City Council Budget Work Session - Capital Improvement Program   3/26/2026

I call the Charlottesville City Council special work meeting, special meeting to order.

It's on the FY 27 budget.

Councilor Fleisher?

Here.

Vice Mayor Oschrin?

Here.

Here.

Here.

Okay.

thank you i'm sorry i was not connected to this but i'm getting there i'll give you the talk rest and stuff i mean you can all right so counselors and members of the public tonight is your your final planned work session so we're going to talk about cip and we also have

And in anticipation that you might choose to use some of the time to continue your discussions about decisions that you might make about your strategic initiatives fund or not.

And then we're also looking for you to be able to help us understand

Thank you.

So we're gonna talk about the five-year summary, look at the CIP revenues, talk a little bit about the debt projection, the 1% sales tax for school construction, and then just to fully close the loop on all of the sort of city grant processes, CDBG is one that pulls up the rear in terms of timing, and so we're just gonna provide you with an application summary

of who has submitted, how much they've requested, and what's available to be awarded.

So we'll talk about that at the end.

So jumping right into the CIP, it feels like we talked about this a long time ago, it was back in the fall.

We met with the Planning Commission to discuss this.

Nothing has really changed since that was presented.

At the time we talked about the CIP plan for 27 is

just over 47 million with 196 million over the five years.

If we were to look in terms of dollars spent, education is the highest in this plan followed by transportation and access and then affordable housing coming in third.

As you know, that kind of varies from year to year depending on where projects are.

The one thing that's

Driving the education in this five-year plan is of course the additional funds for the Pre-K Center.

But the graphs on the right hand side of this sort of give you a visual of the categories in which we're spending the money, both in 27 and over the five year plan.

And mostly it's pretty consistent.

Over the five years, no real change there in terms of category spending.

And so I'm gonna run through the next few slides pretty quickly.

This is just as a refresher of what's actually in each category.

Anything that's highlighted in green denotes a change in the funding amount from the 26 plan to the 27 plan.

There's not a lot of new things that have been added.

So most of the things that are in this year's CIP are basically just adjustments to funding based on

either additional project information or things that we know about inflation and those types of things.

One thing you'll note on this school slide is that we did receive a request from staff that our funding for HVAC

repairs and replacements both in the city schools but also city buildings as well.

That funding was sort of lagging behind the cost.

And so we did make an adjustment there to increase the funding in both of those pots of money.

Moving on to facilities projects.

Again, the HVAC that we just spoke about that had been 500,000 a month, excuse me, a year.

And we increased that by half a million as well.

And each year moving that up to a million dollars.

McGuffey roof replacement, that is something that was new, that was added in this year's plan.

For the HVAC replacement is that I mean that's a nice round number.

I don't

Do you want me to go to the corner or just shoot from here?

Good?

Go ahead.

Okay.

A lot of analysis has been done.

There's always a running lumps on the plan and it's more than a million dollars a year.

So we rounded it to make it easy for you all to sort of swallow, but we could use even more than that.

Moving on to public safety, not a lot of changes here as we've spoken about before.

Many of these accounts are set up as recurring accounts other than the fire truck replacement and the ambulances.

The rest of the radios and the apparatus, we're funding those in an annual rate to both build up a reserve of funds so that we're not trying to fund the big numbers all at once, but also so that regular replacements can happen so we don't end up with a big cliff every five or six years as they need to be replaced.

They can do a cyclical replacement cycle on those things.

Transportation and access.

Again, nothing new here other than the Dominion Power Pole remediation account.

There were some changes in the amounts, and most notably the additional investment in the new sidewalks, which was based on the priority list that was presented to council with the tier, I think it was one, two, three projects.

The funds that are here represent, correspond with that listing.

Parks and Recreation, all of this, all of these accounts were also in last year's plan.

Most notably though, in the 26 plan, we only had

One year of half a million dollars put in the CIP because we weren't sure what was gonna come out of the plan or how those dollars were gonna be spent.

I'll add on that that we fully expect that going forward budget cycles that line item for the parks master plan will dramatically increase.

We were not able to get to a place of being comfortable putting in any numbers at this time.

beyond these $500,000 amounts just to be able to say that Parks has something available, some amount available to do some projects.

There's still work to be done.

Their master plan came in, if I'm remembering correctly, $70 million, $78 million for full implementation as visioned.

So we know that those numbers need to be dramatically different if we're going to come anywhere close to that, but we now

have an assistant city manager here who's going to be working with the team to try to figure out how do we allocate better over the next five year cycle.

So those numbers will change.

So what is the Parks and Rec lump sum account?

Those are dollars that they have had for years for it's a lot of maintenance or like

Do they spend it all every year?

I don't know that it makes any real difference.

You may be able to tell me that it does make a difference, but I

And I probably described that in the wrong way.

It's not more, it's not really maintenance as much as it is small, not multimillion dollar projects, but obviously small projects that need to happen within the parks or the parks facilities.

So it's not painting and that kind of thing.

Do we have any sort of definition as to when something is enough that it is a capital expenditure as opposed to a maintenance expenditure?

If you were replacing, I mean, it seemed maybe you were replacing a bench.

can't be more than $10,000.

That strikes me as being a regular maintenance matter rather than a capital matter.

And I guess my first question is A, does it matter really which category we put it in?

It would matter for any accounting reason or B, does it matter for, I don't know, sort of definitional purposes.

Again, going back to when I was on the Planning Commission, we had a definition of capital expense that basically, I don't remember what it was, a minimum of $100,000 or something like that.

No, it's a fair, I'll just answer it from the budget and then accounting piece and then I'll defer to Evan.

But essentially, we try to look for something that's $50,000 or more.

is what we consider capital.

And again, I'm not doing this account justice, and maybe Evan can, but it's not like we're replacing one bench.

We sort of look at that as a pro.

So they might replace all the benches in a park or whatever they're doing in a particular area.

I really don't have anything more to add other than we also look at it as a capital refresh for a park.

So it might be replacing a bench, but it's also doing five or six other things.

Is that something that is a bondable expense?

We wouldn't bond a $10,000 bench, but if we were able to go and refresh the park, that would be a bondable sort of thing that we could look at in total.

It's definitely not small expenditures.

I can assure you they're best because we have too many things that need to be done.

I know one example would be that we have found ourselves having to go in and do work on restrooms outside of the normal schedule.

And that's because individuals have gone in and they've done damage to the restroom.

So it takes it off its cycle.

So we have to go in and we have to replace all the accessory pieces in the bathroom because they were destroyed.

And I'm looking at some details and actually getting some other information in as we speak.

So it's things like benches, yes, bike racks, grills, dog waste stations, picnic tables, trash receptacles, water fountain.

And then some more significant repairs would be tennis courts.

May I ask about the trees active life cycle management?

