Planning District Commission Meeting   10/1/2020

O'Brien, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the nature of the declared emergency makes it impractical or unsafe for the TJPDC, the Thomas Jessup Planning District Commission, to assemble in a single location.

So this means being held with electronic virtual communication using a Zoom software, in accordance with virtual meeting procedures and policies as outlined in item 4.0-01, Virginia State Budget HB29, effective April 24,

2020, we are meeting virtually.

And this meeting will be recorded and will be posted.

So keep that in mind as we go throughout.

A couple of other housekeeping items.

We ask that each commissioner will mute their microphone until they are speaking.

We will do a roll call vote.

instead of all call.

So we'll go through the roll call vote.

Before the meeting, we'll have Christine do a roll call to see who is in attendance.

And if you are here for the public and wish to speak on public comments, we simply ask that you raise your hand.

And the way you do that is you select the participant icon at the bottom of the Zoom, and you select the raise your hand icon.

Or if you were calling in on a phone, it is simply star nine.

Chip and Christine were watching and monitoring to see if anybody wants to speak during the public comments.

And I think that is it.

Yes, sir.

Sounds good.

I'd be happy to.

It appears that whoever is called in without a video has their hand raised.

Is that intentional?

OK, great.

I'll go for roll call.

Dylan Bishop?

Here.

Andrea Wilkinson?

Here.

Tony O'Brien?

Donna Price?

Here.

Here.

Rory is here.

Great.

And Michael Payne.

All right.

And Christine, you did hear me say that Ned's on.

Yes, sir.

All right.

Sounds good.

Just a reminder, as we go through each vote, Christine will do a roll call for everybody there.

Also, we have some new members and some familiar faces that are back again.

I'd like to welcome everybody back and welcome the new members.

First item we have on the agenda, matters from the public.

Sounds good.

The next item on the agenda is the Cassette Agenda.

And we have several action items with the minutes of the September 3rd meeting, as well as the financial reports fiscal year 21.

Thank you.

We have a motion and a second.

Yes, I would like to add as commented in the chat that there is a small revision to the minutes that Sean Tubbs is no longer with Piedmont Environmental Council.

He's an independent journalist.

I've made that revision to the minutes posted on the website and in the revised packet online with the copy that you all received.

Yep.

Roll call vote.

Dylan Bishop.

Yes.

Donna Price.

Aye.

Bob Babyok.

Alright.

Do we hear from everybody?

I can.

Can you hear us?

I think we heard it from everybody.

Christine, if you can hear us, I think we can hear you.

All right, thank you.

The next item, sign number four, we have a resolution.

And the first I have a resolution we have is the Fiscal Year 21 Department of Housing and Community Development Funding Agreement.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

We receive on an annual basis from Virginia's Department of Housing and Community Development through the General Assembly and their Committee for Local Government.

roughly $75,971.

We normally receive this same amount and have for about the last 10 years.

We actually had an increase in this for FY21 until all of the budget crisis occurred and that was part of what did get cut out of

of the new budget.

But this is an agreement just for the DHCD funding to us.

And in return for this, we do an annual strategic plan for the organization.

We submit that as well as all of the accomplishments that we have undertaken throughout the past fiscal year.

And we can use this money for any type of regional planning activities to help fulfill that obligation.

Thank you, sir.

Do we have any discussion or questions for Chip at this time?

Second.

We have a motion and a second.

Any further discussion?

Dylan Bishop?

Aye.

Donna Price?

Aye.

Bob Babyok?

Aye.

Rory Stolzenberg?

Thank you.

All right, thank you very much.

We're on to item number five, new business.

The first item for discussion is the rental and mortgage relief program update.

And I am more than happy to turn this one over to Christine.

She and the staff here at the PDC have been doing an incredible job on the regional rental and mortgage relief program.

I'll just say that I'll point out that the numbers you have before you are from September 22nd.

Christine's going to give you some updated numbers.

And just before the meeting, she got some additional good news.

Great.

Oh, boy.

While you work on that I'll go ahead.

So the good news that we received at about 5.30 this evening is that we have been approved by DHCD for an additional $450,000 tranche which means we're up to $1.35 million for the region.

The way that it works is as they front us the first tranche of money and then we report to them with a written remittance report based on our usage and we continue to qualify for additional funds based on that demand.

So the report that Chip is showing you was prepared on the 22nd.

This is a very fast moving program so these numbers are already outdated but I can share with you

that we have received from DHCD to date $664,000.

I just put in a remittance request tonight for another $305,000 for a total of just under a million.

And that would be money that the PDC has received.

We then continue to distribute that out to our sub grantees using the per capita formula.

And to date, as of the 24th of the month, we had cut checks to individual households for $530,000 with a large handful of other households that have been approved that are just awaiting a check being cut and even more so that are pre-approved that were awaiting additional funds from DHCD.

So the program is continuing to meet community needs.

We've served approximately, actually I can give you the exact number.

We've served 308 households to date.

A couple of those, I didn't have the time to pull it out because I just got this at 5.30, but a couple of those are folks that are returning for a second or third month of support.

