Planning District Commission Special Meeting   6/22/2023

Very good.

I'm going to go ahead and read the Notice of Electronic Meeting before Ruth and we'll afterwards take roll call.

So the meeting of the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission is being held pursuant to Code of Virginia subsection C of 2.2-3708.3, which allows a public body to hold all virtual public meetings.

The meeting is being held via electronic video and audio means through Zoom online meetings and is accessible to the public.

Notice has been provided to the public through notice of the TJPDC offices to the media website posting an agenda.

The meeting is held personally to the remote electronic participation and all virtual meeting policy as adopted by the commission on September 1, 2022.

The meeting minutes will reflect that the meeting was held by electronic communication means and the type of electronic communication means by which the meeting was held.

The recording of the meeting will be posted at tjpdc.org within 10 days of the meeting.

OK, we'll take it, Tony.

We'll get you back.

Counselor Payne?

Commissioner Russell?

Hey, Dale.

You're muted.

Supervisor Barlow.

Supervisor Barlow.

Great.

Thank you.

Supervisor Jones.

Here.

And Supervisor Galloway.

OK, and Mr. Payne is here.

Very good.

OK, next thing on the agenda, Mr. O'Brien, is presentation.

I'm going to kick us off.

I'm going to go through a presentation sharing the results of the survey that we put out.

We're going to do an interactive stop, start, continue activity that we are going to welcome you to either participate electronically by typing things in or by speaking out loud.

And we will record what you say to make sure we capture everybody's feedback

For the purpose of tonight is just to work session through the 23 to 26 strategic plan for the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

All right.

Can everybody see my screen that is looking at one?

All right, I'm going to get started.

So as I shared with you guys in a previous commission meeting, the strategic planning process timeline, we did our kickoff in May with you all, then staff prepared and refined the process.

We did some benchmarking against previous strategic plans, looked at other regional commissions, regional councils, councils of government.

We developed a survey with questions and then we deployed that survey

We are now at the point where we're back to you all for a work session.

The next steps will be to do a staff retreat to go through some feedback with staff and some professional development and team building.

We will bring a draft strategic plan to you all in August for your comments and feedback.

We will then go to other stakeholders for their comments and feedback.

through things like mayors and chairs meetings, existing check-ins with leadership in each of the member jurisdictions, and then bring a final draft to you in September for your consideration.

So survey results were emailed to, surveys were emailed to 53 recipients.

We decided this year that we would target our chief and deputy or assistant administrative officers.

members of all six of the elected bodies, and then the planning or community development directors of each of our member jurisdictions, as well as other TJPDC commissioners.

We received 17 survey responses, which is not a large number, but is enough to begin to guide us through some discussion tonight with you all, for you all to affirm and give feedback if you agree with some of the responses in those surveys.

Can I make a comment on that?

Yes.

I have my doubts.

No, that it was PDCC commissioner

I see.

The survey content, for those of you that weren't able to see it, first was to reaffirm our mission, vision, and core values with each of our member governments and survey respondents.

We had folks look at the 13 priority areas that we currently have, things like housing, transportation, economic development, the broad categories.

and indicate whether they thought that those areas were very important, important, unimportant or not applicable.

We then got more specific and looked at specific programs and or projects that the TJPDC was working on.

And again, had them indicate whether they continued to be very important, important, unimportant or not applicable.

We broke those out by content area.

We then had a list of about 17 other services or programs.

To identify those, we looked at other regional commissions or regional councils and to see what other types of activities are other regional bodies doing on behalf of their regions and then asked folks to identify if they were very interested, somewhat interested, not very interested, not at all interested in us pursuing them and or were neutral about the topic.

And then finally, we wanted to make sure to get some specific performance feedback on how we are currently performing.

So there were 15 items related to that, asking folks to either agree or disagree or neutral on some of the statements.

And all of these I'll share with you in further detail.

We then gave folks the opportunity to just leave open comment.

And at a later date, I will send out a list of all of the comments that were received, but did not include that in this presentation.

So as we discussed in our early June meeting, the mission was reaffirmed by you all that there was no need for substantive change.

We did receive one comment to please include a hyphen in cost-effective.