Is that from the four point something million that we've seen for the downtown maltrees?

Yep, and I see one thing on my color coding here.

There actually is a new account that I missed.

The city county park maintenance joint parks.

That is for the joint parks between the city and the county.

And the county asked if the city could

create an account by which we could use that for projects or things that come up during the year.

We didn't previously have that.

We had just been budgeting for, you know, paving or a tree replacement.

And so this amount of funds is there to help with those projects as they come along.

Is that specific?

So is it a joint account?

That's our account for our share of expenses.

The county.

Okay.

Can we check back in about, there are the two line items on here for the Dental Law Management Plant, Tree Management Plant and the Active Lifecycle Management.

I can do the same.

So the active lifecycle is that every year, sometimes multiple times a year, we have to go through and like trim branches, hazard branches and stuff like that.

So it's going through and doing that ongoing tree maintenance work so that we don't have limbs falling and damaging property or people, right?

The other one is actually the larger project that we did that whole tree management plan for that is about really over time renewing and replacing the trees up and down the whole wall.

I know that we had a presentation on the fact that it was going to be a systematized management plan.

I'm just curious since we're going to be spending in FY28 at this point projected to triple the amount in any other year.

Yeah.

What I believe that is, is so that the plan actually calls for replacement of, we call the groupings of trees, mosques, replacing those mosques all at once.

And I don't recall this, but I think that in this instance, I think that involves

taking out the trees, taking out the bricks and the soil, replacing that soil.

Because remember, one of the things we learned is the trees are planted in the old road bed, which is part of the reason they aren't doing as well as they ought to be.

So taking out the soil, putting in better soil, replanting the trees, and then relaying the bricks.

Well, they're spaced out because the idea is that we don't want to do all the trees at once.

So we don't take out the entire canopy.

I don't.

Was that the one in central?

I think that's the one in central.

We do have the biggest problem.

Oh, I forgot about that.

Great.

Good evening here.

So how we designed it was since it's for central place, central place that where we're going to do the vast of trees.

But how we designed it was that the first year is going to be any work.

So we're going to have to get an architect, a landscape architect to come in to design that.

And that's why you see the second year is a higher price.

That means it's for construction.

So if you look at that 500 and something in the first year, that's A&E work and the second year is construction just for phase one.

So this project, if you can recall, the report calls for a 20 year plan to replace trees on the downtown mall.

Thanks, Riaan.

With the parks master plan, obviously that is something that lots of people in the community care about and are watching and it can be transformative in terms of our parks and services.

As you referenced, the cost is 70 plus million, $500,000 a year.

And again, you kind of acknowledged this is essentially

Not currently implementing it.

Yeah.

I can answer that question.

So what Parks and Recreation staff did is we looked at the entire master plan and we worked collectively is coming up with a 10 year plan of how are we going to accomplish all the projects and we prioritized it.

What staff recommended was let's try to look at high impact for the first year or two with low cost and that's where you get the $500,000 where we are looking at new park signs.

Those are small impacts but high impacts.

for the community because we did not want to look at a big project for example we have four parks that is called out in the master plan we just did not want to put all our money into one bucket of let's say two million dollars and it takes us four years to get accomplished where the community is looking for some improvement

So that is what we are looking at is looking at high impact for the community with a low cost and that's where we have the first year of 500,000 as everybody mentioned signage and redo of benches adding

In the future years for the big ticket items, again, 70 plus million dollars, is part of that conversation going to be whether or not city council approves an additional revenue source that's just for parks?

Good question.

So as we do understand, and in the back of our master plan, it calls for, we know that $78 million is a lot of money, but it calls also for staff to look at other opportunities in terms of grants.

So number one, what the department looked at is let's prioritize what is important.

for the community, which we did, my tenure plan, then what we are going to look at is how do we achieve that in terms of we know that we will not be able to get 78 million dollars directly from

Capital Improvement, but what other grant opportunities we do have.

But in order for us to get there, we have to right size our department and the city.

Again, we are working in partnership with Public Works,

Reaching out to their department is to say, hey, do you have any resources?

We are looking at the grants department is to say, how can we get this?

So to close up is that we are looking at all these facets before just jumping in and just requesting a lot of funding at one given time.

And I'll add just for further explanation that direction that I've given as well has been that I did not want to see us placing numbers into the CIP that are not real.

We've had a history of that.

And I don't want that to, I don't want us to slither back to that.

So a lot of the effort has been around the idea that if we put the money in CIP in this recurring fashion, then the intent is that it gets spent.

So whatever numbers go in there are hard pressed because we have so many priorities that we're trying to balance that if we put it there, we need to spend it.

We also have the four plans that still also need to be done for Market Street, Court Square, Washington Park, and Tonsler.

They're big ticket items just in the plan and the construction documents before we make a movement of change at any one of those parks.

We need to spread those out as well because we're gonna spend a lot of money on designing and nobody's gonna see anything.

So that's going to take away from actual physical improvements that get to be made at parks as well.

So we need to have a little more conversation about where to place them, spreading them out so that we can see change as well as plan for change at the same time.

That's the reason why we took another year in

Spending more time to try to figure out how to put a true five-year plan together that will look different.

It'll have an ebb and flow to it or you'll see the numbers changing from 500,000 to well over a million or two possibly.

And in the presentation that I made to you, it's why the decisions made, decisions pending page exists.

Remember Parks was one of those bags of money that is a decision pending that we need to be able to figure out how do we get it to fit in with that bigger price tag.

Any more questions on Parks and Rec projects?

Okay, so moving along to the affordable housing projects.

This is, again, these were all projects that were in the plan last year.

The only real change at this point is 501 Cherry.

There is $700,000 that was added to 28 based on an action that you took

And you'll notice that the Salvation Army line item is still there.

It is meant to just be there until we know that that conversation is dead at the Cherry Avenue location.

I thought it was important enough for us to leave it there until we really started to see how this drive conversation materializes.

I've asked this before and I always forget.

Park Street MACA is underway.

We funded it.

Where does that

live in our budget?

It's in the CIP in last year, I think.

Last two years, it was funded.

Right.

But it's not yet dispersed.

But it's still there.

Correct.

Yeah.

And CSRAP, that is

Program with a lot of discussions to be had around it and I know kind of where is that at and what's kind of the next steps for determining things around CSRAT?

Yeah.

I think we're looking at the next update before the end of this fiscal year.

Still more work to do and

But the funding remains the same at the $900,000 as a projection for the next five years.

That could change, of course, once we get that work done.

That's part of what the original conversation was about, either going up or down.

Honestly, just depending on if we set parameters, that would mean that the contributions would change or if we add more people.

So this just keeps it as a placeholder at the current budget.

But it's possible that some some basic things around how it operates could change.

Absolutely.

