that go in, what goes into the model, what comes out.

I've got that on a presentation on our website, but I'm not going to do that tonight.

I'm going to tell you what came out of it so we can go from here.

So what this model does is we put all these capital needs, all these operating needs, the debts, the transfers, everything in it.

We put an expected growth in it.

We apply two financial policies that I think you just recently adopted.

One is that we never want fund balance to go below 1.25 times the sales revenue.

I think that's now a city policy.

Did we adopt that?

And the other is we don't want our debt service coverage ratio needs to be above 1.25.

We forecast

A 2% annual growth in sales.

The last 10 years that's what it's averaged.

and what comes out of that is that we propose rate increases from 2026 to 2032 as shown on the screen.

We're talking about 5% in 2026, 5% in 2027 for water, and three and a half percent for the five years that follow.

On the sewer side, it's 2.25 in 2026 and drops to two

Two drops to two thereafter.

Now, that's a shift.

That's a shift because the last time I was here, those numbers were five all the way out to 2030 and they were four from 2026 all the way out to 2032.

What has happened?

And that's why I'm back here.

If nothing changes, and I propose the budget next year, I'll follow the same thing.

That's last year when I did the budget, I followed the same presentation I gave you before.

This is a shift because we've reduced the rates we're intending to do.

We're intending to apply.

And the reason that has occurred is for the last two years, we have had 5%

Growth rate in our commodity sales, both water and sewer.

That's a little bit unprecedented and unsustainable.

We don't predict that going forward, but that has had a huge effect and therefore we've been able to reduce our projections from 5% to three and a half and from four to two.

and now I go back and I say, remember I said, you read western Virginia law authorities and I like what I'm hearing because it sounds to me like they're doing the same thing we are.

They're looking at what happens in that.

Now there is one disadvantage to this that in order to keep these kind of rates is we do incur some risk.

If you look at the period between 26 and 2035, we need $75 million.

These rates increases will only bring us in 61.

So over that period of time, we will be $14.5 million short.

That's the risk we will incur.

And when I say the risk will incur, those assets that I showed you on that bar graph theoretically will come due.

We'll hope that some of them last a little longer than standard industry life would tell me they would.

And they will.

Some will be shorter, some will be longer, but on average we hope it will do a little better.

That's the risk we carry.

But we do that to balance affordability.

But here's the key.

We will recover.

And I think any utility

When you don't apply a rate when it's necessary or when you kick it down the road, it becomes more and more difficult to recover.

Those numbers, if you say, I don't want to do anything in 2026, then I've had Amy and Andy and Larry play with this and say, it really makes these numbers down the road really get high fast.

And we went through that once in COVID and didn't do it one year and

I feel good in these recommendations.

I'm happy to say we've reduced.

I don't think we will sustain 5% for another year or two.

We won't make quick decisions, but if we do, I'll be back to do it again.

If our growth goes in the opposite direction, then we'll have to make adjustments the other way.

The key point here, and I just want to picture you what's going on here.

This is the output from the model.

The whole goal here is

is to keep our fun balance above that little red, our fun balance is that dark red line that's trending between the red and the two dotted lines.

You can see we successfully do that, but you can see in 25, 26, 27, and 28 how it drops

and gets very, very marginally close to not being acceptable.

That's why we have the higher rates up front because we've got to do that.

We've also had to defer capital, but then we catch back up down the road.

And that is our strategy on the water side.

That's the strategy on the SOAR side.

You can see both models work well.

And on the SOAR side, we have a pretty good fund balance.

Right now, I know we've talked about the farm and getting that back into the sea farm, getting back into the water, the SOAR budget, but you've got to have a long-term sustainable plan for the rates, and that allows us to keep it low initially and then keep it at 2%, but you can see we achieve what we're after here.

So that's, to just give you a little summary, what would happen here, $52.90 would go to $54.72.

I think that's about a 3.5% rate increase, and it's what, a dollar, a dollar, and I'm doing the math here, $1.82 a month increase for this year.

So that's what we're looking at to sustain the model.

There is one little thing that's a little tricky.

We are, what we're actually trying to do with the rate increase is bring in $700,000 additional in capital for water and about 300, I think 380 for sewer.

And that helps us not defer any more capital than we have to.

But how we do it is still a matter of discussion.

For years now I have been doing that by, we have city rates, we have rural rates.

In the city we have a block rate structure where there's the first block of usage and then there's a cheaper rate for a higher use.

Many years ago when I first came here, there was like five blocks and the difference between the first one and the bottom was huge.

Now we shrunk that over the years.

We have city, county, and we have both block one and block two.

