City Council Meeting   5/27/2025

I call our Tuesday, May 27th City Council meeting to order.

Roll call, please, Pam.

Mayor Reed.

Present.

City Manager Banks.

Here.

City Attorney Brown.

Here.

Vice Mayor Fleming.

Here.

Councilmember Alsadun.

Here.

Councilmember Robinson.

Here.

Interim Chief Pollard.

We do not have any special recognitions tonight.

I do want to state that

At some point I will be leaving the meeting a little early.

I have to travel to Richmond, Virginia for the Virginia Transit Association Conference which I'm the president of and I need to be there early in the morning so I'm going to be traveling tonight.

We'll do a quick recess and I will switch chairs or the vice mayor will come over and finish out the meeting so I want to

All right, so we'll go to the consent agenda any item placed on the consent agenda Shall be removed and taken up as a separate matter if so requested by any member of council Otherwise all items will be voted on with one motion Any discussion Quite a few special events

Mayor Reed, City Council, this public hearing is to set the real estate tax rate for the fiscal year 25-26 budget.

This specific public hearing is required by state code.

State code says that when your real estate tax assessments increase by more than 1%, then we have to have a public hearing to set the tax rate.

In our case, assessments were up 5.9% going into next tax year.

Okay.

Thank you Any questions for Larry?

Okay, I will open this item up for public hearing if anyone wishes to speak on this specific item Please state your name and address you'll have five minutes Seeing none in person Pam do we have any callers?

Thank you.

I will close public hearing on this item.

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve the real estate tax rate for fiscal year 2526 to be set at $1.01 per 100 of assessed value as presented by staff.

I just will say, you know, we're over a dollar.

And we were the very last city, 38 cities in Virginia, the very last city to eventually make it over a dollar.

Some cities now have reduced that.

They haven't had to build some of the stuff we've had to build here.

But we're the last city to go over that dollar mark in tax assessment.

So held as long as we could on that.

I appreciate the work that staff have done in putting the budget together.

And I'd just like to reiterate that we are holding the tax rate steady.

Even as the assessments go up, that's a likely change over time.

I want to say

This actually came to fulfill the demand or the request by our residents of the city.

Every time when I talk to people, the community members, they raise these things, this issue actually.

And then now the city and the council are listening to the demands and the requests

and we hope that will continue that for their next budget.

Roll Call please Pam.

Aye.

Council Member Robinson.

Aye.

Council Member Alsadun.

Aye.

Mayor Reed.

Aye.

We will now go into regular items.

Good evening mayor, council members, and staff.

My name is Kristin McComb and I'm the Community Development Block Grant Program Manager for the city.

The Community Development Block Grant or CDBG is federally funded through the U.S.

Department of Housing and Urban Development or HUD.

The City of Harrisonburg receives an annual allocation that is then distributed to eligible projects within the city.

Applications for the use of the 2025 CDBG funding in Harrisonburg were due in mid-February.

Since then, the CDBG selection committee has gone over and scored each of this year's applications for the community development block grant.

At the April 8th council meeting, I presented the selection committee's recommendations and a 30-day public comment period followed.

No comments were received outside of those presented at the meeting.

The allocation amount for our 2025 grant was announced a couple of weeks ago, so we are able to move forward with finalized numbers as you consider approval of this plan.

Our 2025 allocation is $512,000

$512,366.

I am sorry, $512,000.

I don't know what is going on with my brain right now.

You've got it here.

I'm just going to move on.

That's actually about $20,000 more than I had estimated.

As noted last month, we're also adding $108,600 from unspent funding in prior years, which brings our total to allocate in the cycle to $620,966.

Under the category of housing and property improvements, there was one applicant this year.

The selection committee is recommending that $140,000 go toward the Habitat for Humanity's critical home repair program in an effort to promote affordable housing by keeping low and moderate income individuals in their homes in a safe and accessible environment.

Three city department projects were chosen to receive funding this year.

Each of these projects represent city staff efforts to connect LMI residents with valuable services.

The three projects chosen for partial funding this year are a playground replacement at Helendale Park, an ADA sidewalk at Westover Park, and the basketball goal replacements at Ralph Sampson Park.

At the April public hearing, I had noted that the Westover sidewalk project funding would be increased or reduced as much as required to meet funding constraints.

We're able to actually fund this project at $169,493 rather than the $151,600 that was estimated in April.

The city may use up to 20% of the CDBG allocation for planning and administration activities.

Harrisonburg has historically allocated this full amount to general administration and later moved this funding to other projects in the city as needs arise.

As noted in the public hearing last month, administration funding has been increased to be funded at the 20% cap.

It went from $98,000 to $101,473.

Only two organizations applied for funding

in the public services category this year.

The selection committee recommended full funding for each of these two projects and that's the ARC and Meals on Wheels.

We're looking forward to working with each of the listed city departments and outside organizations this year as together we work toward the goal of improving the lives of low and moderate income residents in Harrisonburg.

Does anyone have any questions?

Any questions for Kristin?

Yes, I just got a notification from the National League of Cities Committee.

I'm on the Energy, Environment, and Natural Resources requesting or suggesting that we write into the budget process because they're contemplating cutting out the CDBG program.

I went, yikes, we've got to save that.

So I immediately signed onto it and forwarded that to my colleagues.

and it said that there was a deadline of last Friday but I checked with my NLC staff contact she said it's open again so anybody who wants to please beg for this new administration to continue the funding for the CDBG and that huge horrible bill that cuts all the good projects out so anyway we're advocating for it now I ran this by city manager today and he says that's often kind of

CDBG, they're considering blocking it.

But somehow this year feels different, and the more we push back, the more likely it is to stay in there.

Now this is planning ahead, right?

Right, we have received our allocation amount from them.

Of course, nothing will be finalized until we get official documents, signed usually around July or August is when we hear back and actually have that.

But at this point, everything seems to be

Okay.

Now, as I understand it, all these projects are reimbursed, but as you say, if we get a letter in July, that means that that's as good as a promise to reimburse it?

We hope.

We've always moved forward in that way.

It is a reimbursement grant.

You're correct.

So that means that all of the funding is spent and then we go to the U.S.

Treasury and ask to have that money pulled down.

And it's, as I understand it, unconstitutional to to deny the funding that Congress has already approved.

Yeah, I think concerns, you know, this year are probably greater than in the past over this program and hopefully, I guess, as it moves to the Senate, maybe that's the place that might

As we were talking earlier, only two organizations put in for the public services amount of these dollars.

So we didn't have folks this year that made the request.

I'm glad the ARC and Meals on Wheels can get fully funded because those are fantastic programs.

From their point of view, this is helpful.

They get full funding.

It would be good to talk with organizations to find out what prevented you from applying this year.

Were you concerned the money wasn't going to be there?

Staff not available?

Are you losing funding elsewhere?

Sure, yeah, that's a great follow-up for me from our conversation earlier today, for sure.

I would suggest that while I was writing a letter with my grandson today, a letter for government class in which he was required to write to a congressman and ask him to fight for certain things that may be in jeopardy.

And so this is one of those opportunities for us as constituents to reach out and say, we've heard that there may be a risk of losing the CDBG funds, which we both know, we all know, are still very important to this community.

Now this is a year by year cycle and so these applications are due every February and then the selection committee will meet sometime in the late winter and then the selection committee will

to see what's come in and score all the applications.

And then as far as the city projects and what was submitted from city projects, those are the only projects that aren't receiving any funding this year, actually.

And so with those, it's really a matter of talking to staff and amongst the selection committee itself to determine which of those projects seems like it makes the most sense to use at this time with CDBG funds.

And so that's how those recommendations are made.

often some of the same organizations for outside organizations do receive funding year after year because they put in excellent applications.

But it is a fair process every year for new applicants and I do a training every year for them.

Thank you, Kristin.

Sure.

I'll move to approve the 2025-2026 CDBG action plan as presented.

Second.

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Aye.

Mayor Reed?

Aye.

Before you this evening, Council, is the appropriation ordinance for the fiscal year 2025-2026 budget.

We've now presented that in early April.

We've had several discussions in public meetings before tonight.

We had a few changes presented there.

Looks like they're balanced there.

The schools, I think they got less from the state in this projection, but it balanced the budget as presented.

Thanks for bringing that up, Vice Mayor.

It also accommodates the additional funding that Ms.

McComb just mentioned that we got through the Community Development Block Grant, which is a

Any other questions?

Motion?

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

Second.

Any other discussion?

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Vice Mayor Fleming?

Aye.

Aye.

7C?

Yes.

City Council City Manager's Office received a request from the family of Sarah Munger who was the young EMU student who was killed tragically on Vine Street in 2023.

The requester would be responsible for costs associated with the application and installation

and Council approved a similar request in 2009 for Ms.

Sherry Anderson on South Main Street and in 2020 for Maile Beasley on South Main Street and city staff supports this request.

I see her family.

As you know, your daughter met the world to EMU and to this community.

I appreciate the effort you've put forward to do this.

And I know a lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into making this happen.

And I see friends here who are like family and a loss like this.

I mean, words cannot even explain or even try to give you enough condolences and heartfelt just prayers for what you're going through.

But I just think this is just a wonderful idea.

And I'm so happy to be able to be here tonight to vote in support of it.

We get a motion.

Madam Mayor.

I recommend that we approve the Vine Street Roadside Memorial as presented by City Manager Banks.

Second.

Roll call please Pam.

Aye.

Councilmember Alcindor.

Mayor Beal.

Aye.

Thank you.

Okay, Mike Collins.

Come on up.

to come to this meeting to kind of get just a little bit more in depth what happened and where we might be going.

I think I heard him say I can't wait to see what Mike comes up with to solve this.

So hang on Andy.

Let me get into slide one real quick.

The emergency ordinance, you guys know about that.

I just want to make a perspective from this slide.

I've been with the city 36 plus years and I've probably had

We attend similar events like this.

It's not my first rodeo, but something like this.

But that always leads to the question I've been asked maybe a hundred times since it is, well, what's different this time?

Well, let me tell you on the positive side what was different this time was we had an ordinance to guide us.

You look at that ordinance that you're talking about.

It began in 2000, been tweaked three times.

You might want to guess who was behind that ordinance.

And so we had that ordinance to guide us.

We had a lot better and transparent outreach from our Office of Communications, reaching a lot of folks who we couldn't reach before.

And we also had a tool that we built internally that let us really metrically determine what our status was throughout the event that occurred.

On the negative side, this was an extreme event.

I'm going to show you what I mean by extreme event.

And the other thing is that as we continually get bigger or larger in demand, our margin of error gets smaller and smaller and smaller until we do capital investments.

And the week that this occurred,

We had an average of over 10 million gallons a week.

We typically have about eight and a half.

We had JMU graduation.

We had 12 shifts from both Georges and SVO, and an extended weekend operation from BPGC.

And there are about a million gallons a day users.

So moving to the next situation, I just wanted to develop, just from that slide of perspective,

Here's another slide of perspective in the slide of this purpose.

The purpose of this slide is to show you the value of our operator staff and the attendance that's required.

We have a class, what's called a class one facility, which is the highest base class one facility, runs 24-7-365.

We use multiple water sources and we're about running 85% capacity.

And what this particular slide shows you is that since January 1,

2024.

Eight events have occurred similar to what we had with what's called a turbidity, which I'm going to call it the bad stuff, basically mud turbidity.

Since January 1 of 2024, we've had eight of these events.

And the turbidity numbers are shown at the top.

Those turbidity, the bad stuff, ranged from 32 to 180, 180 being the most recent one we had.

Shutting down our facility, if you look at the bottom of the graphs, on one occasion we had to shut down the facility for three hours, another occasion for five hours, this last one 21 hours.

