Board of Supervisors Meeting   9/14/2021

September 14, 2021, meeting of the Nelson County supervisors for 2 o'clock.

Please stand for a moment of silence.

So there's going to be some minor changes in the arrangement of the

We're going to have the VACO Achievement Award and the legislative update before public comments.

These people have some places they have to be and don't want to hold them up for too terribly long.

So we're going to do that.

And then I also have a few announcements.

Oh, thank you for reminding me.

Please remember to speak into the microphones, both supervisors and the public.

I've been told by some people that like to watch it later that they can't always tell what we're talking about.

So thank you for that.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's great to meet all of you.

I'm still waiting to meet you too, but I'm so excited to be here in Nelson County.

I spent 10 years in Rocky and County Parks and Recreation and look forward to all the different projects and everything we have coming up here in Nelson.

I know that the previous directors here put the county in a good spot and I'm excited to continue that along.

If you ever have any questions for myself, feel free to reach out.

Thank you so much.

Welcome.

Great to have you on board.

I also wanted to take a moment to express my appreciation to Grace Mawyer, who's going to be, I believe this is going to be your last meeting with us.

Grace has accepted a position in Lynchburg, an accounting firm, and

She's been a key piece of the team.

She's been a great part of the team as long as I've been here and I'm just grateful for the time you spent with us and looking forward to tracking you in the future.

OK. Let's see.

Mr. Jeremy Bennett is here from VACO to present an achievement award to the county.

And I believe he wanted to get a photo of this so we can get this taken care of now.

Thank you so much for coming.

Chair.

Mr.

Chair, members of the board, good afternoon.

It is a pleasure to be here in Nelson County.

As said, I'm Jeremy Bennett, Director of Interim

We established our achievement award program to recognize counties that have adopted innovative approaches to providing public services and identifying programs that can serve as models for other counties to emulate.

Today, I'm proud to present Nelson County with its first ever achievement award, which also won the best small county achievement award.

So you guys are setting quite the precedent for your first award.

This is our 19th annual achievement awards program.

We received 102 entries in 2021.

30 winners were selected from 19 counties and it was truly competitive as only 29% of entries were selected as winners.

Mary Land, retired PACO Director of Policy.

So for Nelson County, the award goes for the Blue Ridge Tunnel Rehabilitation

Piedmont, Shenandoah Valley, and beyond.

The bulkheads in the tunnel create the barrier to walking through the entire tunnel, which that vacant, unused, and reclaimed by nature.

That is until Nelson County envisioned the passage as the major recreational and historical amenity, an economic initiative that will further strengthen the area's thriving recreation and tourism industry.

And I understand that this was a 20-year-long process

and now for the county staff.

We understand that once the tunnel has been opened, it's received over 60,000 visitors in less than seven months.

And traveling through the long dark tunnels, a stirring experience for a variety of visitors throughout the Commonwealth and beyond.

And I've been through it three times myself, so it's quite the experience.

So I'm very thrilled to be here.

So I would like to congratulate Nelson County again for this excellent program.

We invite Nelson County to participate in a breakout session at the VACO Annual Conference this November in Norfolk to further showcase your achievements to the entirety of the VACO membership and other counties.

And we certainly congratulate you all and we look forward to your participation in the 2022 Achievements Award Program.

And with that, Mr.

Chair, I'd be happy to physically present this

Mr. West, and maybe we can get a photo with the board in the background.

We're really good at pictures.

See you in November.

I'd like to hear

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman, members of the board.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here with you this afternoon.

Congratulations on your award.

I think Jeremy and I have been following each other around here in the month of September at different boards of supervisors meetings.

So it's a great pleasure to see local governments in the TJPDC region that are winning April awards.

And I just really appreciate the partnership that we have with them.

TJPDC is well worth working with them on legislative issues and on their level.

I wanted to talk to you just a little bit this afternoon about the General Assembly, just give you a little brief budget update, but more importantly to get some input from you into the next regional legislative program as we head into the 2022 legislative session.

This past year being such a weird year, it was kind of weird the General Assembly too,

They ended up having a very short session, followed by an even shorter special session that pretty much gave them the length of time that they would normally have to do their business in an odd year.

But they got through it, meeting virtually in the House, meeting without the public at an alternate site by the Senate.

And then, of course, as you know, just recently, the General Assembly convened in a special session during the first couple of weeks in August, at which time they

Thanks for looking fairly good budget-wise at the state.

I'm sure I've heard about the fiscal year 21 record state surplus and I think that moving forward into the current fiscal year as well as

looking into the next biennium when the General Assembly will be crafting the budget for the next two years when it meets in January.

The revenue projections are looking pretty good.

The Governor just announced yesterday that for the first two months of the current fiscal year, state revenues are running about 5% higher than were projected through the month of August.

So you know there are so many programs that the state has that the localities implement so we're hoping that as we move into the next budgeting cycle and there are some additional revenues that will be available for the state to appropriate that some of those funds will be making their way to localities particularly about public education where there's been some

I guess some times here in the past really 12 to 15 years where the state has been underfunding a number of items and there's been some recent catching up.

There's still some work that needs to be done and some initiatives that the Board of Education has put out there that remain unfunded.

Talking a little bit about the Regional Legislative Program, really appreciate your all's support last year as we really stepped back again in that kind of unusual year.

to take a hard look at the program in ways that we could straight line it, ways it could be scaled back.

There were a number of positions that had been in there for years and years, exact same language that were really not relevant anymore.

So we're able to clean some of those out and really focus on a smaller number of priorities.

The top three priorities from the 2021 program were included in your packet today.

A lot of the positions that are in the program have to do with money and tools.

So don't give us unfunded mandates.

Pay your share of costs to a program that you're requiring localities to implement.

Give us the tools and the authority and the flexibility to do things that need to be done in the local level.

All three of those priorities from the 2021 program have centered around that, certainly with COVID and the impacts of that.

There was the perennial position that we had on budget items and state revenues.

And then what is probably one of the most important items for us right now in this region, as well as in the other parts of the state, and that'd be funding for expanding for all families.

And I'm very happy to say that just a couple of hours ago,

We were able to hit the submit button for the SEVAC Firefly Body, Virginia Public Communication Initiative grant request.

The deadline is 11.59 tonight, so we're glad to be able to get that in.

We'll be looking over those next couple of months and hopefully hear a good, positive, fully requested funding award being announced sometime in the summer.

I've also had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Carter.

I think we can exchange some emails too and we'll have some further conversation with the Community Services Board about some mental health issues, particularly detention or order transfers and the impact that that has on your law enforcement community.

It's something that's being felt in other parts of the state as well.

I've been to a couple of other counties as I mentioned so far.

We've heard about infunded band-aids, warning F.D.

emphasizing the program again.

I'm pretty concerned, I'm not sure if it's a concern here, but I know it is in many areas about the lack of school bus drivers as we've started school here in the past several weeks or months and is there a way that the state might be able to

That's about all I wanted to bring to you today.

Certainly would appreciate hearing from you all any feedback that you may have as to the current priorities, any thoughts on additions or changes or revisions to the program as we head into the next General Assembly session.

And then we'll be incorporating those types of requests into a draft program to bring back to you for your consideration and approval in November.

I'll talk to you every day.

Jesse, anything we ought to know that you're doing?

I mean, I was going to give that in the reports, obviously.

OK. That's fine.

We can go from there.

But in terms of General Assembly, I think the only

I was thinking, I mean, Mr. Chairman, you know, there was several years ago, I think, when they did provide some state taxes.

One topic that did come up from several business owners, obviously for those who participated in the payroll protection plan, the state is or is not taxing that as income.

Are they mirroring what the feds are doing and treating that as non-taxable income?

You know, I would have to go back and look, because I considered that at the beginning of the session, and how they were going to deal with that.

I want to say that they ended up recognizing a portion of it, but not all of it.

A hundred percent.

OK. Got it.

That would be good to know.

OK. Mr. Parr?

Mr. Barton?

One of the things on our minds is the range of places that we might be able to devote some of the American Rescue Plan Act funds towards.

I know that Candy's working on that and Steve as well.

I think a lot of folks are using it for broadband that's certainly not

That's a phenomenal issue for you all.

I know some other PDCs, like TJ PDC, were lead applicants for VADI programs.

Some of the counties were using most, if not all, of their allotment as some local match for VADI.

Those two items are kind of bubble to the top of what I've heard, just kind of generally what folks are looking to use the dollars for.

I can tell you too that from the PDC standpoint,

In many parts of the state, the local communities are looking to their PDCs to kind of help them to administer some of their funds as well, particularly regions where there are a lot of small towns that don't necessarily have capacity to be able to administer a lot of funding that maybe is coming in excess of what their yearly budget is.

So that's an area where PDCs would play.

David, thank you so much.

All right, great.

Thank you.

Appreciate the time.

We'll look forward to seeing you again in November.

OK.

Thank you.

OK. We're going to drop back to our second agenda item, which is public comments.

I have five people who have signed up after I give them an opportunity to speak.

If there's anyone else, they can speak at that time.

First name is William Smith.

William Smith, follower of Virginia.

I can't really speak.

I know the chairman brought up that

statue a deal last month again.

And I'm really not here to speak for or against whether it should be taken down, but I, you know, growing up here in Nelson County, I was able to be around a lot of great people, but one of them sitting right there.

And I think my great-grandfather was on this board when this statue was erected.

And some of the things I've heard from the chairman and some people about what happened back then, it kind of bothered me because my great-grandfather was very much a fighter for civil rights.

and Ty Serpiusius, and fought against the Bird Machine.

He supported that statue at that time, I don't know how you feel about today, but he supported it back then because it represented the enlisted soldier of the Rockfish Valley, who most of them were illiterate, and they were sent off to battle for the planner class that lived along the James River who were draft dodgers.

That's what's coming from my great-grandfather's look about that.

And I just think that needs to be

Contextualize, it was put there on the 100th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.

It was not put there as a symbol of segregation or a symbol of the machine's massive resistance.

It was not, we had a very progressive pro-Civil Rights Board in the 60s for that time period.

And I just think that that needs to be contextualized and not, it was not put there for a lot of the things that the chairman said last meeting.

Good afternoon, everyone.

My name is James Bibb, Arrington, Virginia.

Well, I have stood here and spoken on four different occasions about the very same topic.

and the topic is that our soldier memorial needs to stay.

I have no words to express my feelings as to what's happened in my dear state of Virginia and that of the nation over the last number of years.

Politicians making drastic changes across the landscape without what we'll call it against the will of the general populace is in my

And when I watched, I was only going to be here and do the work last week or last month, and when I watched you bring it up and there were certain things that were said that the last gentleman spoke against and it's difficult.

to understand for me, because as a son of Nelson, as a true son of Virginia, what that memorial actually means to me.