Then the final category is the technology infrastructure.

The communications technology account, that's a funded account through PEG fees that has to be used on our public access TV.

Citywide IT infrastructure, this is an account that we use to help with things that come up during the year.

or things that are not previously budgeted but we have to adjust for.

And then the voting equipment, this is I think year two or three of funding that gets us to a total for the replacement that will be taking place in 27.

And so all of that brings us to a total of just over $47 million for 27.

and 196 million over the five years.

Yes.

Okay.

Backing up to the transportation access projects, Page, just because of something that was mentioned when you were talking about parks, where in the

the small capital projects, bike racks were mentioned.

I'm assuming that is just bike racks that are in parks, not the bike rack in general.

Yeah, I think do you have anything

can speak to that directly?

My memory says that that includes bike racks.

But we've used it also for like some of the things and things for bike lanes.

And then

I know as of late, some of the V.O.

revenues that we get have been used for like the website and the subspecies.

Thank you.

Yes.

No, but the other thing that when I think about what you're describing, that's a project that I suspect could get expensive really quickly, and it would probably end up being a standalone project in and of itself, that we would do it in a concert with a larger streetscape project, because if we're

If we're adding a curb, we're changing on the street, we're potentially changing how the water flows.

Yeah, very true.

So for the, you know, we did the quick builds projects with the idea that we would study their effect and see which ones we wanted to harden and that sort of thing.

So that's something that we've been discussing is actually setting up just like we did with the sidewalk program where we created a tiered sidewalk replacement program.

We're talking about doing the same thing with Quick Builds, where we would take the Quick Builds programs and tier out what could be

What can be easily done?

What's kind of been a mid-tier?

What's a more difficult tier?

Yeah, it's something that we're in process right now.

I would expect that in the next few months we'll have something but it's important to note that as part of the the tiers that James was talking about the public engagement portion really needs to be fleshed out because with these temporary measures out we've gotten some good feedback but we haven't gone back to

That is true.

Typically when it's something that's not budgeted and it's of a certain size, then it's a surplus request.

so that's usually how it would come and it would just be a matter of what else is being considered for whatever balance of surplus we have available.

If it were a small amount then usually sometimes what happens is the departments try to determine, I'm thinking of Mike because he's sitting here, Mike knows that Sam is sometimes undisciplined and will say hey Mike I need you to do this and Mike wants to make me happy so he'll figure out how to make his lump sum account work for me and then he'll figure out the impact of it later

Yes.

And just going back to your, excuse me, question on the bike infrastructure.

As of December, there's about $991,000 sitting there unspent in addition to what we have in the five-year plan.

So part of that, I think,

When Mr.

And so this is why we're not putting anything in.

putting much in because we wanna maintain, but we don't wanna make sure we can spend it on real products.

I'm not saying more than in his head.

I know there's, you know, everyone's got a work plan, but what can we do

You're doing it.

Great.

Consider it.

But you're in the same system that I am as it relates to the CIP.

I want us to move away from any notion that the CIP is a slush fund, is the savings account,

is a place to hold unless approved by the budget team.

And that savings account component is we save over a period of time to avoid the cliff that Krisy mentioned.

Those are appropriate moments, not tuck it away so that I'll have it available to me to pull out and do something that's not discipline behavior.

I have one other transportation related question.

Are we spending anything out of this budget or does it come out of some other budget for bus shelters?

It's in their budget specifically.

I know that we did remember that we gave extra money in the surplus or set of projects.

And we're in the midst of a study.

We just saw a presentation on that CARTA.

A beautiful presentation.

Very well done President Lynch.

I need to see that.

Yep.

What each of them has, what each of them needs.

You know, there's lighting maybe on the sign, but not for the people using the bus stop.

There's, you know, a trash can and earbud, but it's not really the bus stop.

You know, we need this square footage of pad to improve.

We're like, what is the pad made of?

Yep.

Want to make sure somebody's doing something about it.

Bus stops is a thing for me.

Sure, so we have design guidelines which the VAR is meant to be using, does use for their review of projects within those different districts.

And those guidelines are quite dated at this point in time and particularly dated relative to the more recently adopted comprehensive plan and zoning ordinance.

And is that basically like funding for your consultant?

Yeah.

And then the initiatives ended

Is there a reason for that?

It was just because we identified it as a five-year commitment initially and the goal is to monitor the use of the funds and determine by making further allocations based on using those funds.

So that's still a question.

We've had

Some efforts have been to try to go after big grants and in going after big grants we take big chunks of that money and set it aside as the local match in case we get the grant.

We haven't landed the grant yet, so therefore we have money that has been able to build up.

and again my desire is to have us not have any money sitting for long periods of time unspent so the part of the reason for not putting anything into those later years is to see what happens over the next few years because climate is a challenging topic for the federal administration today so not knowing what the chances are going to be for being able to do bigger ticket items we may have to do more things that are smaller over time and then that would help us determine

Is it a million dollars or is it half a million dollars in those out years?

Well, I appreciate that.

I definitely would say I think in the out years, the need will still remain.

Nothing else for climate resilience.

Climate change will still be real.

It's been something like that number for a long time.

It's recurring.

And what we've done is, you recall, I think two years ago now, we broadened that

Well, it still has the moniker Small Area Plans.

It's really geared towards producing smaller plans and other implementation type plans that support land use planning on a finer scale and support implementation of the comprehensive plan.

Yeah, I guess it just,

Maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah.

Oh, you're talking about small area plan implementation?

Correct.

Yeah.

So the focus, one of the focuses as we move into our next era of small area plans is really to make sure that those plans, what'll differentiate those plans from previous ones is that they will be a lot more focused on identifying implementable plans.

I'm sorry, implementable projects that this funding source will be used to achieve.

So,

I'm not trying to talk out of both sides of my mouth but that is because we have every intention of doing more small area plans and we had a real request from the public to make sure that there was money available for implementation after the completion of the plans because we weren't doing that part of it before.

we would do the plans and then we would have to figure out how do we find a bucket of money to do something and this plan implementation fund is the is the reset because that was the strategic yes strategic something strategic investment area that was the only plan that we actually created a funding source for and it went unspent.

Council Snook used to tell us about it every year

I guess it could be a whole other topic of discussion and I understand there's been changes but it just still feels like unclear to me how

I think to the question of how will we harden some of the improvement plans, some of the quick bills and things of that nature, if they're in small areas, small area plan areas, then that would be one of the funding sources that we could consider if we haven't already started to maximize it.

I put pressure on anyone who uses those accounts that they have to spend them because the SIA account at one point was over a million dollars with no idea on what it was going to get spent on.

Thank you.

Well, there really is an intention that as we complete small area plans, we're able to move quickly into implementation while there's the momentum in the plan.

Makes sense.