Also associated with that are the purple ones which is also excessive maintenance required during a period where we lost hours there too.

So the whole point about this is

This is not a one-time occurrence.

This is what our operators do.

Our operators protect us from this, and they're very good at it.

We're fortunate to have many, many class one operators with a lot of experience with this, but this one was a very tough one.

So having developed a perspective, let's talk about actually what happens, and I'll make it very simple here.

There's a lot of big words on that slide.

What goes on will make it real simple.

Look at that beaker right there.

There's two beakers right there full

The first one is what nature dealt us.

That's what came out of the rivers on the left.

The beaker on the right, that's what we try to do inside a treatment plant.

It's very important to get the right chemical dose of a coagulant and alkalinity, not to get into chemistry, and make it separate like that.

That's what happens in the treatment plant.

The bottom of it gets disposed of.

Even though the top of it looks real clear, it's still not good enough to drink.

You can't tell the opaqueness of that water until you can't hardly see 20 units of what's called turbidity.

In our treatment plant, we can't put it out in the distribution system at 30.

We can't do it at 3.

We have to do it 100 times better than 0.3 to make sure our water is safe.

What happened in this particular event, and that was the whole goal, and what happened in this event was that if you look at the graph on the right, it shows that on May 12th, the river flows over, in a very quick period, went to 180 turbidity units.

And then for five days after, it consistently changed.

So what's happening here is our operators have to find the perfect optimum mix to get the turbidity to clear like it did in the beakers.

But then when it's changing, every minute, and it takes three hours to go through facility, the minute you get it solved, it's changed again.

So you're hitting a moving target.

So in this particular slide right here,

The key point here is, in the graph, it shows you what happened.

On the left, it shows you a couple things in the table.

It shows you high, medium, and low turbidity, and it shows you high, medium, low alkalinity.

And you'll see where two of our water sources are.

They're somewhat able to treat because they have some alkalinity in it, but rainwater, and I don't mean rainwater, I mean the runoff after the rainwater,

has all the bad stuff and all the good stuff.

And so what happens in this whole thing is, or the rivers that we're taking water from actually becomes just like runoff.

And it's very, very, very difficult to treat.

So what happened in that then was that if you go back to the beakers I had, it doesn't separate as well.

The water on top is cloudy.

The only way we can protect our citizens is to, typically we can run, you run that supernatant that looks clear at about 20 parts turbidity through a filter to get it less than .03.

Typically we can run a filter 30 hours.

In this case, because of the difficulty in the changing conditions,

we could only run a filter about 10 hours.

And that created a real demand and a problem that in our system that really, really, we had to clean so often that we couldn't get the enough water through and that becomes shorties.

And if you take a look at this, this is the tool we built that I was talking about.

Where the graph is, that dark black line,

is how much water we had in the whole system in all the tanks when they're filled at 17 million gallons.

If you look at the week of the green, that was the week before it happened, typical, no interruptions to raw water supply.

The blue line you can see all week was steady until we filled up and kind of backed it off a little bit, everything was good.

Then all of a sudden in the week of the red,

We had to shut our systems down because our filters, we had to shut it down, clean our filters, we couldn't get water in.

So the water in the distribution system dropped from a typical 11 on the lowest period during the week to a low of six, and that was getting close.

And that's why we enacted the emergency because I wouldn't have said it then because it's doing the jinx out loud.

Typically, when I wrote that ordinance back at the beginning time, a lot of times it was because we had water breaks on our raw water line.

If we'd have had a whole water break right during that, it would have been a disaster.

And so we said, hey, let's declare the emergency, give us a chance to fully recover, which we did within five or six days, and we're back to normal.

So that's just kind of a perspective of where it is.

Now we'll get to the last part.

Where are we going with this?

Well, I've been looking at this and I think we have one action that we want to do immediately.

Our backwash facilities, when we run the water, we run that supernatant, that clear jar through those filters and those filters get dirty.

We have to stop production on that filter and we have to run treated water back through it, clean it out, put it in a tank, get it out.

That held us up significantly.

We had to do it so often that we had to sit and wait for our backwash facilities to clear out before we could actually clean.

So we found some workarounds.

to do that we ended up sending more of it to the sewer authority than we normally do because sometimes we send it actually have a permit to put it in the stream and it takes time to get to get to that level so we are going to try to optimize immediately our backwash system so that our backwash system or our disposal system is not keeping us from cleaning our filters so we will try to do that.

that may cost nothing and that may cost cost considerable investment into some sort of pipes and our crews or our engineering department is currently evaluating that.

The second thing we'll do is when you go I'm gonna go back to the beaker again you have to have the right chemicals to separate that supernatant from that

from the sludge that's below.

We have on two prior occasions, or many prior occasions, but the last two, brought chemical companies in to try to help us find different chemicals, combinations that might work better.

It's still up to our operators to be proficient and find out, but the more tools you give them to work with, the better chance they have.

We've brought our chemical manufacturers and their specialists in, saved water from those previous events and they weren't able to help us.

We'll reinvent that and maybe we'll bring some consultants in.

I know Virginia Tech has people, local chemists, make our team a little stronger and see if there's a better

We have to have the facilities and we have to have the chemicals on hand and we don't have that right now.

So if we were to change directions there, that might be a capital investment, but we'll see where that goes.

That hasn't been really successful in the past, but we'll try it again with a little more emphasis to see if we can give our operators more tools to work with.

Those are two things that we can do immediately.

Now comes some issues here.

If you look at the graph, you will see that, I'll first reference this, you can see that we want to be with waters that have high alkalinity and are not

impacted by runoff.

So if in our future in 2026, we will bring on the South Fork of Shenandoah River.

The South Fork of Shenandoah River will bring that alkalinity with it somewhat more than North River did, but it will also bring some turbidity with it too.

So how that facility will change and what tools will be available to us if we would have had that source

During this operation, could we have treated it better?

The answer to that is maybe.

We won't really be able to tell that.

We haven't gone down and did treatability studies on that stuff during critical times because we're busy taking care of the problem at hand.

But there is some possibility that things will change and that may be beneficial.

So that's going to come That's paid for as you know our rates support the projects funded It just got to wait to 2026 and bring it online so that may give us a tool to work with it that we didn't have The other issue I want to talk about too in our raw water is you guys know I want to every two years or so update our raw water supply management plan and You know that

Down the road, because of drought conditions and environmental concerns, we will be looking for 3.4 million gallons a day of supplemental drought supply water.

Well, that drought supply water needs to come from someplace other than surface waters, the North River and the Dry River.

So that's probably going to come from something that's groundwater oriented or maybe a quarry oriented and something like that.

So we have targeted wells and other options.

All those sources are very high in that missing alkalinity.

And so it's very probable that as we build out our water sources, we'll have other water supplies that we can naturally bankable and that may treat better during high turbid times than they do today.

Now, theoretically, a chemist will tell you, you look at the equations,

The chemicals we use at the treatment plant should be able to account for the fact that we lost that alkalinity In our source waters, but I can tell you it didn't and it hasn't for years and it's just it's it's a complex situation and and so anyway, we will continue looking for that in action item two, but action item three is

comes down the road and it's going to bring us opportunity for mitigating this issue.

The fourth action is, and finally I think we need to look at our water treatment plant just a little bit, and I don't think we need to overreact, but if you look at your capital outlay plan, I think that comes to you sometime soon.

The next expansion of the water treatment plant is scheduled for 2044 and that's based on one and a half percent growth per year which we've averaged for the last ten years.

I don't know if any of you remember when I presented the long term financial model I said we've had five percent growth for the last two years.

So right there, or you can do the math, we just zoomed nine years off of that schedule right there.

Now whether we'll return or not waits to be seen.

You know, that growth's great when we're talking the financial model, but that growth's not great when we're talking about investing in the expansion of the treatment facility.

So we need to look at that.

And the other issue is that our facility is rated for 13.1 million gallons a day.

We're running at eight, nine, I think last week.

But I have some concerns about that.

And generally, the Virginia Department of Health is very conservative.

And that's part of the 2024 expansion timeline.

But I wonder if we can run at the rate of 13.1 million gallons a day when the Shenandoah comes on, will we be able to run like that at that rate during normal times and during times when we have like this?

What that all boils down to is a real healthy look at where our growth is and when we might be expanding our next water treatment plant.

2044 is a ways off but that could very easily roll back 10 years based on what we've seen here and so we'll look at that.

I just want to remind you when I gave you the long term financial model and I said look here are the rates for the next five years there was none of this expansion in it.

So those are the challenges of solving this problem and being sure and moving things up quicker than you want to

is the impact it has on rates.

So that's my whole perspective, the whole thing.

Just to sum up, where are we going in the future?

We're immediately going to try to remove that backwash issue.

We're immediately going to try to reinvent the wheel here again on the chemicals we have available to combat this problem during these kinds of periods of time.

We know the Shenandoah is coming.

Perhaps at some point in time we want to move that alternative groundwater source up rather than in 2040.

We do that.

It's a rate issue.

It's an investment issue.

Perhaps we want to expand the treatment plant sometime earlier than what we're talking about.

How early?

I don't think I'm talking about tomorrow, but I'm starting to talk about it.

In 2044, I'm not talking about it.

2034 I am talking about it and because it's getting close so that being said that's just a little summary so I hope I've been helpful I hope I've been understanding what caused it where we are the dilemmas we have not the dilemmas but the choices we have going forward so I'll wrap it up I threw a lot at you I really threw a lot at you but I hope you appreciate what I'm trying to

to convey a complex issue and the balances of cost to our citizens versus levels of contingency and safety.

Never at any time, never at any time, remember when I said this is one thing you need to take away, when you go take your mind goes back to that picture of that beaker with the good stuff on top, never would we let that come through

to our citizens.

We stopped the production of the plant so that doesn't happen before we let that come through to our citizens.

And I will tell you, I think I heard today, who did I hear?

Richmond went into a boil water notice today.

This has happened in Orange County, Orange.

This has happened at New River Authority a year ago.

Loudoun County has invested three digit million dollars to take this thing through a quarry before it goes into the treatment plant from the Potomac River.

You say, well, what about Bridgewater and what about all these locals?

They're not us.

They're not us.

They're nowhere close to us.

We are a Class 1 facility.

We're a class one facility at 85% with multiple surface water sources.

That's apples and oranges.

There's no use even having that conversation.

I saw the Richmond announcement as well that they went into boiling water today.

I was interested in what you're saying about groundwater as a potential long-term thing to investigate because I remember hearing at some point during this that the county wasn't having this problem because they for the most part rely on groundwater is that right and where we have the surface water and that's where the rainwater runoff and the turbidity happens

So that could eventually be a good balance.

And I'm also remembering when we were crafting the resolution for what's now in Congress as the Shenandoah Mountain Act.

And you wanted to be sure that if you ever needed more water, you could go in there.

And we built that into the resolution.

I don't know for sure what's in the legislation.

I haven't read it cover to cover.

Hoping that could pass that might be first of all protected from things like fracking which would destroy our water supply.

Well, I want to pick out just one word she said that she really hit the nail on the head.

Balance.

All groundwater brings you different problems.

Surface water brings you these problems and good things.

Groundwater brings you these problems.

In the long term, we're going to end up with a mix and a lot of cards to play.

And I think that's the best thing you can do is give your facilities tools to work with.

And that's where we are.

I mean, we started this.

If you go back to the raw water supply management plan, we need drought water because all of these surface waters are falling under regulations to protect the aquatic life.

And that's why we started pursuing it.

But all of a sudden you start realizing, and fortunately,

The answer to this is the answer to this, too.

So that's a nice thing.

Most of the time, they fight each other, but in this case, our long-term plan is right on target to give us balance, and that's a real key.