We have seen the increase in the amount people are asking for because DHCD has changed their program requirements to allow people to now seek reimbursement for 100% of their rent in arrears.

It used to be only half with the landlord or lender.

Agreeing to pay the other half, they can now seek support for the entire payment as well as the current month's rent.

And if they apply after the 15th of the month, they can also apply for the next month's rent.

Additionally, DHCD, in order to provide additional support to the state, has set up their own call center directly for landlords who have multiple tenants that the landlords can then reach out on behalf of any of their tenants that are

Interweres for their rent payments, and Virginia Housing is administering that portion for BHCD.

Chip, I would say we probably don't need to go through the breakdown by locality because they've changed so much in the last week that they would not be relevant right now anyway.

Yes, that landlords can apply directly through Virginia Housing.

Yep, and we'll be putting something out very shortly.

We'll be doing another marketing push through Facebook and connecting with the community to make sure that they all know that.

Make sure you send a copy of that off to the directors.

You know, what's really, really interesting is when we look at this, sorry to interrupt your deal.

Like, hmm.

If you tie a million dollars, it's going to impact something.

I think everybody just learned a quick lesson.

I agree.

I was looking at the number of households approved and those denied.

Process two, the second page of documentation that was provided.

How many more requests do you see coming in?

Let me make sure I understand your question.

How many new households are applying?

Yes.

They're continuing to come in.

And part of that, we suspect, is because as people are learning about the program that didn't hear about it initially.

So we're getting a lot of new households, actually.

And the pending numbers are very large.

And at first, they seem quite alarming that we have so many people in the pipeline

But a lot of those numbers can be very misleading.

So for example, for the city of Charlottesville showing 101 pending applications, many of those are in pending status because they received support from the Pathways.

So they're already getting that assistance, but we leave them in our system and we leave them as pending should the city's funding run out, we can then use our MRP.

Is there a sense of if the number of people who have applied and already and are pending

That's an excellent question and that one we've been trying to get better data on.

Currently when someone in the system is in pending status, it's not required that there's a dollar amount associated with their application.

So it's very difficult for us

to get a gauge on that quantitative number.

However, when we look at individual localities and we look at the sub grantees data, they are showing that it would exhaust the available amount.

So we need to continue being diligent to get money from the HCD, but I don't necessarily think it's a, we need to be diligent about marketing.

I think people know about it and are applying.

It's just taking families,

A good deal of time to gather the required documentation.

That we were, from the beginning of this program, we were told that there was a possibility for up to $2.2 million for our region.

And the decision would be made $450,000 at a time based on usage or based on that demand.

And Christine has been working trying to get some data from the state as to how the rest of the state is doing because what we're either we're concerned about or there's an opportunity is if other regions aren't spending

At the rate we are, then we may have an opportunity for more money.

But on the other hand, we're concerned that if Northern Virginia, Richmond, and Hampton Roads are spending at a higher rate, they may send our money to them.

Are there anything that

Most of this money is coming from the state, right?

That's what I'm thinking for you, Michael.

Michael, to answer your question, what I would recommend is continuing to push the program through the localities communications.

Thanks.

And Christine, I apologize if you address this, and I was distracted reading some of the data, but

When you look at the sheet that's up, Charlottesville and Albemarle average about 1,450 per household.

The other four jurisdictions, about 2,150 per household.

Is that because in Charlottesville and Albemarle, there have been other sources of assistance that they have redo?

Yes, ma'am, that is exactly right.

Okay, and then as a follow up to that, then it would appear that from this source of funding, unless otherwise redistributed, that Albemarle and Charlottesville may be able to assist a larger total number of households

whereas the other four jurisdictions are going to be more restricted in their residents, more limited in their opportunities, which I think goes back to what Chip may have been saying about possibly some shifting around the funds, not only perhaps locally in our district, but also through the state.

So I really appreciate that proactive thought process of trying to maximize the assistance that can be provided here.

I think we also have, it's a telephone number 3834 with their hand.

Donna handled most, got most of my question and I was reading also because I ran off copies of the report of the package.

From the time that an applicant enters the system and exits it with a check, you probably covered that and I might've missed it.

I have not covered that.

And I can tell you households can be approved within a

We have a 24 hour period if they are prepared when they apply with the documents.

They've done their research and they know what to submit.

But we do have also households that have been intending for several weeks.

So it's hard to get a really good number on that.

The last time we had to report this data to DHCD was early in August and we were an average of five days.

So the follow up on Michael's comment, one of the things that we may be able to push out is some sort of educational program through our networks that if you show up, please be prepared because if you show up with the documents, you can get your check faster.

Sure, yeah.

But they may need a little help in that process.

Just want to say great job, Christine.

I agree.

I know this is a

At this time, it's probably a pretty demanding task.

So you're doing a tremendous job.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

And I've got a quick question.

If there is an answer, what accounts for the much higher success rate for Albemarle applications compared to

basically any other county except maybe Louisa.

I don't know if I have an answer to that.

So the question is why are they having more success in approvals I understand.

Again, I think a lot of it, especially in Charlottesville, I know a lot of that is because they had their Pathways Fund set up in tandem with this.