I have historically, for the last ten years, made that adjustment based on a dollar per thousand.

That kept the difference between city and county the same, that kept the difference between

We don't have to do it that way.

We can do a percentage across the board if we want to do that.

However, we're going to be careful about that because that violates one of our contracts that we have.

The other scenario is we can always do something that I did in 2010, I think it was, cost $60,000

With a consultant back then, I did it myself in 2019, there is a philosophy that you look at the customer class.

that will tell you who's putting the financial burden on your water system.

And when I say that, we classify our customers as residential, commercial, industrial, institutional, and apartments, both city and rural.

And it will tell you, according to an AWWA format, who's putting the burden on your water system financially.

and you can turn around and use that to try to create a rate structure that matches that.

Matter of fact, if you lived in California, you'd have to do that, but we don't live in California, right?

So anyway, but if we ever wanted to do something like that, that is so extensive.

I want to know a year ahead of time.

It's not something we can do in 2026, but 2027 if that, I mean, I actually had a former council member who was interested to know if JMU was paying their adequate share.

Questions?

May I stop?

Yes, you can.

I'd like to ask a question about that.

I know the threshold, the minimum you get billed for, folks who use substantially less than that, who are good water savers, don't get the effect of that.

I've heard that argument before and I cannot sit here and tell you that's not a good argument.

But let me tell you how that would change.

We have what's called a minimum.

So I think the minimum right now is 3,000 gallons.

So you're going to pay for 3,000 gallons whether you use 500, 1,000, 2,000, or 3,000.

Then it starts changing, okay?

If you move away from that, you would not believe how important and how much more revenue comes out of that particular group of people.

In other words, you can imagine somebody only using 500 gallons a month is paying a lot more per thousand gallons than somebody using three.

But there is a way to get away from that.

And what you have to do is go to a base rate.

What a base rate is, is it says to you,

based on the size of your meter, you're going to pay this minimum before you ever pay the first drop.

Then everybody starts paying after that.

We could go to that.

I did have a council that wanted me to look into that.

And I will tell you, it's a little bit dicey making that change to make sure we don't make a mistake.

And I would say, if you want to look at that, you need to kind of say, we need to look at that not when we're at budget time, but

We just saw a presentation about that You know Relative incomes and here's some reverse many other places is much lower than many other cities our size And so, you know, I wonder how we can

reduce burdens in ways that make sense for us as a city and what the strategy might be for doing that.

When we think about how we, the small things we can do to help elevate the economic security of our residents.

These are the type of things, small things we can do.

I guess it's never the case of if you do something here, then something else balances out.

If you would turn back the hands of time, 15 years, almost the majority of municipalities in the United States had a declining block rate structure, which meant the more you use, the cheaper it is per thousand.

Okay?

It was Harrisonburg's case.

You know, you were trying to track big water users.

Okay.

That was the case.

That was probably the case from the 40s to the 90s.

They also had minimums.

Today, that has gone by the wayside.

The majority of them have uniform rates and have base rates.

So we have come closer to having uniform rate.

As I told you before, we once had four blocks.

We now have two blocks.

Myself and the finance director got together one year and said, okay, let's really work on this.

And we made a pretty big

Step in it was successful and it was okay and was a lot of feet wasn't a lot of pushback and We got through that we're happy where we are today if you want to look at a base rate Just tell me and I'll come back if you don't mind.

I think as you can see the opportunity to do a mathematical analysis is just exciting so I think I've heard I've heard and certainly from several of you some interest in some of that so I think you know Mr. Collins and his team and

and Ms.

We absolutely can do it.

I appreciate and recognize just how good a water system we have here in Harrisonburg, right?

It's really one of the many things, you know, HEC, the water system that is kind of pride in the state, right, that we have here.

It's just a matter of targeting who you want to target.

You have to make those tough decisions.

We don't do anything based on income or anything like that.

We try to do it other ways, but anything's

A lot of stuff going on out there in our industry today.

We've graduated from very typical declining block rate structure and still have the minimum.

We were there in the 90s, we've got there in the last 10 years, made some moves.

I do appreciate all the great work that you do, you and your staff for the city water.

I wonder if the county using our city water and sewer, do they use it?

Yeah, by contract.

Oh, we, just to be clear in case you get into discussions in the future, we have three customer types.

We have our city customers, those that live within the city.

We have rural customers, those are customers that live in the county that we sell directly to.

And we have, you'll set the rate structure on both of those.

Well, let's take 33 West all the way to River Rock Park.

From 1898 until now, they build up there.

They connect.

They pay us.

We connect them.

We build them directly.

Rockingham County, however, wields water to the north.