You talk about Raleigh being a very protective water, I mean a very nice water, and it is, but it's a very difficult treat.

You don't have to treat it much because it typically has no turbidity in it, but it has no alkalinity in it, so it's very difficult to treat, but you don't have to treat it much until it rains in it.

Then it's a problem.

We had to shut that source off first.

It was the same as North River with no alkalinity in it.

So the dynamics, you know, and if we'd had a source that had alkalinity in it, we could have blended it together and made up.

Those operators up there are pretty sharp and they're not chemists, but they're awful dang close to it at times.

They have to be so attentive, but the thing about it is...

Yes, first of all I'd like to thank you for the tremendous work that you did and your staff.

It crushes me that 10 times that you said that you had that before but not the same thing.

Well, when I said 10 times in the past, probably the majority of times that was like that was due to a broken water main.

When we have no raw water, the production stops.

But we've had many of times where we've had turbidity like that and we just treat it.

Our operators treat it and, you know, our margin of error, not error, but our margin of ability to be interrupted keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller.

But, I mean, we have really haven't run into these problems to the point where I've ever had an emergency declaration.

I knew we were getting closer.

So I'm not going to make excuses to the things we didn't do, but we've never yet

Even though you declared emergency, we've never shut that facility down.

We're getting closer and closer every time.

We've done things.

We just went to a new source.

We've expanded the treatment plant.

We've had chemicals in there.

So we'll continue to battle it in small ways and in long ways.

I'm proud of our history of how we've gotten here.

That's our job.

Our job is not easy.

I'm going to tell you that.

That operator job is not easy.

But if any of you have ever been to the Citizens Academy, we started out with a video that says there's no room for error.

One more thing is that, like I know you were thinking in an alternative way or resources just in case if you see this situation.

It could be you know climate change.

We don't know like we can predict like there will be rain, but we cannot Like cannot predict like them out of it so like like you know brainstorming, maybe we can have like Alternative resource like just in case like under underground water is that something in mind or even?

We use polymers, we use coagulating agents, we use alkalinity agents.

These vendors of chemicals want to sell you things and they'll come in and do all the testing in the world and we have done that.

It's just a very difficult waste to treat, I mean water to treat.

And the changing conditions, when you go back and look, if you hit it right here, you're no longer there anymore.

And it's just a moving target.

So if you make the recipe right now, it's not right in 15 minutes or in a half hour.

So it's a difficult challenge.

It's the heart of being an operator, to be real honest.

We just got to give them the tools.

My job is to give them the tools.

But for example, things we've done, just as a thanks to Rockingham County, we took four million from them.

We have done many favors for them when they ran short and they've had problems.

And we took four million from them, so there's one example of things we've done.

each one of these events are different so when people talk about turbidity is it correct saying that depend you don't know that you can't say in advance okay get the formula ready here it comes no you have to wait till it comes and then gets the formula ready that's okay you also have to know the alkaline alkalinity is I guess that's how you pronounce it yes

and turbidity that exists in the streams that feed us the water and then you have to know when to turn that off and when to do this and when to do that and I mean it's truly a science and I didn't realize the many you know streams that lead up to where we get our water from and so how do you prepare like we say now that there's a capital outlay plan of 2044

But depending on the city's growth and how our water starts to come about, that could easily kick that plan up 10 years to 1034.

And so how do you plan for something that's going to be so costly when you really don't even know what you're going to get because you're not making it rain.

You might make it rain with the money, but not the really rain rain.

So we really don't know how to prepare.

I don't think that we can't prepare.

I think we can.

I just think you have to have an understanding of when and what to do.

Are we working with the tools we got today or are we working with in the future?

If you're talking about all this stuff in the future,

How do we know what we need to do?

Every time we do a CIP, just like we evaluate all our other assets, remember I told you we had $877 million of assets and they're all retired?

We do that every year.

We will reevaluate and we will sit down with the Virginia Department of Health and reevaluate when the next treatment plan expansion comes.

I can also tell you, based on this growth,

this is when this is going to occur or if we get this growth this is when it's going to occur and I have to pick one okay now next year I may change that growth rate based on what I saw for the last you know you can lay out the best plans in the world and you have to have a plan but you have to be flexible and change it to think you've got the perfect answer today and not stay on top of it until you get there is a mistake and that's

You know, and we will stay on top of it every year and every time I change it

I put it into the long-term financial plan and I come back here and I tell you, oh, remember this time I told you, well hey look, because of our growth, we went from 5% for the next five years to 3%?

Well I might be back after that 5% after I figure this out again.

So I'll sit down with Virginia Department of Health, we'll re-evaluate this.

I really can't tell for sure when that treatment plan expansion's coming.

Until I run until we get the Shenandoah up here and I see what how that works I'll have a lot better foresight of when we do that the minute I have a different thing I'll change that I'll change the CIP planning based on the best knowledge we have at that time You know, we do it every year, right?

I'll replug it in the financial model and I'll tell you I

Hey, based on what I'm telling you, I can't keep that three percent.

It's got to go to six or seven or nine or whatever it is.

But I won't do that too fast.

Unless we're an emergency, we'll try to look at it over a period of time.

It's kind of like stock investing.

You don't want to react right now.

You want to see what the trends are, I guess, so they say.

But anyway, that's what we'll do.

Oh, I don't ever, Ms.

Robinson,

Please don't ever say we don't plan because we plan every day.

I mean, it's difficult to plan for, but we do it.

That's why we do CIPs.

That's why we do the financial model.

That's why we try to stay on top of it.

So we'll get back in here and reevaluate.

The only thing that comes with the investment into the other water supply is, I mean, we'll be able to determine when that's going to happen also.

Now you can always make the decision to move it up to help the situation, but there will be a time we have to have it because we won't have enough water when all the regulations kick in under our Virginia Water Withdrawal Permit that says you shall not take so much out of the stream.

That's when we know, and we'll watch that growth, if it's five and five and then it all goes in reverse for two years, which it could, that's a whole different scenario than if it stays at five and five.

So we'll make adjustments every year.

You just have to stay on top of it and stay vigilant with where we're going.

We know supplemental water's coming in the future, and we know the treatment plant's coming in the future.

And we'll put it off as long as we reasonably can to keep rates reasonable.

But when the time comes, hopefully we'll have a few years to build it up and know what we need to do.

I hope that helps you.

It's not an easy thing, but we got to stay after it and readjust every time we get more information and know what to do with it.

And this is a learning experience right here.

This makes us refocus a little bit and say, hey, maybe we better look at it a little sooner.

Not tomorrow.

There's two things we'll do tomorrow.

Yeah, so a couple questions, so thanks for all the information.

So at a point, you figured out, in essence, the turbidity chemical equation that you needed to solve, right?

You got the coagulants to work in a way.

We didn't get it where we wanted it to be.

And where it is today, it's wonderful.

We never got it until that river stabilized back here to the right of the graph.

Until it got stable, we never got it really, really good.

So what we had to do, we went ahead and treated it, but we had to keep cleaning our filters.

And that kept losing production.

We didn't let anything out that wasn't okay.

We just had to keep cleaning our filters and losing production and that kept losing our storage.

Never did we let anything out that wasn't okay.

So in essence you put together a mix that helped but didn't really kind of get to what you thought was kind of the magic formula in essence.

Bingo.

And I'm looking here at one of the graphs that had kind of the red

There was a point down there where it dipped down on the 20th and came back up.

Was there another event where the turbidity changed and you resolved it quickly?

What dipped down?

uh the flow right there no we had to stop bringing water in the plant because our backwash facilities got filled up okay and we couldn't clean because we couldn't get the water out of the backwash facilities that's what i said that's what that dip was right there yep and so we had to shut it all the way down

and so that's why that's priority number one is we want to get that back.

We do not want the ability to get rid of the wastewater stopping our cleaning of the filters and that's what happened.

It just took so much.

It takes about 50,000 gallons in two hours to clean one filter.

We have eight of them.

So if you think about that,

that's lost production and the water we clean it with is water that we've already treated.

So we lose 50,000 of what we treated plus two hours of production time.

So the more you have to clean when you're under a circumstance like this, that's not good.

So something was different within the turbidity mix here, the chemical or the mineral mix here that you had to kind of figure that out.

Have you learned anything through this that might point to what that source might be?

Is that part of what the next steps are to see if you can identify what that change is, if that's happened elsewhere in the state or not?

I'm wondering, I get the reason I'm asking is, how vulnerable are we to

We have collected about 25 gallons of water from this period.

We'll bring a chemical company in and say, could we have done better?

Whether that means we used the chemicals that we got better and we missed the point, that's one question.

More likely, is there another chemical

that we could have used during this period of time that works better.

Then we invest in that, build new tanks, new chemical metering stuff and get that chemical in there.

Maybe we don't use it for a year when the next time comes.

That's the thing we have to fight.

And whether or not the next most difficult time is exactly like this one is a little bit of a crap sheet.

We have to figure that out as operators.

Again, as I go back to your scenario here, those folks up there, I mean when you see it happen, that's what they do all the time.

It's just that this situation was like a perfect storm.

Tremendous demand.

If we would have had the ability to continually wash our filters, we would have been able to keep up with it.

that we would have washed them instead of every 30 hours every 10 hours or you know we could have got through this a lot easier but we didn't but we never got it to a perfect chemical amount we could have got through it so it's a combination of can we get a chemical work better can we get a better backwash facility can we have a bigger facility can we use natural alkalinity we use a chemical to feed alkalinity

But I watched them use it.

The more we use it, the worse it got.

And they're sitting up there running jar tests.

And they actually have a pilot filter around a plant that actually simulates.

It simulates the plant.

And what it takes us to do in a plant in about four hours, they can do in 30 minutes.

So they can they can adjust it and see what's going to happen and actually run it.

And it was difficult to get that.

Those folks are working on that night and day and they're working on jar tests like that.

So you know you have that right there it says since January 24 we've had eight eight of these high turbidity events.

Was that unusual for this time frame?

Is this so has this you know grown either consistently

We've had, I mean, you have no idea what Hurricane Fran was like in 1993.

and there have been some like this.

I'd say, no, this is the job of an operator when you live on a, I keep saying that again, this is the job of an operator when you live on a surface water plant.

And if you go back 10 years ago, I'm sure those operators say, well, what are you talking about?

We did this all the time.

It's just that our margin of

of safety is not there anymore because back 10 years ago we were treating at five and a half million gallons a day.

Today we're treating at eight and nine.

The health department has us rated at 13.1.

Which one?

That requires, right now, we can't run at 13.1 because we don't have the water supply.

We're waiting for the Shenandoah to come on to be able to push it to 13.1.

But there's an interesting thing about 13.1.

13.1 requires us to run the water through the filters at five gallon per minute per square foot.

Typical allowances by the health department is at four gallons per minute per square foot, and I'm trying to figure out

13.1 is a capacity.

When I think of maximum capacity, I think you tend not to want to get to maximum capacity.

The criteria that I referenced 2044 was by Health Department standards, if you get to 85% of capacity, which I think is 11 something, we're averaging 8, 9 now, you have to go into design.

When you get to 90% capacity, you've got to be in construction.

We're not there yet.

There's a trigger point for design for us that we'll see and of course I guess you know we'll be building up to that point as well so you have lead time as you're building up to that point.

Yes.

You know a new water treatment plant what would be the time frame from you know we know we need it online.

There's a point at 11 point something.

If we see growing up to that level, you know, we have kind of two years to think about we need to get something in place.

is how I got to 2044 at 1.5% annual growth.

That will take us to that point in 2044.

Like I said, you look back 10 years, we've averaged 1.5%, except for the last two years, we've averaged 5%.

So what are we going to do in the future?