Sorry, one more question.

So for existing small area plans, the 10th and Page one is,

underway, that'll be the next one.

I mean, I think we- Yes, and?

Yeah.

I mean, from my perspective, Starr Hill, if there's a project that we can implement in there, then we should look at it and move on it.

There's no reason to not do that, but there's some history with that one, I guess.

That one's before my time.

Cherry has specific implementable things.

You've got the North 29 one, which is really geared towards big, large scale, VDOT kind of interventions.

And then you have the strategic investment area.

I would not take it too in the weeds, but I would say with the Starr Hill one, I think maybe this already exists and it could be dug out.

Maybe it needs to be determined as a final determination of what the environmental situation is at Cityord and the scale and environmental remediation.

Because to me, that's basically the question that

The city was about to make a final decision on years ago, and then there was turnover and all kinds of things.

There might be more than that necessary to determine if it's actionable, but yes.

I think that's the challenge with that plan is I think there's a number of things that need to happen to figure out

I mean the central element of it being the redevelopment of that site.

There's a number of things that need to happen to determine if that's actionable.

I'll say that one of my

Desires has been, and I've talked to James about it when he was the planning director, as we get the team in place and settled and performing consistently, then one of the desires that I had was to revisit the Starr Hill plan and bring it up to small area plan designation.

because it's missing some components and we need to complete those components and then we can conclude that it is equal with the others because there's no reason to have one vision plan and all the others be small area plans and I think that the question about City Yard is a big feature of that plan of course but there were other things and still things probably that could be identified that could be done.

because I wouldn't want that neighborhood to feel left out because the plan didn't meet the box to be checked as a small area plan.

That's not fair to them.

They didn't cough that.

So I think there's a fixing of that.

and planning all the great work that happens in the city.

And purchasing, there's procurement.

I think most of the vehicles there are in use.

Is that a list we see?

What review is there to make sure that each of those is a place where we still want a traffic signal?

I can speak to that.

So there is a list.

We are adjusting the process.

So what we have there, it's primarily based upon the structural integrity of the traffic signals, but we want to make sure that when we're doing the replacement of those signals, that it is the long-term, I guess, desire to keep a traffic signal at that location.

So as part of the scoping, we have the engineering team looking at

Traffic Billing is doing a quick fursery look to see are the traffic warrants justifying the need to keep a traffic signal there.

And if there's any, I guess, any doubt whether it is, we would then kick that up to a more detailed study.

With that being said, a more detailed study and any change moving away from a traffic signal, whether it would be a four-way stop or a potential roundabout,

That would be a much more significant project and would take some time.

I do want to make sure that we are reviewing that to make sure that they're all needed.

Can I see in the weeds on that for just a hot second?

So what if it is a signal that needs to be changed?

So I believe that we are looking at the mast arms, primarily the structural elements, and then looking at just the traffic volumes through the intersection, where there are questions about function.

Thanks.

I know they've been looking at

right turn onlys and things of that nature.

And the buttons to switch to no red.

I know that's a name that's been talked about too.

Any other questions?

Any expenditures?

Is it not really a question?

What are we talking about?

We can come back.

I'm gonna go ahead and skip ahead a little bit.

So, we've talked about expenditure.

How do we pay for this?

If we just look at 27, just under 78% of this plan will be funded by bonds.

The general fund transfer, if you recall, we have a policy that we call our PAYGO policy

that ensures that at least 3% of the general fund budget is going to the CIP to pay for cash funded projects.

A lot of that we have been exceeding that policy largely because of our affordable housing items that we have keyed into the plan that require us to do.

that are not eligible for bonding and so they are cash contributions.

In 27, this is not new, I think this was back in 23, we did program some contingency dollars into the CIP to help offset that ebb and flow of the cash contribution from the general fund.

And so in 27, we are using just under $2 million of contingency that was programmed in several years ago.

There's not a change.

It's been there for a while.

And if you looked at this over the five years, the pie basically looks exactly the same.

The contingency is a little smaller because this year was the biggest year that was programmed for contingency.

but essentially it looks the same.

And so as we look to debt, part of the balancing act with the CIP is looking at our debt capacity versus what we can afford.

For those of you that have been around for a while, you'll recall that many years ago when we started talking about the

Buford Renovation.

We threw out $50 million and at that time we were talking about the fact that that amount of money was going to exceed both our debt capacity and our affordability.

Since then, and we'll look at this in just a minute, our general fund has grown at such a rate that our debt capacity is really no longer an issue.

It really does become the affordability piece of it is how much debt can we afford to pay?

Because while issuing debt is easy in the short term, it is something that is a 20 plus year commitment that we do have to pay every year.

And so,

If we kind of look at that overall, right now our debt service, the green graph on the left, if you look at our projected annual debt service for 26, it's about $19.1 million moving up to just over $26 million by 2031.

Conversely, if you look at the blue chart on the right, this is what we are projecting the general fund transfers to be and you'll see that this year we're at $15 million

We're not really moving the needle that much in 27.

That was actually one of the budget balancing levers that we pulled before we presented this budget to you.

But it takes us all the way up to a potential general fund transfer of just under $26 million.

Got it.

Oh, transfer.

The 3% is just based on whatever our budget is.

Yes.

So I mean, how are we managing this?

And this, if you were to look at these two graphs, if you went back to this same work session over the last five years, this graph, both of these graphs have looked very similar.

The way that we're mitigating this is, which I'm going to show you the details behind this in one second, is that

We have been funding our debt service fund to build up a fund balance for years in anticipation of greater debt service needs that we're drawing down on that.

We've been using one-time funds to put extra dollars in the debt service fund and then we also have been working to annually increase the general fund transfer to get that base up to where it needs to be.

So

Kind of a peek behind the curtain at what makes this up.

This is a chart and one thing I want to, you know, always say before we look at this is don't get so hung up on the exact numbers.

The idea of this is to kind of give you an idea of what are the pieces of the puzzle that we're working through each year as we look at our debt picture.

So if we were to look at the planning side on the left, and again, anything in black is something that has already happened.

So those are real numbers.

That's the real amount of the bond issue.

That's our real annual debt service and our real general fund budget.

Anything in blue is what we're projecting and it is subject to change for lots of reasons.

One is we issue our bond rate, excuse me, we issue bonds based on a cash need basis.

So just because our CIP may say that we're spending 47 million in FY 27, if we're not actually spending all of that 47 million, we're going to only sell bonds for what we know we are going to spend within two years as our cap for IRS reasons.

and so they also every year the interest rate depends on the market and when we sell bonds and how much we're selling so that our annual debt service can always change right now the assumption that this chart is using because interest rates have gone up considerably for a long time we were basically selling

bonds almost for free because it was at 1% which now we're projecting about a 4%, four to four and a half in the out years.