We send one bill to Rockingham County and they bill all their customers directly.

And another curious question like do you know if they're like bills lower than city or higher?

I think it depends.

They try to stay a little bit lower than us.

I don't want to get into their finances, but their cost of operations is nowhere near where ours is, so they have no money for capital.

That's their challenge.

Debts we're going to have to take on to build these things, what, 10 million and then 15 million.

What makes me nervous about that is what we were addressing on Capitol Hill with the threats to the tax exempt status of municipal bonds.

We'd better hope that holds.

I mean, you know, the thing about debt

This strategy here is a strategy to fund AXO through cash.

The only reason we would take on debt, first of all, the first debt we're talking about 10 million in the next year is totally mandated.

Mr. Brown will find a way to get us out of that.

Valley Springs, we will cash fund it until we get to 613 and that's because it's right beside the existing pipe and as we finish a project we can connect in and keep going.

Once we get to 613 we're gonna go around behind Cooper's Mountain because of all the clutter in Route 33 and to do that is a large, large, a large, large

investment and there's no way we can wait till we can get enough cash to do that so we'll have to capital fund that.

But it will occur when our debt service drops off.

That's why we timed it 2035.

By timing 2035 though, that 1898 water line will be 140 years old with a useful life of about 120.

That is what I call risk.

Now should we incur problems you know all kinds of water breaks and problems like that that schedule might have to change but that's the plan for right now and that's why that debt was funded but we I mean we have been so lucky or fishing or whatever not to get into debt and I never hope I have to get into debt to fund AXO

Okay, Axos, where we are, we are a mature utility.

We are not building a lot of new stuff anymore.

We are rebuilding what we have created for a hundred years.

And to cash fund that to me is the whole key.

We don't want to get in a situation where we don't raise our rates and then all of a sudden we've got all kinds of problems and now we've got to do a debt and do a, you know what I'm saying?

That's not the way to run a utility in my opinion.

I'm just thinking this could be a sort of poster child for why we need that tax exempt municipal bond.

Going back to the contract with the counties, I think we did it in like 1993, is that kind of when

I think it's the last version but kind of the the margin value of it so I think we don't do percent increases with them we do

absolute increases as we kind of change our rates.

I know I'm getting into a complex issue here, but we've kind of changed how we do our rates over time and it has changed how the contract works with the city and the county in many ways.

I know that sewer

line on the north side of the city there, that will certainly support a lot of north in the county, potential development out in the county, right?

The sewer?

Yeah, the sewer.

No, we don't have sort of capacity for the county in the north.

And the only way that would ever happen

is if we would collectively do a pipe project all the way through the city to do that.

The strategy that I showed you back here intends for us to use the piping network that we have and take out the extraneous waters that are getting in that system so that we don't have to rebuild that system.

There is no capacity for Rockingham County to the north of the city.

And to this point in time, there's no plan to do such.

Now that's not that's that's to the north and even with rural customers whether it be Rockingham County rural customers now there are other little pods in places that make sense to do that where we have capacity that we won't use and can market it and for example Granite Farms was a great example of that because it goes down through a hearse intersection that we intercepted that we would never get our never get our capacity worth so we used it

North is not a good thing.

Not even half, 25%.

Granite Farms and Quarry Heights were

The one that goes to Granite Forest, which is a county development, will go through Hillandale Park and then hit an interceptor

This interceptor right here that comes from the quarry will actually come down, make its way to South Main Street and make it that way.

Grant Farms will go through Hillandale Park and go down on the other side of Route 42 and make its way to Mt.

Crawford through what's called their Upper Cooks Creek Interceptor.

Any more questions?

Did I have too many slides?

No, you did fine, thank you.

Any questions?

Thank you.

Well, you know, one thing I just just to say this, you know, as we you know, this has been a evolving document.

So this has gone through, you know, a number of councils over a number of years here to get to this point.

And so this was my second time going through the council and just to say I really appreciate the group here.

in discussing this, going through this vision statement, coming up, making our modifications, trying to add our input to an existing document.

So I really appreciated the work that everyone put into this.

I think everyone was very, very serious and very attentive and listened.

When I was talking on the radio this morning I relayed that we'd done this retreat and update our vision and I said the most important thing we did was pull up a city for all to be our front and center tagline because that's who we are and talked a little bit about some of the tweaks we made so to speak, changing that to a harmonious community

adding the financial empowerment piece to the economic development for residents as well as businesses.

A few tweaks to the resiliency like explicitly adding renewable energy.

A few other tweaks here and there.

We rearrange the educational part so that it covers the full spectrum including workforce development.