We're not increasing the number of new houses and new connections at 5%.

Our people are using water more.

Our existing users are enjoying it more.

Our industries are using it more.

Just like I said, our turkey plant.

Our turkey plants ran 12 shifts.

Two a day, six days a week.

That's what they had planned that week.

So our existing customers are using more.

Well, I don't survey the United States, no.

Yeah, yeah, we'll meet with the health department and see who is.

I have, Front Royal is one facility that's on the Shenandoah, and I don't know, I didn't hear any problems from them.

Our operators will check them out in the next week or so.

But I didn't hear any problems.

And you know, again, when you say are they having problems,

You could have come to Harrisonburg.

I mean, did you know about all this stuff that happened?

That doesn't get out in the public.

And I'm telling you what's going on behind closed doors all the time.

That happens.

I mean, you can bring an operator that was here, and I've been here since 1988.

They'll tell you the same thing that was happening back then.

It's the same thing.

Can we get through it?

Do we have the tools and do we have the expertise to get through it?

We always have, and we did this time.

You know, you guys enacted an emergency and we said, we're going to get this fixed before we have to do anything.

Well, we did.

OK, we got through it.

It's just it's out there.

It's out there.

I've said to many of these that didn't get out there.

We got we got through it safely.

Why?

Why alarm everybody?

But that's the challenge.

That's the real challenge.

You need to know and hold me accountable for getting this thing some short term action and some long term action.

And I've laid out four action items to very quickly.

that maybe within a month or two I'll feel very comfortable that hey if the exact thing happens again we probably won't get here but we keep growing I can't keep keep smoking mirrors here at some point in time we're going to have to invest and you know I take very seriously when I bring out long-term financial model and I say no it's not gonna be three percent it's gonna be seven percent for the next six years because we got to be able to treatment plant and we got to go get another another raw water source

Could you go back to that same graph that Vice Mayor Fleming pointed out with the red arrow in the middle?

I just wanted to ask you about the the black line is storage, right?

That's what's in the water tanks?

Yes, ma'am.

Now, is it true that when you turn on the tap and put a glass of water under that's coming out of a tank not straight from the water plant?

Is that right?

So yes and no Depends on where you are If you're the majority of the city has the treatment plan on one side and a tank on the other so it's coming from one It's coming from tree once you start getting up out from the center of town.

It goes through a tank first What was really scary was that dive down of the black line Because we were drawing on the storage as you were trying to get the water treatment back out

That's why I said, when I listed the very start and I said things we had this time that we didn't have in my previous 30-some years here was the outreach to, I made those calls to those large users in the past.

I made those calls again, but Mike reached out to all the other people who could help out.

And just one real thing, the feedback, most of the people

Because you kept us safe.

It didn't hit us, right?

You kept us safe.

So yes, it was tremendous.

We did what we had to do.

Go ahead, Nasser.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Andy.

I'm going to move something about this?

Following Mr. Collins' presentation, the next item is a resolution ending the local emergency related to the recent and potential severe weather event effects on the Harrisonburg Water Treatment Plant.

Luckily, we did not have to use any of those powers.

And so at this point, we feel comfortable recommending to City Council to rescind that local emergency.

Let's remove the emergency.

Any more discussion?

Is that accurate enough?

Yeah.

Roll call please, Pam.

Councilmember Dent?

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Aye.

Good evening.

Tom Hartman, Public Works.

Mike spent a little bit of time talking about water he's pulling from the river.

I'm going to talk now about water that we pushed into the river with a pretty cool innovative project that Public Works came up with to help meet some of our MS4 goals.

MS4 is our municipal separate storm sewer system.

So as Mike is required to treat the water before we drink it, we're required to treat the water through different mechanisms before we discharge it into the

into the surface waters.

One interesting fact, Mike was talking about the Shenandoah River.

The city, that would be when he starts pulling water from that water source would be the first time that we were contributing to water that we're drinking.

Currently the water that we take, our city doesn't drain through those watersheds.

Once he connects the new water source, we'll be pulling water that we're treating from our MS4 system.

So with that, just a brief overview of our MS4 requirements.

This was

Something that we started doing in 2013.

The 2028, the first column, the first row is our total removal requirement for both phosphorus and nitrogen.

We're required to remove 890 pounds per year and over 6,700 pounds per year of nitrogen.

To date, we are removing over 1,000 pounds of phosphorus per year and we're currently removing just over 3,300 pounds of nitrogen per year.

We're still, so you can see on the chart there, we're still lacking in nitrogen.

We're about halfway there.

With the project I'll show you here in a second, what we're calling the Softly Farmed Land Conversion Project, that will contribute an additional 187 pounds of phosphorus that we will remove from surface water that we discharge, as well as over 1300 pounds of nitrogen.

That's the big ticket thing that we want to do with this project.

Before you've heard me talk about TSS or total suspended solids, as of last October, that pollutant was removed from our TMDL.

So we're currently the city's only focused on two, nitrogen and phosphorus.

We have to meet our 2028 goal of 890 and 6748 by October of 2028.

TMDL is the tax total maximum daily load.

This is essentially how much we're allowed to release.

We're engineers, we love our acronyms.

So with that, we have our soffle property that was purchased for public utilities to pass our raw water line through to bring the water from the South Fork into our treatment plant.

A couple of different colors on the screen.

I'll show you.

I'll explain what they are.

But to orient you quickly, the city is to the top of the screen.

A good way, if you look over here in the top left, you can kind of see Harrisonburg's outline.

This is the property located off of Port Republic Road.

Port Road is to the right.

Right of the screen, if you know Lakeview Golf Course, it's just over to the upper right corner is Lakeview Golf Course.

A couple different colors.

The red is the front portion of the property that will stay unencumbered by Public Works.

That'll stay as a farm ed and decisions have been made formally on what that will be done, but that probably will not have trees planted on it.

The largest, the 96 acres, the property in the cyan or blue color is where we would do the land conversion.

And land conversion for us is to take the pasture and crop fields that are currently present in the cyan blue area and plant trees.

We will plant over 30,000 trees in this 96 acres to help bring, so with that conversion to help with those trees will bring us to that plant removal of the nitrogen and sediment.

The green area on the bottom of this green is currently forested.

We'll just preserve that forest area.

We won't receive any credit for the preservation, but we'll keep that buffer there.

The brown area to the top is a disposal site that public utilities has established for construction debris.

It's a permitted

Construction debris disposal site will maintain that integrity.

It's a good place for us to dispose of our material from various construction projects throughout the city.

And the long skinny line that passes through the center of the site.

That's the location of the raw water line that Mike has recently installed.

The water line is actually the smaller of the two lines.

This one, this buffer area is in case we would need to run a second or an additional raw water line.

We're not disturbing our trees and our forest.

to do that.

And then there will be maintenance roads throughout the parcel to maintain access to not only the valves and the stations that are out there, but also to give us the ability to go in and maintain the tree farm.

Our goals are, if you were to support this project this evening, we will start in earnest in July with securing a contract for tree planters, because we're not going to do this ourselves.

As much as we would like to, 30,000 trees is a big endeavor.

Our current plan is to plant about, to take five growing seasons to plant the trees.

So 6,000 trees in the summer, 6,000 in the fall, 6,000 in the summer, 6,000 in the fall.

And then wrapping up with the last planting in the fall of 2028.

Then after that, there'll be three to four years of ongoing maintenance of young tree maintenance to make sure we're doing weed control, mowing, watering as needed to make sure we get our forest up and running.

There will be spot replacements because we will have some loss.

I think we're predicting 10 to 15 percent loss, but we'll be back and replant those areas.

We will have a variety of trees and we'll try to insulate ourselves from an emerald ash borer beetle concern, so we'll have no more than 10 percent of any tree species.

There will be hardwood trees that we'll plant out on the Softley Farm.

So with that, that's our plan and our approach to help meet our MS4.

Good, thank you.

Part of the equation you didn't, I think, fully bring out so that there's a cost for this.

Correct.

That cost is to get a savings.

Right.

I think this is around $1,200 a pound for nitrogen.

When we think about the land purchase of the public utility, stormwater utility purchasing the land back from the utilities department as well as the cost of planting and maintaining the trees, that's about $1,200 per pound of nitrogen.

On the open market or other various projects, we're seeing $2,000 to $2,500 per pound of nitrogen.

It's a very cost-effective measure for us, for the city.

So that's the reason we decided to pursue this.

Plus, with anything with stormwater, when you can get volume, it helps you be more cost-efficient.

So with what we're currently paying on, so we're okay on the phosphorus, we've had our phosphorus goals, actually the nitrogen, and this is about half

Half of the remaining diet.

It costs about half as much as predicted to get that same amount of nitrogen removed from our waterways.

Plus, instead of getting them accomplished in one project with one outlay, one contract, just one set of staff to monitor it, we would have to

It would be up 10 to 15 various projects spread throughout the city.

And when we start to do projects within the city, that means we're obtaining rights of way, or easements, multiple design engineers, multiple contracts, multiple contractors, multiple staff trying to manage all those projects.

And we still have the one, the biomass reactor that we're still not getting credit for at this point, right?

Correct, with the bioreactor, the wood chip bioreactor, which is another

So in essence we have a tool that's really cost

That one's extremely cost effective.

Extremely cost effective that we can't quite get the credits for through... In the urban scenario, right.

Rural scenarios have the ability to use it, but not in the urban world.

DEQ hasn't granted us those credits yet.

If we get those, that becomes an extremely cost effective tool for us to maybe get the last half of that down.

Correct.

Both.

We're seeing our projects in the same kind of frame as if you would buy credits from the open market.

When we buy credits from the open market, we're buying it from projects like this.

So it's property owners that have pastures that they don't want to farm anymore.

and they're looking for ways to capitalize their investment so they'll go plant trees on those properties and then create a bank, sell them to cities and localities like Harrisonburg.

So we just took the idea and we cut the middle man out.

But as far as costing, we have seen

Yeah, and I'm just saying that this has the benefit of actually mitigating the water instead of just passing it around with a credit.

But on the other hand, could we sell credits given this project or does that work?

Not at this time because we're still on a deficit.

If the city, Keith and our office is much more in tune, I'm kind of going on a wing here, but if we would want to go bank our credits to be on the market, we would have to deduct up to 50% of the available credit just to be able to market the other half.

There's some regulations in there about banks, about how viable, about how much of the credit you can actually sell versus how much you have to withhold from the market.

But in this case, we haven't met our goal yet.

So we need to take everything that we have.

And one thing that was in the memo I failed to mention was by doing this project, we don't permanently encumber this land to be a land conversion for MS4.

If the city would ever want to

So how is it connected with the city?

is property that is owned by the city and it drains to the same watershed that the city drains to.

So because of those two factors, we're able to install a measure, treat the water, and take the credit as water that we've treated to help with our MS4 requirement.

Shenandoah up to the Potomac, Potomac over to the Chesapeake Bay.

Water that leaves the city goes from the city to Black Chiron, I think to North River, then to South, then the Shenandoah River, then the Potomac, and then Chesapeake Bay.

Water goes up the hill and north.

I don't know yet.

I would probably be reluctant to because we know that we need to preserve the trees and the forests that are there for the purpose of the land conversion.

That will be something our staff will continue to monitor.

We'll have to do quarterly inspections and drive the site just to make sure that the trees are healthy, that we don't have any loss.

Where we do have loss, we do replanting.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Mike's going to start.

Oh, we need a vote on this.

Yeah, we need action on that.

Madam Mayor, I move that we approve

The use of a portion of Softley Farm as a stormwater best management practice as presented by staff.

Second.

More discussion?

Councilmember Dent?

Aye.

Councilmember Robinson?

Vice Mayor Fleming?