So a lot of what would have been approvals are pending.

It's a good discussion guys, any more questions?

All right, thank you, I appreciate that.

Next is item 6B, the agenda items for fiscal year 21.

I sure will.

I'm really happy to give a little bit more detail on some of the projects.

We try to give you an update every month or a sheet with all that we're working on.

But with a fairly light agenda tonight, I thought it'd be a really good opportunity just to go through item by item on a number of the projects that we're working on and give you a chance to ask questions.

And one of those that we've been working on for several months now and it's been way overdue is a complete new website update.

And as of right now, we are anticipating we'll be able to share that with you at your November meeting.

We're really excited, you know, bringing in some new technology with it and just a fresh look.

Quite frankly, what we've done is we took, as examples, some engineering design firms in the private sector and used that more as the model in trying to

Put less on each page and make it easier to click to what you want rather than trying to put more, which makes it a little bit more difficult to read when it's more data on one page.

So hopefully you will like it as much as we have here in the office.

Very related to that, I hope some of you may have seen already on the news.

We've been covered by one television station, couple of newspapers.

The Regional Housing Partnership, we have contracted with a consulting firm and we will be rolling out about that same time in November.

A search tool, a web-based search tool that will be only affordable housing for sale and for rent.

Mike can even pull one up real quick.

This is somewhat what it will look like.

This is Washington, D.C.'s housing search where

You can look for either rental properties or for sale properties.

It will have a maximum amount for any properties that are listed and property owners for either rent or for sale will be able to list their properties for free.

And then the third leg to this tool is that we will be listing information from all of the housing providers in the region so that people will know where to go, how they qualify, what type of programs, what type of information they'll need.

There'll be a calculator that people will be able to put in the numbers to see based on their income how much home they can afford.

So we're really looking forward to this.

Some of our local governments have already stepped up to the plate.

We sent a funding request around to all of our local governments.

And some have already committed funds.

And we're also in the running for a nonprofit grant to help fund this.

So this is something we hope to unveil with you at your meeting in November.

Get out of this.

And please stop me anywhere along the way if any of you have questions on any of these.

Our November meeting will also have our annual financial audit.

The auditors, Robinson, Farmer, Cox, were in the first of September.

They were only in the office for about three days.

Things went very, very well.

So we're looking for another positive audit at next month's meeting.

We were able to submit our grant application to the US Economic Development Administration for a comprehensive economic development strategies plan, a SEDS plan, they call it.

And we partnered with our counterparts at Rapidan, Rappahannock, PDC up north of us.

And we've applied for $250,000 to do a super regional economic development plan.

This will be drilling down into the mom and pop, the tourism, the ag tourism, the adult beverage industries, trying to put together a plan of action to create increased economies for our entire super region.

We continue to work with the Charlottesville Area Alliance on a five-year action plan, creating an age-friendly community.

Most of the jurisdictions in our region are partners with the Charlottesville Alliance and we hope with this five-year plan we will gain the rest of the localities in our jurisdiction.

We're very happy to say when I wrote this, we didn't know it at the time, but we were able to help Louisa County with a grant application for some funding to increase voter participation for this November's election.

And I found out just yesterday or day before that Louisa County was successful with that and received that funding.

So we were really happy to help with that.

Nelson County, the Nelson Cares business grant program we're administering and working with their staff on has been going very, very well.

And we've received over 25 letters of interest.

And Christine, please correct me, but I think we will very soon send out about 11 award letters.

in the coming week.

So that's taken off very well and we know it'll make a real difference in Nelson County.

Very similar to that, we partnered with Nelson County to get a Go Virginia grant that's specific to the craft beverage business.

It's a grant that will help marketing and business

Don't say renovations, but rejuvenation, trying to get through the pandemic and then prepare themselves for post-pandemic.

And there's a consultant working with the craft beverage businesses, not just in Nelson, but actually throughout the region.

Nelson just sponsored the grant.

and we'll be working to help the businesses retool because of the pandemic.

Finally in Nelson County, a lot going on there.

We submitted this past week a community development block grant downtown revitalization plan for Livingston.

The Department of Housing and Community Development has a number of minimum guidelines that we had to meet to get this grant and we were able to submit all of those this past week.

And what will come out of that is a visualization as well as an action plan for Nelson County to work in Livingston trying to revitalize that downtown area.

Kudos to Albemarle County Supervisor, Ann Mallock, who oversaw the Rivanna River Summit, which is part of the Rivanna River Basin Commission that we administer.

They had a virtual summit with over 50 participants on September 25th.

A very, very good conversation.

And I think a number of action items will come out of that, not just for the Rivanna River, but the entire watershed area.

occurring at the same time was the Regional Housing Partnership's Housing Summit.

Normally the partnership sponsors an annual summit and this year they did it virtually, had I think over 40 people participating with that, with an economist speaking out of Northern Virginia.

was very, very successful and still have an October, November, and December summit to go.

And the November summit will be receiving a run through of the housing search tool that we showed you just earlier.

Over in Fluvanna and Louisa, we are completing the Zion Crossroads Corridor Plan.

We're partnering with VDOT on that, where we're doing both a transportation as well as land use plan.