So I've made that very minor edit.

And then there is comments related to the organizational vision and that there may be some value in potentially wordsmithing a bit for it to be more clear.

I think there was some

Comment around it's hard to understand what it means to be the vision is to be the intersection and rather we work at the intersection of ideas, partnerships and support.

I didn't think it was a substantive change.

So I did put in a suggested edit just to wordsmith that a little bit.

Again, the core values stand with what was in our previous strategic plan.

and we plan as a part of our staff retreat to also look at those five items in a little bit more detail and see if we have any recommendations for any edits.

Excellent question.

It was on the slide 57, 53.

53 went out, Mr. Smith.

So I have it on your screen, but I also emailed it to you all just in case the text was a little bit small.

You could zoom in if you needed to.

But on the priority areas, how important are the following priority areas for the TJPDC?

So not only did folks indicate very important, important, unimportant, not applicable, I then ranked those in order of most importance as based on the survey results.

And so you can see rising to the top, overwhelming majority

believe that many of our programs are either continue to be very important or important.

Several that you see that are unimportant, we suspect may be related to, for example, the MPO may not be as relevant to somebody that is in a rural jurisdiction or regional tax board administration may not be as relevant to someone that's not a member of the board.

And then at the bottom, you can see the only one that received some

Unimportant and or not applicable to us is Human Service or TJPDC Corporation.

And again, the corporation is the 501C3 nonprofit arm that has been used traditionally in the past to be the fiscal agent for budding nonprofits and has a mission to support the mission of the TJPDC.

I'm gonna go through each one of these slides, and then we're gonna do an activity that's gonna draw us back to these.

So if you have questions or comments, you are welcome to interject them at any point, but we will also come back and focus on each of these slides individually.

Then looking at our programs and projects specifically, if you look at our transportation and transit planning activities, again, overwhelming majority think that they continue to be very important or important activities.

And again, in some places there were indication of not important, but that could also be related to whether or not a particular jurisdiction has taken advantage of that.

So for example, transportation alternative program, we have not administered a TAP grant in all jurisdictions.

Environmental planning, here are four environmental programs.

Not a lot to say other than it seems

Again, these four seem to continue to be, at least in majority, very important, more important to the work of the region.

And as a reminder for the Rivanna River Basin Commission at the bottom, two of our six jurisdictions are not part of the RRBC.

So that could be part of the reason for noting not important.

That's a projection now, I don't know.

and then our housing activities, looking at the regional housing needs assessments that we've done, regional housing partnership, you know, holding regional events.

And again, we see pretty strong indication that many of our programs and projects continue to be either very important or important.

There were in this category a couple of not important

just to note anywhere that you see green along the right hand side, and then also a couple of not applicable.

And again, this could be attributed to, for example, the Virginia eviction reduction pilot, that VRP grant is only in the urbanized area, and so it could be not applicable to our rural jurisdictions.

I think it is important to note that there was a couple of not important for some of our federal housing programs.

So I'd like to get some of your feedback on that when we get back to this slide.

And then these are general services that we provide, not specific to any content area, our legislative services, grant administration, grant writing and support, policy research, demographic data,

And again, I think the survey results of those that responded indicated that the majority of the services that we do or are providing continue to be valuable services to the region, with the exception of a couple that you can see in green.

So, for example, conference or meeting space may not be important to

several of our respondents is not being a need that the PDC either must or needs to provide.

And then also environmental review coordination and GIS mapping.

We have heard anecdotally from a lot of staff that a lot of our jurisdictions have that capability that did not once have it.

And so that's less of a needed service, although as a majority still continues to be important or very important.

And then these are services that are not offered that other regional councils, regional commissions, planning district commissions provide.

I think David can attest to as the executive director of the VAPDC that no PDC is exactly alike.

They're very nimble and flexible, but also very specific to their region's priorities.

And so we just wanted to throw out these ideas of things that others are due just to get a gauge.

I think it's really important

At least for me as staff to say, this doesn't necessarily mean that we should go out and actively seek opportunities for these, but this very much helps us as staff and in getting your feedback begin to gauge as opportunities come before us, as funding sources are available, NOFOs are released, then we have something to go back to, to look how important was this or how interested were our local governments in this topic so that we can then

help triage what comes before you all as a commission to support application or support seeking funding.