Aye.

Aye.

Good evening, Madam Mayor and Council.

As Pam is getting my presentation pulled up, I am Mike Parks, the Director of Communications and Public Engagement.

I'm going to get us started here, as Tom said, and then I'm going to hand it over to him as we get into some more technical aspects of this project.

We're going to be talking about community connectors and then we're going to get into a smaller piece of that, which is the Complete Street Project.

As you all are aware, we were one of 15 groups.

When I say we, I mean city staff.

Chando Valley Black Heritage Project, Northeast Neighborhood Association and HDR.

selected from across the nation to take part in Community Connectors, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like.

We're trying to reconnect communities, especially those that have been separated by some type of infrastructure.

And for us, that specifically is North Mason Street.

Now, Community Connectors is about a lot more than just North Mason Street.

But for our Complete Street project, that's what we're going to be talking about tonight.

So our Community Connectors project is this piece of downtown over into the Northeast neighborhood.

You get a good look at what that area used to look like and what it looks like more recently especially this North Mason Street corridor.

More especially you see this is part of what we're talking about with community connectors is this portion of the Northeast neighborhood.

This is of course 1937 prior to urban renewal compared to what that looks like a little bit more recently.

What you see again is you can see that obviously there are a lot of changes that have been made over the years, a lot of loss.

And this is really what we're talking about during our Community Connectors effort is what was lost during urban renewal, what was lost as North Mason Street was created, how to address those harms, and how do we move forward as a community building trust.

And the Complete Street project for North Mason Street is a big part of that.

So as I said Community Connectors that is organized through Smart Growth America.

They've been with us every step of the way through this process.

We've been working on for quite a long time now and Smart Growth America has been very helpful getting us where we need to be, bringing a lot of expertise and their experiences in other communities like ours that have done projects like this.

So we're very thankful not only for their expertise but also the grant that is allowing us to do this project.

As I said, Complete Streets, that's a small portion of everything that we're doing in the Community Connectors Project.

And that started with a leadership academy.

This brought together city staff, members of our community, business leaders, people who had a stake in North Mason Street and in the Northeast neighborhood to start talking about what are some changes we could possibly make to North Mason Street to make it less divisive, to make it easier to bring the Northeast neighborhood into downtown.

and heal some of those harms that were created in part through the creation of this street.

Tom's going to talk a little bit more about this, but the focus of our Complete Street Leadership Academy was what are some things that we could possibly do to make North Mason Street better for all types of users, not just vehicles with people walking, biking, rolling, anyone who wants to use the North Mason Street corridor.

We wanted to look at what are some options that we could test

Just put something out there for a short amount of time, let our community use it, and then engage with them to see what they think about those changes.

If it's benefited them, if we need to make some tweaks, is this something we should consider doing long term?

So again, our focus is on what are our options?

How can we test them?

How do we hear from the community about what they think about those options?

This is the team that has taken part in that Leadership Academy.

As you can see, a number of city staff members, members of local community-based organizations, local business leaders, and people from the Northeast neighborhood, all of which have come together to talk about what can we do out here.

It's vital this was not a city staff only project.

We want to hear from people who experience this corridor every day, people who work in this area, people who have to walk across North Mason Street, people who live in this area.

who can bring their own life experiences to the table and talk about what would be best for them and their families and their businesses.

So with that, I'm going to let Mr. Hartman talk a little bit more about what a complete street is and what some of the options are that we're looking at.

So complete street, this isn't something new to the city.

We've been doing this the past couple years.

Where we take a street, Garbers Church Road is a perfect example of one way to address this.

Previously, we had a four-lane undivided highway that passed by two schools, a golf course, and residential areas.

Had complaints about speeding, safety concerns.

With the most recent pavements, we reduced a lane in each direction, added a center turn lane, bike lanes, more buffer, some enhanced crosswalks at the school sites and shared-use path crossings.

Now it's a safer street.

PD says cars drive 35 or lower.

I led a walking school bus the other day down the street and felt safe and fine.

So I mean those are, that's what a complete street is essentially and that's one thing that Smart Growth America wanted, taught us during the leadership academy and as well not only city staff but taught some of our, taught our residents that were part of that academy some of the strategies and the reasons why you do that.

Again just examples, you know, complete streets are for the, they're for everyone.

They're not just built for cars.

They're not built just for pedestrians.

That's how we can

interact and make those modes work together safely in the spaces where we know we need to have multimodal transportation.

The timeline, February and March, we had three virtual trainings with Smart Growth America downstairs in City Hall.

Two hours each session, very well led.

We had great conversation.

I think the folks from the community that were there started to learn a lot about reasoning, why, some of the tools and tricks.

We had one session where they had

Example problems we broke up in groups and it's kind of cool to see the see everyone out who doesn't have the engineer brain like I do Come up with similar ideas as me.

I was like, well, that's awesome, you know Then we got into March, middle of March We had Smart Girls America come down to our new public works building for two days get to hang out with us Taught us more about how to look at Mason Street specifically.

We took them outside.

We had some of the

We did that in the morning and in the afternoon we actually did a walk on it so our group went out to Mason Street.

We walked the whole corridor from East Market to Main Street, took notes, talked about pinch points along the corridor where it wasn't safe to cross.

were some opportunities to change from the four-lane divided to a more of a complete street concept.

That evening, we had an open house where we invited the public to come to a meeting at the county building.

We picked the county building because it was right on the corridor.

We could look out the side door and see the street.

Very well attended.

We had sticky notes all over the boards.

We had little kids drawing notes and putting notes on the board.

Way more people came to that and interacted than what I anticipated, which was a great surprise.

for the event.

The next morning we wrapped up with the group sitting around three different sets of boards and us all taking our own ideas and drawing what we want the complete street to be.

And at one point I was talking to Steve from Smart Growth America, staff were standing out around the perimeter and all the residents were doing all the drawing.

It's kind of cool they were invested in the project to kind of see them take ownership of that and kind of come up with ideas that we were and then

After that, we took all that drawing and we had to make it work engineering-wise and that was the next month.

We were supported by a consultant that was provided through Smart Growth America who provided the drawings that I'll show you.

But city staff worked hard back in pushing and pulling trying to make something that was achievable in a short time frame both from staff and financially and something that made sense to the traveling public to go through because we knew we wanted to keep this

All this is culminating with the actual project.

Our staff is out procuring all the material right now.

We plan to start the road changes on Monday, July 7th.

So coming out of the fourth holiday our crews will be out there.

We're anticipating three days to get the project implemented like I'll show you here in a second.

That's our staff putting all the bits and pieces together and then following that immediately after that on that Saturday we're planning a community event because with the project that we're showing we're gonna give two lanes back to the public.

for that three to four weeks.

So within those three blocks of two lanes we want to do events.

We want to kind of the community to see what can we repurpose these lanes to make them be, right?

We want to bring that connection back between the northeast neighborhood and downtown and this could be the way.

Instead of Mason Street being that divider that was built to be and the arterial roadway that it never kind of grew to be, what can it change the character of these two distinct neighborhoods and

We had a perfect day in March.

It was cool but sunny and nice.

Open house, here's some pictures I mentioned.

You can tell Amy put this slide show together.

I didn't prep very well.

You can see the attendance in the county room, which is amazing.

There's a little kid on the on the table, like I said.

And again, this is the design meeting out in our public works building staff.

These are the boards that we were drawing on, hammering ideas back and forth and then

We would take the good ones and then put them on one, then take the good ones from that and then transfer it all to the final one that had the recommendation that I'll show you.

So this is what we'll be doing.

Starting on the left of the screen is East Market Street.

Mason is right in the middle.

So it's going to get a little confusing.

I'm going to do my best to show how we're doing this.

So let's find my mouse.

Oops, sorry about that.

Yeah, that was working.

There we go.

Yeah, it's not working now.

Can you go back a slide for me?

I'll just have to explain.

So when you leave from between Market and Elizabeth, we'll still use the median.

So there'll be vehicles traveling southbound there and vehicles traveling northbound.

If they're coming northbound, they're going to start to be consolidated into one lane.

We're doing that because at the intersection of Elizabeth and Mason, we will be temporarily turning off the traffic signal and we will install a mini roundabout.

That's that circle.

So in order to do that, we can't have two lanes entering the roundabout.

We have to have a single lane.

The reason for the roundabout is to help push the southbound vehicles over into the northbound lanes.

So between Mason and Wolf, all the vehicles will be in the northbound lanes with bi-directional traffic.

The previously used southbound lanes will be that open space area for whatever we plan to do on the 12th with the community events.

Also, post on the 12th, I think we're working to have picnic tables staged there so people can stop, have lunch, have dinner, have a picnic, just take a break on a walk in that area directly next to Elizabeth Street parking deck.

As we get to the intersection of Wolf and Mason,

Again, that signal will be turned off and we will be in stop control for Wolf Street.

Mason will just move, will be able to pass through.

It won't be a four-way stop.

That's a bad word in public works.

It'll only be a two-way stop on Wolf Street.

And then the block between Wolf and Rock, again those southbound lanes will be closed to traffic.

They'll be available.

That's directly adjacent to the food co-op.

Those two lanes will be open for whatever events or however a community wants to use that space during those three to four weeks.

Can you change the slide for me, Pam?

So now as we get to the intersection of Rock, this will be another stop-controlled intersection where Rock will stop, Mason will continue on.

Both lanes will be in the northbound direction.

Southbound lanes will remain open.

will remain closed but open to the public to use.

Then as we get to Gay Street, we have to then get back to the median divided Mason Street.

We do that with a larger roundabout at the intersection of Gay and Mason Street.

And you can see that's highlighted with the yellow circle and the yellow paint and the lineators that we'll have up there where then we'll split the traffic back to go to up and down Gay Street as well as to put the traffic back into the north and southbound lanes.

of Mason Street.

Also at Gay, the signal will be turned off and bagged temporarily, so the roundabout will be the intersection control measure that we will use there.

We do understand and remember that this east market to Mason to Gay is our truck route, so the roundabout has been designed to accommodate the poultry trucks or any kind of large interstate rated.

The buses and the fire trucks?

Correct.

This, yes, we've been talking with Teutopia.

The inscribed circle

will be constructed out of rubber parking blocks, so they're mountable.

Trailers will have to go over the parking blocks.

The cab or the front end of the truck can make it around the roundabout without jumping up on the curb.

Same way with the buses.

We've tested all of this with a program called AutoTurn, where we take a simulated vehicle through the roundabout.

They all make it safely.

That was one concern.

Luckily with Gay Street and Mason, that's a large intersection.

Yeah, I mean I love the idea and in Gay Street it does open up.

But what I'm thinking about, I'm going back to ROC.

That's just a stop control.

Okay.

And we're currently working with Chief Tobia.

The signal at East Market

We don't want to be backed up when he gets a call.

Because I think it's half, 50% of your calls leave ROC and go to East Market.

So we're going to install some technology in the station that when they get a call, they push a button, it turns a light at East Market in Mason Green.

So that platoon is starting to wash out as his fire truck starts to respond.

So he doesn't have to wait until he gets to the top of the hill and the Opticom finally sees him.

So the East Rock will have the same current, whatever the current is, right?

There's nothing changing?

Correct, only that the eastbound approach coming from Main Street towards the fire station, you're going to stop

at a new location.

Right now, you would stop just ahead of the southbound lanes, but because we're closing the southbound lanes, you're going to pull through the southbound lanes and stop at the median to then turn into a one-lane direction depending on which lane you're going to.

Again, as we get closer, a lot more public information about this.

There's going to be tons of signs and flags.

We're going to be monitoring this as we do the implementation and as it's in place.