And the true sons of Nelson that sit on this board understand that.

And those that are not a true son of Nelson or daughter don't seem to understand that.

And through discussions throughout the community,

I've been told, Mr. Reed, that you're trying to leave your mark on our community.

That mark is a stain to me.

And I don't mean that in a disrespectful manner.

I really don't.

First room proponents of your community to do your bidding is, in my feeling, a slap in the face to your constituents.

And Mr. Barton, you claim to be an ambassador of history.

and a picture of a passion for what the Rogers View truly do.

And I have personally said in your classes that you reflect upon you in the discussions of this board.

And last fall, you poured your heart out on this topic.

Here in this room, Hank claimed and stated to be against the removal or relocation of the mine room, of the memorial, and yet now claimed to be a proponent for removal.

Why?

Politics, that's why.

Plant simple politics.

Is it truly more important to politically align than to trust your heart?

Continuously stirring up the vision in our community where there lies none is unacceptable.

And the people of Nelson don't accept it.

We are a loving and caring community that wants peace and enjoy our way of life.

Our soldiers memorial

is one of Nelson's boys and stands on the same ground that he once stood.

And that is where he needs to stay.

Thank you.

Tarleton Blue, Baltimore, Virginia.

I'm not going to pretend that I have real strong feelings about the statue itself because I don't.

I've coexisted here with it for well over half a century and I never really took much notice of it to be honest.

So I guess what bothers me is the method and the processes.

What I don't want to see happen is what's happened over the past couple of years

Whereby a small handful of people, if they can spew enough venom at enough volume, they can make things happen that the majority of the people don't support.

And so that's what worries me is that not that the statute will come or whether it will go, but the process by which the decision is made.

And I think that probably there's a majority of constituents in the county who

I would like to see if there's any decision that's made be based on the population as a whole making the decision through a referendum or something like that.

Jim Marshall.

Good afternoon.

My name is James Marshall or Jim Marshall.

I live at 773 Laurel Lane of Lovingston.

The actual location is at Woods Mill.

This development is on like 102 acres and it's not going to directly affect my neighborhood.

We have like 20 houses in our neighborhood.

The only access point is Old Ridge Road.

So I'm not representing my neighborhood.

I'm not representing the people who are directly affected along Old Bridge, Sage Bridge Road.

But I wanted to just present to you what you're going to be faced with.

They're going to ask for a special use permit.

Their website, I want to highlight some things that they

have on their website, one, over 600 acres.

Now they have 102 acres.

So 150 acres adjacent to that development is in our neighborhood.

Then the other, the remaining part that totals up to 600 acres

They say walking trails to the brewery.

The only way you can walk to the brewery once you get off of this property is through our neighborhood.

They will have permission to walk across the 150 acres or so, various trails, if they stay through the trails.

Three, Skeet Shooting Equipment.

Where's that gonna happen?

Four, and this is the one I really like, Freedom to Do What You Please.

Now if that were contained to that one property alone, I'd say the immediate neighbors should be the only ones concerned about it, but in their own website they're saying they have

The use of 600 acres.

So that's our neighborhood and then the farm where the brewery is.

Freedom to do what you please.

That could mean so many things.

Some of them good and uneventful.

Some of them could be tragic.

And it's being presented on this website is

Well, as you all know, you can see it in our local papers, you can see it statewide, and you can see it nationally.

Having a lot of money doesn't ensure your behavior on many results.

You want me to wrap up?

Number five, on-seat event monitor.

Okay, what about non-event times?

Then they also

What We Do, that's number six.

Wedding venue, event venue, and lodging.

These are my thoughts.

What other events?

Music concerts, people, loud sounds carry on the neighboring properties.

Fireworks, famous above, speech shooting, limits on who, when, the time, and work.

Or unknown events,

Mr. Marshall, concluding remarks, please.

You're above four minutes, so please.

I didn't time everybody, but I think the buffalo spoke longer than three minutes.

No, sir.

No, sir.

I'm keeping time.

You're five minutes.

I don't have but a little bit more if you give me a little bit of leniency.

Okay.

Off-site.

Once off-site, who's responsible for the patrons of Rockfish Ranks?

Staying on the paths.

Number two, signing to ensure number one.

Three, limits on use of paths.

Is he going to walkers and horses?

Those are pretty low-key things.

How about four-wheelers, dirt bikes, golf carts?

Number four, use of Metadrive, Laurel Lane, and Old Ridge Road, autos, pick-ups, ATVs, UTVs, et cetera.

Who will ensure this cannot or will not be done?

How about firearms offsite?

Safety.

Do you have any further questions?

No, I think, thank you for making your remarks.

I think it would be helpful whenever we have public comments to remind the public of the rules of public comments.

And one of those rules is it's not a time for interaction with the board.

It's not a question and answer session.

And I'm not saying this against Mr. Marshall because he didn't know the rules going in.

I think it's our responsibility to inform the public.

Three minutes, period.

If we're not gonna have a three minute rule, then we shouldn't time anybody.

And this is not a time for interaction with the board.

OK. We'll close public comments.

Oh, excuse me.

If there's anyone else who wishes to speak, I should give you a chance to speak.

I'm sorry.

Hi.

My name's Robert Bertram.

I live off State Ridge Trail in Warwicks.

And I guess I got some bad information.

I thought we were going to be discussing Rockfish Ranch here today.

That's what I was led to believe.

But rather than waste all my time, I'd like to make a short comment.

I've only become aware of this project in the last few months from neighbors along State Ridge Road.

Very alarming to all of us based on its sheer size and number of things that are planned to happen there.

It's just way too large for State Ridge Road, for our quiet neighborhood, the reason we all move there.

I'll keep my comments very short.

I would just hope you as the supervisors

I would like you all to think of this as your own neighborhood and how you would watch it if it was in your own neighborhood.

That's what we in State Bridge Road, we want it controlled.

We don't want it out of control.

That's basically it.

Thank you for everything.

2225 Union Hill Drive in Magana.

I wasn't going to say anything today, but since the statute was brought up, I just can't sit by and not say anything about what's going on.

To me, as an African American, that statute represents slavery.

And some of you say that some of you family served in the civil war.

But what about those that were killing the Civil War during slavery?

As I said before, that was the old South.

This is the new South.

We need to move ahead.

It's part of old history.

It's part of history.

We need to start a new history in this county.

You know, it hurts me when I see that statue.

and Hertz from the African American community who fought so much trying to bring civil rights to communities.

Been a whole lot.

People have fought and died for civil rights.

And here we are in 2021 looking back at slavery times.

We need to move ahead.

Nelson County needs to move ahead.

Other localities have gone to State Supreme Court and they had the statute removed.

There wasn't only a little so with the generals.

But why is Nelson County going to allow that little statute to stand there

It is time to move on.

And no matter what, it is time for you to make a decision.

It is time.

And I do it saying that you're dragging your feet.

It's something that can be taken care of and not keep prolonging it.

We are willing to work with anybody.

But that statue must be relocated, moved and relocated.

Plus, we will not give up until it is removed and relocated.

Don't think that we're going to stand by and see that it's not removed.

We're going to do whatever it takes to have that statue removed.

We're going to go to all limits that we can to have it removed.

And you as a board, either you can stay back there or you can move forward.

It's time to bring the county together.

Let's pass.

Let's come together now.

Work together.

Work together.

And we can do that, but we must

Move this step.

And I thank you for allowing me this time.

But I feel hurt on the inside by not having it removed and relocated.

It reminds me of slavery.

We've come too far and we must move ahead.

As I said before, the localities have moved in without any problems.

The State Supreme Court has told them that they have to remove it.

That's that to put in 1965, 100 years after the Civil War.

Thank you.

I appreciate it for you listening to me.

But I hope you do the right thing.

My name is Milton Hudson.

I'm at 1032 Stony Creek East.

I am a veteran.

I'm a retired veteran, a disabled veteran.

Somewhat a little different than Reverend Rose, we've

and to some degree I agree with his sentiments, his emotions and all of that.

It makes a whole lot of sense to me as he is my father's age.

However, I think where I kind of, you know, I have my own little take on it is, and it's something that Mr. Barton or Representative Barton had spoken of

meetings online.

And he suggested that something be done to reflect inclusion.

And that's what I would think would need to happen with it.

Removal, it doesn't, you know, but I respect it because he grew up in that era.

I don't know much about his, you know, I don't personally his experience, but I do respect it as I respect my own fathers and my mothers and my grandparents.

But I do think that we need to seriously, seriously think about what we're doing and how, you know, moving forward.

I love Nelson, couldn't wait to get back.

You know, I wanted to do what I had to do, but always having a mindset to return home.

And some of the things that are going on in the country, you know, they hurt.

They really do hurt.

But nonetheless, we have to kind of just gather ourselves and deal with it.

So I would hope that all of us, the county, just remember, I went to school with Brother David.

I went to school with him and we had a discussion last week about Schoolwood Days and the fun times.

Well, I got to experience and we got to experience something different than Reverend Rose.

And I hope that we would take that into consideration.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Okay, then I will close the public comment.

Mr. Chairman, I move that we approve the consent agenda as presented.

Mr. Barton?

Yes.

Mr. Parr?

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford?

Yes.

Yes.

Back to presentation, we have the VDOT report.

Hello, Mr. Brown.

I didn't know you were here.

Good to be with you all today.

Just want to give you a few updates on some of the action items from last month.

Mr. Reed on your tracking council 151-I was unable to get

Our traffic folks to go along with doing special counts.

I'm still working on that on 151 and 6.

Don't know how that's going to work out, but haven't had much success in getting them to commit to specific counts during specific times of the year.

Still pushing that.

Mr. Harlan's not here, but we've been working on trimmings on the 151 and out on Mountain Road.

Pook our machine and cut back half the mountain road.

And we planned to go over to 250 in conjunction with Cole Pepper, VDOT District, Nancy Mills Area, of course, to help improve the site distance at the intersection of 250 and 6.

That was one thing.

We do have a roadside contract that was put out for a tree company to come in and completely cut trees back and brush overhang of 150, 150 and 6.

There's gotta be rebid and it came in way more than our funding, so that's gonna be rebid.

The convenience center at Shipman, on 56, we have done some trimming out there that has increased, improved sight distance.

We cut back approximately to the right-of-way line.

We are working with the property owner who owns that property on the, I guess the south side of,

The right side of 56 leaving the convenience center going back toward Shipman to do more trimming.