I found this slide to be very valuable to me to see what are other things that we could be doing that would provide value to our local governments.

Again, we'll come back to this one to talk.

Then this one was related to performance.

And so you can see the statements that we presented on the left.

And for the most part, the majority of the respondents said that the performance was either they strongly agree or agree with the majority of the statements.

There were a couple that stick out, as you can imagine, the one at the bottom that member local governments show ownership of the PDC.

I think that's something we'd like to dig into a little bit more with you guys tonight.

The one above that, TJPDC, provides innovative solutions to regional issues.

I think we can discuss that some more.

And then there were a couple of strongly disagree to some of the statements that I'd like to dig in with you all to see your thoughts on those.

And that was specifically delivering objective high quality projects and services.

And then these two, TJPDC, is balanced in its delivery of regional and local and then balanced in service to urban and rural.

I think both of those are statements that all PDCs are often grappling with.

So I'd like to talk about that some more.

So from the survey alone, the core themes that came up were the

Programs and services that we are providing that continue to be either strong support and or very valuable are listed here.

Again, we're gonna get your feedback on all of this.

This is simply from the survey.

Some strengths that were identified that almost all people agreed with was that PDC had professional dedicated staff.

They're effective at forming professional relationships.

PDC is responsive to requests for service from its members when they seek our support.

We communicate clearly and effectively.

We offer valuable expertise.

We're effective at identifying critical regional issues and then provide local government good value.

And on the flip side of that, there's potential areas for us to be more aware and to be thoughtful that we approach and perhaps make some improvements in.

And that's balancing that delivery of regional services versus local services.

And that's something we talk a lot about internally.

and then also that balance between service to urban and rural and making sure all six of our member jurisdictions are getting equitable access to our services.

And then the one comment that was made about the delivering high quality products, I'd like to talk through with you all.

And then also this idea of members not showing or having ownership of the TJPDC.

I know that has come up at least in my looking back at former strategic plans that has come up several times.

All right, so now Ruth is going to work us through the workshop portion where we're really gonna ask you all to engage and give your feedback and really help us sort through some of these and get, as a commission, what are your thoughts on a lot of these?

She's gonna walk through how the activity works.

I want to, from my perspective, just go ahead and urge, there is an electronic option to type in and to give us your thoughts, but also we welcome dialogue and just

You know, sharing openly and raising our hands and just talking through this.

It doesn't have to be as formal.

What's most important to us is that we're listening to you and we're hearing from you so that it can shape the strategy for the next three years.

I'm going to stop sharing my screen.

All right.

So for the stop, start, continue, I'm going to pull up a whiteboard that you all

We'll have the option to directly interact with in the Zoom.

You can click in the post-it notes and type comments.

You can grab text box from over here on the side and just right click and right on the screen.

Perfect.

I see a few people are in the whiteboard now.

So the purpose of a stop-start-continue is similar to a SWOT.

It's kind of taking a look back at what are we doing that's working well.

That goes into the continue section.

What should we start doing that we're not doing right now that could be helpful?

So that's the green middle section.

And then what things should we stop doing that are not helpful?

And that goes in the red section on the left.

So to start, I think it would be helpful for us to go back and look at some of the data slides.

So for the priority areas, we see, you know, a few of these have survey responses of unimportant or not applicable.

I would appreciate some feedback of, does this resonate with you?

Are those areas that we should look at more critically in our work programs?

And then I'll give you a couple, like 30 seconds to look at this and then I'll open up the whiteboard again.

And if you have any comments about like,

Yes.

Some planning district commissions serve as the continuum of care and or they serve as their mobility management program.

And they're directly serving versus facilitating convening.

And so we here with Blue Ridge Area Coalition for the Homeless have a continuum care that's separate from the PDC.

And so I think this is indicating

Of course.

OK, so for this section, they can either be typing in what should we stop?

What should we start?

What should we continue?

I like to see their little names moving around.

Give folks a chance.

One thought that occurs to me in looking at the survey results is that

Items that seem to have had a tangible program attached to them scored higher than those that did not have sort of a tangible program attached to them.