And then our general fund basically right now this projection just assumes a 3% growth which is conservative when you look at the debt capacity.

Obviously as the general fund grows our debt capacity also increases.

So this is a conservative view of that.

But one thing to note is that from 2016 to 2030, our budget will have essentially doubled in about 15 years.

And so that right there is one of the very big reasons why when we were looking at $50 million at one time and we thought we would exceed our capacity was because our general fund was much smaller at that point.

and so as we plan out basically we do sell bonds on an annual basis so that bond issue number is sort of a

A guess, if you will, we've been selling around 20, $25 million.

The $40 million in FY28 basically is a consideration of where we may be with the Pre-K Center, which is why that number is a little higher.

But following over to the consequences of all that on the right hand side,

is that if you were to take 27 for example, you'll see that our debt service payment in that column under the third column under the planning, our actual debt service payment is planned at $20.4 million.

However, we're only transferring $15.8 million from the general fund.

So we are basically drawing down on the debt service fund balance.

And then in addition, you'll note that in 26, that $1.4 million that's in the additional funds, that was basically the gain sharing, the city's share of gain sharing that was returned from the schools for their year ending 25.

So because a lot of this debt service is being driven by

School projects, we made the decision to put that money in the debt service fund.

And that was a lever we were able to pull to not have to budget for as much of a transfer in 27.

However, you'll note that quickly, if we don't have that sort of lever going forward, in 28,

it looks like that at a minimum in order to keep if you because kind of the plan is that debt service fund balances what can we contribute to keep that debt service fund balance either positive or at zero you're looking at two million dollar increases a year on your transfer to make sure that you're maintaining your

your debt service payment.

So by the time we get to 2031, our debt payment is about 26.4 million if everything worked out perfectly here.

And we're still transferring not quite that much.

but when you get to 32 our general fund transfer is pretty much taking on the full freight of the debt service and so this just contemplates what's currently in the CIP with a little bit extra on those back ends because obviously we don't have a CIP for 32 33 34 so it gives you about 60 million

in play here.

And again, this chart changes every year.

So does that mean we can't do

Are the projects until the debt service comes down?

So a couple of things is I think this is something that we actively manage every year as part of the budget process.

You know, we might not issue $25 million of bonds this year or even 20.

So it keeps moving the chart down.

I think we also take every time we sell bonds, we look for refunding opportunities to refinance that debt at a cheaper rate, which helps some of this.

I wouldn't want to say, are you limited to 60 million?

No, that's not really the answer here, but it does sort of put in perspective that it's not an unlimited supply to continue to balance out $200 million CIPs

plans for the longevity.

At some point, as Sam has been referring to, the runway is getting shorter and shorter.

And it also depends on your appetite in terms of what you're willing to dedicate in new revenue for bond payments, essentially.

But

the other thing is your cash correct just remembering that part of it that's your cash and that's your flexible money to do other things so to give you some perspective like before we added the tax increase to the 27 budget we were talking about you had 11 million dollars of new money if you were to follow this chart roughly 2 million of that right off the top would come out for for debt service barring everything here working out perfectly

but we continue to look for additional sources and different things to do here so we are actively managing it and we share this exact conversation and table with the bond rating agencies and they're comfortable that our process is sound and that it doesn't raise a lot of red flags by the fact that we are

looking at this and managing it.

But I guess some good news is that as you know that the state level, there are some conversation about the possibility of being able to use a 1% sales tax increase for school construction.

Right now, the sales tax that the city collects is roughly the equivalent of 1% of sales.

So sales tax rate is 5.3%.

The city gets about 1% of that back from the state, which is in this budget for 27, we were estimating is about $16 million.

If we were to use all of that for debt service, that would equate to about $178 million of debt that could be issued.

The one cent sales tax has to be used only for school construction projects.

There are terms and restrictions about how and what it can be used for, I think that are still being discussed.

And the other thing to note is that sales tax is dependent on the economy as we know.

So for the first several months of this year, we were seeing pretty concerning declines in our sales tax revenue.

So issuing debt is a fixed steady payment, whereas we are estimating what we think the sales tax will bring in every year.

So one of the things we are working with our financial advisor on is a potential policy to come and talk to you about what best practices may be that if we were to get the 16 million or to get the authority to issue the, or to increase the sales taxes,

What does that look like?

Does it look like all of it towards debt service?

Does it look like some of it for cash and some of it for debt service?

What are sort of the best practices?

What have other localities that already have permission to use that 1%?

What are they doing?

So we'll be having more conversations about that as time comes and also as the legislation firms up so we know what we can or cannot do with the funds.

So that will be another consideration for council to discuss going forward and will impact that ugly table that we just talked about as well for sure.

I just talked to a group of students at the comm school and just kind of

One of the things I think about with the chart is one,

essentially kind of taking out 2022 to 2025.

Not taking it out, but because nationwide assessments doubled on average, we kind of followed that trend.

That was because of the pandemic.

That's just not gonna happen again.

So kind of in my mind, I just take that out as like expecting going forward that that kind of increase can happen again.

For growth?

Yeah, for the level of general funding and budget growth.

But I take it away just watching what is, again, taking out the weirdness of the pandemic years.

Every year watching what is our general fund expenditure budget growth and is it beating projections or is it lower than our projections?

And we use 3% here to be the most conservative so that, you know, what would be, what is the worst case scenario in which you would reach your debt limit?

And obviously we're not there.

And to your point, our general fund growth has been more than 3%, but that only makes that percentage less.

Yeah, especially because it just obviously compounds over time.

But I know even when we take out the weirdness of the pandemic years, we have beat 3%.

Can I ask an unrelated question?

Obviously none of this embraces money that we expect to get from affordable housing payments in lieu.

I'll speak and then they can speak.

I think that is a policy issue or a policy decision.

We do know that money is coming.

We don't know exactly when or how much.

And I think

By not programming it here it gives council an opportunity to look at that sort of as a singular issue and gives you an opportunity to decide if you want to use that for something new and great in addition to what you've already contemplated or you know as opposed to putting it here and then kind of putting stuff in and then

what happens two years from now when someone's like, hey, I've got a great idea for this $11 million, but now you've already programmed it in the CIP.

I'll say, you probably know what I'm gonna say, but I'm reluctant to plan it as though we know it's gonna always happen.

So for that reason, I would be more inclined to say that we should adopt a policy that would speak to more of a percentage that we felt comfortable because our development activity had hit a certain stride.

Therefore it was producing a series of these chunks of money that we could predict, we could anticipate.

And therefore we could safely budget some of it

in a manner that it would work for this particular exercise.

My preference would be that we hold it to what we consider the surplus as capable of doing.

That when you receive it, and you can plan in advance of receiving it, but when you receive it, you can do something transformative with it, or you can do a certain number of things that haven't been able to be fitted, to fit into our five-year plan in the CIP specifically.