We trimmed as far as we could but we found if we get permission we will cut that back even more and that should solve the issue of sight distance that we had there with that.

As far as our construction program and drill rustics, on paved roads, we are working on High Peak Road and Cedar Creek Road.

They are pretty much mostly completed with the exception of the hard surfacing.

We do plan on getting to that.

That should happen once in the next month.

So that's kind of up there where we're at and what's going on.

A couple of things.

One, we had a big event this weekend, and a couple of people made comments to me about where Firehouse Road comes out onto 151.

About 10 years ago, there was that study that was done, and I don't know if that's something, if it was just

My suggestion would be to eliminate that intersection.

You've got the equipment, you've got the drainage issue that's just causing constant problems.

You go in, you fix the road, and then you constantly have that drainage there and it gets torn up again.

I live on it and I won't use it.

I always go to Dollar General and turn that way.

I don't ever turn to the Firehouse Road.

And then this is a little bit VDOT, a little bit Verizon, but hot off the presses.

Mr. Harvey might not be here, but he is still working.

I just got a text from him saying that the entrance for Verizon to use the Whispering Pines Road to

One subdivision does want to talk again, so we're meeting.

Okay, so I guess the application submission deadline for revenue sharing has passed the cycle?

Sure, of course.

So yeah.

We'll get them ready.

Perfect.

OK. Yeah, I responded.

Got it.

Yeah.

No, it's going to be another.

Well, our traffic roads are going to look at one specific curve.

One specific.

One specific curve.

That's all it needs.

One curve.

I almost got hit the other day, really.

Speaking of one curve, what's going on in Reed's Gap these days?

Well, I didn't mention that, but yes, we completed the final painting up there on Reed's Gap where we did the widening on the curve on top of the hill.

I am waiting again.

I track engineers to give me the outline for the pavement markings and pretty much once we get the pavement markings down that will be completed.

I hope you all have had a chance to ride up there.

First of all, thank you for your persistence on the traffic count.

And thank you for your continued persistence.

See what the next couple of months brings.

Yeah, appreciate that.

Yes.

And I'll put it on.

I went back to the office and pulled the file up on

Bush Year, Six Year Plan that we passed on the priority list.

I'll put a note on there.

The next time we do the priority list, we look at that road.

Berry Hill.

I'm sure you know it.

Okay.

So thank you for that.

Finally I had someone talk about Adow Road and some of the curves there.

I'm going to meet with her next week and take a look at

Okay, that'll be fine.

I know all of those curves should be, should have curve warning signs.

I know we've done some reviews out there.

I think all the curves that are needed and have advanced warning, if I can speak on them,

I know I'm pretty sure of that, but, you know, we're certainly going to take a look at it again.

I'm just kind of going off memory, but I do remember us looking at several, several stretches out there that people had requested.

One was to extend the, I guess the 25 mile track, 25 mile track speed limit.

And that was, that was not approved.

Our traffic folks would not do it.

It's, it's unposted.

There's a non-posterous pay limit, which is a statute over 55, or is road conditioned, is road conditioned, so I'm driving according to road conditions.

And in that situation, we're very careful that we post all curves that need posting to let voters know you need to slow down.

Okay, I will probably follow up with you next time.

Okay.

Mr. Brown, thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Thank you for the opportunity to come and update you on the 2022 General Reassessment.

First, I'd like to just let you know who we are.

It's Want Green's Appraisal Group.

I'm Gary Eames.

I'm one of the owners of the appraisal company, and I'm also the project manager for this project.

Our company has been in existence since 1996.

This year we will have completed 136 reassessments and that's important because when our notices go out some folks will tell y'all that we haven't done them before.

So just want to get that out that we have completed 136 reassessments, over 2.3 million properties assessed in 53 localities throughout Virginia and North Carolina.

Over the last 11 months,

Myself and two of our appraisers have been doing our field inspections analyzing sales and updating the current county records.

At this point I'd like to thank Andrew and Susan and their staff for keeping our computers going.

That's very important to us.

And I'd like to thank Pam Campbell's office, the Commission of Revenue, for keeping good records.

She updates the sales

They're over a year behind in their transfers, so Pam's office is right on.

I'd like the public to keep in mind that the reason for a general reassessment is not you as a board of supervisors, it's not county admin, and it's not the commissioner of revenue.

General reassessments are mandated through the Virginia Constitution, so it's state.

It's the state of Virginia that requires

a county duo re-appraiser.

You can do one annually every two years, four years, and the longest you can wait is six.

Nelson County has been consistently on the four-year cycle, which is good, and the state would thank you for that.

Keep in mind, too, that the state grades us.

So once the reassessment is

In simple terms, if a house sells for $100,000 and I only have assessed at $80,000, then we're at 80% of the market value.

The state says that we're supposed to be at market value, 100% market value.

So if your assessments are down here and market value is here, the state says we can't stop in between.

They want us to be at 100% market value.

They also would recommend that you do a reassessment if you did the ratio

I don't have any figures as far as where we're going to wind up yet.

We still have about four weeks in the field left as far as working properties and dealing with the data entry, but I did bring a few examples of what we're seeing out there.

This home is up in the Afton area.

It's currently assessed at $148,000 and it just sold for $205,000.

That's one example.

This one again is up in the Afton area.

It's currently assessed at $182,000 and it just sold for $248,000.

You'll like this one.

This again is in Afton.

It's assessed at $275,000 right now.

It just sold for $4.30.

Examples all over the county,

In Shipman, here's one that just sold for $245,000.

It's currently assessed at $118,000.

Another one in the Shipman area, this is a 3.16-acre tract of land with this house on it.

It is assessed at $179,000 and sold for $340,000.

Up on the mountain, Wintergreen, 342, it's over 469.

Another one in Wintergreen, 389, just over 875.

Down in Stony Creek, 242,000, it's over 540.

Another one in Stony Creek,

It's assessed at 301, it's sold at 409.

So these are some of the things we will be seeing once these notices go out.

A couple of condo sales up on the mountain.

Assessment for 205, it's sold at 430.

Assessed at 94,000, just sold for 158.

So those are the sales that we're looking at.

And there are some that are close.

too.

And some of these have sold high.

We know they've been improved.

And basically a flip, someone would buy the house, go in, put a new kitchen, update the heating system.

So we're trying to weed those out.

So what has fueled all of this?

We have the lowest interest rates ever in history.

The demands there, there's no supply.

I spoke to a real estate agent here in the county last week and he informed me that, including condos, there were 45 properties that were for sale at that time of homes.

So what is the good news?

The good news is we're all worth a little more than we were last year, if you can count that as good news.

What's left in the project?

We still have to validate all the sales.

We'll watch these sales all the way up through.

and let them know.

Anyone that appeals will be notified by us as to our decision whether a change went up, down, stayed the same.

And then our process has to be finished by December and then after that sometime

But please keep in mind it's not the Board of Supervisors, these values are my values until I turn them over to the Commissioner of Revenue.

Any questions?

I'm interested.

They say locality, locality, locality in Milton State.

It will be all over the place.

There will be areas that probably won't see hardly any increase.

And then there's other areas.

And probably specific, you know, some of those that I was showing you, that one

If we hit it right at 100% of market value, that's a 300% increase.

No one area will see that kind of increase, but certain properties might, but this is a very diverse county.

You have recreation, you have the river, so you have the lower kind of farmland type, a lot of wooded areas.

And we have the county divided up into roughly 200 neighborhoods.

So we'll be looking at the sales within those neighborhoods and then spreading out from there.

So if you live in Wintergreen, you're only going to be compared to Wintergreen.

If you live in Schuyler, you're going to be compared

We started doing our field work in 20, so we were looking at early 20 sales and basically it's changed so much that now we're looking at 21 sales.

So that's what we're going to watch this market all the way through 21.

Land we may go back real far.

Keep in mind this isn't mass appraisal.

We're making our decision based on what we see from the outside.

Being different from a fee appraiser that would come in and spend an hour going through your home.

Thank you so much.

Alright, great.

Mr. Chairman, members of the board, thank you for having me here today.

I'm Christine Jacobs.

I'm the interim director.

at the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

I'm going to be talking to you today about a regional housing plan that the Central Virginia Regional Housing Partnership put together, of which Vice Chairman Rutherford is actually a member of that board sitting in Nelson's seat.

I have a small presentation that she's pulling up.

Thank you, appreciate it.

So I'm going to start at a pretty high level.

I'm going to start pretty high level and give you a really quick year in review just at the Central Virginia Regional Housing Partnership.

Then I'm going to jump into the plan that we created and the timeline that it took to create this plan.

I'm going to give you a couple high level key takeaways from the work that the consultant did.

And then I'll do a jump into some of the overall data that was collected for the region and then more that's collected specific for Nelson County.

All right, so here we go.

This is a timeline year in review.

So the Regional Housing Partnership has had quite the year, obviously, with the previous presenter.

We all know that housing costs have gone up dramatically in the last year.

We've been fortunate to be involved in some initiatives that are helping.

The first one is called Porch Lake Virginia dot org.

That is a free online housing locator tool that can help people find affordable housing.

The second thing we were involved in, the Planning District Commission, is we administered the region's $1.8 billion Emergency Rent and Mortgage Relief Program, RMRP, before the state took it back over and decided to implement it at the state level instead of at the regional level.

We also held eight educational webinars for the spring, for the fall.

Those are just educational sessions related to housing affordability and for topics that are tangentially related to housing

such as equity or transportation.

And then we did a significant amount of grant research, grant applications, planning, budgeting, and fundraising.

We did put a press release out.

It's not on this PowerPoint, but we did put a press release out that we were awarded a $2 million Virginia housing grant to partner with a developer to actually build units.

So that'll be the first time that the Planning District Commission has ever been engaged in any sort of actual development.

And so we'll partner to do that work.

We're excited.

And then finally the last one, number five, is what I'm actually here to talk to you about.

We finished up about a two and a half, three year process of creating a regional housing plan.

And that regional housing plan incorporates all six of the jurisdictions within the Thomas Jefferson footprint.

And I'm here to talk to you about yours today.

So the timeline for that is we started in 2018 securing the funding.

Again, that was a great partnership we have with Virginia Housing.

They were willing to fund the entire

We contracted with an outside consultant in order to do the housing needs assessment and gap analysis to look at in each of our jurisdictions what are the housing needs.

I think it's very important to note from the beginning that this started in 2018 and we're in a very different environment.

In 2021, we certainly reached out to our funders and said we would love some additional funding to make kind of 180 and talk about the impacts of COVID on housing.

And their response is they want a year or two before they're going to put any funding into looking at that since we're still in the middle of the pandemic.