VDOT's consultants have completed the initial work looking at the current conditions along the US-15 corridor right at Zion Crossroads.

Now we're beginning to work with the public and start to look at what the possibilities are to make roadway and transportation improvements along that corridor, and they will be in concord with the land use recommendations for both the Louisa and the Fluvanna sides.

Coming soon will be the north 29 corridor plan.

Our MPO and our rural transportation programs are working together.

And so they will take from, I believe it's just north of the airport road all the way into Greene County.

And we'll be preparing a transportation plan for that corridor.

David Blount, who's overseeing the regional broadband partnership has received tremendous positive support from stakeholders that he has asked to participate.

And so they will be meeting in October.

And I know some of you on the commission have asked to be on that.

And I think David has already contacted you and is working on a date in October for that first meeting.

Nick Morrison on our staff, he has completed Albemarle County's neighborhood infrastructure inventory.

This is the third neighborhood that we've done for Albemarle County.

This is on Route 29 back behind the Stonefield and Costco.

and it's just a GIS assessment of infrastructure, fire hydrants, traffic signals, sidewalks, storm water drainage, road conditions, parks, things like that and putting conditions on each one of those so that the planning commission for Albemarle County when they're doing their capital improvement planning

They have something that's a quick reference for them to be able to tell each neighborhood who needs what.

That turned out really, really well and we'll be happy to present that to the Board of Supervisors very soon.

River Corridor Plan continues to go.

The technical committee meets every two weeks on that.

We've had a lot of success.

It's tough to get citizen input during these times, and so we went down and our staff posted a number of posters along the Rivanna

Trail, and we have had at least 30 responses from those signs with comments of what people like, don't like, what they'd like to see and not like to see.

So that is picking up speed very well.

Our regional hazard mitigation plan is also underway working with all of our localities and that's something we'll be getting you a lot more information on in the near future.

Projects that are wrapping up the Charlottesville Cherry Avenue plan goes to the Planning Commission in November is what our understanding is from neighborhood development services with the city.

And a Charlottesville Albemarle One Map has been

working on for over a year.

And it's one map of all of the bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure for the urban area of Charlottesville and Albemarle.

We're looking to get that online.

We're trying to host it here at the PDC.

We're having a little bit of a blip with it, though, because we don't have the server capacity to run those kind of GIS configurations.

And so we're working with

the company Esri to see if we can't just host it online with them and what the cost will be or we may still be able to do it on our own server.

So these are some of the things that we're doing.

Does anyone have any comments or questions for Chip?

I'm going through.

Mr.

Chair, I have a question.

Yes, sir.

Chip, Chip, I don't know any other place.

I probably should have asked this at the MPO meeting the last time, and I forgot.

None at all.

We've been monitoring it.

I sat through the Commonwealth Transportation Board meeting last month, and they are expected at their next meeting, which may be October or November, to

to take that on as an agenda item.

One of the delays has been is that the General Assembly hasn't adopted a revised budget yet.

And until that happens, then the Commonwealth Transportation Board can't change their budget.

Great.

Very good.

I appreciate it.

Any additional questions?

If not, we appreciate it.

You guys have a lot going on as always.

So good stuff.

It definitely is.

And I want to appreciate it.

I'm sure the other commissioners do as well.

Let's move on to item number six, the executive director's report.

Okay.

Again, because we only go into the details quarterly with our financials, but I can tell you they're very good.

Even though we had a very small loss in August, we're still ahead of the curve with a fiscal year net gain of almost $11,000, which is

Very good for our normal July and August because we normally haven't started receiving payments from the local governments as well as some of the state agencies this early.

But a lot of it does have to do with the rental relief and mortgage program.

So things financially are really good, even though we did have some cash flow concern areas a while back.

We're now over our concern area there with more than two months of operating expenses in hand for unrestricted cash.

So financially, we're doing really well.

I know, especially for some of you that have been on the commission for a while,

looking for it now, our accrued revenue report that's in your packet that lists all of our grants and contracts that we have in hand.

It shows the monthly operating expenses and it breaks it out into, do we have enough money committed to us to cover our normal operating expenses?

And we do buy actually about a two to $3,000

A lot of things happen over the course of a fiscal year, so some of these projects will be pushed into next fiscal year, they'll just be delayed, so we don't always realize that type of a net gain.

I tell the folks in the office I'm as happy with one dollar in the black as I am a thousand in the black as long as it's in the black and that's where we are right now so financially everything is very positive and that is the main things that I just I wanted to cover with you off of my

Thank you, sir.

Any questions for Chip?

Everybody's quiet tonight for the most part.

If not, let's go ahead and move on to the agenda items fiscal year 21.

And Chip, these are what we are proposing as agenda items going forward.

This could change

These will.

I just wanted to give you an idea.

Just if you're working on your own schedules, there are some very important meetings.

Not only do we have to have a quorum at, but we do need one representative from each one of our jurisdictions in some of the financial matters.

And we always let you know ahead of time.

And what we did is we just went through the last couple of years and picked out the agenda items that occur at the same time every year to give you an idea.