It just provides that flexibility to again not overshoot.

That's what my concern would be is that we would base something on

We will base our plan on something that we might not get in a certain year because we're relying in this case on developers bringing forward their projects and something could go wrong with them.

That's not the economy base.

It's just something with them.

And we've tied it to the idea that based on when we approved it through our planning process, we anticipated that two years of construction, we would have it.

But if they incurred some, you know, some moment,

We don't have any control over that or any ability to do anything but make the adjustments.

That's where I sit.

Well, I mean, let's assume for the moment that the only thing we factored in was

the money that we expect to receive on, you know, say by January one or sometime in the fiscal year for a project already underway.

This gets back to the question that we so far have not yet discussed, which is if we get, let's say $6 million in affordable housing payment in lieu kind of money,

Does that mean that we would go in this fiscal year to $17 million on affordable housing?

Or can we, for example, use part of that money to serve a replacement for other funds?

I gather that the money itself has to go to housing, but it doesn't mean we can't kind of reprogram things.

And one of the things that I've suggested before is that if we look at affordable housing and transit,

as effectively two sides of the same coin, which is the way housing advocates look at it, that we might find ourselves able to afford more in the way of transit.

if we, as opposed to saying we're going to allocate all of that money specifically to affordable housing and it'd be $17 million in one year, maybe three more years go by before it's another big chunk.

But that's the discussion we've never had.

That does speak to the policy that Chris is mentioning, like that conversation needs to happen so that we can clearly hear from you what it is that you desire and then we build around them.

Okay.

Yeah.

So that's all we really have on the CIP.

I mean, the last thing I had to show you was the CDBG applications.

So you probably know where I'm going, but I use that.

I mean, I do, you know, I feel like every year our CIP gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.

And a lot of the projects that, you know, there's no longer the million dollar projects, there are multimillion dollar projects.

so you have guardrails in place to keep us you know in place you know so that you know we have guardrails to ring the bell for you when it's time yeah yes definitely that money back slide it's one of the guardrails meant to be that's right the constant reminders you know that's what

Are there any questions on the CIP?

Sorry, two final questions.

The Affordable Housing CIP, the whatever, the 10th and Portland Project, did that

developers submit any requests for CIP funding?

Yeah, remember that was back when I did the budget brief for you all on housing.

We had the three projects, Brick Lane, Community, I can't remember what it was, $900,000.

Brick Lane is the conversion of the Holiday Inn.

and then Poa for the 10th and Wartland.

So all three of those were the three projects that came in through our RFI process where we request for information about a development project.

We went back to all three parties.

The $900,000 project was the one that you all tended to seem as though you would be willing to find.

We did not make it fit into this

CIP, we ran out of space because we have to balance the cash component.

I think I asked Krisy a couple of times, are we there yet?

Are we there yet?

And she said pretty close.

So it wasn't going to fit.

So we weren't able to make it fit within FY 27.

The conversation with Brick Lane

was one that they weren't really interested in making the potential adjustments to their unit mix, which then in our mind left that project out of scope for consideration.

It was bigger than the other one anyway.

And POA we had a couple of conversations with, and ultimately the conversation ended with more of a, you should go back to the university and have a conversation with them about they need to have a conversation with us.

because they were more or less in a position that they were carrying the university's burden for the conversation that needed to be had with this organization.

So it ended there.

And that conversation with UVA has not happened yet?

No one has reached out.

So I assume he delivered the message.

So, any other questions on this?

Before we move on, the 1%, Sam, when you were talking about that, are we working with the schools or once, and Lloyd had mentioned this, we just need to be prepared to get

the message out, you know.

Yes.

Oh, I thought you were talking about what to use the money for.

Sorry.

I'm like, man, you're really expanding.

You're meaning on how to, that is part of his job.

not what we do to get the message out to the public to support this is that yeah we know we have not done work on that yet of course we're waiting to see what comes out of it because we need the the details on the bill being passed as to what the message gets to be I think what what I feel like I was hearing is

Yes, we need to make sure that we have a clear presentation of what will come of those funds if we were to allow this tax to be passed.

So that is time back to Mike's prior work and ongoing work of identifying what we anticipate a series of projects to look like over a period of time.

That would be what would amount to a facilities program.

It's what I've been talking about since I got here, that we should have

A facilities program identified for school buildings across the system identifying what we deem the needs to be, what the project scope could look like, what the potential budget may be, and a schedule.

And now if we were to have a sales tax pass, we will have a projected dollar amount that we can rely on every year, which is why I asked Krisy to identify what is the debt service capacity that we would be able to rely on for how far we go.

That number exceeds what we preliminarily identified, but when he finishes his work, that number ain't going to cut it.

It won't cover all the projects that we know are in that list.

And it definitely does not touch a high school in a forming of a new one.

So I can assure everyone that this won't do that.

But what I would anticipate being able to clearly do

is identify what would be the makings of a facilities program that the public could appreciate receiving something to look at and have some indication of what would happen amongst the middle schools.

We know that the, I mean elementary schools, we know that the middle school wouldn't need anything probably in that window of time.

It would be the elementary schools and the high school that would be identified as what that scope of projects could be over what period of time and

Is there a replacement of one of the elementary schools or a new one would be a part of that factor too?

But I appreciate the fact that you will want to have that.

But that work group does include school staff as well.

We have the school facilities working group.

Yeah.

Right.

That's true.

They will be the ones to finalize what that looks like.

At least Michael and I started talking about this issue before we really knew that this had a shot of going forward, because there's just real need in the fact that we have 50 year old schools that are in great shape thanks to our team, but they are not meeting the needs of a modern school building in many cases.

So the idea was let's think about what the need is and try and think about what a realistic timeframe is for getting that done.

It would have been the conversation, we would be still having this conversation about schools construction, whether the 1% sales tax was on the table or not.

Because in all of the conversations we're finding that we're getting things done on an annual basis, but the things cost more.

So we're running out of the smaller things to do, and therefore the money isn't going to go far enough.

Hence why my question was about a facilities program in the first place.

So we were going to need to be dealing with that no matter what.

This is a great relief that we will have a source provided that public agrees to make it available for that particular use.

But we should be able to address a lot of need.

And in the initial work, we anticipated capacity.

So unless something dramatically changes, I think we have a good course ahead.

for what to do.

Just real quickly.

This is, again, no, this is still in committee, so no decisions have been made or recommendations.

This is just a snapshot of what has been applied for.

I believe there are 11 applicants.

You can see the programs here.

We have two pots of money.

One is the CDBG pot and one is the home pot of money.

The total requests for CDBG was 597,000, 185,000 for home.

There's an admin portion that comes out of the CDBG pot of money.

We don't know what HUD is.

The exact awards are from HUD at this point, but we've anticipated.

what those are.

And so, like with BCF and other processes, there's always more asked than we have funding.

Right now is this looks about $241 million short from being able to fully fund.

all of, oh sorry, 241,000.

I'm in CIP world.

And then $99,000 short from being able to fully fund the home request.

But this gives you some idea of who's applied and what they're applying for.

And I believe that goes to the Planning Commission.

within the next week or so.

And that's it.

That's all we have.

Kyna, anyone signed up to speak?

I know some people came in.

Anyone like to speak in the back?

Okay.

I didn't see any other questions or comments at this time.

We need to decide on next week or?

Do we want to talk about

I don't know if we're all ready to talk about VCF, but do we want to talk about the one cent increase option and what we were presented last week, or there's been some chatter about for future self, what we can get up for yourself later.

No, no.

I think we had all said we wanted to do everything we possibly could to make sure that a tax increase was necessary.

So one of the options they gave us last week was the

take from the Strategic Initiatives Fund, take from the other fund, right?

And then we, cause we had to make up 1.4 million.

One, I wondered if we could get like a longer runway to see if the state would make its decision by the 23rd.

And that might not, that's not really, that deadline is not really possible in this short period of time, but maybe something we want to look at for future self.

Yeah, Kris is pulling it up as well so you can just be reminded.

It was the revising of the revenue is the bulk of it.

So that's why it's not two cents on the real estate tax anymore, it's now one.

It's like 341,000.

Yes.

Yeah.

So that's really, so we're looking for whether it's tonight or next Thursday, we're looking for you to finalize what scenario we are actually going with for offsetting, for addressing the fact that you're stepping back from a 2 cent increase on the real estate tax to a 1 cent increase on the real estate tax.

So it's only, again, you're only short the 200

Just second and agree with what Jen had raised.

To me, one of the questions is because of our city code, which we have the power to change, there's a provision from 1974 and that we have to adopt our budget by April 15th.

Many other localities in Virginia adopted May, June have the flexibility to not do that.

We won't know that state's budget until at least April 23rd.

So we're adopting it before their special session even begins.

Our school's budget right now that we're basing this off is based off the budget introduced by Glenn Youngkin and Roanoke's a good counter example.

where they're gonna adopt their budget in either May or June.

They based their school's budget on, they modeled the House of Delegates budget and the State Senate budget.

The State Senate budget increases their funding by almost $7 million.

Their school's budget is about twice ours, all of which is to say the General Assembly could very well impact between one to $3 million in our budget,

would determine whether we raise the real estate tax rate or not.

So since we're already this deep into this year's budget cycle and this is something that comes up during the budget cycle every year and not that far in advance, is this something that you're asking the rest of us if there is a desire to ask our staff to look into it for next year?

Yes, as it's, you know,

Well, as a practical matter, tax tickets have to go out to people by May 1st or so.

So I don't know that we have the ability to hold off making a decision until after April 23rd.

So, I mean, we've looked at it from staff perspective in terms of could we do it?

The answer is yes, it buys you about two weeks though.

The reason for that is, and I would defer to John whether it's even possible for this year or not, but part of what has to happen is, as Counselor Snook referred to, is we have to change the due date on the tax bills, first of all, from I think, you know, like June 5th is the current date.

It would probably have to be moved to like June 20th-ish.

And then we have to back that up and allow time for one, your approval, and then two, for that information to actually get to the printer and get, I think there's a 30 day requirement on the bill for the taxpayer, which is why we'd have to move the due date.

So I think all in all, by the time we finish it, it buys you about two weeks time.

So that is, if we were to do that this year, it could buy about two weeks.

Yeah, but I think the question is, our charter says April 15th.

I don't think it's a charter.

It is an ordinance piece.

I will double check that.

Right now I'm looking at our code section that says that the council shall approve the annual budget and shall make such city levy prior to April 15th of each year.

It was 1976, you're close, when that went into effect.

That can be,

Y'all know me, I love nothing more than amending an ordinance.

So that's completely possible.

But as you said, there are practical implications that go along with this.

There would be a revenue collection impact whenever we make the change.

The first year of the change, as basically identified, is that it's going to cross over the 45-day accrual period.

So we would close down to what?

So the first, if bills are due on June 5th, you have from an accounting standpoint, 45 to anything that's collected from 45 days after June 30th can be accrued back to the fiscal year.

So that would be August 15th-ish.

And if we move

The tax due date, you lose two weeks off of that.

So the 45 days would short you time, but you can change the accrual.

It's an accounting change, but it can be done.

And finance confirmed that they didn't see a problem with that.

So it doesn't affect the, like right now, if things are due June 5th and we have

three-ish weeks before the new fiscal year.

Well, that's part of the thing of that.

Even if we, there does need to be some, I think we have to provide 30 days notice for how much is due.

So we have to get the bills out 30 days before the due date.

So back 30 days up, let's say we make it June 20th, got to back that up 30 days.

And then we've got to allow time to actually give that information to the printer for them to be processed and then mailed.

From a staff perspective, I don't think we're comfortable that we could actually get

I think we're not comfortable that all the pieces and parts that need to happen, that there's much more time beyond that because there's a lot of pieces that have to fall into place.

I mean, I guess you could make the bill due June 30th, but we can't say

Here's the budget and then have it ready to go July 1.

So there's a lot of administrative stuff that happens, but it's mostly about processing the bills and getting them mailed and then giving people time to pay them.

That's helpful.

But again, often two, three weeks is

difference between knowing the state budget.

Any other questions?

Whatever you can tell me is what I'm saying.

Ultimately, what I'm really just advising you is that you have one work session left next Thursday.

In that session, we would need to hear from you

the scenario resolution here.

We know that you've taken schools off the list.

We know that you've taken CAT off the list.

At least that's what I read from the last conversation.

So are we going to tap into the city wide reserve into what degree?

Are we gonna tap into council strategic initiatives fund to what degree to make up the difference that is needed to offset one penny?

of the real estate tax to go with your revenue adjustment which is the updated number that Ms. Hammill gave you last week.

What is the best, since that's

That's a list of things that would be weird to communicate by reading it aloud.

Do you want it in advance to review?

We need line item because that's a part of the budget.

So the line item usage is what we're looking for.

So what we've done in the past with that is you know because of FOIA things you can't deliberate behind the scenes so your list does need to be discussed openly and publicly but one thing we have done in the past is we have had counselors send their list directly to the city manager or to the budget team and then

We come prepared with a spreadsheet where we actually do the math live and in person, you know, these were the suggestions and then you all can say yes, no, whatever, and make the sausage that way.

So you can do that between now and next Wednesday.

Yeah.

We'll move your deadline to Monday.

Yeah.