What we're using primarily is tape and our friend, the Flex Post Delineator, if you've been out on South Main Street recently at Point Drive, the new yellow sticks in the road, those items, as well as the parking blocks that we'll be using for the roundabouts.

If we see any safety concerns that pop up or little pinch points that we are

to anticipate our hot spot areas, we can make immediate reactions.

That's something that we're going to have to do, and Sparkler with America understands that.

We need to do something that's a little bit advanced and forward-thinking for us.

It's getting our public works folks a little bit out of their comfort zone, doing something like this.

But I think in a demonstration project for three or four weeks tied to a very beneficial effort that I think that we're doing with community connectors, this is really going to spawn some good thoughts about how we

You monitor that on site with personnel, with cameras, how do you monitor that?

So we'll be gathering data.

They're in the three or four weeks that it's in place.

We'll have traffic counters out on the street to do that daily volume and speed counts.

We'll also put counters in the neighborhood to make sure there's no diversion, because we know some people just don't like anything new, so they're going to find the new way to go to avoid things.

That's something we don't want to do.

We don't want to push an additional cut through traffic through the northeast neighborhood, knowing that we've worked with the neighborhood to make the streets safer in the neighborhood.

The last thing we want to do is inundate it with more trips.

So we're going to be checking that.

We'll also put cameras up at key intersections to count pedestrian movements because that's one thing we also want to see is growth in that pedestrian traffic from the northeast neighborhood to downtown and downtown to the northeast neighborhood.

With taking it from a four-lane divided to just a two-lane roadway, those crossing distances get cut in half if not by more.

So it's not as big of a get to get across the street now if you would go to Wolf or Elizabeth or especially Rock.

That's a huge get to get someone to try to get across Mason Street.

and not play Frogger, right?

So we want to see how beneficial this change is to that measure.

With that collected data, then that will help our staff and our Jacob and James and Tim, our planners, fine tune the best grant that can help bring aspects of this project to the city.

Because we know that these aren't going to be inexpensive permanent changes.

We're going to have to find those avenues.

Essentially, but then from Elizabeth to East Market just to get the traffic back to the four lanes.

Correct.

In this, with the Leadership Academy, we had initially wanted to go from Market to Main, but the section from Gay to Main would have taken a lot because there was two businesses that would have been impacted if we would have closed the southbound lanes.

the cost for all the material to do that for that section just it didn't make sense to make that big a financial commitment.

Let's focus on the three blocks that we can do really well instead of just trying to do all of Mason Street.

I think we can get a rep enough of an example of benefit from those three blocks as we would doing the whole thing.

Yeah so that's what we're gonna be doing in July so

Now that we have solidified our dates for when this is going to happen and know that this is something that can move forward We had hoped to do it a little bit earlier that didn't come to fruition.

So that does give us more time to do communications and

Luckily, we have two community-based organizations located in the Northeast neighborhood that's done a great job spreading information about the whole Community Connectors project.

There will be a number of different things we do, everything from canvassing to yard signs to community events, much as we have with Community Connectors up to this point.

We're going to be getting out information, signage in this corridor, letting people know that changes are coming and what to expect and where they can go for more information.

And then once it is in place, we'll be out there very often doing on the street surveys with people who are walking by, providing opportunities for them to do online surveys if they want, having those conversations with people who are using the corridor.

Okay, because you're changing traffic patterns.

Yes, ma'am.

So, and I could tell you for myself when the traffic pattern, the stop signs changed on Wolf Street and... Oh, yes.

Yes.

You know how many times I done forgot to just, because you switched it around.

Coming downhill.

Yeah, so it's a little, you know, it's traffic patterns, so people just

It's going to take time to kind of get people to get used to it.

I mean, I think it's a great idea.

I'm not going against it at all.

But I know it's my, you know, that's my neighborhood.

Yeah, and that's why it was important for us to have this out here for multiple weeks.

We want people to have a chance to use it and get used to it and see if this is something that they prefer.

And also if it's something they don't like to provide us that feedback as well.

Because then maybe there's a tweak we need to make.

Maybe there's something small we can do.

Maybe there's something large.

Maybe this isn't working.

The test will allow us to see that and have those conversations over three to four weeks.

But yes, we will have about a month to get information out to the community letting them know these changes are coming.

Yes, at one of the community events that Tom showed a photo of, we did have a number of people who came and they said, you know, I feel like I can't provide feedback on this because I don't live in the neighborhood.

And we said, well, that's okay, we still want to hear from you.

Now, community feedback from the neighborhood is very important to us, obviously, but we want to hear from everyone in the whole city who will be using this corridor, not only for this project, but for Community Connectors as a whole.

There's a lot of education throughout this project that we've been doing.

to let people know about what has happened in the Northeast neighborhood, why we have developed these mistrust issues over the years and how that affects everything that we do and how the city can address those moving forward.

That's not something that just we can do just with one neighborhood.

That's something that everyone in our city is going to have to be part of.

So we have been happy with the turnout at a number of these community events that we've done.

We've done a handful now.

And as Tom said, we have one coming up.

Did you get support from?

They were taking part in this process.

Good, excellent, excellent.

The group, we wanted to close in northbound lanes because it was closer to the neighborhood, but that's where all the access to the businesses were, and that would have been just too much of a hurdle to try to get all that to work.

So we just picked the southbound lanes as a test, but we'll see what happens.

So it's only four days project?

I think Tom made a comment that Mason Street was built to be a major arterial road but just hasn't really turned out that way.

I can jump in there.

Mason Street was turned into this two lanes in each direction because where the county government center was was a safe way and a drugstore as part of the urban renewal.

Not to have a history lesson but I mean urban renewal the concept was bringing business back into our downtowns which were quote unquote into decay and

That's the history of urban renewal.

If you're familiar with that then you know that most of this divisive infrastructure was done in the middle of

of the black neighborhood.

So a lot of these mistrust issues that folks currently have go far back.

And so what we're trying to do with this project is, one, look at the infrastructure because obviously what it was meant for is not what it's used for or was ever used for.

And so what we're trying to do is reconnect the northeast neighborhood to downtown.

And I like the model of the complete streets and like works for everybody with the bike lanes and the crosswalks.

If you're in a major city and you're on an interstate, you're pretty sure you're driving through a division that was created intentionally that was laid down specifically to do that as major interstates are.

So, you know, it's interesting, you know, you talk about Garber's Church Road, you know, we reduced the car footprint

there, but we also have not reduced or increased traffic jams.

We haven't increased.

I think that's an important lesson to learn.

We have about 8,000 vehicles a day on Mason Street.

That's a two-lane highway.

We don't need a four-lane divider to handle 8,000 vehicles a day.

If it was 20,000 vehicles a day, we probably wouldn't be talking about taking it down to a two-lane roadway.

We'd look at doing ancillary things, adding bike lanes, making the crosswalk safer, those type of things.

I think it's important to note too that I know we hear a lot about bike lanes and about making Mason Street safer for all, but our primary concern was to address the harms that were created by the urban renewal program

Okay.

We'll bring us back to session.

Next item on the agenda.

7H is the presentation of the HB Flex on-demand rideshare pilot.

So on microtransit.

Thank you for the invitation to present tonight.

So the last time that we presented to you all, I believe it was our director, Gerald Katobu, and he was presenting on our rebrand effort, which since then we have officially launched to rebrand our transit, paratransit, and now including this microtransit pilot program.

Our transit services, HB Connect,

Our paratransit is HB access and microtransit is now HB flex.

Just to play on the words a little bit, we saw connect being the transit option because it connects people with their daily life.

Paratransit being HB access because it provides access for people who otherwise may not have it.

and Microtransit being flexed because it's that flexible option between them.

And so we just thought I kind of all collected together.

So we also wanted to just kind of explain a little bit about what Microtransit is and then kind of show you a very brief overview of kind of what part of the passenger experience is and so that'll be what the PowerPoint focuses on.

But what microtransit is, just in case any of you haven't heard of it before, it's essentially an uber-lift-like service operated by public transit.

So it is a ride-sharing, ride-request, same-day, same-ride service.

And so what that means is that you use our app, which is currently Passio Go or passiogo.com.

You choose our

Service as the one that you want to look into and you choose HB flex you register for an account and you can request a ride and you'll very quickly see that vehicles coming to you will pick you up at your Door and take you to the door of wherever you're going this initial pilot program.

It's grant funded and it is focusing primarily on the downtown area and the Burgess Road Walmart and Valley mall shopping areas and

We did our feasibility study within the last couple of years and those were kind of highlighted as the main points of interest for users who would use a program such as this.

And so this pilot is lasting for the summer.

It started last Monday and it is running through Saturday, August 16th.

So far it's a bit of a slow burn to start.

I actually checked about 30 minutes ago to see how many passengers we've had this evening so far and it's six which actually is a high number so far for the first week and a half of it running.

But we are looking at numbers that we are honestly very hopeful about seeing it grow over the summer and how it's going to run fully with more people using it as word gets out.

So just to kind of walk a little bit of what the walk through a little bit of what the passenger experience is I already mentioned the app of the website and so I kind of want to show very briefly I won't get in the weeds of the full detail process But this is a PowerPoint that is available on our website HarrisonburgVA.gov backslash bus dash service and it is available for everyone to be able to peruse that way for anyone who just

you know doesn't want to go through the process they have this assist to make sure that they can get registered correctly and be set up to win when they use this service so

This is actually a map of our service area.

For the packet that you all have in front of you, it's a little bit more apparent.

For any Disney Pixar fans who've seen Ratatouille, I believe that this is the profile of Linguini, and that's how I remember the service area actually really well.

But you can see that it's covering downtown, hitting a lot of the neighborhoods up towards Mount Clinton Pike, and then it focuses on the Walmart Valley Mall areas.

Ride request service is meant to be only within this area.

So it's meant to be able to take you from your home to do some shopping and be able to go back.

It's also meant to be able, if you want to get an evening night cap, we run into 11 p.m.

while this service is running for the summer.

So you could head downtown to enjoy a little bit of our nightlife.

Like I said, you would go to the app or the website.

This is actually using the app, these screenshots.

I took them myself just using my phone.

So this would be what it would look like when you would go through the process.

You could download Pacio Go, select HP Flex from the menu.

and you could work through, it's a very standard account setup.

You hit sign up, you give your, kind of the usual information.

First name, last name, phone number, email, make a password.

And the key here, the key piece of information here is also going to be the home address.

Because what this app and website do for the user, it tells you if you are in the service area already or not.

With your home address being the default for where you're going to be picked up.

So my home address is outside of the service area so every single time that I log in it goes we can't pick you up here and that's a good thing because we want people to be funneled towards the correct pickup locations and drop-off locations.

Log in and then it would just be request a ride.

Have a valid pickup and drop-off address and again it will tell you if those addresses are within the service zone.

And then I actually just heard somebody, somebody's logging in to pass you a go right now because that was our service alert tone that I heard.

So that's a good thing here.

And it'll, you can also, it says request the ride now.

That time is slightly adjustable but this is intended to be a I need the ride now, I'm requesting it right now.

Very similar to Uber and Lyft.

And then if you provide information on if you're gonna have any guests with you So it's not just a one person for each request You can mark how many guests you have we already have one user that we're pretty sure is using it with their kids daily and If you have any ADA accommodations ie mobility devices all of our we use our paratransit fleet So we are able to fully accommodate all but maybe some fringe cases we have encountered over the years a few mobility devices that might be a

Either too heavy or just a size large that it may not fit those one vehicle, but it could fit another But we are compliant in all regulations for any type of passenger that might use our service And then you would just go through it kind of like I said Pick up address drop-off address the hours for this service through our feasibility study a lot of residents noted that they wanted a

earlier service hours compared to our transit and paratransit service and so we actually opted to start at 5 a.m.

and our transit service and paratransit service are still starting at 6 30 a.m.

even with our extended hours over the summer

which are 6 30 a.m.

to 9 30 p.m.

Monday through Saturday and then we only go until 9 a.m.

we knew that if we lasted all day we actually could very easily overwhelm our fleet and our capacity to if it got popular so we wanted a measurable semi controllable timeframe to do it so we have one in the morning and then if we're taking you to work a little earlier we want to be able to get you home from work a little later

and so we start back up at 5 p.m.

every evening and we run until 11 p.m.

and I actually also know for a fact that we have somebody using it to get home from work at 1030 multiple nights so far in the first week and a half so we're already meeting that goal that was in our feasibility study of providing access for a way to get to and from work

Again just a little bit more of the user experience once you have everything put in it puts everything on a map you're going from this point to this point it's within the service area and just a little bit more just kind of the same thing you can say when you want to be picked up the accommodations you may or may not need

If you're riding with somebody and then you request the trip and then the moment you request the trip you can see the status It'll say hey, thanks.

If you you'll send you a text message, it'll send you an email But the moment you hit request you get those notifications And it shows you

actually that your trip was approved meaning all of your details are correct they're in the zone the time is good and it's been assigned to a vehicle the moment that happens you can actually see where your driver is on their way to you they might make a few other stops because this is a ride-sharing service so it's not just a one-to-one ratio we could pick up other passengers along the way drop them off as well along the way to your destination

And then as each step of your trip progresses, so does the status.

So the driver is here ready to pick you up.

You're on board.

You are heading to your destination.

And then lastly, the trip has been completed.

Yes.

Now how about, because I'm thinking I know a ton of kids who would want to use this service in the summer.

Too bad it doesn't go to Westover pool.

But is there an age restriction?

That's a great question and this is actually asked when we presented to the executive leadership team.

This is comparable to transit and paratransit where on our transit service we actually have city students regularly use it to go to and from school each day and so

That is correct.

It's our paratransit fleet.

So it's the small buses and we also have two minivans.

Again, all of our vehicles still remain ADA compliant.

It's for our paratransit fleet.

They are actually during paratransit service hours that overlap with the flex hours.

They will be doing both so that rideshare won't just be with other flex microtransit rides.

Now do you need to, if you're say in a wheelchair,

Is there some place on the app that you can say, hey, I'm in a wheelchair, I'm going to need help.

That changes the time frame that maybe someone else gets.

So that's on there as well.

It's a little hard to see at this distance, but the lower portion of that screenshot does say like, hey, I have a wheelchair or I need a wheelchair van.

So you can mark that specificity.

And that's also where you can mark if there's two people in a mobility device, you could say, hey, both of us.

You can bring your bike.

So if you go somewhere,

If there's a point where paratransit service for folks who depend on that is stressed at some level, will you be monitoring that?

Yes.

So in that case you would then scale back the availability

One of the things that we are looking at through this pilot program is the stress that it puts on our current pool of resources.

One of the things that we would consider with a permanent launch might be additional vehicles that are specifically for the microtransit service or simply expanding our current paratransit fleet

or hiring more drivers to use our vehicles at a increased volume throughout the day.

And a pre-designed idea of how you're going to address that?

Paratransit does have the requirement that we always service any calls that are requested.

It is a requirement by law for us to do.

And so with flex, because we don't have set limitations as part of the pilot program, just kind of figuring out what we want any limitations to be or guarantees.

We're not guaranteed like, hey, we'll pick you up in 10 minutes.

We'll pick you up in 15 minutes.

Yeah, no worries, no worries.

Let me jump back ahead real quick here.

So after the trip is completed, well maybe that is the very end, but after the trip is completed, it's quite literally as simple as just doing the exact same thing to go back home or go to your next spot.

Like I've already mentioned, we actually already have a set of quote-unquote regular users after even just a week and a half.

Some of them doing one, two, or three rides a night.

or day, some doing it in the morning to get to work and using it in the evening to get home, which was our goal.

We wanted this to be a service that is specifically aiming for Harrisonburg residents primarily.

You'll notice that that service area does primarily focus on Harrisonburg residents and that's because we wanted to make sure that, one,

What people requested was being met.

They wanted the early hours.

We gave them the early hours.

They wanted the later hours to get home.

We gave them the later hours.

And we kind of also pulled in our feasibility study where that input was coming from.

And a lot of it came from these areas and a lot of interest, especially going to our shopping centers, which for transit and paratransit is also a main hub, just shopping.

And so we wanted to make sure to capture that with this pilot program.

That's kind of what I often will say is the 10,000 foot view of this program.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's a great program actually and definitely people in need of it.

It is.

Right.

Like there are like other people like families are relying on Uber service.

I think it could.

Being a currently free service and everything like that, I think there's potential for some economic impact.

One of the things that we wanted to provide with this service though was that you know that this is being staffed by a city employee, somebody who has been trained, they are a safe driver, and they've gone through the city process to be hired.

Well, let me also just share some background context for, say, other agencies that have implemented this.

We see this microtransit program as being a complementary service to our transit and paratransit.

Kind of that play on words earlier, transit's the connection, paratransit's the access, and this is the flexible option in between.

We see it as complementary, whereas other transit agencies across Virginia, in fact at VTA, where

Mayor Reed was off to.

Last year someone made a presentation about I think it was the Virginia Beach area where they entirely replaced their transit service with a microtransit fleet and they didn't have any fixed routes anymore for a particular service area.

And so there's different ways to implement this and one of my kind of thoughts in this vein of thinking is that being a complement to the currently existing services that we provide for Harrisonburg, I would hope that they would be mutually beneficial.

Maybe a little bit of competition breeds good business kind of thing.

That's kind of where I would hope that it could kind of fall in.

That way there's not a negative impact to anybody who might economically benefit from a service like this that isn't free.

And I think, Elliot, isn't it also important to remind council and the public too that this is not the same service as Uber and Lyft.

This is a ride share program.

So it's not going to be as immediate

Well it can be used by JMU students as a group going from this place to that place.

It could be, yes.

So the service hours for this one are going to for the pilot duration of the pilot through August 16th.

It'll be Mondays through Saturdays 5 a.m.

to 9 a.m.

and 5 p.m.

to 11 p.m.

I feel that Uber is going to be, at the beginning of the pilot program, I'm thinking that just in context of the fixed route area, I think it will affect some Uber

some Uber drivers but you have to remember it's a pilot program and also it's working in conjunction with our transit that we already have running so I know for folks who live in this area getting to work is a problem and it's a financial problem so I can think of many people

For instance, my mom has aids that cover in the evening and they will catch an Uber to our house to start work at five.

But then they will catch an Uber home when I get out of council meeting.

This will be a big difference because they're not well paid.

They're paid, but they're not well paid.

So to me, when I look at the overall effects of this, I think about the population that will be using this.

A lot of these folks are in the Atlas population.

This definitely is going to be an asset.

And in the summer, just helping our children get to where they need to be and knowing that it's a certified hired person by the city.

My grandson will more than likely use it, the 15 year old, because he will not get in an Uber.

Because he still, even though, you know, we've got the license plate and this that and the other,

One of the other, I'll say, coexisting factors with us being a ride share service in something like Uber and Lyft is that we are locked into a service area.

Whereas other services where you're paying for it, it's wherever you request, wherever you drop off.

And even when we would get to a point where we would permanently launch the service and expand to have additional service coverage areas within the city, we would still be in those zones, whereas other services wouldn't.

And this is hitting zones that don't have transit.

You're going to places where transit is going,

So the pickup zones really are areas where we don't have existing transit, mainly because of the expense of running transit to those areas at this point.

A lot of the neighborhood space that this particular service zone covers we kind of view as is any residence within three-quarter miles of a bus stop and even then three-quarters of miles a long way to travel and so by having a service that can go in the neighborhood rather than just along the main artery it does provide a

The hours alone, five to nine, allow folks to get to work.

I wonder how this will affect those who normally will call an Uber

drop off their kids at the daycare, then get back in the Uber, and then go to their final destination by 8 or 9 o'clock.

How will a scenario like that work?

That's a good question.

If I'm answering it today, it would probably be kind of that sequential thing.

You would probably need to order a separate ride because our current program, how it's situated, doesn't have multiple destinations sticking with the vehicle along the way because, again, as a ride share service, it might be going to drop someone else off immediately.

I would rather leave a bit earlier for work and ride for free and have to set up that second ride than to have to pay for that Uber.

Now once this pilot is completed, do we, I hate to ask but I am, what would be the cost or are you sure about the cost for a service like this?

Correct there is not we don't really have a price that we would put per ride yet that's something that we would engage when we or we would determine when we would get to that point I think the word that we've kind of discussed is like it would be considered a premium service separate from transit and paratransit which are by nature coexisting services they have to run when each other run microtransit is kind of separate from those as services for our department

So we don't have a price tag on it yet.

We would determine that as we would get closer to it.

What would the cost of a ride be worth?

But we don't want it to be exorbitant.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

I just love it.

I noticed that I'm just outside the service area.

That will lead to my question.

A permanent launch we would look to cover either more area or add additional service areas that would connect with each other.

So the idea though, this is a grant funded pilot.

Lots of questions will come up as you're doing this, obviously, learning about it, hopefully to gather a lot of information that can help drive a next step for this.

I think what's important is that we do have free transit in Harrisonburg, but it doesn't cover all areas.

And the dilemma of, as we've increased our current transit system,

Do we do more volume in the areas of high users or do we expand to lower use areas to give folks more access to transit?

This is a bit of an experiment to see whether we can fill that gap without providing a full bus.

Yeah, it goes out there which can be very expensive.

So I appreciate this I'll be at the Virginia Transit Association conference tomorrow as well.

So Actually, I'm excited to say hey We're doing this because this is a question that comes up, you know in cities all over Virginia now Is this something they want to step into?

We're learning from some cities, but not many folks have been able to set this up.

So I think I appreciate

Our staff again taking a lead on this, getting a grant for it.

It's really nice.

Thank you all.

No.

All right.

Thank you all.

Thank you.

All right.

I'll just take a quick opportunity to point out Ms.

Spain, our Deputy Director for Public Transportation, who is sitting next to Elliot.

Okay, next on our agenda is an update on Kids' Castle construction.

Alright, good evening Vice Mayor and everybody on City Council.

To make this a little bit smoother, I'm going to read the summary so I can segue into what I really need to say tonight.

After a joyful farewell event to the old Kids' Castle, construction is now underway.

on the new playground, which incorporates extensive community input that was received through the design process.

Costs for the new kids' castle are projected to exceed the budgeted funds.

The budget was based on an initial cost estimate developed during the ARPA community engagement and budgeting process in 2022.

In particular, the cost of the playground equipment and installation has substantially increased.

As a result, staff have worked with a contractor, Harmon Construction, to minimize these increases

without compromising the playground design.

City staff has identified alternative funding outside of the designated American Rescue Plan Act funding to fill the gap.

Before proceeding with presenting a reallocation request to city council, city staff wanted to make city council aware of the projected budget overage, the reason, and seek confirmation that city council desires for alternative funding to be dedicated to this project.

So basically what has happened is our number, our initial number that we had for the budget for Kids Castle is three years old and we've come in way over budget.

So when we first started the project we had, we have a total of 3.175 million and when we started the process of looking at pricing the Kids Castle we were at 3.9 million.

Through various meetings with the contractor and sitting down with the head of Harmon sometimes and sometimes making conversation at track meets and wherever we needed to do this

We've whittled it down with taking out a major lighting project.

We went from 3.9 to 3.7.

Negotiating more on the price and getting more competition on people that could provide playgrounds leading up to the kids castle itself, we saved another $100,000.

Some of the vendors that were providing playground equipment wanted us to use their installer.

By finding another installer and bargaining with those vendors, we saved another $100,000.

and then so that got us down to about 3.5 and where we really started where I started to get nervous a little bit was that the last set of cuts for about $100,000 that we were looking at were things that make it cool so shields to make a colony or pavers that line walkways we've lessened the cost on those and and maybe we're gonna install stuff that's not quite as attractive as it could be

There's a wall that goes around Kid's Castle that looks like a medieval wall.

We've changed that to the point where I still think it's going to be pretty attractive.

It's not quite the same, but it's a more cost effective way to do it.

So where we got to recently is a place that I started thinking that the integrity of the design itself would be affected.

And basically when you're working with a number three years old, think about what stuff costs just in general life three years ago to where it is now.

One of the pleas that I have for city council, and you all know this, we've upgraded a lot of stuff in Parks and Rec over the last couple of years.

It's our chance to make, it's our chance to upgrade our park system for people to use for the next 20 to 25 years like Kid's Castle was.

And if you saw some of the pictures or you attended the event of the farewell of Kid's Castle, it was awesome.

It was one of the coolest things I've seen in my years of Parks and Rec because

I'm not from here, but as I've heard and as Mr. Banks has told stories and all of you, the event was overwhelmingly positive of people that had just that care for the kids' castle that's there.

And it's my, not recommendation, but I think we need to replace it with something that is as grand, if not a little bit more, so people don't keep dwelling on what kids' castle was.

Kids' castle was a phenomenal playground.

It outlasted its use, so its durability was terrific.

But people still love it, so what we put in its place is very important in my opinion that we go forward with something first class.

And so we're a little bit out of range.

What the new budget amount would do, it's $317,000, basically $318,000.

It makes up about a $222,000 gap for a new contract to sign or

or an allocation that would let us do Kid's Castle the way it is now, and it gives us a contingency of about $100,000.

It's a little bit less than that, but it puts some funds in there.

And lastly, I'll just say that I think the old Kid's Castle needs replaced, and I don't want to take out playground pieces because that's what's next.

So when you walk across the drawbridge and you get into the new Kid's Castle, there's an infant section, there's a toddler section,

There's a 5 to 12 section and then you get to the kids castle.

Kids castle is phenomenal.

That's going to be great.

But everything leading up to it was the wow factor that everyone saw and gets the kids excitement.

The other things too, we'd have to take out some of those playground parts or what's just as important is a mom or dad takes their child to the playground or a group of kids and shade structures, right?

You kind of like, well that may be low hanging fruit shade structures.

It's not.

It's where a parent sits for an hour or two and gets out of the sun.

And that's one of the biggest things that parents use so they can be comfortable at the castle while their kids are playing.

So what we're looking for tonight possibly is some direction from city council to allow staff to identify alternative funding to increase the project budget by $317,000.

It's basically $318,000.

Yeah, and I was just going to say, I mean, we're not looking for a vote this evening.

We're just looking for some consensus from council.

Mr. Props and I can then work with Mr. Mancini and his staff to see if there are additional funds that we can find in the budget, the current year's budget, to address this overage.

Because again, I agree 100% with Mr. Mancini.

We don't want to jeopardize the integrity of what the community has

Along the same lines of the spray grounds as well.

We've put a lot of thought and held off on cutting corners at the spray grounds too because we want those signature parks to end to last for a long time, right?

So sometimes you have the smaller pocket parks in Hillendale and different things like that.

These are our signatures that people will travel to make a destination out of and something that Harrisonburg can be proud of.

So, and you know, we're up against an ARPA timeline as well, right, for these funds.

So we don't want to jeopardize that timeline on this.

And is there any thought of looking outside of our budget?

I know that's tougher to look at grants, what type of funds that might be available for this.

Yeah, always.

I'm looking at grant funds and stuff.

A lot of times, though, it's hard to find construction grants in Parks and Rec to do that.

Doesn't mean they're not out there.

But in that time frame crunch, it's probably

I'm not going to say you can't find any right now, but we're probably late in that game.

I know, you know, with Kid's Castle and for a lot of our park facilities, you know, this is the place in the city where the broad range of our community gathers, right?

It is the coming together point of the broad cross section of our city, the diverse

One of the reasons why Mr. Mancini came here this evening is because, again, he is in current negotiation with the general contractor, and we just wanted to make sure we didn't want to continue to cut.

As Brian said, he's already cut several hundred thousand dollars to try and get it down to what was budgeted.

with the vendors that they're buying the services off, I've seen that firsthand.

So the transparency from Harmon Construction, what they've done, what they've done to bring in competition to bring that cost down has been phenomenal.

It doesn't affect the integrity at least of the play structures.

The one thing that we did get from residents, they wanted us to light up Purcell Park a little bit.

The parking lot that is right there, right by the pavilion and a little bit of the pathways through the park that lead kind of over to the other Little League fields on the other side.

They kind of wanted us to make that brighter and a little bit safer.

That's a bummer that that had to come out, but that was a big package of around $200,000.

Well, that makes sense.

Rather than skimp on the things you actually are building, find something that you can postpone to a later, smaller project.

Yeah, and I think with what we've talked about with changing

like the castle walls and stuff, I don't think it affects too much of the integrity.

But the next thing, if I had to grab the money to make us get to where we were, I'd take out probably a whole section of playground that leads to the kids' castle.

So that's when I got to the point where I'm like, I don't really want to do this, right?

Right, got it.

So the city manager's looking for kind of a general consensus.

Do you want to answer?

Move forward and see if,

Larry can do his magic.

And then Brian, you can do your magic and see if we can kind of make ends meet.

And then you'll come back to us at that point and say, here's what we came up with, right?

Or maybe Larry might do it at that point.

But I can if you want me to.

I can definitely do that.

All right.

Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yes, good evening again.

This is a supplemental related to capital projects for public works.

Total of two and a half million dollars.

Of that, 1.9, almost two million is from JMU.

and $570,000 is VDOT revenue sharing funds.

These projects are, one is Mount Clinton Pike shared-view path.

And then also for the University of Louisville realignment project to get that

Buzz it up and we can sign contracts.

I think what we've seen is, especially coming out of COVID, that pretty much any project you've put together, no matter what contingency you've planned for, you're going over the contingency, right?

And we see that in our projects.

This project, I think they used really the best VDOT

numbers on how to project and put a contingency there and they're pretty good at those and they still didn't hit the target on those.

So I think that's been the challenge of the last couple years of projecting costs of things.

Second.

Okay, is that our, do we need a roll call for that?

Okay.

Councilmember Robinson?

Aye.

Aye.

Next item.

Okay.

Yeah, the next one.

This is a reallocation.

This is related to the Mount Clinton Pike project Although we did find the majority of the funding through VDOT for that project.

So the other obstacle in projects here is rock

Yes.

So any questions from folks on this one?

Yeah, you're gonna do that.

They oftentimes, yeah, they'll do, well,

Yes.

Second.

You have a second?

Okay.

Any other questions or comments?

Councilmember Dent?

Aye Councilmember Robinson?

Aye Councilmember Alsadun?

Aye Okay, that reallocation passes as well Okay, so that takes us through our main agenda items And next is our other matters Comments from the public limited to five minutes on matters not on the regular agenda

If you'd like to speak, please give your name and address.

So anyone.

Can you hear me?

Sir, I sure can.

My name is Randy Klein.

I live on 480 Hartman Drive here in Harrisonburg.

I want to talk about what's in the paper this morning.

We are getting a collective bargaining agreement.

And I want everybody to understand exactly what the long-term effects of this deal that we got through the superintendent here.

And just for some backdrop here,

In the early 1970s, I was a part of the organization that brought local 29 Teamsters to Packaging Corporation here outside of town.

And I've also had experience in Illinois with teachers unions.

I was married to one for 25 years and

I've got some experience I think maybe some people here in Shenandoah Valley do not have.

And quite frankly, I can't understand it.

How somebody, a businessman would start a business and he's got his business up and running and he invites a union into his business.

How does that happen?

I've never heard of it.

But here we are, a city of Harrisonburg, inviting a union into our city, school system.

It makes absolutely no sense to me.

But I'm not talking to the choir here, obviously.

But anyway, I think we're completely off the rails.

and in my opinion, what, you know, if this is so good, why isn't Shenandoah, Augusta, Page, everybody around doing this?

Nobody's doing it except us.

I'm not real fuzzy and warm about it.

I know you are.

But there's some long term situations that's going to happen here.

It's going to happen.

I'm going to go through it here fairly quickly.

But what is going to happen is you're going, the teachers union is going to go and they're going to have their first vote on contract.

and everybody's going to be, eventually it's going to be approved and then what happens?

I'm going to tell you what's going to happen.

Out of those people that voted, there's going to be a disgruntled bunch of folks, of teachers.

Won't be all of them, but it'll be some.

And what is going to happen is

They're going to say my team, the Virginia Education Association is going to be the Harrisonburg Education Association.

The Virginia, those education associations are a feckless bunch to begin with.

But what's going to happen is these people are going to be disgruntled.

And I'm going to tell you the Teamsters are already looking at it.

and the Teamsters are going to come in and start to organize Harrisonburg City teachers.

It's going to happen.

All right.

And then you're going to get a real union.

All right.

I'm just telling you, it's going to happen.

And I don't think anybody gave it any consideration.

It's happened in Illinois.

You go to Chicago, they got all Teamsters.

And it's going to happen here.

And the long run effect, I'm afraid is that your employees, your city employees are going to be the next.

And I think there are, I don't know, I don't know a city employee, but I know they're probably talking about it.

And you've got 30 seconds.

About 30 seconds left.

Okay.

I'm about done.

All I'm going to say is that you heard it here, you heard it first.

It's going to happen.

Okay.

Any questions?

I didn't think so.

Thank you for your comments.

Javier Gacheja, 257 Fairway, Harrisonburg, Virginia, 22802.

Sorry, it took me about six months to make it back.

And I want to talk about elected officials' behaviors.

That's what I want to talk about tonight.

I have a discussion with two elected officials on election day about one elected official telling voters as they were going into city hall

that I supported President Trump not to vote for me, but today I'm here as a private citizen.

And my comments reflect only are on my own and they do not reflect my employer.

I want to make that clear.

That elected official stood there and talked to people and told people who I supported without having spoken to me directly.

And I wasn't going to do this because I was advised not to do it.

I'm doing it because a little kid looked at me and said, I don't want to talk to you because you're a Republican.

Then I want to make sure that elected officials are held to a better standard, a higher standard.

Because, like the national anthem said, this is the land of the free.

And as the land of the free, we are free to be Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and whatever we want to be.

And the last time I checked, I decided to come to this country for a better life.

Not because they were Democrats or Republicans, because it was America.

And as an America, little kids should know that they are allowed to be Democrats, they're allowed to be Republicans, and they're allowed to be anything that they want to be.

They can be a he, they can be a she, they can be a them they, they can be believers, and they can be non-believers.

The little kid heard that comment when he was he, she, them, they were going into voting with their parents.

And that is the example we saw that day.

And that is the problem that I have with.

The second story that I want to tell is that that day we had discussions about taxes.

I'm not talking about the resolution that was passed today.

I noticed that I got here five minutes late and I couldn't speak about it.

I wish it was done a little later.

But they were not going to increase.

But my tax assessment got into my property two months later.

And I walk all the cities.

Some people didn't have to walk, but I walk the entire city knocking doors and listening to what the people of Harrisonburg needed.

And a bunch of the doors were opened by teenagers caring for their younger siblings because mom had to have two jobs or dad had to have a job and a part-time job.

And I know that this is not a back and forth, but people are wrong about that.