They were afraid that if we started any research on that in another year, we would be asking to do it again.

So we're on hold for that.

In 2019 is when we did the Regional Housing Summit.

I know many of you were in attendance.

That was at the Omni.

That was a chance for us to bring together all of our partners in the one space and start to talk about housing as a regional issue.

2019, we also did a lot of our background research on this housing plan, collecting the data that we needed, doing regional surveys, convening focus groups.

We went and we did a stakeholder meeting and a community meeting in each of the six jurisdictions and then worked with a consultant to get additional data and research.

Moving forward ahead, I'll fast forward a little.

We spent a lot of time drafting this.

We worked with a

Committee of the Regional Housing Partnership.

They're called the Strategies and Analysis Committee.

And that team was tasked for looking at all of the data that we had and beginning to identify potential strategies that could be used to address some of the housing needs.

And then here we are at 2022, the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission just approved or adopted this as the regional housing plan in their August meeting.

And moving forward, our hope is that we can support jurisdictions with their own planning for affordability, knowing

from the beginning that this plan is intended to be a toolkit, not a guide.

There's nothing in here that we are suggesting that we know better than you about your own locality.

It's more so benchmarking and looking at best practices and strategies that can be used in working with your county as you guys identify your priorities for housing.

Key takeaways of the data.

To make sure we're still using the same language when we talk affordability, I think the biggest question that is always asked is, what is affordable housing?

And I think one of the hard parts about answering that is affordable is relative, right?

It's relative to your income, it's relative to your household size, it's relative to where you live.

So HUD, the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines affordable as not spending more than 30% of your household income on housing related expenses.

That doesn't include utilities.

They consider you cost-burdened if you are paying more than 30% of your income on your housing expenses, and they consider it severely cost-burdened if you're paying more than half of your income.

So when we talk about cost burdens through this, we're using that 30% and that 50% threshold.

This is the regional housing data, so this includes Nelson, City of Charlottesville, Havana, Louisa, and Green.

We found that within the rental market, there were just under 9,000 urban renters that were cost burdened and an additional 4,040 that were paying more than 50% of their income on their rent within this region.

They found that about 2,000 of the rural renters were paying more than 30% of their income and about 940 more were paying about 50% of their income.

Again, that 30 and that 50 is a threshold of HUD.

It's important to remember that some people choose to pay more than 30% of their income if they are wealthier families, if they have larger homes.

So this is just one definition of affordable.

And then again, the bottom is the household data for the region showing that there are both urban and rural homeowners in the thousands that are paying more than half of their incomes for their rent, I mean their mortgage and their housing costs.

The purpose of this study was to also begin to project out a little bit of how that will change over time.

I can tell you already, I would suspect that those numbers are wrong already because of the pandemic and knowing how many more people are likely cost burdened due to the loss of jobs, etc.

This is other high level regional data.

I often hesitate to put housing data side by side by jurisdiction because it shouldn't be compared.

to your regional colleagues, but I do sometimes think it's also nice just to see where you are in case you're curious.

So this just shows the percentage of renters that are cost burdened.

You'll see in Nelson that's 27%, that's 27% of the renters within Nelson.

And then the same for homeowners that are cost burdened, about 26% of homeowners are cost burdened.

And this is the severely cost burdened.

but 11% of the renters are paying more than 50%, more than 10% of homeowners are paying more than half of their incomes.

This is Nelson's specific data.

So what I previously gave you is the regional gap.

This is Nelson's gap.

So about 260 renters are paying more than 30% and about 480 owners are paying more than half of their incomes.

So I think it's also important to look at these relative to the size of your county and it's going to be completely up to you all.

I want to make sure I stress it's completely up to you all.

What you take from this plan that's really useful to you all, especially as you're going into a comprehensive plan rewrite and then what you say is just not for our county based on your own priorities.

One thing we like to think about when we look at housing is the cost of transportation.

You know that old saying, if you drive until you qualify,

We all know the further you drive away from where your work is, the more your costs are for transportation.

So we like to think of housing and transportation together.

The image on the left shows the inflow and outflow of jobs based on the on the map census tool.

And that shows that just over 4700 of Nelson residents are commuting outside of Nelson in order to meet their employment.

and generally their commute times average 30 minutes, which is about the same as other jurisdictions of your size.

And then on the right, it shows of the six most common job centers.

If we went with the federal 56 cents per mile commuting to work every day and back, that is an estimated cost of what it might be for transportation related costs if folks are commuting from their homes

again affordable for whom is very relative you know what's affordable for me might be really different than what's affordable for my grandparents on fixed incomes and you know it's very different than somebody at the beginning of their career with a law degree so I think it's really important HUD makes

their fair market rents as you guys are, and Nelson is included in Charlottesville's NSA, Metropolitan Statistical Area.

So I would suspect that when you all see that 1,325, your thought is, well, that's not what we necessarily take rent here.

But what it does mean is that you do have some rents that are high like that.

If this were the fair market rent for Nelson specifically, in order to pay less than 30% of your income on housing related expenses, you would need to be making $53,000 a year for and for to not be considered cost burden.

All right, so why the regional housing plan?

Why did we decide to do this?

You know, we had a great amount of data

and we wanted to be able to provide a tool for support for jurisdictions as they began thinking about housing and as housing is changing within their regions.

I think one of the most important things that we think about is that folks don't necessarily always see jurisdictional boundaries where we work, where we have recreation, where we have entertainment, where we have family crosses, those jurisdictional boundaries.

And so housing can be seen as a regional issue and one that

can be coordinated across jurisdictional boundaries.

Why now?

It's particularly important now because we know how much higher rising land costs, the cost of construction, the home values, and what a competitive market it cleared in, just like the previous speaker talked about, how few homes are actually available and on the market right now.

As far as community engagement, on the bottom left, you can see those are the tools that we used in order to collect

feedback specific to Nelson.

And then the vision that the Regional Housing Partnership came up with, which I think is ambitious but is spot on, is that Planning District 10 will have 100% alignment of supply and demand.

I think that is definitely something we want to be shooting for, but so that anyone can find access to safe, decent, affordable housing in communities of their choice.

The guiding principles that we use to create the plan is that we wanted to stress coordination, we wanted to stress how important it was to engage the community in the decision-making around any strategies that are adopted, and then really thinking about anti-displacements, connectivity, and accessibility, so that all of your community members can find that safe place.

The regional goals that we came up with have three specific categories, and you'll see that in the Nelson chapter that was included in your packet.

And we were specific to make sure we included strategies that were just policy changes or required programming to be set up or actually required capital for some sort of investment.

Some of the themes that came out of the engagement that we did from Nelson, again, this was almost two years ago now.

I can't believe that, but with the pandemic, time flew faster apparently.

So some of the themes that we heard from your community members, from some of you all as stakeholders on the committee, from some nonprofit organizations, we have private developers, we have citizens, so it was a very diverse group of feedbacks.

Actually, Nelson was some of the best diversity of feedback that we received in any of our six jurisdictions.

But was that there was an aging population and that with that means that you guys have a lot of seniors and a lot of seniors potentially living alone and with that comes the need for folks wanting to age in place not wanting to leave their own homes in order to be able to stay in their communities and there was a lot of conversation and a lot of feedback for us around preservation and retrofitting homes and

to get homes that are either at risk of substandard or currently substandard, up to code or up to comfort so that people can continue living in them.

There was a lot of discussion about the deteriorating stock and what to do with homes that are falling out of the market.

And then another theme that we heard is a lack of varied housing options.

It certainly depends who you talk to, what they want to see come into their community.

So keep in mind that this is just the folks that did provide their feedback.

that they would like to see more housing sizes, the missing middle, the accessory dwelling units, smaller cottages, smaller units, that not everybody wants a large single family home, not everybody wants to live in an apartment or a townhouse, but that there weren't very many options available.

And then the other thing we saw is just the rental options are limited here and overall supply is limited everywhere.

So that's not unique to Nelson.

And then another category or theme that we heard was about the resources.

You know, everything housing related, there's just not enough money, you know?

The water and sewer infrastructure is high, costs are high, land costs are high, but these are different resources that could be committed, looking at vouchers, looking at down payment assistance, and again, that's dependent upon your community's desires to do programming like that.

And then the last thing is, it was important to note that Nelson is currently looking into doing a comprehensive plan rewrite and floor zoning.

co-pre-write, and so a lot of the recommendations that did come up I believe will be addressed through that process that you guys have already started.

And then finally, the way that we did each of the chapters was along the housing continuum.

So we start with strategies that can help those that are unhoused or experiencing homelessness, and then we move into strategies for affordable rental, affordable home ownership, market-grade rental, and market-grade home ownership.

And then finally, the strategies are in those three different categories.

This was provided by our consultant if you look along that continuum at the top from unhoused all the way up to market rate ownership housing.

The gap data that I showed you earlier of the number of people that are experiencing cost burdens or severely cost burden is broken out across that continuum.

So if you see the majority of the cost burdens that are occurring are occurring within that affordable rental and affordable ownership range.

A lot of people ask, wait a minute, why are there people, you know, 10 severely cost potent garden folks in market rate housing?

And again, that could be people that are choosing to pay above and beyond, or it could be people that are in housing that they were able to get into that they can't necessarily afford to be into.

And we know that happens with the housing market crash back in 08 and 09 that a lot of people were way underwater in their homes.

So that could be some remnants of that.

and then I am not going to go through because there's probably about 12 to 16 pages of these but I wanted to show you just an example of what the matrix looked like where if you look across the housing continuum on the top this is affordable rental recommendations and by recommendations we mean available strategies in the toolkit it does not in any way mean you should do one through 20 in that order because they may not be fitting for your community

What we would recommend is as a part of your comprehensive planning, you all choose to have the housing chapter in there as required by code that you can use this to help you develop the housing chapter of your comp plan, looking at different priorities that you guys may have for your community and looking at whether or not they would require new programming or policy changes or actually capital to be invested.

Of course, the conversation of housing in Nelson County has always been a constant one.

It's been a conversation since for many years and gets more exacerbated as time goes on and supply changes and markets change as well in the job markets.

Of course, you know, I know housing is a serious issue and it is important that we as a board address that in our comprehensive plan.

Thank you for having me.

Does anyone else have questions before we go?

You know, I mean, it's so frustrating.

It's a question that absolutely needs to be dealt with, but yet it's very frustrating.

You look for different answers, innovative answers, some way to do that.

Have you had any examples of private enterprise building low cost housing in an area not rural where

spaced out but closer together.

No, it's not very common.

Well, you hear so much about public housing, and that's kind of, I think we've had a couple of fairly successful low-cost housing developments where there's

I mean, you know, you have many different concepts.