For instance, we bring the audit report to you every November.

We do the HUD and home caper report to you at the same time every year.

Especially the budget, because of the way we have to do budgets,

We normally try to bring those to you at the same time every year as well as just letting you know that we don't normally meet in July and in January so that you can go ahead and take those off of your calendars.

I can say I'm really happy that we went ahead and passed the projected FY22 budget

We did find out that both Charlottesville and Albemarle will be, I believe November 5th is the deadline for our funding request to the local government.

So we have that behind us and we'll be working on those applications based on that FY22 budget that you approved.

But yeah, this is just for your reference and they may change a little bit.

I don't think it'll be change a lot.

The other thing I'll just close with is looking at these, especially for the months that you don't see very many items.

If you have a topic you would like for us to bring up, please do.

I also want to point out the fact, you know, we've asked Chip, I think, a while back to do a presentation for Greene County, and that was prior to COVID.

So the TJPDC staff will do an excellent job if you have a certain topic that's of interest to you in your locality.

We had a pretty good turnout, and it was very informative, and we really appreciate the fact that they, at that time, were able to come to Greene to present that.

Now, at this point in time, I'm sure they're willing to come to any locality virtually to present anything you'd like to present, so

I just would like to say that I appreciated the agenda items laid out the way you did them, Chip.

I don't remember if you've done it before that way, but it was actually pretty helpful.

Thank you.

No, we really haven't done it this way.

I'll have to admit, I was doing it for myself, just so I'm making sure we stay on target and on schedule for all the things we have to do.

And as I started jotting it down, I thought, boy, the commission could probably really use this.

Any more comments, questions?

Thanks again Chip, I really appreciate this.

I guess moving on to other business, we'll head into the round table discussion.

And what I'll do is, if I miss anybody, Christine and Chip, please make sure and point that out for me.

I know we have some new members tonight.

So we'll go ahead and we'll start if it's okay.

All right, so Nelson County, what is happening?

Obviously, broadband is a huge topic.

We're probably going to be rolling out a whole lot more money in the next six months, probably another $1 or $2 million to get more fiber internet.

So that's exciting.

I made a commitment to try to get everyone fiber in the next two years.

Looks like we're on track to do that.

Lovingston, really excited.

Thank you, staff, for working with us.

And that's Susan and Nick, I believe, were the ones who were helping us head up that.

That was an exciting experience.

In today's time, it's kind of nice to have some good or exciting news.

You don't really get it too often.

So Lovingston's one thing we get to look forward to, and Fiverr.

I will say we're experiencing a lot of, I would say, morale issues in our school system.

It's been very disappointing to experience, and it's nothing money can fix.

I think that's a reality a lot of us have to come to Jesus about.

You can only throw up with so much money and things not be complicated.

I do know we have a huge boom in foster children, which has been interesting and very sad.

So trying to make a big push for foster parents in Nelson.

We currently have 35, which for our area is fairly big, which is a big number.

So trying to make that a little bit of a more conversation piece over the next month or so.

I wouldn't say exciting.

Nothing exciting coming up.

I guess the biggest thing for us right now is, you know, with losing the funding that we had planned for the comprehensive plan update, we are now in talks, you know, very preliminary talks on how to break down, you know, things that staff can go ahead and start on, get working on.

I know we're

TJPDC is already planning to work with us on updating the transportation chapter with VDOT.

So we're looking forward to that and just kind of seeing what we can go ahead and bite off and get moving forward with that.

Gotcha.

Yeah, you know, one thing I know is you can always tell an economy when depending on how many special use permits you got coming.

So

and I guess we don't have too many.

I also had a terrible experience of having Rocky Mountain spotted fever.

I wanna tell you all, I give that a zero out of 10 rating.

I'm still feeling it as I sit here.

Just don't recommend.

I went to the doctor thinking it was COVID and doctor's like, heck no, it's not and you're gonna wish you had COVID.

So check yourselves for ticks in the next summer is all I can say because you will be bedridden for a week.

No, that's plenty.

One question I have for you.

You won't bet.

Well, I'm jealous.

I will say that for a fact.

That's all the people in Greene.

That's, yep, I understand you.

We have CVEC has about 68 customers in Greene, I think.

We're trying, wish they had more of it.

Yeah.

No, I'll just say to Jesse's point about the special use permits.

We had some backed up, so we just got rid of a bunch.

Go get us some more cell towers.

All right, let's move on to Fluvanna.

Tony O'Brien, I believe I saw you on earlier.

Are you there, sir?

I am.

Can you hear me?

Okay, great.

Really not a lot to report since the last meeting per se.

You know, we're continuing to spend the monies that are coming in to help both businesses and

promote the elections as much as possible as well as safety in our community.

We really didn't have a very exciting meeting so I apologize I don't have very much to report on but I can say that you know we'll probably have some some good news coming up in the near future and Fluvanna seems to be benefiting from not only the broadband that's coming into the area but just

the general growth that's happening in Zion's Crossroads area as well too.

So that's about it.

Never all that information is exciting.

Yep, absolutely.

I'll try to add a little excitement.

How does that sound?

Sounds good, sir.

There you go.

Tony, good to hear your voice, by the way.

And Jesse, feel better, brother.

So a couple of exciting things as far as Fluvanna goes, something that I'm personally involved with and the county's involved with, and Tony, you may be aware of this, but they're going to start routing traffic through that roundabout next week.

that the new roundabout where 618 Lake Monticello Road and Route 53 over by Effort Baptist Church if you guys are familiar with that area should be wrapped up by November I was on site actually this morning and they're gonna route some traffic around there a little interesting tidbit about that that was the first smart scale project in the state of Virginia so a little shout out to Flovanna County first approved one

Play off a little bit on what the Regional Housing Partnership wearing that Chairman had a little bit, kind of the same area.

I had a really great meeting.

Tony, you'll be happy to hear this.

There's a multifamily developer builder that's just committed to building 150 affordable housing rental units there.

So that's exciting.

That's great.

Yeah, and we spent Chip most of our time talking about how we can get those units into this new search tool or MLS is what I would call it.

So I think you guys are going to get more than what you asked for once we get that thing up and running in November.

And I got one quick little thing to report in that is unrelated to this, but since we shared it at the Regional Housing Partnership, and it's another half that I wear, we're happy to report we are dangerously close to a full merger between the Thomas Jefferson Land Trust and Piedmont Housing.

It's been many, many, many months in the workings.

I'm personally excited about that.

This will give us the ability to scale up our operations and provide affordable housing units both in the city but more importantly from my perspective out in the jurisdiction, other jurisdictions, Fluvanna in particular and Nelson, Greene and Louisa.

So we're excited about that.

More to follow on that but

We've got LOIs signed or MOUs depending on which side of the fence one works.

In my world it's called LOIs.

I think in the government world it's called MOUs.

So I hope I got it a little bit more exciting, Tony.

No, no, that's not necessary.

I'm going to go up and see my grandson for the first time since COVID.

So that's what's happening this weekend.

And Keith is not taking enough credit.

Let me just give Keith a plug here because that roundabout that's come into play there, he worked with the developers and it's been a dangerous intersection.

A lot of traffic rolling down 53 very quickly.

My neighbor, in fact, was killed in that intersection.

And so he was able to negotiate with the landowners to give part of their land so that roundabout could be built.

And in that development area that we're going to have there, we're going to have our first set of apartments.

But we don't have any apartments in Fluvanna County.

So that's we have a couple of townhouses, but I don't think we have any apartments.

So that that is

Good news for people that want to live around the lake but no longer want to maintain their properties.

And we're excited about that development coming in.

I'm particularly excited about easing the flow of traffic and adding safety to that intersection as well.

Thank you.

Where do I send my $100 to?

What address do I send that to?

Thank you, sir.

And Keith, have a great trip.

Enjoy yourself, sir.

All right, let's move on to Louisa.

Let's start with Mr. Gentry.

Long time no see, sir.

I'll let you go ahead and start if you're okay.

Bob just won't let me get away.

It's that simple.

I got five items here.

I'm sure he can expand on some of them.

Basically, we're getting very, very much more serious about broadband.

We've got $15 million we're dangling in front of the co-ops and

having a joint meeting with them to try to get things moving again.

Things really slowed down.

The comp plan that we've been working on for about two years now, we're hoping to wrap that up pretty much at the next board meeting Monday.

We're doing a lot of solar panel projects in the county.

Looks like everybody wants to do that in rural area in Louisa and so far probably they all have been successful except for one and most of them that aren't successful are due to lack of the proper buffers because we want to keep them out of sight as much as possible.

Schools, the schools are doing extremely well here in Louisa County.

We're not really hearing on the board perspective a lot of complaints.

our superintendent spent a lot of effort getting ready for this year and it's paying off and the last thing mainly due to COVID is the Lake Anna area is booming there's so many folks moving into the area because they want to get away from the urbanized areas and some that even were living in the area part-time now it's become full-time so we're seeing extremely active year there so we don't know how that's going to turn out as far as it is one of our growth areas

And that's probably going to speed things up from that perspective.

Well, I can probably say a few things.

Usually try to.

That grant that was received for our voting

issues and plans is going to pay off even more.

We've had over 1,700 people respond to early voting as of today.

We were averaging, after the first day of 268, we've been averaging about 150 a day from the start.

And that's with one location in our admin building, but we're opening a new location at the art center

on October 19th to run through the end of the month.

So we're going to feel we're going to try to get a big boost from the yearly voting crowd anyway.

And that's worked out pretty well.

The other big issue for us that's coupled with

The same board meeting, which is going to be a little racy, is we're going over the CARES spending plan for our little contribution that we received.

We had some preliminary meetings just to come up with a score board listing of pending prior times and we'll be coming up with that pretty soon which is really going to help a lot of different areas within our county.

And the other big, I guess, in a way is the disappointment is the census issue.

As you all know, it's $2,000 per man, woman, or child per year for 10 years.

And there's been a lot of, I guess,

Of course COVID didn't have a factor in it, but I'm a little disappointed in the powers to be representing the census because they didn't really emphasize that particular subject or that particular item, the $2,000 per person emphasis enough because I thought that was one of the prime motivators to get people to raise their hand.

So I don't know what the current status is.

It was supposed to end the 30th of September.

And I know there's a lot of propaganda out there saying it's going to go through October.

I don't know what the final verdict is yet, but I'm hoping.

Because some of our folks have been content with what we, as a percentage, received 10 years ago.

And I wasn't satisfied with that.

This is free money and goes for a lot of great causes that would have to be made up otherwise.

So I'm hoping we can do a better job of ramping that up.

And so it's been a little exciting.

We've had some other local issues that have really worked out real well.

No real fanfare or excitement yet,

Anybody else had?

I've got to be honest, Bob, you started off really slow.

Faster than I did.

So it's hard to speed it up.

So I'm sure you're probably hearing from Christine or somebody.

I believe that that $15 million needs to go to Bob's house.

All right, let's move on if we can.

Let's go ahead and go to Albemarle County.

Yep, I'm here.

I'll hit some quick highlights.

Just since our last TJPDC meeting, the board, we did have a board retreat.

which focused mainly on board governance processes and procedures relative to working with the county executive's office.

That was a four or five hour session which was really well done.

We typically do that in a year when we have new supervisors.

It happens a little sooner but got pushed back to September just due to the COVID.

We received an update on our community development work plan.

So we're starting to see based on big projects that we've had that community development's been working on,

where we're at timing wise and they were able to bring forward their updated timelines and then we'll be making some different prioritization later on when they come forward with the next year's work plan.

Of course we're in preparation for the upcoming budget so we're starting to be in that strategic planning as I'm sure a lot of you are starting to just forecast and see where we're at but in October we should or this later this month we've already started to get some analysis on the

Last fiscal year and where we ended up.

So I'll be all the supervisors are curious and interested in seeing how our revenues ended up shaking out by the end of the year.

And then that informs what we're doing moving forward as we're all dealing with just a different situation.

And then we did, as I believe it was reported at the last meeting, at least the action was already taken.

But we did remove the statue, the Confederate statue that was outside of our court square.

So that was removed.

and the supervisors decided to send that to the Shenandoah Valley battlefields.

They were one of, I think we almost had a dozen applicants, but that is the one the supervisors landed on to be the home for that statue, the cannons and the cannonballs.

And then we're watching and keeping our eyes on all we seem to have successfully voting.

It seems to be going well in Albemarle County and I'm sure we'll continue to get updates on that through October as well.

Thank you, Chair Galloway.

The only other thing I would add is two things.

One is next Wednesday, we're expecting to get our draft housing policy recommendations.

So I think we're all looking forward to that.

And then I would also give a shout out to that traffic circle in Savannah.

That's the route I take every time I go to Richmond.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Sure.

Like everyone, COVID continues to be something that dominates everything we do.

We have seen an uptick in cases, primarily driven by the UVA.

We continue to be aggressive in partnering with Albemarle County and the university to do what we can to

eliminate community spread and keep some restrictions in place.

And the university has been pretty aggressive on their testing and tracing capabilities.

But we're definitely, that's a huge priority to do anything we can to limit or eliminate community spread, particularly as we head into the fall.

Our school system is starting to examine possible plans for returning to some kind of in-person classes.

There's nothing finalized there yet.

But that is something that the school system and the school board are working on.

As others mentioned, for teachers, families, it's definitely been extremely difficult.

I think trying to navigate where we are in our school system, you know, that's the nature where we are, but

We're going to, I guess in some positive news, we're going to get some, we're going to soon be finalizing how we're going to spend the next round of CDBG money through the CARES Act.

And some portion of that is going to go to the Pathways Fund, hopefully be able to provide a little bit more support in conjunction with like the rent relief program and other things here.

We're not near the finish line yet, but we are making progress on our comprehensive plan and our housing strategy, which will be accompanied by a zoning rewrite hopefully as well.

And I think there has been a lot of positive developments there and we've got the beginnings of a draft housing plan that the consultants have been working on.

Likewise, I'm very excited to hear that news about the Community Land Trust.

I think that is going to be a really huge player in trying to solve our affordable housing issues, not just in Charlottesville, but regionally.

And we're beginning the budget process, very beginning of it.

So far, our revenue projections have been pretty close.

Klein, although the hotel lodging industry has taken a bigger hit than the original projections had assumed.

A lot of uncertainty, but it definitely is a concern for us that absent additional support from the federal government, we might see some

Thank you.

Rory, first off, welcome.

I would shake your hand, but obviously I'm not there in person.

Normally, I think you're probably one of the first new members we haven't had an opportunity to shake hands with in this environment, but I just want to say welcome to the commission.

And I'll state, if you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out to Chip, staff, myself, or anybody on the commission, and we'll help you in any way we can.

Yeah, well, thanks, Dale.

I think Michael really did a pretty good job of that update on what Charlottesville is up to.

So I'll just quickly introduce myself.

I'm Rory Stolzenberg.

I'm a Charlottesville software engineer for a renewable tech company and a planning commissioner.

So now that Lisa Greene has turned out of the planning commission and moved on over to the housing authority, I'll be taking her spot on TJPDC.