I put mine in the wrong square.

I know.

You did it.

Good job.

Thank you.

One thing I think, to be honest with you, I think broadband is going to decrease in priority because I think, I think over the next three years that should probably go toward the bottom of the list.

Okay, so a couple of the comments on the whiteboard.

What should we stop?

Dale, we captured your comment there that broadband will likely decrease in the upcoming years.

Also, what should we stop?

You guys can tell me if this is in the right place.

Environmental issues have been a critical part of our efforts yet seem to not be receiving highest priority.

There's nothing new yet in the what should we start doing that we are not already doing.

And some notes for what we should continue is legislative services.

I think it's always been good to show state legislative goals and how the PDC can help.

Should continue.

I see Ms. Wilkinson, you moved your comment over into what we should continue.

And then the one that was in the chat.

I think environmental planning should be maintained and expanded as a priority.

The regional hazard mitigation plan showed major environmental impacts are regional and require intentional planning across jurisdictions.

along with health of the Rivanna River Basin, which requires regional coordination.

There is another comment, we should continue with affordable housing discussions.

And then does anybody, it looks like someone's typing in one out.

Does anybody else wanna add to this just by unmuting and sharing and we can type it in for you?

Are there any things that we're currently doing in our general programming, our large content areas that we really shouldn't be focused on that we are?

So this is gonna sound strange, and I know Ernie hasn't experienced this, but there's probably some more

Local Community Outreach.

That's probably needed.

So there's several members who are running for elected office in Nelson County right now that are actually campaigning against the PDC, which is really interesting to see happen.

And to get into the details of that would probably require a little bit longer than a sticky note.

But I think there is some more community outreach, especially in the rural context.

And Jesse, I would agree with you because we had the same situation in Greene.

In fact, a person on the TJPDC prior to myself being like this at-large supervisor was actively campaigning against TJPDC back in 2000 and I guess 12, so forth.

So I agree with you as well.

Okay, another one in the chat that we're gonna add to the sticky that says possible things to start is regional financing mechanism, for example, green banking, and there are ways to increase, I can't read the bottom of the comment, hold please.

Oh, sorry guys.

I gotta be able to read it.

Exploration of bipartisan infrastructure, law inflation reduction act programs that the planning district commissions are eligible for or connecting localities with opportunities.

They're good candidates for those programs.

Thank you.

That's helpful.

Thank you.

So we're going to go back and do the same thing for the

Williams.

We want to talk just transportation and transit planning.

And so the top one on here is Regional Transit Governance Study and or Development of Regional Transit Authority, Regional Transit Partnership Facilitation, the new Safe Streets and Roads for All, Grant Opportunity, Transportation Alternative Program, TAP Application Support and or Administration, Regional Mobility Management for Seniors and Persons with Disabilities, Rideshare, Travel Demand Management, and Telework Agile Mile, and then Regional Bike Head

Planning.

So those, I want you to see these survey results and then we're going to go back to the whiteboard activity and we're going to get your feedback specific to transportation and transit planning for PDC.

So from your perspective as commissioners, are there things related to transit or transportation planning that we should stop doing, that we should start doing, that we are not currently, or that we should continue?

All right, any verbal feedback that you guys would like to give or stay the course?

All right one from the chat that we'll pull in that says definitely continue regional transit governance work and another one typed in said expand and promote ride share and rural transportation

Okay, move to the next one.

Now if we can think specifically about environmental planning.

Our current programming around environmental, as you guys know, is watershed improvement, the WIP, through DEQ.

Best Management Practices, Funding Application or Implementation Support, Solid Waste Management Planning and Required DEQ Recycling Report, and then the Rivanna River Basin Commission.

One of the items on services not offered was energy conservation and so maybe energy conservation and.

Community or neighborhood energy initiatives, I don't know how that that might be too fine point, but

Yeah.

Solid waste management planning was right near the bottom.

I think as we go forward, especially recycling,

Yeah, I think one of the challenges around environmentalism is that the watershed in particular is sort of the lack of sort of understanding by

Upstream counties, for lack of a better word, to downstream counties.