And what is the process for, we call it the strategic initiatives fund.

Could we change it, the title to council reserve fund?

Yeah, it's been called.

I mean, Kyna and I were just talking about that today.

Somewhere else it's called Council Strategic Investment Fund.

And then I guess the final question is, and was there anything else about the budget that you

I'm looking at you.

Is there anything else that you were curious about, wanted to talk about?

Was there some consideration that you might be thinking you wanted to bring up to other council members because that would be your last shot.

I had a request for next year's budget.

Love it.

So I'll wait for that.

I think we can.

I think everyone's been working on BCF, and I think we can probably get you the spreadsheets with

OK, and that's good.

And then that will also answer the lump sum contribution to that.

I think one of the add-ons to that is

Again, we won't have numbers for you until Monday spreadsheet, but a consideration to set aside some of the strategic initiatives fund, again, not a yes or no yet, but has been thrown around for standing up an arts council to handle arts and culture organizations outside of the,

Mr.

That's an example of what I'm looking for.

I think something we've had in conversations kind of less formally, but we recognize that there is a need for additional bandwidth in the housing department.

Keep it in mind if we can't fit it in this year, what can we do to make sure that we have staffing for next year?

By saying that again, you do.

And we are looking at different ways to just kind of mitigate the impact of not having individuals in that seat.

But it's a priority.

We will discuss, give you our final decision on the breakdown of the making up the difference in that one sense.

Just a few more things.

Whether we do or do not adopt our budget before we know what the state's budget is, we do know what the House and Senate proposals are.

Is there an interest from other counselors to direct staff to model what our budget would look like under the House and State Senate budget, as opposed to the Youngkin budget, which is

I'd like to see that modeling.

At least we can solve them out.

Yeah.

I would definitely agree with the point about housing staff.

I can send an email with just the PowerPoint presentation that the Housing Advisory Committee received and that is available online in their agenda.

But I think it would be a fair summary that their presentation was that our current housing staffing levels are unsustainable and

very out of line with how many programs we do so we just second that and I think it was like five positions total two of the things that we can reach a decision point on at our last work session very small amount of budget things but if other counselors are interested in funding the participatory budgeting pilot program that's like a ten to thirty thousand dollars total allocation and then second

Next year is going to be the 10th anniversary of the summer of 2017.

Whether we just want them from, I don't know where in the budget it comes from, again, some amount of money to be preparing for memorializing that anniversary and having the community involved in a process figuring out what does a permanent memorialization of 4th Street look like?

That doesn't need to be a huge amount of money, but just something to look out for it.

Again, not asking for a decision tonight or anything like that, but

So, Michael, you explained to us what the participatory is, what that would look like.

Jen can also give a lot of- Oh, is that- I think it's super cool, but I probably can't give you the down home logistics about it, but it's a facilitated process of, I've seen it done in neighborhood by neighborhood of engaging

the public in determining what they truly want to spend the budget, parts of the budget on and how that's reflected in their desires.

And Michael, it might be too oversimplifying, so jump in.

So it's like the monopoly knights on steroids.

It's like a lot of conversation.

It's a lot of engagement, hence the fee that comes with it to kind of facilitate those conversations.

But it tends to,

But I mean, how do you, how does this, you know, cause I've done countless like transportation meetings when I was doing that type of thing.

Even when I was in school where you get the same people, how do you get the

You have to be in the room or is it you get gathered people that we know really don't come to meetings because we could get skewed if a group or whatever sends, you know, get everyone to come to the meeting.

So I would say Richmond has done a lot with it and Charlottesville almost did a pilot and then August 2017 happened and all the staff

left within a period before it was implemented.

But their strategy was gonna be you pick a neighborhood, you have 10 to $30,000 total that could be allocated, and they would go door to door, knocking doors in the neighborhood, explicitly to try to get people who don't normally show up.

And part of that process would be just engaging with what the city budget looks like for people who haven't historically don't engage.

And they did a small pilot,

Just a lot of good conversations came from it, and I think a lot of people who were never involved in local government were thinking about, oh, the city can't plant flowers here because of right-of-way.

Yeah, so I, you know, I definitely, before we say to move forward with that, I just want to have a little bit more conversations about what it will look like, you know, but... You know, we have a local community member who's like an expert in participatory budgeting facilitation, so she's, I can ask her what some of that will be.

Yeah, my concern, I just know this community and that if we don't get the people that's not, that won't come to meetings

We just won't get the full picture.

I know we can get the input from the people that come because they're going to come and we'll extract some great information, but it's the people that don't come that I think have some valuable input in as well.

Can I just take it from the top for what our homework is for Monday?

So we're going to do

what part of the one cent we wanna take from city reserves and or strategic initiative.

We're gonna have our input on CYF sorted your direction, the spreadsheet for everyone's spreadsheet for what they see.

Yeah, PCF.

And then,

Do you have anything else?

Thank you.

If there's no other information, is there a motion to adjourn?

I mean, I think, do I need to come up here?

Yes.

Okay, fine.

So there's no mic here, so I'll project.

My comments are pretty consistent with what they've always been, from the schools.

I sat in the classroom today at Summit doing a special reading group that's been convening twice a week the past year with Miss Howard, our Youth Opportunities Coordinator and some community volunteers.

I mean there's a lot of improvement that's happening and important work that's happening with tying communities to our schools but funding is needed and I have watched your conversations about collective bargaining and I have to say that I think there's still a lack of clarity and I think that if there are questions for the school board I would encourage you to ask those questions but ultimately like

Our support staff needs that increase.

So collective bargaining is something that we must prioritize.

And everything that we gave you was a needs-based budget.

It's not like a dream budget.

It's a needs-based budget.

Sorry, I should have started with I'm speaking as a community member and as an individual, but as someone who is interested in seeing money poured into the schools.

And so the budget that was presented from the schools was a need-based budget.

And I need us to remember that

There are a lot of needs.

There are a lot of unique needs with the diverse student population that we have in Charlottesville.

And truthfully, the schools could use way more money than the budget that was presented.

But I do think that any reductions of that is, it's not doing it justice.

And I'm speaking to you as, again, a community member who went through our schools.

it's still in our community and it's still working with students and doing that like mentoring work and volunteering work and I know that there's a real need there and so this is kind of my final appeal to you I'll probably be back next week but to please fund the schools and to give the full amount that was requested it's really really needed and we're talking about you know

Bigger city ideas and things that we need to memorialize and all of these things.

And I think they're all important.

And I want to add that the best way that we invest in our community is through our schools and of course through affordable housing.

So I think it's important to make space for all of those things, but to remember the education is shaping our future leaders.

So thank you all for your work.

Thank you.

Any other comments?

If not, can I get a motion to adjourn?

All in favor please say yes.

Yes.

All opposed please say no.