I mean, obviously, one of those of which Christine has worked on was the land trust.

You know, that is that is an example of what a public private partnership would look like.

Obviously, we've seen some success with that.

We've seen some issues with

As it relates to specific programs, I would definitely echo that Virginia Housing with cooperation with a lot of PDCs are trying to answer that question.

So I would say not yet.

they have not I mean obviously we had the Montreal Village project back in 1980 yeah something and then you had the apartments that came up that was another federal program that HUD came up with and that was I think in 90s or early 2000s kind of concept so then we're still coming back to the issue we're like well you know that worked over in Montreal Village you know now how but at the same

And that also comes down to financing.

You also have to have financeable people.

All those things get very complicated or very difficult with the regulators that we have today.

For example, Montreal Village, what happened in the 1980s, it would be extremely difficult

A. without a substantial amount of federal subsidies, federal or state subsidies, especially with the private.

You will not see the state government doing projects such as that subdivision.

They're not going to take that project at all.

They have to use private enterprise and foundations and community developments that you'll see all over the place take on those issues.

So in terms of

What you need in some ways is you have to get some development of like 20 to 30 units somewhere and then try to make that something that you can have a specific demographic that's able to purchase.

It's not easy and with the current state of regulations and that's what Christine was saying, you don't see too many for-profit groups go into it for the reason that it gets so expensive.

Very fast, and then they're like, if we're here, that's not making my margins work.

You know, it's not worth it when I can spend an extra, let's say $20,000 in my, even though I'm in a different demographic, my margins are where it could be, where I can afford it.

In trying to find housing for people that they can afford,

You know, it's interesting.

I went to that thing about employment and having trouble with employment.

People find people who work.

And

Well, one of the surprising things I found out was that states that were still paying money to people for not working had no difference in the amount of people looking for work.

So it was some other problem besides that.

And the fact that wages are low, you know, it seems to me

If you go to increasing availability of houses, you have to have income that can purchase it.

I think you would be amazed, obviously, with the statistics that we often work with.

We don't usually operate on median or mode.

We work on the median.

And I think you would be amazed, which is the middle.

So whatever that guy's income is, is what we're going to go by.

And if I'm not mistaken, Nelson County's

relative to what she had in Wintergreen, what she had in Nellysford, when she added so many affluent demographics that have residency here, I think it's like $90,000 for a family of four.

And now I look at that and I say, yeah, good luck.

You know, if you have one family member that's making 50, I consider that wow.

You know, so how what is it for?

That's why when you look at that dollar number that came on the screen, it said like 1300, 1325 or whatever it may have been.

And that's a HUD number.

The problem you have is it's the other 50%.

The problem we have as a society is the average wage is decent, but the number of people making the large amount askew, make that figures askew, in which we have so many more people who don't make that.

Correct.

But you can't look at it just in that nutshell necessarily.

And I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this because then it won't take all day.

But do you then have affordable places in Nelson?

Yes, you're right.

You have somebody who's to the left of that median number, they're not going to live in Afton.

They're not going to live in Nellysford.

And so that you do have areas that are a little bit easier to live in Gladstone, Schuyler, parts of Lovingston that are more affordable for those groups.

You can see the market of manufactured housing and how that's infiltrated and been able to build a house for less than $120,000.

And then that takes care of the family.

Their income is only $45,000 a year.

But then you run into the issue, which gets more complicated, of land availability.

That's complicated.

Now you have to find an acre lot that's for sale that's less than $20,000.

Oh wait, are zoning so complicated and difficult as it relates to cutting out small parcels that, you know, there's none.

There's no land availability for that person who makes less than $50,000 a year.

If you want to make it a wage issue, that's fine.

But you're still not going to answer the land issue, you know, and land availability and subdivided land pieces.

I mean, when we look at a family that's got a farm that's been in the farm for our family for 200 and some years, well, they only have a certain number of division rights, depending on so many other different scenarios, you know, as opposed to being able to subdivide it 20 times for all their 20 cousins.

So it's not simple.

It's complicated.

And you could be a wage thing.

It's a lot of different things.

Also, just some comments on my end.

You have to acknowledge the role of the Community Development Foundation in terms of doing what they can to bring the private and public partnership together.

That's a really important thing that gives us at least one tool we can look at.

The other thing is that if you look at the demographics, we have this rising tide of age in Nelson County, which further skews

It is and so the question is do you provide for something that you know that that deluge is bringing or you try to you know build a dike up against it and try to provide other things that you know probably want to do everything ultimately but it's it's not easy I'm just really grateful to y'all for you know for

bringing this to us like you said it's not a you know it's not the solutions it's the toolkit so it gives us it gives us all a lot more to take a look at when we consider the future for the comp plans anyway thank you so much great job Christine thank you okay

So we have a recommendation to put this on the back burner for a few minutes while we cover some of the things where people have been waiting for a long time already, since we can hold you hostage a little more easily than a lot of the public.

So give you a call back in just a little bit.

So let's go onto the new and unfinished business just temporarily and the consideration of the right-of-way conveyance.

Do you want to do the tap one first?

Okay, that's fine with me.

Thank you.

The board has two resolutions to consider approval of.

There are two applications for transportation or procurement program funding for VDOT,

Planning District Commission Staff, Ms. Shafferford, and Courtney Jacobs are both here to assist with any questions the board may have.

We have two applications we submitted through the PDC on July 1st, three applications for the Lovingston pre-feralization project and then the Gladstone depot project.

Both of those submittals were approved to go to final applications which were due to VDOT October 1st, the board's resolution

I think the primary considerations for the border, the commitment for the local matches of this aperture is here for Friends of Gladstone Depot.

The resolution for Gladstone speaks to the Friends group providing the local match.

The aperture, if you allow her to speak,

You don't have to be able to do that short or long term.

So I'll just note that we're not recommending against an approved resolution.

I think you can be sure that it is, and if it's approved,

And that application, there's a description of work to be done.

It's about one, two, three, four, five paragraphs down.

And it would provide for environmental assessments, development of engineering plans, site preparation, and replacement of buildings, pier footings.

The total cost is 300, estimated cost is $365,615.

And over the total, there's

With the Lovingston project, the board may recall that the county staff, in conjunction with the townships and BDC staff, applied to the Department of Housing and Human Development previously.

We received a planning grant award that looked at downtown Lovingston revitalization.

So this is an outcome of that project where the proposal is to install new sidewalks on the west side

on Front Street from the intersection of Main and Front Streets to Theater Drive.

And the estimated cost is just over $2.2 million.

The local match would be just over $440,000.

I noted these applications are being prepared for sale by October 1st deadline to VDOT.

This resolution provides the board's endorsement

and funding that's being sought plus equally important in some respects is the two local matches which collectively are just over 500,000.

Both applications are approved for funding.

We probably won't know that until sometime after first year, very likely the spring of 2022 when the next six-year improvement plan is considered by the

That's different, yeah.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Right below that.

Yes.

Okay.

They are two separate resolutions.

And that, Mr. Chairman, is my suggestion that we just vote on both of them separately, since both of them are significant to each respective community.

If that's okay, can I proceed?

Mr. Chairman, it is with great excitement to make this resolution.

Of course, with our Resolution R. 2021-48,

To approve it, I think this will be great for Lovingston.

It will be a great opportunity.

And of course, you know, we never know what we're going to get, but we're moving in the right direction.

And that's a, sometimes that's a, that's the best thing we could do and get in our town.

Hopefully a little bit of a facelift.

That's a motion to approve.

I'll second it.

Second.

Mr. Parr?

Yes.

Mr. Barton?

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford?

Yes.

I make the motion for, I'm glad Tony talked about it.

Where's the, is there anything to read?

Resolution 20-21-49, no, 2021-49.

Nelson County Board of Supervisors, transportation alternatives set aside the application of funding

first phase of the relocation of the Gladstone Depot.

Mr. Parr?

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford?

Yes.

Mr. Barton?

Yes.

Mr. Reed?

I think it's best if I may defer to Mr. Saunders.

Nancy here is probably better versed in me if she's amenable to this to make the presentation.

The consideration is the board's consent to authorize staff to proceed with an acceptance of a 25

But right of way to assist with, you know, enable VDOT to improve the redevelopment or future redevelopment of Oak Lake in the Montebello area.

Members of the board, my name is Massey Saunders.

I'm a land surveyor engineer.

I've been working here in the county for 30, 40 years now.

We're working on a project now for Mr. Craig Kohlberg up near the Parkway.

It's Skylar Farm LLC and 12 Ridges LLC.

When he bought the property,

decided he wanted to put some of the property into a conservation easement.

And that went into a conservation easement with the Virginia A. Doris Foundation.

And that is the property of Skylark Farm LLC.

And if anybody's familiar with the Christmas tree farm up on Parkway near where the aviation towers are, that's the property that we're talking about.

Anyway, during the purchase of that, he decided that he wanted to put a vineyard in up there and he put the

We started to work on a comprehensive plan for the vineyard and other improvements associated with the vineyard.

And during the course of that, some individuals came to me about possibly buying some property up there or having some rental units up there.

During the course of all those conversations, we started into some planning processes and this has been going on for probably three or four years.

putting all the documentation together, trying to get through DEQ, trying to get approvals to do various things.

But anyway, to make a long story short, the parkway does not want to give him a good right-of-way.

I mean, he's got a right-of-way, but he can't use it for access to a residential home setting that he wants to develop down over the side of the mountain towards Spy-Rite Gap and to the commercial facility for the

Fingers.

So we came up with a plan to come off of Spy Run Gap with the road.

We've been through DEQ.

They've approved it.

The county has approved it as far as erosion sediment control.

But now the hang up is VDOT.

In order to put the entrance in, we've got to improve Spy Run Gap road.

And that road only has a 30 foot prescriptive right of way on it.

And so VDOT wants to

wants Mr. Colbert to do a dedication of right-of-way to the county, since that's the secondary road, wants to do a dedication of right-of-way so that they can know that they can get onto the road and to the shoulders of the road and maintain an improvement that's needed.

Well, as a part of that, VOF is saying we can't do that until you have that permission because of the portion of the property being in the conservation easement.

The question then became, does VDOT need to make the application or does the county need to make the application?

Well, when I went to Justin Alsace with the VOF, they said the only people that can make the application are the people receiving the right of way.

So that's where we're back to the county.

Mr. Kohlberg is willing to grant the 50-foot right of way that VDOT wants so they can maintain it, but we need to have

a application by the county for about 78 feet of road maybe 15 feet wide in order for him to get to the point where we can improve the road to be able to put the entrance in for him to serve the houses he wants to serve and serve the vineyard which is already in place and then the restaurant, not restaurant, the tasting room and so forth that's already in place on the mountain.