I don't think there's any doubt that you're seeing a lot of activity with the downstream counties that are being impacted much more by flooding and those types of events.

And it doesn't seem to click upstream that you're part of the problem.

And I think that just sharing regionally

Any other comments on this category?

Okay.

So the activities right now, programs or projects that the PDC is doing related to housing is regional housing needs assessment and data collection and reporting.

The Virginia Housing PDC development grant, creating affordable units, regional housing events like webinars and summits,

Regional Housing Partnership Facilitation, bringing together the voting board, the Federal Housing Preservation Grant Program, HPG, the Federal Home Investment Partnership Grant, the Federal Home ARP Grant Administration, and then the Virginia Eviction Reduction Pilot that was only available to the urban areas.

Two, one, it looks like it didn't rate particularly high, but I think that the VRP program is really important just as one of the only eviction prevention programs that still really left.

And then two, I know this is underway a little bit, but the study of a regional land bank, I think is a huge opportunity, especially thinking about

How the Charlottesville Redevelopment Housing Authority can operate outside city limits.

Thank you, Michael.

Other thoughts around housing programming?

Anyone interested in unmuting and sharing your thoughts and we can get them?

Yeah, so just a couple of, I'm just mainly listening to the discussion and formulating some thoughts.

I do want to go backwards a little bit.

I think it's super important.

I don't know where you're going to fit it into any one of these boxes here.

But I think it's super important to work on our value proposition to our jurisdictions.

I know we talked about this in a previous, earlier today.

And I think this is, I think what we're going to start seeing is we're going to be starting

Regional pushback as some of our jurisdictions are experiencing, specifically to rural, that what's the value proposition.

So I think much like Ned and I are doing these roadshows on housing, we really should start, in my opinion, on what we should start doing is start promoting our value proposition.

And specifically on the housing side of it,

I'm a big proponent of trying to do something similar to what Albemarle County did with the DoD with its ROI, what was the impact on the jurisdiction for its DoD, Department of Defense.

I think something similar to that focused around housing, on what housing impacts the local governments, either from a fiscal or otherwise would be a great tool

for the jurisdictions.

I know it's a little bit long.

God only knows I'm a little long with it anyway, but how anybody can capture those thoughts and put them in little yellow stickies would be grateful.

I would be grateful for that.

All right, Keith, I've captured in the comments section, extremely important to work on the PDC value proposition.

And then on a post it, I put

Yeah, I would encourage everybody to Google and take a look at the 2011 version that Housing Virginia did about the fiscal impacts on local governments, something similar to that.

I think that'd be a great tool for local elected officials to look at or decision makers.

Just to follow up on Keith's comments, I think it's one of those things where everybody says they want more business, they want more opportunities for their county, but there seems to be a disconnect between economic development and housing.

And if your housing prices are

Just astronomical, that really hampers economic development in the long run.

That correlation, how do we show that to rural communities that are generally speaking hesitant for growth and don't understand the cost impact of expensive housing?

Thank you.

You know, I still feel sometimes we fail at explaining to the normal workforce person why housing is critical, you know.

I think I always find myself arguing with people who can't afford their own home in today's market, you know, every time.

So, I don't know how to verbalize that, but

If you have other comments, continue to put them in the chat.

We're going to go on to the other category just to be mindful of time because I do want to keep my promise to keeping it to an hour or less.

And then these are the general services.

Here's the survey results, small area planning, grant administration.

I'm not going to read them all to you because they're on your screen, but would like some general comments and feedback from you all on if these rankings resonate with you, if there's anything that sticks out to you that we should do differently.

One thing that I'll add about the general services is these are often more so the as requested services.

And so one thing that we've discussed internally as staff is making sure we're clearly communicating to our local governments the range of services that we can provide.

So as you need general services, you know that the PDC can supply those as extensions of your own staff.

And so just throwing that out there that often there's not

So here we are with performance.

Again, these were either strongly agree, agree, neutral, or disagree, strongly agree.

and overwhelmingly folks either strongly agreed or agreed.

There were several neutrals as you can see in the red and then individual comments about the delivering objective high quality projects.