So it's a good evolving document and we've

Yeah, I mean, we spent two days on this, and it's, we, even though we've changed councils, it still represents who we are, and I think you're right.

I mean, one of the, what I wanted, and we put out

But first was a city for all because that's what resonated with this council, that that would be our tagline.

And so, I mean, our retreats are open to the public.

Anybody can come to our retreats and we take it very seriously.

We spent two days together.

We had a facilitated retreat and this is what we decided to do.

And I think it fits the city that we are today.

I just want to throw a little bit on the economic development piece because that is one of the pieces that I put a lot of time in with us is kind of adding kind of a new component with our economic development and so I appreciate folks' patience and kind of working through that with putting a component in here which is about

economic opportunity for residents.

And when we think about economic development, we often think about businesses and retention and recruiting of businesses, which is a necessary strategy we have to have.

And when we do, we have someone who does that well.

But another component of economic development is our residents and their financial security, their financial empowerment, their economic opportunities, their social mobility based on that.

So I appreciate folks working with me on that to kind of put that in here.

And there's so many components that are part of that, right, of the small business work, the entrepreneurship work, but there are a lot of other things, talking about how to reducing fees for folks, child savings accounts, housing counseling, the types of things that we can step in to help residents individually.

So it's a pretty broad range of things that you can step into.

I'm excited for us to kind of start looking in that direction as how we can do some work here.

Look at our fines and fee structure.

What can we do that helps folks there?

Yeah, I appreciate the council how they are caring actually to their local residents and to the city.

and I saw that the council was aware of all the issues that residents are looking for a solution for and they put the vision that hopefully will be implemented in the future and will address all the issues that people are actually having or facing.

One of the things I've kind of heard a few rumblings and I wanted to verbalize those to the council tonight and say that I stand with our vision we work very hard on this vision but when people make comments I like to address them so that they know they have been heard and basically

What some folks have been saying is that they're upset that we are adopting a vision that is not in line with the MLK way vision.

So I pulled that vision up and just wanted to go over it because I think that everything that's in the MLK vision is in our vision and everything that's mentioned here

is something that we took a lot of time with discussing during our retreat.

So it says the MLK Way coalition believes in inclusive community in which every person is loved and valued regardless of any difference and is empowered to participate, have a voice, and affect positive change in her or his community.

I think that we covered that.

Our vision does this and so much more.

I think that we've also included in the work that we did during the retreat a vision, guidelines, thoughts, wants, needs for the future that take this to a whole other level.

And so I just wanted to say that I like hearing

when folks give me their honest feedback.

But I also like to stand up when I know that we've done everything that we can do as a council to cover all of these things that have been mentioned.

That we make sure that we listen to what folks are saying, but that we dig deep and make sure that we're covering everything that makes our community the place that everybody wants to be and wants to live.

And so I am just happy that we came up

with a vision that we all agreed upon.

And it seems like it's been an evolving vision.

So it's not something that just we came up with that day.

This is just an evolution and just the tweaking of things that have been in the work for a long time for our city.

So I am very happy with what we came up with.

And I just loved working with the group that day and being able to be very transparent in our

and our needs and desires and wants for the future of the city.

Second.

Roll call please Pam.

Councilmember Dent?

Aye.

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Aye.

Funding was appropriated in this fiscal year, fiscal year 2025, adopted budget for the update and replacement of the wash bay equipment and our central garage

This supplemental appropriation will provide additional funding to complete that project.

So the central garage fund already has its own fund balance?

Correct.

It's just a matter of putting it on a line item?

And that's related to the city?

That garage over the city?

I move that we approve the supplemental appropriation in the amount of $300,000 to the central garage fund as presented by City Manager Banks.

Second.

Any more discussion?

Council Member Dent.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Vice Mayor Fleming.

Aye.

Council Member Alsadun.

Aye.

Aye.

All right, we'll go to other matters.

Comments from the public limited to five minutes, so matters not on regular agenda.

Anyone wishes to speak, please state your name and address.

Hello, my name is Michael Greeley.

I live at 618 Virginia Avenue in Harrisonburg.

I have two concerns.

One has to do with litter and trash in Harrisonburg.

I go on walks in my area of Harrisonburg, Virginia Avenue and I see much trash and litter coming from properties.

Sometimes the trash blows from properties to streets and other properties and I'm very concerned.

I don't know if there are ordinances on the books or how this can be resolved.

to the people who are living there or the people who are landlords and so forth.

I noticed the problem more so where there is off-campus housing from the university.

I noticed some trash that faces Virginia Avenue, for example, some trash that drifts off into the gutters on the streets and so forth.

So that is one concern.

And I did not know if in the past Harrisonburg has considered maybe

a beautify Harrisonburg idea or program that might be promoted and make people more aware of trash and litter.

I think we all want our community to look as good as possible.

And I think that when people say trash, that doesn't have an impact.

I know it discourages me when I walk around and see the trash.

people's yards and so forth.

Then my other concern is Virginia Avenue.

I notice that sometimes the vehicles and motorcycles go very fast on that road.

I did go to the police department a couple months ago and made my concerns known.

I've not seen any real change.

Just a general announcement, April 12th is Black's Run cleanup day in the city of Harrisonburg.

So if you come down to the municipal building, you'll find hundreds of people going out to pick up trash that day.

Thank you.

Anyone else?

Seeing none in person.

I read there are no callers.

Okay, Vice Mayor.

A little quicker because we had a long long break between meetings a lot happening with us.

A couple things since our last council meeting on the 26th February 26 we had a

JMU liaison meeting and so myself and councilman Robinson were there Generally good discussion probably the last one with President King maybe Tomorrow JMU will be having their announcement of their new president.

So they gave us Let us know about that really discussionally centered around the Port Road University Boulevard project which is

consuming a lot of time and energy for them to get completed.

So I guess everyone will be able to kind of weigh in a little bit on the National League of Cities Conference that most of us went to, which I believe like 3,000 folks from across the country were there.

And so a lot of things going on, and each of us kind of go our own ways with the stuff we're working on.

One of the committees, or the committee I chair, the University Community Council Committee, we had a speaker there, someone I brought in from Providence, Rhode Island, a woman named Courtney Hawkins, who's their director of operations there.

And they just did a, Providence has done a fascinating, what they call pilot payment lieu of taxes with their universities and hospitals in the city there.

and done a really fascinating structure how they set that up.

And so we had a presentation of that.

I think it was pretty well received.

Mayor Reed was there as well from other universities who were attending that.

We'll have some follow up for that.

One of the ideas was developing a balance sheet to help cities and their university partners kind of look at all the contributions being made from each.

and helping that form discussions about how to maintain a healthy relationship moving forward.

And NLC is committed to put some research and funds behind to help me do that.

So that was exciting.

I was at a focus group, they had an invite focus group there talking exactly about the financial empowerment work that I've talked with.

I met some really interesting folks who are doing great things in other cities

around the country were kind of the smallest of the cities that were there but didn't get a chance to sit beside the vice president of Wells Fargo who funds a lot of this stuff and was very interested in Harrisonburg.

So I said, well, we're interested in your funds.

So let's follow up on the conversation there.

And then also had another focus group I was with looking with the research department at NLC

with things they might look at in the future and how they might be directed on some of those things.

And really the new one that came up, about 15 of us who were in the room, was Civility.

And this is a group, bipartisan or cross party folks who were at NLC there and that was kind of everyone's desire is to have NLC

take a lead and step into discussions around maintaining and increasing civility.

A couple other quick interesting things on the 18th, March 18th, that was the Chamber, Harrisonburg Rockham Chamber for kind of a soft launch of the Latino Business Council.

I talked to Brian about it, an opportunity for us to connect and learn kind of what are things they're looking for help for.

How can the city enable

that type of support and development and entrepreneurship within the Latino community.

And so I think that's a really positive development for the city.

I think we've often talked about that.

How do we bridge many of these gaps?

And this one seems to be a really positive one there.

And then on the 21st, which is what is it, the 25th, so a few days ago, we had Eric Scorsone, Dr. Eric Scorsone from the Weldon Cooper Center.

come here and present to us about the work they're doing.

It was a really interesting discussion.

We had folks from a number of different localities that were here in that discussion.

Learning from that, EC's Rockingham County and Harrisonburg and the Valley

is really kind of looking the future of vibrant places where economies are going to grow, folks will be moving to, you know, we have a lot of attractive qualities here.

And so how we step into supporting that, being smart about our growth is key.

But I think he, it was good kind of to hear his feedback to say you guys seem to be doing something right here.

Some of it is just the natural geography you have actually right here.

in a place that's set up pretty well.

But I appreciated the folks who came to that discussion.

I appreciated the work he's doing.

Look forward to the work they're going to be producing for us here pretty soon as well.

Okay, Danny's already mentioned the first two events that we did together at NLC.

represented at the race equity and leadership meeting and the women in the municipal government.

The one thing that I remember most is that there was just this fear all the way across the board in every meeting I went to about the possible loss of federal funding and how different cities were looking for ways to

The reality of it is that nothing's gonna be pretty if we do lose those funds and so That was just something the one thing I did wanted to mention