I think the consideration for the board is sort of multifaceted.

One would be authorizing staff to, it could be the same authorization, of course, authorizing staff to move forward with the acceptance, the documentation necessary for the board to consider acceptance of the conveyance and the 50-foot right-of-way, and then, secondly, authorizing staff to also submit the application for the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to facilitate this overall initiative.

And then we will bring those things back to the board as I've discussed with Mr. Saunders, probably in the October meeting, as long as we can move it along that quickly.

So a motion, if I may, to those effects.

I move forward with bringing back the documentation yesterday.

consider acceptance of the 50-foot right-of-way conveyance.

It also authorizes staff to proceed with the application of the Virginia Outdoors Foundation to get their approval that coincides with this overall.

We've been able to 50-foot right-of-way to also be considered for approval by the board.

I might add one thing.

The application was filled out by me and turned into VOF, but because I was not the third party receiving it, they would not accept it.

So the application has been filled out.

Basically all the county has to do is take the application that I put together and put it in their name as opposed to the sort of coal works name.

Okay, do we have a motion?

Yes, Mr. Chairman, I move that we offer our staff to move forward with accepting the 50-foot right-of-way and also to submit an application to VAF for approval of this project.

Questions?

Discussion?

Yes.

Yes.

OK.

Thank you all.

You're welcome.

Take a five minute break here.

and we'll be back and pick up with the redistricting.

So about a month ago, Census Bureau finally released all of the 2020 population data and county staff

We got to looking at that data and looking at, you know, how our population had changed.

And I guess as you guys have seen, you know, our population did decrease slightly.

The guided level redistricting that the legislative services puts out basically gives guidelines for how we proceed with redistricting and they

require that all of our election districts must have essentially the same population with a 5% deviation plus or minus from the ideal population.

Nelson's ideal district population is 2,955 people.

And when you look at the current

Capilations, along with a deviation of plus or minus 5%.

Only one of our districts fell outside of being a conforming district as far as the district population went.

And you can see that there.

The central district with the plus 7.55%, that was the only one that we

were required to reduce the population.

So we took a look at the map, so we took a look at the population and where we could make a fairly insignificant change in population to bring the Central District into compliance.

And what we found

It might be easier just to go straight to the map.

We found that there's a small area right here at Woods Mill, and it's shown larger here on the map at the bottom, that essentially consists of that area where the Woods Mill subdivision and Woodridge Farm Brewery is.

Relocating the people in that

That area from the central district into the east district would bring all of the districts into compliance.

And you can see here that the new district populations based on that map and the new census data do bring all of these numbers down

to within the plus or minus 5% of the ideal population.

Yeah, the prison conversation.

Yeah, so that is in the state code.

Apparently the Division of Legislative Services is going to at some point provide us with some adjusted population data.

Hopefully that data doesn't like vary significantly from

So you've got this listed as scenario one.

Just one.

I did this as a starting point because I thought that this particular solution was disruptive to very few citizens in the county.

We looked further because I guess ideally, you know, East District is a, you know, plus 0.74% deviation.

If you look at North and Central, one's, you know,

plus three point something and one's minus three point something.

Same thing with South and West District, one's plus two.

It would be nice to maybe bring those more into the zero point something percent.

But I just, I felt like, I mean, certainly, you know, this is just a starting point for you guys to decide if you want to act further.

For the North District, to make it larger, you're either going to have to go into this area around Stony Creek to try to find additional people.

Or you're going to have to go down Route 6 further into the Central District to find them.

Or possibly you would take people from here, which is like the Buck Creek, you know, all those roads, you know, to the left as you're traveling on 29 North.

I didn't think those people would be particularly happy to go into Afton to vote as opposed to Auburn.

I think splitting that Stony Creek community in any way might be controversial, but I mean, that's an option.

And then, you know, East District's great.

I mean, obviously with this scenario.

And when you look over here,

For the West, you're either talking about, you know, getting even further over, oh, I'm trying to think.

Yeah.

For some reason, this map doesn't look right there, but... Beach Road Road is the line.

It was almost like you were going to want to like move the West District.

You know, this is 29.

You were going to be going south of 29 to pick up people for the West District.

Those were just my observations and I think you know today we were just here with scenario one to say yeah and some of the parameters that you have to work by is it has to be a physical visible kind of line like creek, river, road, mountain range, some kind of physical you know you can't

Yes, you can.

Yeah, and you can see a lot of those lines there are roads.

I meant to bring this up earlier, but this map actually does contain the census blocks.

And these numbers that are in those blocks are the population that is attributed to that block.

So, you know, for instance, if you're going from the North District, you start to go into this Stony Creek area.

And those census blocks are there primarily because there is that water feature, something physical on the ground.

Sometimes just a lot of them had zero people but they were like a

So clearly it makes sense that the central district loses something someplace and that totally makes sense.

But the deviation is actually larger in the north district.

The negative deviation right now.

So first of all, it seems like that a scenario that would change something in the North District might be preferable just by looking at the numbers.

The other thing is that in the central district there's two areas that are I think also worth looking at.

One would be the south part of Fauver and the other would be just around Perry Lane past Davis Creek.

So you moved, so basically we're trying to get Ernie

Ernie had to, he was at 3,178 and he had to be under 3,103.

So he had to go down by 70, at least 75 people.

When you say Perry Lane, Davis Creek, we looked at that area

But the Perry Lane you've got what?

97 and 13, that's 110.

Just one other thing to point out about where the new boundary line is between the Central and the East District.

The other piece that's a little problematic is of course the Fobber precinct where you've got

Well, that they're using railroad tracks.

Is that for railroad tracks?

Railroad tracks divide us there.

Okay.

I mean, is this map?

It looks pretty good.

Sure.

And our target number is, you're earning these loose 78 people.

And it can be more.

At least 78 people or 78 people?

And it could be as much, I mean, he can go down as far as 2807, but I could just, I'll do the math and tell you, well, everybody has to be between 2807 and 3103.

Right.

So he, I guess it's possible that he can

Right.

Okay.

I would love to have you come up with the proposals.

and then Jesse and I throw things at each other for a while.

I mean, there's some Schuyler residents in there.

I mean, you know, there's some Lovingston people in there.

I think we'll all find out.

It might be Afton people in there.

And I, you know, we might almost be working on it too soon, in a way.

Because I mean, how many people, what's our prison population currently?

Residents of our relative precincts who are incarcerated

will now be counted in our population.

Yeah.

60?

I'm not sure.

Probably that arena.

50, 60 people.

And you know, that could make some of the, that's such a small number that we're working with trying to fix for Ernie that it could, I mean, that's an entire voting census block, you know, hypothetically.

Well, I'm sure that the largest prison population comes from Stone Creek.

Yeah, I agree.

The left side of the road?

That's a sore, it's a sore subject.

No, I get it.

You know, I mean, that wall is there, Prince Mountain, but I'm just throwing out.

I'm still a shadow by that.

Or, you know, taking both sides of freshwater.

And we don't know yet if this is going to affect November.

Hopefully.

Steve, can you send an inquiry of our prison population?

Because I do know probably half of them ain't even from Nelson.

Make sure we're not going to have any major skew.

And if we could get a big piece of paper with the census box, that'd be great.

Yeah, that was kind of where we used this.

Father.

The folks here would be, the people that you're changing would be in FOBR, because they're all FOBRs.

Yeah.

Hypothetically.

Alright?

Is that a good plan?

We can go to Woodsville and beautiful.

So that's going to bring us to new and unfinished business.

Yeah, if it's actually complete.

I can take questions about it.

I just need to refer to the proposal that is noted.

It's very comprehensive.

Are we voting on this now?

The thing that I understand is I want to invest in agriculture in the county, but why would we invest in Amherst?

Would that create barriers to do what we want to do?

You know, it seems to me

We have an agriculture department at the high school.

Why don't we feed the money into that?

And to be perfectly honest, from my experience in living here, I've had difficulty dealing with Amherst County.

And I'm not sure that,

Being a large county than we are, we have a lot of input into what happened in this facility.

to take place of anything that either county is doing in their existing CTE programs at the high schools.

The idea behind the facility, that's one portion is helping high school CTE but this would range from younger kids all the way to adults and the idea is for this

host career education for adults that want to change careers and get their CDL license or learn how to do welding or things that aren't high school related classes.

I almost envisioned it as a GED program for the CTE site.

It's given people an opportunity to learn these different trades, whether it's how to install solder, how to install fiber,

When the guy was here giving his presentation, he didn't emphasize any of that stuff.

Well, I can't speak to why he spoke about what he did, but I've been involved in the process from the beginning, and I know what the intent is.

Also, I'm familiar with the facility in Chad, which is kind of the

The struggle that we run into, and that's a great question you asked, is Nelson County doesn't have the economies of scale.

We don't have a big enough population.

In other words, so for example, if we're gonna do a welding class or a solar class, one of the issues you run into is, yeah, sometimes you don't have enough kids to fill the class to justify an instructor coming from out of town to come in.

And so what, hold on.

So what you have to do is, with this partnership, it will allow us to bring both demographics

Where do kids go?

I remember we had a lot of welders that worked on the pipe industry.

Where do they go to learn welding today?

So if you're a Nelson County kid, let's just say you live in Howardsville, your closest schools other than from the high school, but if you want to further that is Central Virginia Community College all the way on Lynchburg, KTEC, I can't remember what's the one over in Alta Vista, it'll come to me in a bit, and the PVCC.

So what this would do is it would eliminate a very substantial drive, which is a big barrier for a lot of low-income families.

Where is PVCC located?

You know where PVCC is located.

That's over on the, right off of 29.

You can see it right near the prison.

That's close to Howardville, then Emmerst.

Yeah, but the thing is, but not as high, not Cairo, not Massies Mill, not any of those.

I mean, this is, and not only just that, this is helping the local farmer potentially have a market closer to them and they don't have to go to the other side of the world with their cattle.

I mean, it's so much more.

I,

I understand that you're saying that, and I don't understand it enough to know the answer.

You know, I listen to what you're saying.

I mean, do you think we should be able to offer more career and technical education to our kids?

I mean, I think we do.

And the struggles that I've run into when I bring up the question and I have worked very hard

You know, it's funny, as a teacher, it's sort of like the baseball movie.

If you do it, they'll come.

If you're good at what you're doing, they came.

The students came, no matter what you offered them.

I think we should offer those things.

We have to pay for those things to be in the local high school.

That's just where the link, we can't move the link.

I know they've already said they would agree.

If the location was on the Nelson side, that's not the concern.

But here's something that I want to make sure we don't get hung up on because it seems

Students, and CTE.

And that might make up about 20 to 25% of the purpose of this facility.

That's a small percentage of what this facility is about.

We're getting honed in on, we're getting caught up in the weeds.

We need to look at the other aspects of what this facility could be, which is what this study, okay, a small investment on our part that has already been proved and averaged.

And the number of man hours that have gone to get us to this point

I feel we would be letting down the entire potential if we don't approve the feasibility study, which is what we're talking about today.

But it would give us the vision of other opportunities.

One little thing, it could be an event space.

It has beautiful views.

The sunset from this piece of property is amazing.

It could be a wedding venue.

It could be a place where they could have, if there's a riding rink, it could be barrel

The other thing about going in with Amherst is it gives us the potential to exponentially expand on the funding opportunities where you have crossover regions between Amherst and Nelson coming together and the funding resources would be more than just two coming together and doubling.

It could be larger than that because of the funding opportunities.

So again, I think we're getting hung up on the K through 12

Education, or the 9 through 12 CTE kids, that is a very small portion of what this facility could do for our community.

In fact, I don't know that the Chatham facility even uses it.

I don't think they even use it for school age stuff.

I think it's all the other sources.

We're just trying to add that level

as an opportunity to expand.

But that's not what they are.

You have information about the shadow facility.

And we've been taught.

Yes, sir.

Yes, sir.

It's Old Dominion Ag Complex dot com or something like that is their website that explains what they do.

But right now, before we

I think the question you're looking to answer right now is, do we want to participate in this facility with Amherst County?

And I think that question is about 60 to 180 days down the road from now.

Today, what we're talking about is, do we want to proceed with the feasibility study to see if we want to make that decision 180 days from now or 90 days from now?

Mr. Parr, I agree with you with your assessment about education.

I think that that is, you know, that's something that really the Chatham facility doesn't even really even mention.

But

What is the foundation of the Chatham facility are offices that are housed there where there are people there every day.

There's the Farm Bureau, there's the Farm Service Agency of the USDA, there's the Soil and Water Conservation District, there's the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the Cooperative Extension Service, and Farm Credit.

All of those are housed there.

These are all

businesses that provide some financial foundation for this.

These are things that I don't have any interest in providing a facility in Amherst to establish those things.

To have an economic foundation for something like this

means that you have to have something that pays the bills month after month after month after month.

Can education do that?

Probably not.

Can events do that?

Probably not.

Can rentals do that?

Probably not.

If the question is, should we be investing $30,000 into something that would be located in Amherst County?

I'm not in favor of it.

I mean, we've been through so many things outside of our county.

I'm not asking that you agree with me.

I'm just saying that's how it is.

Mr. Parr, that's a different question.

You just answered it.

But a couple of things on the bills you talk about.

I hope you all understand that this facility is not going to be owned and operated and funded by Nelson County and by Andrews County.

This is going to be a separate organization that will be responsible.

Yes, there will be seed money that the two counties will help get it up and running, but this organization is going to be paying their bills and they'll be taking care of the expenses when it's established.

Number two, there are already two, I can't give you names, but there are already two large retail businesses looking to locate in this facility if it is realized.

And number three, one thing we haven't talked about, and I think it's a question that a lot of people are thinking, is Amherst is going to benefit from the tax revenue?

And it has already been set up that if this were to go through, either they would refund, all taxes would funnel back into the organization

Two large private entities are going to be

And we're talking $30,000 and you're saying this is a pittance?

Well, they certainly could afford $30,000 in the feasibility study.

I don't see why the, you know, I can see them coming to us after the fact and saying, look, this is what we've done.

We've done all this work.

We have this thing here.

Let's be involved.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, we'll see what you have.

But they haven't done that.

I don't quite understand their motives.

Okay, any further discussion on this?

Anyone want to make a motion on this?

Hearing none.

Wanda reports.

I handed out my report earlier, copied for a link to the show status of the world of the coronavirus.

As of yesterday, the county had five new cases of the virus.

Department of Health is tracking this pretty much on a daily basis.

From September 2nd to the 13th, the county had its highest count on the 16th.

in September 4th, the average daily count over that period is 7.5 cases per day.

Since the board's meeting, sorry, I have a typo there, in August, August 10th, the total number of COVID cases has increased to 1,131 from 903, or 220 cases per day.

The Department of Health and CDC guidance for areas of high or substantial transmission in the county is a locality of high transmission which is the worst level for the VDH and CDC guidelines is to wear a mask indoors in public settings and for individuals who are not vaccinated

As we reported last month, we've reverted to more of an honorary system where we aren't asking people when they come to the courthouse or other county facilities or require them to wear a mask.

We haven't had an uptick really with county employees yet being impacted with the virus or having to quarantine because they've been in close contact with some of the virus, but we've had at least one employee who's been out recently with the virus and the question's been presented to me about

I grew a day of sick leave.

Just making this only applicable to the virus would be amenable to if we just don't

So the consideration is only predated to the COVID-19 virus.

If I asked you to think about that one, move it in my report.

The American Red Team Plan, as was mentioned earlier, we are working through that.

We have several ideas for possible uses of the funds.

We know Andy participated in a seminar or a Zoom meeting today about it, and we're pretty confident we could use it to purchase ambulances, for example, the wheel-to-wheel radios that were deferred to

and something that's come up recently which is not in my report but I'll add it here because it also could pertain to this American Rescue Plan.

We're working with the service authority.

They recently accepted sealed bids for their Wintergreen project which is basically will replace their existing wastewater treatment plant and also do a significant rework in their wastewater collection system.

We worked with them last week and we revised

their shortfall.

So we've sent communications to our federal representatives and our state representatives asking for their support to secure either federal or state funding to address what is from our estimates about a $3,750,000 shortfall.

We don't know where that's going to lead to yet.

I spoke to

Ollie called me yesterday and said he would support Senator Dean's efforts.

They're going to see what they can do.

There's no guarantees.

Haven't heard back from any of our federal reps yet, but hopefully we will.

So we're trying to help the service authority tackle this, but it's I'm trying to say,

We've been working on for a while.

We had a question with one of the, there's two primary pumps that work sort of in tandem.

We've had an issue with one of those pumps not functioning properly.

We looked at it for Paul on Monday, and what they found was there's a dial for a valve that's associated with the pump, a check valve, and it says open or closed position.

Well, those were reversed on the dial, and the valve was actually the closed position.

When they realized that, they opened it up with a wheel and tested the pump,

May, Matt M. Jones, the manufacturer's rep, and he's helped us throughout issues with Piney River.

I think we're going to pay him about $890 for his time, so good fortune there, if I may say.

County of Green City Plan draft has been circulated to the Planning Commission.

The planning staff have gotten

We will incorporate your comments.

We don't get any in our plan, so the discussion of this is to just go ahead and issue the RFP and get sort of the show on the road if we put it that way.

So we're pretty well positioned, but we want the board to see the RFP.

Moving on to our item initiatives.

We had a work session last Friday morning with architectural partners and Timmons on local recreation and business projects.

Some of you are going to see this in the next four or so weeks, possibly sooner.

So some of the information is sort of confidential.

We don't want to release it to the public yet because of the interest in acquiring property, but I think

Both projects are moving along very well.

The recreation project, we should be submitting some more specific information on that probably within the next couple weeks.

at different levels.

It's very encouraging for me to put it that way.

And I hate to be sort of not really informative, but I think this information is forthcoming, cost information, how the sites could be developed, the elements of the recreation facility at a large scale and a reduced scale.

It's all moving forward and both consultants, they thought we would be positioned to bring everything to the board

in our report, which they've just gotten it today if I hadn't sent it by email.

The building basically has a lot of issues, structural, internal issues, external issues.

The Hurt and Profit report says the issues they identified could cost the city about $140,000.

Our commercial partners have added another $250,000 to that to get it to

Pretty well restored, but Mark Smith of Architecture Partners said this estimated the cost would be about a half million dollars to bring that building into or no issues whatsoever.

Sort of the good news is you don't really have to do anything at this point if there's consideration sometime in the near future of

And lastly, this isn't in my report, but I sent a memo to the board previously about overtime.

So as I noted in that memo, the Carroll Assembly, a special session in August, reversed course that restored the ability to utilize compensatory time and or to pay for overtime.

So the board in August, as you may recall, approved funding

for overtime for all the applicable county departments on an estimated annualized basis and just over 21,000 is appropriate for the sheriff.

The question for the sheriff was we wanted to use a 160 hour work period of 28 days versus the state and federal provisions of 171 hours.

Well, I think he's acquiesced to 171 hours

So to sum it up, for our offices in, I think primarily county staff, we're good with paying overtime now throughout the year, 72, at the end of the funding shortfall.

What's critical about that is primarily the dispatch where we use the components

which was very similar with the Sheriff's Department personnel is this employee gets comp time, they take that time off and then another employee has to work for them and then they accrue comp time so it's just sort of a vicious cycle which is the same with the Sheriff's Department.

So with respect to the Sheriff's Department,

We'll carry them through probably September, and they're continuing to accrue vacancy savings.

So it could be that the board's amenable to this, which is a question for you all to speak to, is just to, we're developing and identifying the total cost to pay for

The current amount of accrued comp time and holiday pay and overtime.

So we have that total cost because we sort of like we would like to just wipe that off the books and start fresh and move forward with paying the deputies, the law enforcement personnel for their overtime, their holiday pay.

I've been helping them significantly with, and they, like a lot of localities are experiencing, they lose people, they gain people, but they're constantly in flux with recruiting people.

And that this is a cycle I refer to, definitely pertains to them, where if they use compensatory time to pay for holiday time,

People either can't use it or the people that do, the person who takes their place accrues it and it just starts all over again.

So I don't know what the board's position is on that.

I can take questions.

I think we can not have a budget.

without really impact until they're fully, and they have all their employees in place, there's no vacancy savings.

At that point, you might have to consider appropriating funds to pay vacation, holiday, compensatory time, or get that off the books.

But we can probably carry it for a significant period of time.

They just hired two people, but they're still down four.

So for July, they saved just over 21,000

For August, they said 21,000, and for September, you know, Harrison won four more people by the end of the month.

It's probably gonna be 15 or 16,000 more that we could reallocate to compensate them for any overtime, holiday pay, et cetera.

And talking to candy staff this morning, the overtime for July and August was just three hours.

but the sheriff is amenable to the 171 schedule it's just a question of paying overtime or reverting back to compensatory time because so I put in that report the board when someone leaves that

You probably don't have to decide today, but it is something that is very important to Sheriff Hill, would be very important to his staff, probably be very helpful to the county as far as not having this continued issue

I don't think it's that great of an issue for our staff.

A dispatch, yes, but it's just similar to the sheriff's.

Yeah, we're going to bring that back.

Next month for the board, you don't have to, it's not mandated to be paid until the end of October.

The consideration there is the funding that General Simley approved is only for compensation board supported positions and we have several positions that are locally funded only.

So back to the vacancy savings, we can also probably use the vacancy savings to pay for

And our internal discussion was like okay we're going to get the numbers and bring it back to the board and how we would address just paying for those additional costs if the board's you know be able to provide the same benefit for all law enforcement personnel.

So I guess if I may, the two questions I have for the board is any input on offsetting any COVID-19 absences, just letting those things go.

Yeah, I'm fine with that.

All right, well, let's go with that.

I think that's appropriate.

I think that, you know, an illness is an illness.

Yeah, I don't see any reason why it should.

I don't think all illnesses are the same point.

In fact, who's been around a long time, but I've never seen you wearing a mask.

I'm in shock that I just heard those words spoken out loud, especially considering the scores.

I just don't understand.

But I think we need to have some accommodation for that.

There's some stigma.

And people may tend to not be forthcoming with their illness.

because of that stigma.

I've never thought twice about coming to anybody I hadn't flew.

But there was, I was, and I did what I was supposed to do, and I was a little embarrassed and disappointed when I got COVID.

But there are people out there that are gonna still, people's mentality changed when the rules changed on when you had COVID or you had the symptoms and you stayed home.

when they didn't have to use their PTO versus when they didn't.

Yeah, if I may, just a specific example, particularly related to what are called the hybrid VAs that are employees who they are for our policy, they only

They accrue 96 hours of sick leave each year, use it or lose it, and not use it for vacation, of course.

But we just had one individual who is a hybrid employee for VSR purposes, and for that sick leave purpose who has been out for just over a week and a half.

And they asked the question,

Do I have to take sick leave for that?

Because they're going to exhaust that 96 hours pretty close to it.

For people like me, who have probably seven months of sick leave approved, I'm not really concerned about it, but I can't speak to how many hybrid employees we have, but every time we get a new employee who has no prior experience, they're going to be in that hybrid group.

I just wanted to add that the hybrid employees that even though they own a six-hour lump sum sick leave at the beginning of each leave year, they have access to short and long-term disability.

Yeah, right.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's different.

That's, yeah, yeah.

You just reminded me.

I had 200 days of sick leave.

When I retired, I got $10 per day.

Well, if you don't want it inside, that's fine.

You're aggressive.

I mean, if it's limited,

I mean, as we transition and we realize that it's going to be this and the flu.

Do we want to look at it vaccinated versus unvaccinated?

I mean, and how we respond to that.

I agree one size fits all, which is probably a little different from what you meant.

Yeah, no, I understand.

You don't understand.

Yeah, yeah.

You don't know how many times that we've discussed the pros and cons of that.

That's people we consider.

Well, if you don't want to decide, that's fine.

Well, I'll remind the board, when we had the CARES Act funding, and this, I was a beneficiary of this, the board agreed to use the CARES Act funding to offset any absences

I mean, hopefully we won't have that many new cases, but with this Delta variant, it's very hard to know.

It'll be HECO, it'll be whatever's after that, you know.

If you want to think about it, it's not like we can't bring it back.

We're going to meet again two Fridays.

I would suggest maybe one or two boardrooms come in that meeting so you can get more

When is that meeting?

Next Friday, well two Fridays is what we anticipate at 10 a.m.

And it's probably going to be by soon.

Looks like October 1st.

That's October 1st.

I think you're going to be very impressed.

And then the challenge after that is how to pay for the thing.

Yeah, I'd like to come too.

Whatever works, but at me, we might have to.

Yeah, we're waiting for a document from Tim and Seth where the business part will be very enlightening, I think.

Okay.

Very good.

Any other questions or comments for Steve?

Mr. Rupp?

I have been living the TJPDC life for the last two weeks, just about every day.

Thank you.

And it's exciting.

We're grateful.

We'll be done.

I want to talk about the social servicing related to COVID and the schools.

I spent some time with the schools and I underestimated the residual effects of COVID on our society.

You know, social service...

I'd like to call the order of the evening session of the Nelson County Board of Supervisors.

First order of business is public comments.

I have

Seven names of people that have signed up.

This is just to let you know that the public hearings are going to be separate.

So if you have anything you'd like to say about the two items upon which we have public hearings tonight, please don't talk about it during public comments.

Hold it for the public hearing.

So for the public comments, limited to three minutes.

We're going to be fairly strict about that, but the chair can let you go on a little bit at the chair's discretion.

And you need to give your name and your address before you start.

My name is Ann Norwood.

I live at 3509 Stage Bridge Road in Lovingston.

I wanted to speak to you about a concern I have regarding the current zoning ordinances, specifically as they relate to the topic of vacation homes versus hotels.

I'm going to give you a couple definitions from the bylaws.

A motel is one or more buildings containing sleeping rooms,

designed for or used by automobile tourists or transients.

They have convenient parking and they have cooking facilities.

A hotel is any hotel or motel to be included in the hotel or other place used for overnight lodging which is rented to transients is not a residence and where the renting of the structure or structures is the primary use of property.

Hotels and motels require a special use permit as they are commercial in nature.

A vacation home is a house rented to transients.

Rental arrangements are made for the entire house, not by room.

Vacation homes are currently listed as a by-rate privileges.

The term was added in 2016 to allow private homeowners to rent a room in their house, like an Airbnb room, or even rent the whole house if they wanted.

Currently, there are no specifically stated limits to the number of vacation homes per property.

Common sense would say

that the number of rental homes should be in line with the guidelines of the property division rights and zoning rules.

However, commercial enterprises are buying land and planning to build large numbers of houses for the sole purpose of renting them.

In other words, they want to build hotels.

These projects should require full special use permit examination by the planning commission, the board of supervisors, and the public, but instead are being treated as a buy-write project with limited oversight.

If these projects fail and the properties are eventually subdivided, the multiple drawings will be out of compliance with current division right guidelines.

Areas that would never have allowed this density of houses will now be stuck with an unapproved subdivision.

I ask you to consider strengthening the language in the new comprehensive plan to align the number of allowed vacation homes with the intended limits of existing property division rights.

I ask you to recognize attempts by commercial businesses

to exploit the ordinances by building resort hotel communities as by-law projects without the input of you, the Planning Commission, and the citizens of Nelson.

If you've prepared your comments ahead of time in writing, you could get those to Grace and that would help her immensely.

Thank you.

Good evening.

My name is Barbara Larson.

My husband and I divided 477 Stage Bridge Road in Lovingston and I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you this evening.

I'm here to express my opposition to the special abuse permit application submitted on behalf of Rockfish Ranch, a private entity managed by the State Charlottesville Management Group.

The proposed development would include a wedding event

As you know, the property is owned A-1 Agricultural.

Rockfish Ranch LLC contends that they have the right to construct vacation rental structures on agricultural property because they are not permanent structures.

Regardless of what they call, Rockfish Ranch is essentially proposing a subdivision along the Rockfish River on agricultural land.

These rentals could be occupied for most days of the year by individuals from outside Nelson

We contend that this use would be more detrimental to the environment, nearby property owners, and roadways than if they were permanent structures.

Rockfish Ranch's application states that, quote, visitors to the development will be encouraged to park and leave their vehicles and spend the weekend walking.

As lovely as that sounds, I'm skeptical.

We live in a car culture and visitors are far more likely to drive to other locations across Nelson County.

One only has to visit any hospitality business along 151 Saturday to know what I mean.

We live here because we love the world character of our part of Nelson County.

Stage Bridge Road is a country road.

A wedding venue with the activity and alcohol that comes with it is not compatible with our neighborhoods.

The public safety requirements will further stretch our sheriff's resources and they are concerned about the safety

We urge the supervisors to deny this application until a new comprehensive plan is complete.

Any new plan should reconsider the status of vacation property and recognize its impact on the character of our region.

We welcome growth, but please think about who is driving that growth.

Are we welcoming families and businesses to support those families or corporations that will develop land to support transient visitors?

Once the development occurs, the character of our neighborhood will be forever changed.

Michael Hevner.

Michael Hevner, 8 Dollar Road, 1-1-4-6, 8 Dollar Road, Plauber.

Uh first of all, I'd like to thank you guys for uh for what you're doing, for your service, and

and the amount of time you put in on the efforts and on behalf of Nelson County.

I'd like to offer a couple of things.

They're not a lifelong Nelson County person, but Nelson County has definitely grown on me.

and I never knew there was a statue there until it was brought up the first time.

I don't think that this is going to divide our county.

I think it is shining a light on the division that's there already.

And I think this is pure politics of the debate, whether you're for or against, and whatever decision that's made is going to end up in the courts.

And I just don't want to see that divide grow.

You are our guys.

And I don't envy that decision.

But there have been good folks that are on either side of this debate.

So we will definitely pray for wisdom that you guys would whatever happens, whether it's you make a decision or put it on a put it on the vote, put it on the voters.

put it on the ballot.

I don't know what all that entails, but I think that would be something that would give every Nelson County person a say.

Hello, good evening.

Give us your address please.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Harry Cowell, 4011 Stage Bridge Road, Shipman, 22971.

And so, addressing some of the things that Ann Norwood spoke about and I have a concern, to be brutally honest, I'm an adjacent property owner and one that would be severely affected by this proposal that's going in here.

But what I really want to talk about is more philosophical because

We're seeing an influx of these very, very large, well-heeled, well-financed, extremely wealthy corporations coming in and buying up the open land that is some of the most beautiful part of Nelson County that we appreciate.

We're putting in these developments and they appear to be skirting, shall we say, the edge of our zoning ordinances and putting in developments that will have profound impact on the neighbors and the county and the traffic and the roads and everything else.

Well, when we look at the long term, what are these things creating?

They'll create, in the short term, some construction jobs.

There's no doubt about that.

And maybe some road construction, road work, heavy equipment, carpentry and so forth.

But long term, what are they bringing us?

They're bringing us the potential for a very few low-paid, almost essential housekeeping jobs.

And I don't think that's a good direction for the county to take.

As I stated here a couple years ago, I think we need to be looking to get more small, high-tech industries in that can bring in really good paying jobs and have very variable impact on the neighbors.

And I think that's something we need to look at and think about very carefully before we approve developments like the one that's being proposed for Stage Bridge.

Thanks.

The sign up sheet was not very clear.

I'm really here to speak on the cigarette test.