And then the constant need to be very mindful of the balance of the regional work we're doing as in compared to the local services that we're providing.

And then also the balance between the urban and the rural initiatives.

I think we've had a chance to look at that.

I think that last option, remember local governments show ownership of the TDPC.

Then it gets back to Jesse's comment earlier that a lot of residents and a lot of the individuals who

Great, thank you.

OK, I've got that, Dale.

I've captured that in a comment that citizens, board supervisors, members, et cetera, may not see the value.

And back to Keith's value proposition statement.

If I could just add to Dale's point,

How we could promote what we do better to the actual people living in our jurisdictions.

How we can let them know what TJPDC has done for their jurisdiction that may have helped them or their neighbors.

Okay, I've got that Andrea, thank you.

Any other thoughts on performance?

Okay.

So I really appreciate you guys indulging us and trying to work through that activity.

I know doing that on post-its and virtually and talking through it was new for us.

And so thank you for

for trying it and giving us your feedback that's very valuable to us.

I think one thing that I want to add as we start as our leadership team thinking about the TJPDC in the next three years is making sure we still have a very strong administrative focus internally in order to make sure that the agency remains strong and healthy so that it continues to be sustainable to do the work that it can.

And so one of the things that I would like to include with your feedback on all of this

is that we go through and do kind of a policy audit or review, update some of our guidance, update our employee handbook.

Oftentimes in the last couple of years, we'll have to refer to something with a realization that it hasn't been updated in five or 10 years.

And so I think there's a real need for us to do that work in this round.

I also think it's really important for us, as you all know, with the transition of our finance team and with our former finance director having been here 16 years, it's really important for us not only to continue to focus on clean audits, but to enhance attention on the financial health and using the tools that we have to ensure that the agency remains healthy, not just has a clean audit each year.

So that's really important to us as leadership.

Continued relationship building, whether that be with new state and federal agency staff, there's been a lot of turnover, making sure we know our grant reps well, we have points of contact with all of the agencies that we're working with, is really important to us so that we can know where we need to go for help and make sure we're liaising between state and local in a way that adds value.

We've also started to instate and will continue to do so regular scheduled check-ins with all six of our member jurisdictions.

We've been meeting as a leadership team with the leadership team in several of our jurisdictions.

I'd like to expand that to make sure all six are included so that there's very regular communication with leadership staff.

And then internal focus on some team building and culture building.

As you guys know, we've had

A lot of really great new staff come aboard, but making sure we're building the internal strength of the organization as we also focus on the external programming.

And then continuing to think through transition planning and cross training.

You know, it's become evident to us that when there is one keeper of a certain type of information for the organization, when there is a transition, that's incredibly challenging to work through.

And so making sure

All new processes, backend systems that we use, our HR and benefits function, that there's more than one person that understands how to do any one function of the agency so that at any given time, if somebody is not available to do it, we don't lose momentum and have hiccups in our programming.

And then the last one I want to leave on there is the building needs within this next three years.

Our current lease will either renew or expire.

We don't yet have any indication from our landlord, but always want to keep that on our minds that if we are

Notified in any way that the lease is not up for renewal, making sure we're ready to move pretty quickly into looking at other opportunities.

So these are a couple just administrative ones that I feel like it was important noting within our strategic plan.

We have a five year lease that will come up in 2025.

This will be the first lease renewal with the new owner.

And so we don't yet have any indication from them whether they will continue leasing it, if they're going to want to do renovations.

We just don't, we don't know that because we, our old owner, we had a much closer relationship with.

This is an LLC.

And who's our property manager?

Well, I guess my thought would be that

I guess you're always looking, right?

I mean, 2025, based on the last time that there was looking at potentially new spaces, I think that took some time.

I think I was just coming on, but it wasn't like, oh, we found something in six months.

Thank you.

Any other comments on the administrative focus as a strategy?

OK, now we'll go on to the next one.

So for us, our next steps are we are going to do a full day staff retreat.

We'll spend about half of that working on

strategic planning initiatives, staff team building, and then we'll do an offsite staff team building activity as well.

In August, I'll bring forth to you guys a draft strategic plan for you guys to really dig into and give me feedback on anything that you would like to see revised, share that draft with our six member jurisdictions staff, and then bring forth the final to you.