So it's good to be here with all of you.

Thank you and welcome.

Yeah, I can say one little thing.

Some time ago, the TJPDC helped Ruckersville, which contains half the population in Greene County, but is an unincorporated growth area, to do a small area plan and it has had a

A follow-on committee ever since called the Rutgersville Advisory Council.

Well, Rutgersville has never had any public green space and it is recently in the process of having two small public green spaces.

One is two acres around the visitor center, which is on 29 North, right off 29 North.

And the other is a part of a proper

of some property right near the food line in Ruckersville is a 1.75 acre parcel.

So that advisory committee is now trying to plan possible green space uses for these two small parcels, which would be the first public green space parcels in Ruckersville.

Okay, and I'll finish up.

Thank you, Andrea.

Our EMS department will start operation this month.

Most of you may or may not be aware of the fact that the contract we have with the University of Virginia has come to an end, and we had a volunteer first in combination with the contract with the University of Virginia.

So now we're going with our own EMS department, which is a change for our county.

So that we are fully staffed at this point.

We're starting in October.

The volunteer will actually have their send off tomorrow night.

We are currently in litigation with Rappahannock Service Authority, our water authority.

You may have seen the articles in the paper or on the news.

Basically, we've asked them to allow us to withdraw.

They have said no.

They have then barred our representatives, which is consist of the counties of Albemarle, excuse me, counties of Orange, Greene, and Madison.

And they have barred the Greene County representatives from voting or speaking on topics.

And they're making decisions related to the water rates and the water projects

going on in Greene County.

So there are a couple of lawsuits going forward.

For me, this is more or less a bump in the road.

I know that Louisa and Fluvanna went through their own issues a while back.

We'll get through this.

We've already acquired a property for a reservoir project.

We've been moving forward with that.

And our county has invested several millions of dollars in this project.

And quite frankly, we're going to be moving forward one way or the other.

Our schools opened up.

We have a partial hybrid.

Grades K through five is five days a week in person.

Grade six through 12 is two days a week.

They can come on Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday or Friday.

And anybody that wants to come virtual or be virtual can do so.

And I can tell you wearing my other hat as director of technology of the school division, it has been very challenging.

at times, but it was really good to see the students and teachers back in the school environment.

I know that Louisa is going through the same thing.

So for those of you who are going through this process, we made a lot of changes, a lot of concessions, a lot of space considerations.

It was very challenging.

Of course, we're a smaller division than Charlottesville by a long shot.

So, but for us, it seems to be working well.

You know, the parents are now complaining now about the school or about wearing masks or about those type things.

But like, you know, I can't get to the grades I need to get to.

What's going on with the computer?

Why is it not working?

So we're hearing that type of discussion now, which is good.

Broadband, I'm very jealous for all those who are getting broadband in the area.

We are having a lot of complaints, but our providers, we're trying to reach out to them to see what we can do.

to improve service.

You know, I would expect the complaints to take place early on in the process, but by now I would have thought that those issues would have been resolved.

And it seemed like the number of complaints are actually increasing versus decreasing.

And we finished our EMS study, which related to our fire departments and rescue squad.

And that was provided to us by the state at no charge.

And we're going through and implementing those changes to try to better improve

our services, our communications with the 911 center and the fire department squad and everybody seems to be on board and things in that area move along in a very positive direction.

And that's all I have from Greene County.

I agree.

This is a lot different than being in person and to be honest with you at times it's challenging because I'm trying to look at the pictures and Chip moves the screen from left to right and all of a sudden I'm trying to find where the mute button is and everything moves from one direction to the other but it'd be nice to see everyone again hopefully that will happen sometime in the near future maybe before or next spring would be great we were hoping for the fall so far that hasn't happened

I think it'll be a while before we do this again.

But when you were talking about Standardsville, I remember when we used to do the rotating meetings in the different jurisdictions and those who have attended those and those who have not, it's really an awesome thing to go to the individual jurisdictions and have a meeting there.

So we hope and pray we'll get there sooner than later.

and you guys were talking about standards well that was one of our my favorite meetings that we did in your facility there so well done appreciate that and I was just thinking as we were talking through this about a year ago we were talking to BACO conference for all those who were attending that it was um things have definitely changed and we thought that by now we'd be out of the situation and we're not so um

I think Mr. Roth made a comment a while back that our environments have changed forever.

I'm not sure the wording you used.

I know, for example, the schools, for most of you, I don't see us ever not having a virtual component going forward.

Businesses have changed quite a bit and they're adapting, which is good.

But I have a feeling, for example, like the typical Black Friday people may be used to is going to be entirely different this year.

So there'll be some changes taking place, I'm sure.

The next meeting we have is November the 5th.

I look forward to seeing you by at least virtually.

Mr.

Chair, I'd just like to say thank you to all of the commissioners.

Tonight was one of the first times we've had 100% attendance for a while.

So that's really, really helpful for us.

All right guys, with that said, do I have a motion to adjourn?

Mr. Chairman, I make the motion to adjourn.

Second.

I think we need a roll call vote for that.

Stay safe.

Stay safe out there.