Open up if anybody has any other comments or suggestions or thoughts that you would like us to incorporate as we begin to draft that first draft of the plan, please feel free to give comment now.

I'm just going to throw this out.

I didn't speak fast enough when you were talking about the outreach.

It was during the value proposition of the TJPDC.

Last night at the Albemarle board meeting,

During our legislative conversation, David was talking about how you can join up with other jurisdictions to have more impact on legislative type stuff that aligns with what you're going after.

And as our board members started talking about volunteering to go to those boards,

to voice support in person versus just sending a letter similar to what the RHP presentations have been.

So I would just throw that out here that an elected, you know, as we look at the legislative priorities, especially if one elected goes and makes an appearance at another elected body's meeting, I think that has an impact that's different than just sending a letter.

So if there was interest of electeds coming to join other board meetings on topics of shared interest, I think that could maybe, I don't know, swell interest or maybe have a better networking impact than just sending a chair's letter of support to another board.

If you don't mind, I would like to just add a little bit of historical context to this.

So I think I'm the second longest serving, continuously serving, commissioner after Andrea.

You know, 10, 12 years ago,

Albemarle County wouldn't return our phone call.

Charlottesville wouldn't return our phone call.

We were not doing our job well at all.

Matter of fact, I would say we were extremely poor at it.

We have done a 180.

We're just unbelievably efficient at what we're doing.

And the only comment that I would like everybody to end with, there was 10 years ago, people wanted to get out of the commission because we were not capable of performing.

Now we are performing at an uber high level.

But nobody knows about it, right?

We're like the secret service here.

Nobody knows what the heck we're doing.

So now's the time, I think, for us to promote what we're doing and our awesomeness, how everybody wants to do that and how we end up that way.

But I'm a little concerned, very much so concerned.

That we're doing all this awesomeness and everybody else is not aware of that or even understands it.

So my only overall comment would I love to see buried in this strategic plan going out there is how to fix that problem.

We're functioning perfectly.

How do we let the world know, our region know?

How do we let people that oppose what we do actually know what we're doing and the awesomeness we do?

And actually, Keith, I was trying to say a little, I said less, but I was trying to say some of the things you just said.

And I was really relating not just to the boards, but to the citizens of the jurisdictions.

So how do you ever reach them?

People don't know.

Well, Christine, you can recite this number.

How much money did Fluvanna County get for the eviction?

Reduction Act, you know, help folks with their their more their their the emergency rent and mortgage relief that we did.

Thank you.

Which they would have never received if there was not a commission.

Right.

So there was a bunch of people during the during the pandemic that received money that did not get affected, that stayed in their homes and their residences.

So there's so many good things we do.

Folks just need to know about it.

But from historically, we went from

Apariah.

Nobody wanted to talk to us.

To a rock star.

Thank you, Christine.

Now we just need to tell everybody we're a rock star.

That's it.

Well, I would encourage jurisdictions if you have citizen advisory committee.

Now look, in Albemarle, we, man, you throw a topic out there.

We got a committee for it.

I'm in my citizen advisory committee meeting tonight and at the MPO, the TJPDC handles the MPO, encouraging them to get out to the Albemarle's citizen advisory committees to talk about the long range transportation plan.

But if you have similar type citizen involved committees,

The TJPDC, Christine, proactively could go engage with those committees, make presentations because now you're not presenting to staff or elected, you're hitting the actual citizens.

So I know that the city was thinking along those lines and the MPO meeting.

Thank you.

All right, very good.

Any other parting comments?

We are at 805.

All right, I'd like to end with a thank you for an hour of your time, the second meeting of the month.

I want to remind you guys that there is not a July commission meeting, so we do have July off, and then we'll see you again first Thursday of August.

And I hope anyone that has travel or summer plans wish you well, safe travels, and if you're just not doing any of those, I wish you still well.

So thank you very much for your hour tonight.

Bye.

We have a motion to adjourn.

Oh, thank you, Tony.

Motion to adjourn.

Second.

All those in favor?

Aye.

Aye.

Anybody against, just for the record?

Very good.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye.