City Council Meeting   2/1/2016

Thank you.

I don't know what you're thinking.

I'm

I don't know what to say.

Music playing

Good evening, everyone.

I'm going to call this meeting to order.

And we're going to do a Pledge of Allegiance first, led by a guest from Flovanna County, Mr. Ravel Brown, if you would mind coming down and leading us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you.

Mr. Fenwick?

Here.

Mr. Bellamy?

Here.

Ms. Szakos?

Here.

Ms. Galvin?

Sure.

So the city of Charlottesville has a proclamation for African American History Month and it reads as such, whereas February has been set aside nationally

as a time to remember

When we examine our nation's history, we discover countless stories that inspire us, stories of the triumph of the human spirit, tragic stories of cruelty rooted in ignorance and bigotry, yet stories of everyday people rising above their circumstances and the prejudice of those to attain great accomplishments.

And whereas, as we celebrate African American History Month,

We teach our children and all Americans to rise above brutality and bigotry and to be champions of human dignity and equality.

And, whereas we rededicate ourselves to affirming the promise of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal,

that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Now, therefore, we the City of Charlottesville, the City Council of the City of Charlottesville, Virginia, do hereby celebrate February 2016 as African American History Month in recognition of the struggles and contributions

of African Americans and to make all citizens aware of the significance of the achievements of African Americans in our community and throughout the country.

And we hereby urge all citizens to mark this month by supporting and encouraging the efforts of all interested groups

and organizations signed and sealed this first day of February by our mayor, Mr. Michael Signer.

And I'd like to present this proclamation to Mr. Eddie Harris and Mr. Herb Dickerson.

So if you gentlemen could come up, if we could give them a round of applause, please.

Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor.

I have a couple of announcements about the agenda.

Item 3 about 206 West Market Street has been deferred at the applicant's request, and so has item 4 about the Violet Crown movie theater, which may surprise some of you.

However, is David Pettit present?

Okay, so we're going to have you speak in the public comments.

Not now, but at the end of the public comments about the reasons for that at your request.

So we're going to do that after council response.

And we are now going to do an after, oh yeah, let's do announcements first, right?

We'll do the snow removal after action after announcements.

So we have announcements from my colleagues here.

This is the father-daughter dance.

On Friday, February 5th and Saturday, February 6th, Charlottesville Parks and Rec will host the annual father-daughter dance.

Dads, uncles and grandpas too.

Take your little Valentine out for a fun night of dancing.

This is for daughters ages 5 to 12.

Register early, this event always fills quickly.

Tickets are $10 a pair and can be purchased online at charlottesville.org.org forward slash parks and rec or by calling 970-3260.

Just a quick announcement.

City Hall will be closed for President's Day.

So, Charlottesville City Hall will be closed on Monday, February 15th for President's Day.

The Charlottesville Area Transit, otherwise known as CAT, will operate on a normal schedule.

City trash and recycling will be collected as usual.

And the Charlottesville City Council will hold their regular meeting on Tuesday, February 16th at 7 p.m. in the City Council Chambers.

Thank you.

This is the CAT route changes to take effect Saturday, well, yesterday, this past Saturday.

This is the Charlottesville Area Transit.

Charlottesville Area Transit implemented a new service schedule on Saturday.

As part of the update, several routes experienced minor rerouting alignments, time point shifts, and or the relocation of select bus stops.

The changes are intended to increase passenger safety and improve system performance.

Citizens wishing to obtain the new rider's guide may pick up a free copy of any CAT bus from the downtown transit center or by downloading the digital version from CAT's website at www.catchthecat.org.

And we probably have some in the city manager's office, too.

Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor.

And this is a nice segue, I think, to the

the after action briefing that we're going to get about the snowstorm, but the snowstorm that swept the city this weekend did not stamp out the activity of the vortex.

The vortex was an architecture school effort to look at some design issues along Preston Avenue.

But the architecture students, after waiting out the extensive snowfall on Sunday afternoon of that storm, the students and professors took their shovels in hand into the neighborhoods adjacent to this year's competition site.

which was the Preston corridor.

Groups of shovelers liberated driveways, sidewalks, and vehicles around the intersections of Paoli and 9th and again on Page and 10 and a half streets.

Despite the shutting down at the university facilities, students were still challenged to produce projects by Saturday evening, but a finale was still in order.

In the past half decade, the Vortex Finale has occurred on the Sunday, concluding the week's activities, including an exhibition and presentation of each of the team's proposals.

This event invites community members to view, celebrate, and critique the proposed solutions.

This year's inclement weather eliminated most citywide gatherings, including this time-held tradition,

But the will to reach out to the city was not lost.

Students organized a day of community service carrying out the true spirit of goodwill that lies at the heart of this architecture school project.

And again, I just want to say thank you to the students of the architecture school for really pulling together.

and showing real civic spirit.

And I think that may very well be what is most remembered about the Vortex 2016.

Okay, and one more, City Market Arts.

Artists from the popular City Market, along with other local artisans, will be displaying and selling their creations of the 2016 City Market Arts on February 13th from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Carver Recreation Center.

The art show features over 30 vendors with a variety of jewelry, paintings, pottery, and more, all made locally.

Select agricultural products will also be available from City Market vendors, the Rock

Barn and Sweet Jane's Kitchen will be serving up some delicious brats and crab cakes as well.

The event is free and open to the public.

Customers may purchase items directly from vendors at the show.

Carver Rec is located at the Jefferson School City Center, which is at 233 4th Street, Northwest.

For more information, please contact Stephanie Anderag-Mulloy at 434-970-3371, sorry, or citymarket at charlesville.org.

Buy local this Valentine's Day also.

We are going to do the after action report that I've requested on snow removal now and the matters by the public will be after that, but that is meant in part so that you all can respond in your comments to what you've heard.

Mr. Lance Stewart of the Department of Public Works is going to come make a presentation to us now.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council.

It's a pleasure to be here today.

Thank you.

So I had to look up after action report, make sure I understood the format correctly.

And so generally speaking, you outlined what was expected to happen.

what actually happened, what went well and why, and also what can be improved and how.

So I'll try to do that as briefly as possible so I don't take too much of your time.

So what was expected to happen was 18 inches to 3 foot of snow and high winds with potential citywide power outages.

Upon consultation with the police department and fire department and others in public works, we felt that it was best that rather than take the classic strategy of working exclusively the major streets in town, waiting until the snowfall had ended, and then...

Instead of waiting until the snowfall had ended to move into our residential neighborhoods, our aim was to work continuously the storm on major streets and in residential streets so that police and fire first responders and cars could get into homes.

And also we had concerns that our plows wouldn't be able to plow three feet of snow.

And with the threat of power outages and trees down, that was certainly a major concern.

So that was not only limited to our treatment of streets but also the Parks Department as well worked the entire storm.

They've got nearly seven miles of sidewalks that they're responsible for as well as the downtown mall and side streets and many parking lots that they control.

So we had some other goals as well.

Our CAT wanted to run as full service as they could and they did a very good job this year.

in advance of the winter of laying out a series of maps of service disruptions, what they would do in given events, and I think that was very smooth.

We also expected that we would need to haul snow from West Main, Water Street, Market Street, High Street, so we enacted for the first time in a number of years the snow emergency routes.

After extensive meetings with the bicycle and pedestrian committee and folks in NDS as well, we also wanted to bring a broader focus to bike and pedestrian safety, so that included crosswalks, essentially ADA ramps and priority areas.

We had mapped some notions of what we wanted to try to do and accomplish on that and also try to keep bike lanes open, which was difficult in this much snow.

and then of course part of our goal is always to try to get schools open as soon as possible so we had done some pre-planning with our pupil transportation department in the school system to try to make sure we understood where their trouble spots were and how to work those and communicate openly which we do a good job of every year I think.

So what actually occurred was less snow than we had expected, a little bit wetter than had been expected.

We didn't get the power outages, we didn't get the wind,

What we did get was the colder temperatures and some mixed precipitation with some sleet and rain mixed in overnight Friday and through Saturday, created a hard pack of snow underneath the 16 inches of snow, which was really stubborn, two to four inches of snow and ice.

And much of our equipment isn't set up to deal with that kind of element.

We have rubber tips on our plow blades.

and that's intended so we don't damage structures in the street, manholes and such and also our equipment while we're trying to treat a storm.

So generally with the steel tip blade, you can really get a good clean surface and you'll see that in a lot of highways and larger roads where that's not a concern.

In terms of our attack, we maintain that

approach where we stayed on arterials and primaries until they were in good shape, or in decent shape, passable shape, and then tried to slip into neighborhoods as much as possible to try to keep those clear.

We did have some challenges that were unforeseen in addition to the snowpack, which was very difficult to get up.

Some conditions like the cold temperatures and the mix of sleet, we had a lot of ice building up on the windshields of our plow trucks.

We had windshield wipers fraying and needing to be replaced.

Of our 26 plow trucks, 22 had to come into the shop at least once to have those replaced.

So that's probably 45 minutes each time to identify the problem, come in, get it fixed, and get out on the road.

We also had plow trucks stuck because of the slick conditions, particularly on

Steep roads or dead-end roads where backing and turning is very difficult.

So there were 18 separate occasions when we had to get our own trucks unstuck, as it were, over the course of Saturday and Sunday.

And we had, as the days wore on, our tire chains took a beating.

So there were 30 different occasions in which we had to bring trucks into the shop to replace or repair chains.

We just weren't getting traction.

and then we had four of our 26 plow trucks that went down for the count and weren't available as cleanup and storm treatment continued.

Most of those, three of the four were relatively new, one pretty old and lined up for replacement in the near future.

So once the snow had stopped and we shifted into sort of a two-phase approach to clearing

the city.

So again, we had that hard pack that we were dealing with.

Once we got the top layer of snow off of everywhere, we found we were two to four inches of this very intractable material.

So we cleared as much of that off as we could, and then we, based on the equipment that was on the truck, either salt brine or straight salt treated the streets

Took a lunch break, came back and tried to hit it again.

And we found generally that the salt worked much better on those.

So there are some streets around town such as Water Street and Cherry that were basically, that were treated with brine, had very little effect on what we were able to do on those roads.

So we needed to come in with heavier equipment to take care of those so that

explains to a certain extent some of those roads that you're just scratching your head.

It doesn't look like we've plowed when we've been over it six times.

We also shifted some utilities division personnel.

Our Public Works Utilities Division contributes plow drivers, but also has a crew that works city parking lots.

Their first priority is to keep the fire department

Lots open so that they can respond and police venues.

So those folks contributed by taking their heavier equipment and assisting with clearing crosswalks throughout the town.

And that where to do that became very apparent.

We had a map that we worked up and run by the

of the Bicycle and Pedestrian Committee.

And it was very clear.

Students were walking in the streets, particularly around UVA 14th Street, Rugby, University, JPA, by the hundreds.

And Saturday was a rush day.

And I believe Sunday may have been too.

So at points, there were thousands of students.

And they were walking in the streets.

And they didn't have an option.

So those were our first priorities around the university.

And then over the coming days, moved out

Emma Street, Avon Street, Southwater Street and a number of corridors and expanded that section.

So that was something we didn't stop doing.

We certainly didn't cover the entire every intersection in town, not by any stretch, but we we focused on areas that had high pedestrian traffic and busy roads where it was really dangerous for people to walk in roads.

CAT personnel, also mostly their mechanics based on input from the drivers as they were running their routes.

went out and cleared bus stops in those same similar locations where people had to climb over piles of snow to get to the bus.

And then we did haul snow.

on the snow emergency routes, Market Street and then Water Street in West Main.

We have yet to haul from High Street, which is the last route because of the building roof collapse on Market Street.

That High Street is getting much more traffic than it normally would by a factor of three or four, and it just seemed like a bad idea at the time to pinch it down to one lane.

And as the second phase, as the days went on, we continued to clear crosswalks, bus stops, any number of citizen identified problems where we had piled snow in front of somebody's house on a curve, certainly, and places that we'd missed and other issues.

So we also attempted to widen arterials and clear turn lanes.

That was something that, because of our mixed focus and problems we'd had with the hard pack

That was something we would like to have done a better job on the first day or two, but we feel that we took a balanced approach.

Let's see.

And we also, as we got a little further into week, really into Tuesday morning, that we had a pre-existing, existing mapped list of roads or intersections that we know are problems for school buses.

So we worked those to make sure that they were clear.

And at the same time, as soon as we were done, the pupil transportation group

went out in the field and identified new problems ones that we weren't aware of where because of the steepness of the hill or condition of the roads or narrowness of the turn angle that they would have a hard time so we lost I wouldn't say we lost a day that was a concerted effort that both groups put into we were pretty confident we'd done what we could at that point

So what went well and why?

I'd say we were very successful in that police and fire and cars were able to run calls throughout the entire storm.

There were a couple of occasions where we needed to go help them get unstuck while we were unsticking ourselves, but generally that went well.

The great majority of our streets were cleared to blacktop within the first 48 hours after the end of the storm.

We're certainly extremely proud of our personnel and public works.

And the Parks Department, I know, feels the same.

They have a very difficult job.

It's mostly handwork.

But people stay in hotels for several evenings.

They work 24-7 for seven straight days.

And we're very tired, but really did everything they could to make sure that we returned the city streets to safe condition as soon as possible.

And generally I would say that all the groups in the city that have any role in keeping the city safe during a snow event worked together extremely well.

The communication was very good.

So what can be improved and how?

I mentioned earlier we found ourselves in a situation with the snowpack where we needed to try to soften the snowpack and we use salt, we use brine.

We would have liked to have used all salt had we had the equipment to do that.

So that's something I'd like to look at over the coming months is what it would take to be able to have a salt spreader for each piece of equipment we have so we can do that in a timely fashion.

It takes about eight hours to either salt the city or brine the city.

And then I think there's certainly room for an expanded formal plan for how we deal with an emergency on this scale.

comprehensive snow manual now and it's very good in almost every snow we get but it seems that more frequently these days we have more events that are on the scale of 18 inches and up and that we need to have better plans that are that include more contingencies and take into account more refined plans for crosswalk clearing for instance and bike lane clearing

where we really have input from the public and some make use of bicycle and pedestrian studies that show where people walk and people drive.

That's information that exists and that should be included in our plans in public works.

We have some issues that we need to work on as well about this stuck wiper blades.

That was really a very frustrating one and there are ways around that and we will be making changes and also chains and how we can do a better job of

not getting stuck or at least unsticking ourselves so we don't need to send a backhoe that we're in demand to be able to do that.

I think certainly I'm not one who I think the city needs to make a big push to buy a lot of new equipment.

We do have some aging equipment and our current request for operating budget I think gets us in line with where I think we should be.

But I think on occasions like this there are opportunities to outsource some services that we hadn't done previously.

I think our main arterial roads, the bypass and also Fifth Street

McEntire Road, Ridge are all good streets that take a lot of our resources to keep clear that could be outsourced to allow us to have more equipment to go into the side roads.

Perhaps a lot plowing as well.

That is a time consuming thing for our utilities department and for our parks department as well.

It's something that certainly plenty of contractors who do that on a smaller scale that's outsourceable and maybe more prudent than major equipment purchases.

and again we were this was sort of a backhoe kind of storm you know middle of the night work with hauling snow and moving snow with heavy equipment we do have the people who are skilled to do that work we have a limited number of pieces of heavy equipment we have 10 essentially that are good for that and that is equipment that can be leased in advance if you if you have enough warning and we did have enough warning I think in the storm to be able to do that

So, I guess I'll wrap up on that note.

Thank you.

That was terrific.

One of the comments that you made from your report was, well, first of all, let me commend you.

I think you all did the best job you can.

I'd definitely like to say I commend all the brothers and sisters working at the works department to do the best job that you can.

One of the things that I heard though was somewhat troubling when I heard you say that because, or state rather in your report that because it was rush weekend at UVA and meaning that there were students who were walking there that they took priority over our constituents.

here in the city who have been longtime taxpayers who have essentially also wanted to get to and fro wherever it is that they wanted to go.

They were stuck in a house.

I've heard several, several complaints and a few people saying that they were pleased with what happened, but several complaints about the snow either being packed or pushed on different sidewalks or so on and so forth.

But then for them to hear that the priority was placed on the students because it was rush day,

does not sit well with me, and I'm sure that they wouldn't want to hear that also.

So moving forward, I would just like for us to try and look to prioritize for our initial constituents and our citizens who are within the city, and I love UVA.

I have a lot of respect for the students and the professors and everyone who was there, but because it was rush day, and it was during a time in which we had given strict instructions for everyone to please stay inside,

but because they chose not to do so and they want to go rush, they took precedent over our constituents who are many of them here.

I'd like to remind everyone just to be careful to try and phrase our

questions, questions.

If we can improve on that, we'll go forward.

You know, I mean, I think it was, I think, an obvious choice at the time.

To me, personally, we had literally hundreds of citizens, be they UVA students or others, walking in the street while most people were home.

And it was a clear and present danger.

And the time commitment to clear those crosswalks, typically in advance of the sidewalks, was

was not a major draw away from other locations.

And if you imagine the Jefferson Park Avenue coming from Maury Avenue up to town and how many students walked down that on a given day and how many were walking or stepping into the street without looking very carefully, I think it was the obvious choice to make.

But I certainly understand your sentiment.

Thanks.

I don't know how to put it in a question, except to put a question mark after the end of it.

But it's short.

So I will say that we've gotten lots of emails.

And I've also, just walking around the city, gotten a lot of comments from folks.

And there are people who are really frustrated about one thing or another, and often really validly.

So their driveway got hemmed in, or they shoveled their sidewalk, and then it got covered, or a couple of streets got missed.

But I will say that the responsiveness of your department, when people did

make those complaints and I actually mentioned one street that had been missed, immediately got to it.

Every single person, even those complaining who talked about the actual drivers, said how courteous they were and how friendly they were and how helpful they were.

and the number of compliments that we got outweighed the number of complaints which is actually quite a feat because people get frustrated and they do complain and it's a pain when you can't get out of your house.

It wasn't your fault but I think that I really appreciate some of the ideas about ways to make it better because we can always do that.

We are in a part of the country that has only intermittent snows or this kind of snow and it may well be getting more common but I don't know that I would

Yes, Miss Galvin.

Again, thank you.

So having said that, I do want to be seriously commending you.

I think you did a very good job in a very tough situation.

And we've got a number of things that have changed over the years, not at the least of which is our weather patterns, but also our mobility patterns have changed.

We recently learned in a Streets That Work report that

The city of Charlottesville has got a commute pattern of walking to work that's four times the national average.

And we have a bike to work pattern that's two and a half times more the national average.

So we are turning into a city that does a lot more walking and biking.

So there's been a lot of concern

and the emails we've gotten about sidewalk clearing.

And our policy has been to issue citations within, I guess it's 48 hours, 24 hours of the storm.

I don't know what the solution is because it can pose hardship, but

I think it's the logical direction to take.

We have the information we need as we consider

Crosswalks in the street, which is a public works function, certainly neighborhood development services who enforces and makes policy and practice about what, whom they target first as they try to cover this entire city.

Okay, that's for us.

I think the next step is for us to have an opportunity to actually debrief.

We haven't even had a chance to do that just yet as a staff aside from Lance taking the time to put together this after-action report.

It would certainly be part of that discussion.

Are there other ways that we can tackle this?

I know Mayor Signer has some ideas about that.

I think he wants to talk to council about as well.

Which would of course include additional personnel.

Right now we have two inspectors, maybe three at any one time, that can go out and identify unshoveled sidewalks for instance.

We've also pulled community service officers from the police department to do the same type of thing for us.

So when we start off with, right in the aftermath of a storm, with this storm for instance,

The start of that 24 hour period began on a Sunday morning.

So you had until Monday morning to clear your sidewalks before we'd get a citation.

And that citation in essence reads that you have another 24 hours to clear your sidewalk.

If at that point your sidewalk is not cleared, we will call in a contractor who will come and remove the snow and then we will charge you for that.

And we tend to start in our business corridors.

and then also looking at routes to school as well.

And then at the same time, we're responding to calls from citizens about particular areas, so you have to prioritize that as well.

I also want to thank you all for your hard work.

I was out, as you know, with one of your plow drivers on a ride-along on Saturday during the storm for about two hours in the Belmont neighborhood and one of the chains broke in the truck that I was on and I saw the condition of the trucks but also how hardworking you all were.

I do have a specific question about

And we have received dozens of comments, some praising, some critical from citizens.

I want to assure everybody that that's going to go, that those have been shared with all the relevant personnel, Mr. Stewart, Mr. Jones.

And I believe after this we're going to have a motion that will pass about directing the government to provide a report to us of options for the future after the debrief has occurred, which Mr. Jones and I have discussed.

It's a difficult question.

You know, I, of course, spoke

Many times with Ed Gillespie, the assistant superintendent of the school system throughout the course of the storm and with his predecessor in past years and with Dr. Atkins as well.

and it was partially about the condition of the roads and it was every bit as much about the conditions of the sidewalks and walking conditions and the ability to get from the sidewalk to the school bus.

Is there a safe place for the children to wait for the bus and can they walk to those?

So in part certainly there were a list, I believe a two-page list of areas that were identified late in the day that people would have liked to have schools to have opened that we did get ready for the following morning.

but I think this does go back to the broader question about sidewalks and pedestrian safety as well.

We did lose time in the early day, day and a half of the storm with some mechanical issues and with the conditions that were anticipated and potentially some earlier use of salt rather than not and in the future where we'd outsource certain specific things like clearing the bypass and

Fifth Street and Ridge, and we could throw more resources and more heavy equipment at the streets earlier.

We perhaps could have gotten that earlier.

Northern Virginia canceled the entire week.

Any other, Mr. Penner?

Okay, thank you.

Is there any discussion further?

I'll make that motion

Mike, I haven't written it up, but I would also add to it that a report come back to us at the next council meeting, because this is still the middle of winter, and you never know what's going to happen.

Mr. Jones, do you think that's sufficient time by next council or not?

Now whether or not, I mean, it depends on what comes out of that report, whether or not it's going to effectively address some long-term issues.

I think it's going to take some time for us to, for instance, if there's an ordinance change that needs to occur, that will take several council meetings for us to get there.

I just have a point of clarification on that one, if I may.

I'd be willing to allow a month.

Well, can I discuss that a little bit more?

Because it seems like we're talking about two different phases.

One is, doubtless, the lessons that will be contained in the report will go into us, which are more immediate, will go into us thinking about other legal options and ordinance options.

So it seems to me that we have two

steps and the first one is easier for you all to do because you're doing it anyway.

They're doing a debrief.

It's just about what is what do we hear from that?

And then we can do the ordinance discussion, which could go for for some time, because the last one was a extensive public process.

Well, I would move that city manager come back to city council and report to us and the public.

at the next City Council meeting what skeleton steps we have learned from this storm.

I'm sure we're going to hear some very good ideas tonight.

We heard about them over the Internet and we can share those.

So the last clause you just said there will be including public comment received.

And the whole point is to find out what we can that will help us pretty quickly without later on we can do the ordinance and capital equipment or whatever.

Second?

Second.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Motion passes 5-0.

OK, we're now going to matters by the public.

Thank you all.

I'm going to read the guidelines that we have.

We welcome public comment.

Time is reserved near the beginning and at the end of each regular city council meeting for matters by the public.

Please follow these guidelines for public comment.

If you were here to speak for a public hearing, please wait to speak on the matter until the report for that item has been presented and the public hearing has been opened.

Each speaker has three minutes to speak.

We instituted a new system last meeting where a chime will

Chime here at three minutes, which is automatic.

If you're up here speaking, just like a traffic light, the yellow, the green is when you have the full three minutes, the yellow gives you a warning when their time is approaching the end, and red means that you've hit the three minutes.

So just take a look out for this.

Please give your name and address before beginning your remarks.

Please do not interrupt speakers, whether or not you agree with them.

Please refrain from using obscenities.

If you cannot follow these guidelines, you'll be escorted from City Council chambers and not permitted to re-enter.

And we are going to go in order with those who signed up, except I'm going to, Mr. Pettit, I'm going to let you go first because your agenda item was moved.

Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, members of council.

I'm here.

I am David Pettit.

I practice law at 530 East Main Street with Len Hart Pettit.

I'm here representing the Violet Crown this evening.

I'd like to introduce representatives of the Violet Crown who are here with me.

This is Mr. Bill Banowski, who is the chief executive officer.

This is Chris Nolan, who's a representative of Dorothy Batten, one of the owners.

And this is Mike Cummings, who's our architect.

These gentlemen all came in to prepare for this evening's hearing.

And we and Ms. Batten went down and we looked at the violent ground and talked about solutions.

And what we saw in their conclusion was that the storefront, as it presently stands, does not satisfy their expectations for the storefront, both in terms of appearance and both in terms of functionality.

So rather than pursue the appeal at this time, what the Violet Crown would like to do is request from you a deferral so that we can go back to the BAR and attempt to work out a solution that will be functional and will meet the energy code.

Because maybe we can put aside the debate about whether it applies and recognize that it's good to comply with it.

and come up with a solution that everyone is satisfied with and that we'll enjoy seeing as we walk past it for many, many years to come.

Ballot Crown has been a good corporate citizen, is gratified by the welcome that it's received from the citizens and from the city and would much rather solve this problem in this way so that we can leave goodwill and come up with a solution that meets everyone's needs.

Mayor Signer and members of the City Council, my name is Paul Long and I live at 1410 Grady Avenue here in Charlottesville.

And I want to state that I strongly disagree with the recent decision of the Board of Architecture Review to allow portions of two historic buildings to be removed to facilitate the building of a six-story apartment building at 512 West Main Street.

We will be bulldozing our history away to accommodate another apartment building.

We need to put a moratorium of further development in this city and particularly on West Main Street until the entire population of our city has a chance to voice their opinions on what direction they want their city to go in terms of development of the city as a whole and West Main Street.

Alex Gaimagami, and Chris Woodfolk and Olivia Vanda Wanda.

Hello, my name is Olivia Vandewood and I'm here with my counterparts Alexander Gaimagmi and Christopher Woodfolk.

We are from St. Ann's Belfield School at 2132 Ivy Road, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903.

Before we begin, we would like to thank the members of the City Council for this opportunity.

And if anyone would like to stand in agreement with our cause at the end of this presentation, please feel free to do so.

On behalf of the students of the issues of race and gender class at St. Ann's Belfield School, we would like to formally and respectfully request that the city take action to create more substantive and just recognition of the legacy of the Vinegar Hill neighborhood.

After the Civil War, Vinegar Hill became the center of the African American community in Charlottesville and served as a key business district and residential area between the 1920s and 1960s.

However, in the 1960s, all 20 acres of Vinegar Hill were deemed substandard, and the city voted to redevelop the neighborhood through their urban renewal program.

With the initiation of the poll tax, many African American residents of Vinegar Hill were not able to vote on the matter.

Today, all that remains of Vinegar Hill, a historically rich and once vital hub of the Charlottesville community, is a marker on Water Street.

This marker, intended to commemorate the Vinegar Hill community, resides at knee level on a wall at the entrance of the downtown mall.

The City of Charlottesville has taken admirable steps to recognize the African American community, including the restoration of the Jefferson School and African American Heritage Center.

In order to give this same respect and recognition, the Vinegar Hill community deserves a more substantial monument depicting the history of the once vibrant community.

The Vinegar Hill Project states that the 1960s redevelopment of the neighborhood underlined the destructive impact of gentrification and the erasure of African American history.

With your help, we hope to increase this community's understanding of the legacy of Vinegar Hill and to ensure that this period of Charlottesville's history is properly remembered.

So far, we have garnered over 450 signatures in four days in support of

of our petition to recognize this issue and either remove the garbage can and planter to make the marker more visible or implement a two by three foot interpretive sign delineating Vinegar Hill's rich history.

Together we can accomplish our goal of restoring Vinegar Hill's legacy.

Thank you all very much and thank you all for standing and showing your support.

Sure, I hope the folks in the audience will be pleased to know that we're already working on that.

The Historic Resources Committee has been working for several months now on establishing a new marker in that area.

They've been working with the Office of Human Rights on that.

Right now they're working to have a fairly large two-paneled structure displaying that history.

And Vinegar Hill historian Scott French has been working with the Human Rights Commission to draft language that would go on there that would tell the story of Vinegar Hill.

So it's already underway.

Sounds like a win-win.

Okay thank you all.

So my name is Mika Zolstra.

I live at 702 Graves Street in Belmont.

I've rented the house there for about 13 years.

Yep, still renting because you know Charlottesville real estate.

But I'm here in response to the invitation to come talk about the snow issues that we were having particularly in my neighborhood.

I have

There's a sidewalk in front of my house that's about 25, 30 feet plus there's a walkway up to my steps and then there's about five or six steps up to my porch.

On Saturday I had shoveled all the sidewalk and the walkway and the steps and then on Sunday again I did it again because we had so much snow.

On Monday people were shoveling out their cars so some of it got back on the sidewalk and so I had to shovel out again.

On Thursday I got a note from the

from the city that said that I was in violation of a city code section misdemeanor punishable by jail time or a fine or both for snow, sleet, ice not removed from sidewalk.

And as I was coming up to...

See that note in my mailbox.

I noticed that about five feet of the sidewalk had a bunch of snow piled on it.

And so I asked my neighbors, I said, what happened?

Did you guys, you know, shovel out your cars and put it back on my sidewalk?

And they said, no, we saw the city trucks come and push it back onto your sidewalk and we'll testify to that.

So I did my best to I mean, as Lance Stewart said, it's at that time it was

they were plowing ice and such so it was a little bit more difficult to shovel that out but I made that attempt and then on Saturday morning there were a couple I guess it was contractors shoveling the sidewalks on either side my neighbors who had not shoveled their sidewalks and they said ma'am you need to shovel that last I don't know it was like two feet of ice or

or you're going to get fined by the city or else we're going to do it and you're going to get fined by the city.

So I said fine, you know, and there was some words exchanged, but I got out there and started hacking away at it with a heavier shovel.

And then they took pictures of me shoveling that part.

I don't know if that was to as evidence of a good faith effort or if they were trying to say, well, she should be fined because it wasn't shoveled, but

and then they said you missed a spot which was actually an alleyway which they thought was my driveway so that was actually something the city probably should be responsible for and I'm not a cranky person you know I like to help I understand you want your sidewalks to be pedestrian friendly I just it was a little bit I don't know disconcerting to be treated as a

as a criminal and kind of breeds resentment in certain cases.

And I'm here also to speak with for a few other people who I shared my experience with and they said they had a similar experience.

It was shoveling, trucks would come, dump it back on their sidewalk and shoveling.

So Gloria Beard is here.

You're out of time.

Is my time up?

Yeah.

Thank you.

Good evening.

Thank you all.

Oh, wait.

Stay.

They got homework.

OK.

Sorry.

Mr. Reynolds.

Yep.

All right.

Good evening.

I'm Paul Reynolds.

Everyone, please be quiet.

Thank you.

Start again?

Yes.

I'm Paul Reynolds.

I'm a resident of the 800 block of Locust Avenue.

I'm also the guy who has developed and deployed a video speed tracker along Locust Avenue and I'm reporting basically what I see as traffic goes by.

I'm motivated by the fact that we've had two pedestrians struck on Locust Avenue in the last four months.

You received a ten page presentation from me Friday that documents four things.

It documents continuing evidence of chronic speeding on Locust Avenue.

It documents compelling evidence of speeding by city vehicles.

This is anecdotally reported to me by a half a dozen other neighborhoods around the city as well.

It presents compelling arguments to slow city vehicles down because of the risk that's incurred by driving 10, 12, and 14 miles over the speed limit.

and it has important data and observations about two traffic control measures that appear not to work.

My objective tonight is to convince you that the city needs to take the lead immediately in stemming the widespread speeding that we see on our streets by acting expeditiously to slow down city, excuse me, city vehicles.

The draft resolution attached to my presentation is meant to suggest that the city staff should adopt and implement sane schedules.

driver and staff awareness training about safety in residential neighborhoods, reasonable driver performance metrics with no fear of demerits on performance reviews for speed compliance, effectively zero tolerance once the above are instituted and regular city manager reporting to council on the effectiveness of the measures taken.

One of the slides in your presentation shows a very important graph that I think you need to be aware of.

It shows the likelihood of death in the event of a vehicle striking a human.

A vehicle going 24 or 25 miles an hour has a 13% chance of killing a human if it hits it.

At 36 miles an hour, which I have documented our buses going, both school buses and city buses, the likelihood of death on impact goes up by a factor of three.

That 11 miles more triples the likelihood of killing someone.

40% over speed, 25 to 35 leads to a 70% increase in braking distance.

I can't believe for a moment that responsible leaders would want to accept the increased risk represented by these numbers.

Finally, the feedback that I provided you on intended measures to slow traffic, the speed trailers that were put out on Locust Avenue for about 19 days were ineffective at the end, completely ineffective.

Lane narrowing with snowfall was ineffective.

The city should take the lead, my final point, in slowing speeding on our streets by starting with city vehicles to require appropriate city staff to slow buses and other city vehicles down and to act expeditiously.

Duly noted.

Thank you.

I'm Reverend Elizabeth Emery from New Beginnings Christian Community, which is at 1130 East Market Street.

I also serve on the Executive Board of IMPACT, which is 27 congregations working together in our community to better the community.

And I'm very concerned with the whole situation of women who are struggling with addiction and alcoholism.

There is no recovery center for 75 miles in our area.

And I have had just this year two women, one who tried to commit suicide, and the police took her to Five East in UVA Hospital.

And there she was released without being able to find a single bed in the state of Virginia where she could go into recovery.

She was released home suicidal.

and Addicted to Crack Cocaine.

I have one woman who's at home right now waiting for a bed to go into recovery.

She's an alcoholic and a prescription drug misuser and each hour and each day that she waits, her resolve diminishes more.

I've had one of my folks be put in jail instead of a recovery center where she committed suicide and this cannot be tolerated anymore.

We have a center for men here in Charlottesville.

We have nothing for women, nothing at all for women.

And we are standing behind Region 10's proposal to open up a recovery center that will serve 50 women each year and allow their children under the age of five to be with them, up to 100 children each year that will help.

And we are working with Mike Murphy and Doug Walker

from the city and the county, the assistant manager and the associate superintendent on this project.

And we would like your support of it.

These women should not be sent to jail because they're addicted to alcohol and drugs.

They need a recovery center.

And this is what we're proposing.

And we'd like your help with this.

it's absolutely necessary and we'd like to invite you to our Nehemiah Action which is on May 3rd at the Martin Luther King Jr.

Performance Center at Charlottesville High School and it's at 6.30 and we will be talking about our recovery center and making plans and we'd like you to consider it seriously in your budget

And I'd like those who are here to support this idea to please stand.

Thank you all.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of City Council.

And I want to first thank you for your continued support for affordable housing.

And in particular, I want to thank you tonight for commissioning a study by RCLCo that's provided significant data as well as a host of policy recommendations.

There's a lot of good stuff in there.

I applaud and support many of the recommendations in the reports.

For example, pursuing a transfer of development rights partnership with the county could be a revolutionary new way to limit sprawl development in the rural areas while channeling growth where we want it.

On the other hand, there are some recommendations in the report that I really actually don't understand given the data.

For example, I don't see how designating workforce housing is another category of affordable housing addresses the key findings in the report.

To wit, the data makes it clear that the two AMI groups that are currently underserved are those earning less than 50% of area median income and more than 120% of area median income.

The data describes how people at the low end of the earnings spectrum pay more than they can afford while those at the upper end pay less than they can afford.

This barbell effect creates a misalignment of inventory and demand such that both segments creep into the middle of the market thereby limiting inventory and creating barriers to workforce housing, the thing that we were looking to address in the first place.

So from a high altitude, the focus should therefore be on policy changes and market interventions that increase the supply of affordable housing to lower wage earners and promote housing typologies meeting the demands of upper income individuals, particularly downsizing boomers.

By targeting the increase of supply where the data says we need it most and where demographic shifts, frankly, are going to require it over the next few decades, it'll reduce the pressure on the inventory that's priced right for workforce housing residents, those earning between 80 and 120 percent of area median income.

So I look forward to hearing the report tonight, but I also want to comment on something that I read in the paper this week as an advocate of affordable housing that gave me a little bit of pause.

There was a suggestion that the city might want to reconsider its commitment to growing our supportive affordable housing stock to 15%, as was adopted as a goal by city council in 2010.

From my perspective, to back away from that goal would be difficult to stomach, unconscionable.

For one thing,

It takes a long time for projects to germinate and come to fruition.

In the greater scheme of things, five years has just given us time to begin to start to make a difference.

On top of this, housing goal number one in the comprehensive plan has only been in effect for a couple of years, and it hasn't really had a chance to make a difference.

This goal essentially to evaluate all policy and land use decisions within the context of council's 15% goal can and should be pursued much more robustly.

Each time we consider a change to an ordinance,

or an application for land use change or an adoption of any policy that affects development, we need to get into the habit of looking at the impact of these proposals on affordable housing.

But I think I speak for many in the room and across the city that I'm really excited about this new council.

I think you all take a really business-like and data-driven.

I want to thank you for supporting affordable housing and hope you redouble your commitment to it.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Marty Bass.

I live at 1808 Barracks Road.

And I'm here tonight to piggyback on Mr. Reynolds' report on Locust Avenue as it concerns Barracks Road.

But the snow report played right into my presentation because within 24 hours of the snowfall, cars were whizzing by on Barracks Road.

And speed is definitely an issue.

I do not have the advantage of the sophisticated equipment used by Mr. Reynolds.

However, I am sure it is obvious to every person in this room that traffic and traffic speed is a problem on Barracks Road as well.

Nobody goes 25 to 30 miles an hour.

I do honor the speed limit and I have had many instances of inappropriate gestures, name calling, tailgating, horn blowing, and one car actually passed me going up the hill.

I asked the police department for a five-year accident report for this section of Barracks Road.

The report, which is attached and I'll leave a copy, confirms my theory that Barracks traffic has increased significantly since the Meadow Creek Parkway construction and the attenuated lanes on the 250 bypass.

Once a new driving habit is established, it tends to continue.

Enforcing the speed limit would hopefully help divert traffic back to non-residential areas.

I sympathize with city council and city officials on addressing these issues.

The overbuilding in the county and the lack of foresight in how this would affect traffic is a daunting issue.

The burden of this, however, should not be placed on residential and I emphasize residential neighborhoods in the city.

We must find solutions.

And these solutions should not be arbitrary, given to the loudest voices, the most signatures on a petition.

There should be rules and regulations that clearly determine where traffic calming is needed and applied.

The city should take responsibility for carrying out and enforcing these rules and not wait for citizen outrage.

The problem areas are obvious.

Good evening, my name is Jeffrey Fogel.

I want to talk about a number of issues and I will speak very quickly.

I wanted to support the minister from impact and it's an issue I have been harping on for decades.

We have to treat public health issues as public health issues and not as criminal justice issues.

We have half of the people in prison in this state and that's 35,000 people who should not be in prison but should be dealt with in another way and we are contributing to that problem.

Secondly I want to

reaffirmed what Mr. Rosenzweig said, which is the city does need, not should, but needs to double, redouble, and then redouble again its efforts in the area of affordable housing.

I was disappointed, however, in their request that they be allowed to use the $225,000

that have been set aside for additional affordable housing instead to give to Southern Development.

Now it seems that Southern Development made an error in its calculation of what it was going to cost it.

Well, it's a private company.

And that's what happens.

If you get into the private sector, you make your analysis, you perform your function, and you can lose money?

or you can make a lot of money.

There's no place for the city to be subsidizing southern development and at the same time to claim that it will increase affordable housing options because it will be just the opposite.

Of course, there's also been no community engagement on this question.

Finally, the housing study which I did not find so interesting since I think most of what you need to know has been contained

in the Orange Dot Project Report and I think you didn't learn much out of this and the proposals that were made are too limited and were very narrow-sided and are things that I think that the staff here should be able to come up with.

In my view, of course, and I've shared this with other people, the one option that is not discussed in this report, which I think needs to be discussed, is the public building of housing.

that your reliance on the private sector to produce affordable housing is just pie in the sky.

It's not going to happen.

And you're going to find yourself in situations you just found yourself in with Southern Development of taking money that was designed for other purposes to support them.

And finally, all the discussions in these housing studies have indicated that what we need to do in our community is disperse poor people.

And let's be honest about it, dispersing poor people in this community means dispersing black people in this community.

I'm sorry that some of the students aren't here, but a monument is appropriate to Vinegar Hill, but I don't think the city actually gets it yet.

What was destroyed in Vinegar Hill was a community, not apartments.

Not stores, but a community.

And you cannot replace a community by making available isolated apartments or stores.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Rebecca Quinn, 1044 Street here in the city.

In 2015, Council approved giving Habitat for Humanity $225,000 in affordable housing funds to support a project called Habitat Scattered Site Down Payment Assistance.

The funds were specifically targeted to a goal in the comprehensive plan to distribute low-income housing more equitably around the city to counter the concentration of poverty on the south side.

Before approval of those funds, though, Council had approved what was a rather contentious donation of Elliott Avenue land to Southern Development on the condition that they remediate the site and turn over 20 of the 47, 46 lots to Habitat for Humanity.

As I understand it, as part of that deal, Habitat promised it wouldn't come back for more affordable housing funds for that project.

Okay, this is where the shell game, I think, seems to start.

Now we hear Habitat and Southern have made a deal for Habitat to pay $15,000 per lot, $300,000, and I'm puzzled, is getting more and more puzzled.

The city's condition was for donation of 20 lots.

Why is the city contemplating a plan that has Habitat paying for what the city was told would be a donation?

Are we being asked to subsidize Southern Development because its cost increased?

Habitat seems to have made a decision to cover those increased costs without consulting the city, so why should our objective, the original objective for the $225,000 be subverted by their business decision?

So, still confused and left with some uneasy feelings, so I think what this says is because

Habitat decided to spend 300 more than it expected at Elliott.

Now Habitat wants to use the scattered site funds at Burnett Commons.

Okay, Burnett Commons is admirable.

I have no question about that.

But that changes the original tent of our money.

If you approve this, please add an explicit statement that this action reverses the July 2015 authorization and eliminates funds for Habitat's scattered

down payment assistance.

I also question whether Habitat and the City really want the resolution as drafted to commit any future funds only for Burnett Commons 3, the park.

Really?

Any?

All future funds forever?

Thank you.

My name's Mary Carey.

I live at 100 Bridge Street, which is Midway Manor.

I came here for several things, but one, I want to point out, Mr. Jeff Fogle, you're a hard act to follow.

But I want to say that Vinegar Hill, I grew up in this area.

I mean, hey, I was born in 1946.

So I'm gonna tell you, I was in the struggle in the 60s.

My friends were displaced.

Thou children live in Sixth Street, Hardy Drive, First Street.

Thou grandchildren live there.

What is going on?

I don't know.

It seems like it's ethnic cleansing.

or whatever because it doesn't seem like y'all want any black people in Charlottesville because you're targeting all the black communities to build hotels for UVA to bring our NCAA here and our ACC here, all that land UVA got over there near the stadium and near John Paul Jones or whatever.

They got plenty of land.

But then this man gonna come in here and talk about he gonna clean up UVA from the snow when we can't even get our kids to school.

So I'm trying to find out what priorities do UVA give against the city of Charlottesville.

And now they're working, they beating down Fightville.

Oh, Mr. Signer, you're supposed to be the president down there at Fightville.

Where were you when they signed them petitions to not let them people come down there for that hotel?

You wasn't even seen.

And now if they're talking about developers getting money from the city, what is this?

Is this a democracy or a hypocrisy?

I don't understand it.

And when you sit up here and everybody kind of tell y'all that y'all doing a good job, I haven't seen you doing anything.

This is your second meeting.

The first meeting was, I don't know what that was.

You were so rude.

Mr. Bellamy, you need to tone down a little bit, sweetheart.

I love you.

Hey.

But I'm going to tell you something.

Yes, ma'am.

And what about talking about black people?

I don't see any of y'all doing anything for poor people.

I don't see you doing anything for anybody in this city except people with priorities, privileges, and got a little bit of money.

and the next hotel where it's gonna be.

Ain't nothing wrong with Main Street that the city is not turned down.

And every time I look up there, they turn something down to what they're putting up there, student housing.

Or something they're gonna make money for, some little rich young boy that don't even know what's wrong with Charlottesville.

None of y'all born here, you don't feel it.

I feel Charlottesville, I feel Venable Hill.

If you were born here, you would feel it.

Good evening.

I am Colleen Keller.

I live at 1872 Field Road.

I'm here on behalf of the Charlottesville Free Clinic, which is at 1138 Rose Hill Drive.

We are on your consent agenda as a resolution, and I'm just here to advocate that this proposal is for a renovation of our dental clinic within our current footprint at the health department.

This proposal was developed with a lot of collaboration with the city staff, Mike, Leslie, Lance, unbelievably has done a lot of work on this going into the snowstorm, and Dr. Bonds at the health department.

It is a renovation.

It's in our current footprint.

But what's important about it, I think, is that it gives us a fourth operatory.

This is being funded by free clinic donors who contribute to an opportunity fund.

A fourth opportunity lets us see more people.

It lets us do hygiene and education.

It lets us engage more volunteer dentists in the community, provide services.

And I think maybe most importantly, it allows us to upgrade our clinic and honors a 23 year commitment at the free clinic to provide high quality care for free.

So I hope that you will support this this evening and we can move forward.

John Hayden John Hayden, Westwood Road.

I don't have a real problem with the timing of the snow response.

I don't think we need to spend a bunch of money on more equipment since the last large snowstorm was in 2009.

However, I will tell you, having had a heart attack, I will never shovel your sidewalk in front of my house.

One of the reasons I won't do it is the unfair way in how you enforce this rule.

On the one hand, you send inspectors to check your sidewalks in front of taxpayers' houses and businesses

looking for violations that would result in fines and expenses, while on the other hand, you send snowplows, tractors, bobcats, snowblowers, and manual labor with shovels over to neighborhoods like Hardy Drive to shovel the sidewalks and parking lots at taxpayer expense with city employees.

I'm happy to show you the pictures if you like, so please don't deny that it happens.

However, having said that, I don't have a real problem with that practice.

But I do have a problem with the unequal enforcement and favorable treatment of one neighborhood over another.

Thank you.

Okay, council response matters by the public and then we're going to go to oh I meant at the end of the whole okay well that's fine I meant at the end of the whole meeting if that's the feeling then we can do that.

Hello, everybody.

I live at 1116 Page Street.

And I'm here to talk about snow.

Well, you know, I didn't even realize until I remembered it, because I'm just a senior.

And the university students came and dug me out.

But two days later, they closed me back in.

So I had to dig myself out with a bad back.

because I couldn't get out.

And when the snowplow came, they only just removed a little snow.

And I didn't understand that.

So I was able to get out that first day, then I've got to close back in.

And the man, the night he came with that little CAT, what is that?

I was standing at my door and the neighbor was out there waving her hand saying, you weren't closing us in.

He told her he'd be back, but he didn't.

He moved the snow to the fence because I'm in the dead-end section.

But he never came back to remove that.

I think he got an attitude.

He was really rude to certain other people as well.

But then it was two seniors.

One lady's 101 years old.

I called on her every day to check on her.

They did the same thing to her.

She couldn't dig her snow.

Thank God for her neighbors helped her.

And there was another lady.

She needed her medication because she went to stay with her daughter.

She's 80 years old.

And they told her daughter they couldn't get up the hill.

and was really rude so she was coming down here to talk to city council she said and said the man so she wanted to talk to a supervisor and the young man that answered the phone said all the supervisors out and didn't understand that so oh so that's what it was there was snow there

Well, anyway, I mean, I know they didn't expect all the snow, and I didn't either, but it's got to be, somebody got to rethink, how are we going to, while you're digging, sending people to dig us out, then they're going to close us back in.

Somebody, the man could have actually, you know, that shovel, evidently it gets too full, so it's throwing snow back and packing it up on the side.

It's horrible.

It looked like he could have just picked the snow up, took it to the fence, came back.

That's like doing right, that's a little bit more work, I imagine.

So he got to be mindful of older people.

And then he sent those messages saying, you're going to find us if we don't clear the sidewalk.

I'm like, I called.

And they really came in a hurry and cleared my sidewalk.

Because I sure don't need nobody to give me no fines.

I want to set income.

Can I come up and speak?

You can speak at the end of the meeting.

You're speaking without recognition by the chair, which will be grounds for dismissal from the chamber.

Sir, he's not allowed to speak.

You're not allowed to speak any further.

You continue the outburst.

Because I made that decision as chair, which I'm allowed to do.

Okay, you have to leave.

Okay, please take him out.

This is an outburst.

You have to be removed.

Okay, um, response by members of council and then we're

Members of Council, you can make responses.

Real quick, Nika Solter, I don't think she's still here, but I'm sorry she was treated rudely, as she stated, and I think we can work on that with the people.

Paul Reynolds, you've done a heck of a job.

I'd like to find some way to get some kind of citizen committee together if you have the time, because this is a problem all across the city.

Locust Avenue, Rugby Road, Lower Rugby, Old Lynchburg Road, Cherry Avenue, all over the city.

So I'll be speaking with you, and that's a remarkable report you put together.

Jeff Fogel, I agree.

I agree that health issues shouldn't be treated as legal issues, and I'll be bringing that up during the budget discussions.

And just a quick thing about the snow.

It's true that personally, I got more emails congratulating the city on the job they did.

I understand about losing.

I lost three days of work.

That's especially tough at the end of the month.

So I understand all that.

But what I saw more than anything was the courtesy and the respect that the citizens of Charlottesville in their vehicles, on foot, and even the few that I saw on bikes and someone on skis, the courtesy and respect they showed each other as we went through this as a city and as a community.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'd like to first commend everyone for coming out.

It feels like the message from a couple weeks ago was well received, specifically in terms of attendance and also from the variety of different individuals who we heard from in regards to the matters of the Republic.

So thank you all so much for coming.

A couple of quick comments.

Dr. Elizabeth, and she left, I'm not sure where she went, but the mental health issue is definitely something that we are not taking lightly.

Simply on par to piggyback with what Councilor Fenwick said,

We will definitely be discussing this in the budget session at the retreat coming up this week.

I also wanted to address a couple of other comments that I heard in regards to not only Vinegar Hill, but specifically, and I'm just going to call a spade a spade, what we're doing for the African American community here in the city of Charlottesville.

would know without a shadow of a doubt that this is at the forefront of what personally I'm looking to do.

And I know that this is a priority for the rest of our counselors.

To date, I see Mr. Harold Foley in the back.

On April 30th, we are having our resource fair for felons.

And not just black people are felons.

That crosses several different ethnicities.

But we will have a resource fair for felons in which all the resource providers in the area will be there.

That's specifically for our community.

When we talk about other things for our community, Ms. Rosita, who's sitting right behind you, we're leading a women's empowerment session.

Yes, ma'am.

Ms. Carey.

No, I'm sorry.

Ms. Carey, I wanted to address you because you brought it up.

So, Ms. Rosita Parker, who's sitting right behind you, on Sunday at 2 o'clock, we're having the first installment of the women's empowerment session for young girls of color.

that's going to be Sunday 2 o'clock at City Space.

For anyone who wants to come, any woman who cares about young women of color, please come out.

It'll be an informational session again Sunday at 2 o'clock at City Space.

And then on February 20th for young males and females of color, we have in the Omoja Festival, Zania will be there, the Omoja Festival for all young kids specifically to talk about cultural competency,

Relevance and also how to make sure that they love themselves and understand the importance of being a young child of color.

So we are doing a great deal and some would say more than we've done in several years to address the issues within the African American community.

You have my word and whether you can take it or not is okay, but you have my word

that this and these issues will be addressed.

In terms of affordable housing, we're looking to work diligently to ensure that the residents of the low-income community indeed have affordable housing.

I've been appointed to the Housing Authority.

It's something that we are working diligently on, and I know the rest of my counselors feel strongly about this.

Now, what's happened before is happened before, and I've said this.

This is our third meeting.

I've said it once.

I've said it twice.

I'll say it again.

What's happened before is what's happened.

What I'm interested in is working to move forward.

So if you want to work with us in terms of changing the narrative and doing what we must to get us where we need to be, then I'm looking forward to working with you.

If you want to be a detractor, then I have no words for you.

If you want to work with us, I'm looking forward to doing it.

I will concur with my previous fellow counselors.

I would like an update on what happened with Ms. Zylstra.

It was my understanding that our snow ordinance actually replaced one where it was a criminal offense about three years ago.

We replaced it with something that is instead a civil fine and doesn't include a misdemeanor or jail time.

And so I don't know who sent her that

Thank you.

And Ms. Emery, or I guess Pastor Liz, Dr. Emery, I've met with several people at Region 10 the other day, including the director, Robert Johnson, and they told me about their plan to build a center for women as a place for folks to deal with issues of addiction.

and it is a public health issue.

It is something that they are treating as a public health issue.

They're not asking us for money to help build it.

They've been raising that.

They've got the property already.

I guess the sad part is that one of Farmer Todd's gardens is there, so that's going to be dislocated.

But this is an incredibly important resource in our community, and I think that we should support it ongoing, the operation, because it is way cheaper than jail.

which is where people often end up.

It's also cheaper than sending people to the hospital, which is often where people end up.

And certainly, even if we're not talking about financial costs, just the toll on people's lives, to be able to take their children with them, to not have to deal with either relatives taking their children or disruption in the family or entering into foster care because you're trying to get well.

I just, I really support this initiative and I'm delighted that they're doing it.

Thank you.

I'll be as quick as possible.

With regards to the women's treatment facility, when my husband was the director of the Moore Center for over 30 years, he worked at least a third of his professional life to try to get a women's health center in the city.

I'm glad that Regent Chen is finally taking this

seriously.

Having said that, I would really like to get an update to Council about the development of this facility.

I'm a little bit concerned of what Councilor Szakos just said about that it would be somehow impacting the Urban Agricultural Collaborative, so I just want to make sure how that's working, because that is also another sacred place for our community.

I would like, if possible, to take a serious look at Mr. Reynolds' work.

And the reason why I say that, the studies that he cites are well known in the transportation planning circles.

It is absolutely true that with each increase in speed, the risk of fatality increases.

and I think his resolution has merit and I was hoping that we could get Mr. Jones, your staff, to take a look at this resolution seriously to see how it would comport with our existing policies and how it could be folded into the work of the Streets That Work initiative.

I also think that much of what was said earlier this evening by, I forget her name, she was from Barracks Road.

Miss Bass.

Miss Bass.

where she talked about the importance of

Making priority streets are kind of initial targets for investment for safety in public infrastructure investments as opposed to, as she used the phrase, squeaky wheel.

That is the whole point behind the Streets that Work process is to get a system where you can objectively look at which streets must be dealt with first from various factors.

And it's my understanding that we're going to get a priority system.

with that final product.

So if we could just fold this work into that and look at it seriously, particularly with regards to the resolution.

And I see heads nodding on council that we seem to be all in agreement on that.

That'd be wonderful.

Thank you all.

We are going to go to the next installment of what will be a regular practice now, which is many of the public comments that are made.

The real point of public comments is to raise issues of concern for the city government.

And we are now instituting practice where the city manager speaks to the specific concerns that were raised in the last session.

So there's a couple weeks to do research and figure them out.

The staff, as you all know, we're a part-time position, but we have full-time staff, and Mr. Jones is going to respond to the ones that were raised last.

I see I'm losing a few people with how interesting what I'm saying is, but still, trust me, it'll be quite a show.

Charlottesville is number one out of all 38 Virginia cities on health and welfare spending.

250% of the mean is what we spend out of our government or as we were 13th with our school budget.

You know, we can have debates about the execution of how we use those dollars, but I think it's hard to dispute that the government has been very

active.

For instance, tonight we are going to hear with Ms. McHugh.

We have a debate about how to spend dollars within the Affordable Housing Fund, but it's clear that that is a priority for this government.

We did a survey of five other university towns in Virginia.

None of them had even a benchmark with how much affordable housing they're trying to provide, whereas we have the 15 percent, which Mr. Rosenzweig spoke to.

So, again, we can have a lot of debates about how to execute with our

policy priorities, but it's clear that we have them and that this is an empathetic and active government in this city.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

So these are responses from our January 19th meeting.

Mr. Long, Mr. Paul Long suggested the city provide shelters at all of our bus stops.

We asked CAT to go back and take a look at that.

CAT currently serves 403 bus stop locations.

throughout our service area, both in the city and Albemarle County.

Of those stops, 44 have shelters, so it would be necessary to place an additional 359 bus shelters.

The cost for the shelters, benches, and construction and installation would be slightly more than $3.2 million.

This does not include environmental assessments, property acquisition, ADA improvements, public process, or labor to maintain those shelters once they are built.

So I just wanted to give you a follow-up on that.

Ms. Jessica Otey suggested that the city distribute sample ballots in the newspaper in advance of elections.

Our voter registrar, Rosanna Benchcoach, is open to those suggestions made by Ms. Otey, and she will be following up with her to discuss that.

Ms. Robin Haynes asked for the YMCA to be protective of trees around the project and the entire park.

especially a tulip tree.

Mr. Jay Kessler from the Y did reach out to Ms. Haines to schedule a meeting.

I believe they were looking at scheduling a meeting for today.

I'm not sure if that occurred or not, but they did reach out to talk to Ms. Haines about that tree and about other trees and how they could protect them.

Mr. Eperhard Gigli raised concerns about providing bicycle lanes in advance of snowstorms, especially along West Main Street.

Our public works crew were careful to do that during the last storm.

We received some positive responses from members of the bike community about the briding efforts there on West Main Street.

And as Mr. Stewart mentioned earlier today, we're looking at ways that we can continue to do that in other areas around the city as well.

And next session we'll do the same process for the matters that were raised that have a city government response.

Thank you very much, Mr. Jones.

We appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay, motion for boards and commissions.

I think we ought to read them first.

Yes.

And this is a motion I move that Joe Thompson is appointed as a new representative for the Thomas Jefferson Water Resources Protection Foundation.

The Bitsy Waters is nominated to be the Tree Commission representative to the West Main Street Steering Committee and myself, Councillor Bob Fenwick, appointed to the Cable Franchise Committee.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Thank you.

Consent agenda.

Item A, minutes for January 19th.

Item B, an appropriation local emergency management performance grant, $7,500, second of two readings.

Item C, an appropriation Albemarle County reimbursement for the Charlottesville-era Albemarle Technical Education Center, Department of Education, Interior Renovation Project, $33,162.74, second of two readings.

Item D, an appropriation of the Albemarle County reimbursement for the Health Department Facility Condition Assessment Project, $5,122, second of two readings.

Item E, an appropriation for the Albemarle County reimbursement for the Preston Morris building envelope restoration project, $34,378.08, first of two readings.

Item F, an appropriation for the state assistance and citizen donation for spay and neuter program at SPCA, $1,001.64, first of two readings.

Item G, a resolution for the free clinic renovations to Health Department Building, first of one reading.

Item H, a resolution for the transfer of funds for online business tax portal, first of one reading.

Item I, a resolution, declaration of state of emergency for the city of Charlottesville, first of one reading.

I'd just like to make a comment.

The Chamber of Commerce wanted the community to understand on the increasing of the fee schedules, some people say, well, we're going to raise the cost on developers.

Another thing would be the meals tax.

We're going to raise the cost to the restaurant owners.

And all of these fee increases or costs or taxes or whatever always fall on the individuals, the consumers.

But in this case, we have to cover the costs for developers and

Thank you.

Okay.

If not, is there a motion to approve?

Second.

First motion.

Motion to approve.

Second.

Second.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

The question passes 5-0.

Okay.

We have a comprehensive housing analysis and policy recommendations.

Good evening, Kathy McHugh, a housing development specialist for the city.

Back in March of last year, 2015, council approved funding out of the Charlottesville Housing Fund to pay for a housing study.

Okay, that's fine.

I'll save it for later.

Hi, I hope everybody can hear me.

My name is Lee Sobel.

I'm going to give a presentation based on a report we've given to the city, which is online if you want to read the full report.

This is a 50-minute presentation.

I've been asked to condense this down to 10 minutes.

So forgive me if I speak quickly.

I've been asked to condense a large presentation down to 10 minutes.

So with that, I'll skip a couple of things because we're gonna talk about this stuff anyway.

I think Kathy just told you our company's a real estate and economic firm nationwide.

We're based in the Washington D.C. area.

I run a group that works solely with the public sector, cities, counties, MPOs, COGs, transportation and planning organizations, and town and gown issues.

So we were asked as a goal to provide an understanding of the overall housing market in the city of Charlottesville.

Our objectives were to characterize the existing and new housing stock, identify the segmented demand within the city by housing type, age, ownership, renter, and owner income, to identify mismatches between supply and demand, and to define the consumer, the depth of market, and the ideal housing for affordable and workforce housing.

And let me just say, I'll take questions when we're done.

So our key findings.

Charlottesville is viewed as a terrific place to live.

I think many of you probably know that.

And the demand to be in a great place to live is such that it has created an expensive housing product.

Housing within the city is expensive to the lowest income groups.

and it is perceived as expensive by many others.

Most households do not pay the full amount that they can afford in housing costs at the upper end and most of Charlottesville's households are owned by people who are over 55 and most households in the city have just one or two people living in them.

The market should be able to provide appropriately priced housing for the majority of the workforce consumers in the region, and that's a positive aspect and finding of our work.

The region shouldn't be as supply constrained as it is, but it actually behaves like a supply constrained market.

that means there isn't enough housing supply for everybody and therefore housing prices are higher.

Two of the factors that create this supply constraint is the limited supply of land for new development, both the city's small geographic area and its built-out character, and Albemarle County's restrictive growth areas.

So this just shows everybody.

You can see the city outline within the center of the county.

You can see the density.

The city's quite small, and yet within the region, it has 16% of the population on just 1% of its land area.

And when you look at the purple area on the right, within the county, that's the primary market area where there's other growth within the county, that represents

32% of the area's population and again just 2% of the land share so lots of people in a very small area and then as you can see beyond the county in gray on the right you have orange areas where people have a higher concentration where the density is a little bit higher so what's actually happening is you have a lot of people living in the city a lot of people living in that primary purple area and then they jump out of the county so where typical communities

Sprawl and sometimes leapfrog maybe from one street or from one exit or from one farm to another.

Here they're actually leapfrogging an entire county.

And we'll talk about the effects of that in a little bit.

This is a big slide.

I'm going to let you guys look at what's interesting to you.

But this slide basically is providing information in our report that shows that the existing housing inventory

is concentrated in both price and rent spans that are affordable to most consumers.

The city has 9% of the region's owner-occupied housing and it has 20% of the region's rental housing.

The average new home in the city is about $450,000 and that's only affordable to households above $150,000.

and 20% of the area median income.

What would be affordable to those at 80% of the median income would be about $250,000.

So you can see there's a gap in what's affordable based on people's incomes.

And you can find the same with Class A rents.

The average rent in the city is at about $1,300 a month and the area rents in the region are about 20% less than what they are in the city.

Well, so 20% of 13, so about another $300 less.

Area rents are about $900.

And then Charlottesville has a vacancy rate of 5%, which is very tight.

At that high occupancy, you would expect to see more people building housing of all types to serve people who are looking for housing.

So this map shows two things.

One, most of the city residents mostly work in or near the city.

And they actually live within 10 miles of the city.

However, city employees are more spread out.

And you can see in the right side, 75% of city residents are within 25 miles of the city, whereas we just said most people live within 10 miles.

of the city.

So what's happening there?

So one is people are getting priced out and they can't find a place so they're moving farther out.

They're essentially driving until they qualify or until they find a place that they can buy or rent.

Or some people are also choosing to live in the Albemarle locality and see the farms and the rolling hills and things like that because that's enjoyable to a lot of people too.

This gives you an idea of both affordable and workforce housing as defined by number of people within a household and then what their income would be on average based on these different price bands.

And so here this just tells you that somebody who makes 120% of the area median income with a family of four probably makes just under $100,000 a year.

The households within the city are small and they're aging, so we looked at non-student housing for our work and you can see that the non-student households below 80% AMI, just over half of make up those households, and between 80 to 120% of the households, 19%, fall within that AMI band.

and then those over 120% make up 28% of those households.

So again, that's people with high incomes or older people with fixed incomes but who choose to continue to live in the city.

And you can see the breakdowns both by household size and by households by AMI.

You can see that distribution.

So over 70% of the households earning under 50% AMI rent compared to 53% of the city households.

So in the city, 53% of the households rent and 47% own their homes and 59% are one person households that rent and 52% of two person households rent.

So here you get a sense of the number of people living in homes and then those by their AMI breakdown as well.

So this leads to an interesting finding, which is that there's an undersupply of households earning 100% AMI and those below 50%.

So what you're seeing on the left here with owner-occupied housing is that the market for affordable or lower-priced homes is not being served.

So you have those high bars and the yellow on the left, meaning there's a strong demand for more affordable housing.

and yet the small bars in the red show that the supply of housing for those people is very, very low, where at the same time you can see there's an undersupply for those people earning over 120% of the median income.

They have high demand for housing product within their income bracket, but they're not being supplied the type of housing.

So what's happening is they're moving into cheaper housing and in fact crowding out the supply of homes for people who might otherwise qualify for that.

And you can actually see the same thing is happening with rental housing as well within the city.

I'm going to just skip this just based on time.

So then we were asked to do consumer research.

Some of you may actually have participated in the consumer research survey.

We were able to reach 1,400 people for our survey and get responses.

We talked a lot about what their key factors were that influenced their next housing decision.

where they would be located, would they stay in the city, move away from the city, what the housing types, what they were interested in, what the size, what the cost was, and we really tried finding out what people's desires were for housing.

And we found that most young people are renters today.

They'd like to own SFD as a single family dwelling unit eventually.

Those people between age 35 and 54, they're mostly owners today, but a large portion rent, largely in single-family detached homes.

And more of these households are interested in owning.

And those who are over 55 predominantly want a smaller home and would like a multi-family unit rather than a single-family unit.

So you have a lot of empty-nesters who are really looking to scale and size down.

One of the things we like to look at when we do a housing study is housing and transportation costs because we understand that housing is a large part

and transportation is a large cost of people's budget.

And oftentimes the transportation provides information about the true cost of living where people are making their housing decisions.

And we found something interesting in our work and that's really the share of housing and transportation costs is about stable.

Whether you have a five minute commute, a 10 minute commute, a 20 minute commute,

or 30-minute commute.

Once, however, the commute goes up to 30 minutes, you can actually see the yellow line.

The cost of fuel as a percent of their total spending goes up by about $200 a month.

So people are actually, again, this gets to that drive to the qualify.

They can't find the housing they want in the city, so they move out.

And moving out means it costs more in fuel or car upkeep and maintenance or even car ownership.

to have that housing that they need.

And then it dips down.

So people always ask, why is it dipping down when they get farther away?

And that's because people are actually choosing at that point to live that far away that they're not commuting as much as everybody else.

Maybe they go into work once or twice a week.

Maybe they go in three or four times a week.

Maybe they telecommute frequently.

And so by the time they get that far away, their transportation costs are not truly reflected in their commuting behavior.

And then this shows you that today most households pay much less than they can statistically afford in total housing costs.

I know a lot of people will come up to me after a presentation like this and say, Lee, my housing costs are very, very high.

And that may well be true.

However, statistically, if you look at what people can afford by their average median income, we can see that many people, some people can actually pay more.

Those people under 50% AMI

can't and they don't.

However, as you can see, there's a higher percentage of people over 50% who actually are paying over $1500 a month.

So they're about 30% in the 50 to 80% AMI, about

almost 40% in the 80 to 120% AMI and then all the way on the right you can see 60% of those people who make over 120% of the area median income are paying over $1,500 a month for their housing.

So it's an interesting statistic that just helps us understand where people are spending their housing costs and this sort of reinforces what we were talking about, the undersupply of housing for the people at the top end.

So the next part of our assignment, I guess I'm doing alright on time.

The next part of our assignment was the policy recommendations.

So the city had asked us with this housing information what could be done at the city level so that they could provide more workforce and affordable housing.

I probably should have just kept it over here so you had something to read while I was talking.

I apologize.

So a summary of the policy options were density bonuses, the SIA reinvestment plan, allowing higher building densities in mixed use or R3 districts, the 2025 goals in the affordable housing plan, real estate tax abatements for eligible homeowners, and affordable dwelling unit ordinances.

Yes, so

Some things are easy to implement.

Some things are a little bit more difficult to implement.

And for all of these policy options or mechanisms, we provide greater detail of each one of these in our report.

But for purposes of today, we just talked about what type of options were even available so you could get an idea.

Again, these are short-term policy recommendations, and these are the longer-term policy recommendations.

So with that, that concludes the brief presentation.

Like I said, there's a larger, very large report, actually, with a lot of really good exhibits and attachments to it with our findings, which you can get online.

And I'd be happy to take questions if you have any.

It goes, that was just right.

Dr. Michael Kochis

Thank you.

I don't know what you're thinking.

I don't know what to say.

D.C.

Music playing

🎵

I don't know.

Fifeville,

I don't know.

I'm

Fifeville

I remind my colleagues this time is not for statements, but for questions to our expert here.

and they'll all be coming from up here.

One of my concerns is on these housing issues and public policy initiatives

How does this fit in with LEAP?

Or maybe Kathy McHugh can help me on that.

Yes, sir.

Those are nonprofits that work with the city.

They're partners with the city.

We do fund them through the housing fund.

And the units that they end up investing our funds in and they become supported affordable units, they are tracked in our database.

So they're reflected in our goal.

This specific study was looking more kind of big picture at the city, not specifically so much

I hope that answers your question.

Well, sort of.

I just wanted to get a general idea of where everything fit together, and the last question would be, if I can remember, I might have to come back to it.

So it was just a general picture of where all these policy initiatives, how they work for the community, who they work for.

It was the emphasis on units.

And so one of the things I would just add for your consideration in this regard, whether it's a program or a nonprofit that you're working with or a policy or zoning, is to particularly define the class of people who might qualify for workforce or affordable housing.

So you may be in a

A jurisdiction in your city may not have inclusion right now for a policeman, a fireman, or a teacher.

In some cases, workforce housing is specifically defined as a certain class.

So it may be a certain economic class.

No, when it comes to workforce housing, well economic in that it's typically a category of those people, maybe with state employees, county employees, city's employees, it could be firemen, policemen, teachers like you mentioned, it could be constitutional defenders.

you would have to set the definitions of the class of category of people that you are trying to help or provide assistance for via workforce or affordable housing.

Thank you.

Sure.

So, first of all, I think your presentation was phenomenal.

You and Mr. Nacute have been doing a great job, especially in terms of keeping us up to speed as to where we are and where we may potentially be going.

So one of the questions that I had was in regards to density.

Now, if we are essentially landlocked and there is not a lot of space for us to build housing, or i.e.

and the City Council.

Correctly say density up is one option.

Density out, of course, is another option.

You may have large lots that may want to be subdivided and provide for smaller units, courtyard housing, townhouses, small cottage type units.

There are trends in small housing down to 600 square feet for a house.

So density out is certainly an option.

You have property that may be underutilized in the city or ripe for redevelopment.

It may not be the highest and best use.

There are trends in certain type of businesses or industry which may be shrinking or leaving the community and then those areas could be targeted for more infill housing even at the same zoning units you have which wouldn't necessarily

at density but you would just get back to people like Councilman Fenwick mentioned and then you could look at providing for mixed use in a sense going up but above commercial uses in which case you're really sort of doing a double duty on parcels that contain both commercial and housing.

Okay, so especially when I think about how we move up and you know we can address the elephant in the room specifically when we're talking about housing

a lot of people are afraid of gentrification or just essentially what we've heard in the public comments a lot of people thinking that we may be building housing or when we do build new housing it's only for kind of that higher tier 120% as you alluded to in your presentation so how do we build housing for those who may be on the other end of that spectrum who currently don't or they have very few options in regards to where they can live in the city of Charlottesville how do we keep them from

That's a great question because it's such an important question.

And I would just point out that the opposite of gentrification in my opinion is planning.

So gentrification is when people go and decide to build in a lower income neighborhood that does not have political strength to prevent it.

and it happens so quickly, planning has to catch up.

Unlike what's happening here in the city with the housing department, you're taking good long-term steps at planning your housing.

So the kind of housing that would go into the places that you would either target through the Office of Housing, or then take advantage of the policies, wouldn't be gentrified, that would be revitalization.

At our last council meeting, we had a report sort of on the state of our affordable housing fund and kind of our target of 15% affordability, looking at supported affordable, which is largely that under 50 to 80.

And we've been having a hard time making progress.

And part of it is because we've gained 11% in population apparently in the past five years.

And so we've just got more housing.

And so the percentage has not risen like we had hoped.

And so it seems like our choice at this point is what I'm hoping we choose, which is to increase our efforts in ways that meet our goal, or the other is to revisit our goal.

But I am getting to a question.

But my question is that, given your charts here, I'm seeing them with the very low supply high demand for under 50%.

at AMI, so for folks at the very bottom end of the economic ladder, and then low for the high end.

It seems that the private sector, having read your report, is probably going to leap into trying to fill that high-end demand.

So it's an admirable goal.

to try and have 15% of your housing satisfy affordable housing needs.

We in our scope have never been asked to look at that benchmark and determine whether or not that's an adequate benchmark or not.

I think it's a great benchmark.

I think if anything, it probably lends credence to the goals of the Office of Housing's desire and the city's desire to build more affordable housing

and to provide housing even at a higher price point because those people can afford it will then release the supply of housing that is right now tightening the supply for people in that 80 to 50% AMI ban.

And then once those people have a little bit more breathing room, it will help those people in the 50% and less AMI

to find, that would be an existing if you didn't build anything else except higher end housing.

However, by having a target goal of providing affordable housing or workforce housing equal to 15%, you're still doing great things at both ends, which as you recall, our report showed there's really a bar belt.

It's both ends that are under supplied.

So to continue meeting the goal, even as your population grows, maybe it is or becomes lofty,

but it's still great to know you're trying to provide all that affordable housing.

What I'm asking, I guess, because I hear that and that's an important half of my question, but the other half is that do you think that we can sort of count on the private sector to be dealing with that 80 and up housing

So I'd like to see a mix among both parties separately and together.

It would be great if some of the higher-end housing also included housing for workforce or affordable.

That's your choice, obviously, but you can provide density or unit bonuses to private

I guess what I'm asking is absolutely, and that's part of one of the strategies that I'm interested in looking at for our 15%.

I'm just saying without supports, our

I think they might.

There's always a market for developers to work on affordable housing.

The incentives sometimes have to be there.

The infrastructure has to be there, both physical and political.

And there may sometimes have to be subsidy.

I think you've

We've answered a lot of them in your presentation, so thank you very much.

But I do want to really make sure I understand this idea of releasing supply.

So when, in one of your slides, I believe it was slide seven, you were talking about how you've got the need for the more affluent empty nester, wanting to vacate their property

and still live in the city.

It could.

It could.

It could be, and again, I don't know which houses we're actually talking about and which neighborhoods and sections of town, but it's a blend.

And I guess what I've also heard, though, is that because a lot of that older housing stock needs a lot of work, that that's also what makes it so attractive to families, working households, to try to find more house, newer house in the hinterlands.

So if we had incentives that helped assist with renovations, and we do have that already, but I'm not sure how well we promote it.

It absolutely could.

Again, this is a very desirable city.

It's a city with a good quality of life, both for business and people who live here.

And it has attractive neighborhoods that are walkable and close to downtown, which is a very attractive thing for a lot of people today.

So it's not just a home.

It's sort of the greater neighborhood outside the four walls that people enjoy as well.

So moving down further in your presentation, it was in slide 13.

You talked about the 2010, the ratios of home ownership to renters.

And we had from another report from the 2010 census indicate that home ownership rate in 2010 was 38 percent, and that was down from 48 percent in 1970.

Your current findings, however, indicate that we've gotten back to the 1970 home ownership rate of around 47%.

And that was, I guess, over the last five years, which is when we had that 11% increase.

So my question is, is there a desired target ratio of home ownership?

So the answer is no.

And so this goes for many different land uses.

So if you are a city and you want to know what the exact ratio of hotels or hotel rooms are, there's Las Vegas that throws everything off.

If you're a corporate office community,

the number of office spaces is inconsistent with office averages.

If you are a community that's a bedroom community, you're gonna have a lopsided percentage of home ownership.

There's no one real standard, and it all depends.

You happen to have a great college, so you have higher renters, you happen to have people who clearly love the community and don't wanna move, so you have a much older population who owns here.

It's all very, very different.

And you're saying that's just a nature of our community.

Yeah.

And finally, and it's related to the last few slides where you did give us a summary of short-term and long-term policy recommendations, are they currently

So that's a really good question.

They are ranked in groups by what was easy to do and more difficult to do.

and what was easy

Forseeable or unforeseeable consequences could be to one of the policies.

So those are not necessarily ranked because we don't understand the political makeup of the community.

We're just really, it's our position to be aware of the political makeup.

Good.

Yeah.

Good.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, yes.

I'd actually like to ask that we

There were a lot of policy recommendations here and I think that we're certainly not going to decide on any of them tonight, but we do have a housing advisory council committee that actually got this report about six weeks ago or so.

Councilor Galvin and I both got to hear it twice, which was nice.

But what I would like to suggest is that we send this report back to the HAC and to staff to make recommendations and put these policies

I'd like to make such a motion.

Ms. Rice, would you mind phrasing that in a motion?

You have a second?

Second.

I have one discussion point, Mayor Signer.

There seemed to be some concern in the public about a focus on workforce housing.

However, I don't see a concern for workforce housing as being in lieu of the goal for 15% structured supported housing.

I would like to say that we need a target

or Workforce Housing, but not in lieu of the 15%.

I accept that.

So you're okay with that?

I am.

No amendment.

Great.

Perfect.

Any other comments or questions, clarifications?

Okay.

I think we're ready for a vote.

That's right.

All in favor?

Thank you so much for your help.

Thank you very much.

Appreciate the time.

Presenters, we are now on to item number five, BAR Appeal, 1600 Grady Avenue, Preston Court Apartments.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor.

I'm Mary Jo Scala, Preservation and Design Planner for the city, and I also staff the Board of Architectural Review.

The format we follow when a BAR decision has been appealed to Council is first I will summarize the staff report and then

The applicant will make their presentation at the BAR.

Preston Court Limited was represented by the general partner, Lynn Hall Ward.

I did see Barbara Lucas in the audience tonight.

She is the facilities manager for Preston Court Apartments.

And then following the applicant's presentation, the chair of the BAR, Melanie Miller, will give the BAR's perspective on the case.

So I would like to say for the benefit of the public who may not be familiar with how the BAR operates, the BAR is a nine member board appointed by city council and the members are comprised of two licensed architects, one landscape architect, two historians, one liaison from the planning commission,

and then two business owners or owners of commercial property within a design control district and then one resident or owner of residential property in a design control district.

So those are the nine members that make up the BAR.

BAR reviews over 100 applications a year in the city's local historic districts that are regulated and appeals are rare.

We get about one a year average.

So the case before you right now is 1600 Grady Avenue.

This is a colonial revival building built in 1928.

It was designed by Stanislaw Mikulski, who is a fairly well-known local architect.

It's listed individually on National Register and is a contributing property in the Venable Neighborhood Architectural Design Control District, or ADC district.

I would say the building is quite wonderful and the surrounding landscape, which consists of nine large trees on their property, contributes to the character of the historic property.

And I would note there are five additional magnolia trees.

They're in the city right away on Grady Avenue, just to make that clear.

There was a good map in your attachments that shows the property with the tree locations.

I don't know if you have that before you, but that's very helpful.

The two trees in question tonight are this ash tree right here,

and a magnolia right here.

So the applicant is appealing the BAR's December 2015 decision that denied their removal of an ash tree and a magnolia tree.

This sounds like a simple thing but actually

I would like to just briefly list this chronology which has occurred since 2012.

This has been a recurring application.

In 2012, they applied to remove six trees, three poplars, three magnolias.

The BAR deferred that for more information.

Later, they allowed administrative approval of removal of one poplar because the applicant was actually doing waterproofing on the foundation and felt that that was absolutely necessary.

A year later they came back and asked for immediate removal of an ash tree.

And the BAR decided it was not an emergency situation.

They told the applicant to go back and make a regular application, that it wasn't something they could do without an application.

Later that year they reapplied for removal of six trees, including the ash tree, the two remaining poplars, three magnolias.

The BAR actually said they were willing to consider removal of four of the trees,

but they wanted a plan to show landscaping and grading before they allowed it.

And then in 2014, nothing happened.

2014, the applicant came back, asked to remove the ash and the magnolia.

That was denied because they did not submit a plan.

And then just last December, they again asked for removal of the ash and magnolia.

It was denied and this time the applicant appealed.

So that's where we are now.

The BAR has consistently asked for more information, namely a grading plan and a landscape plan and the reason for that is in 2012 when they first came before the BAR, they said they wanted to remove the trees and the reason was they wanted to re-grade this, it's a grassy area that surrounds the building and they wanted to re-grade it so that it would have positive drainage from the building down to the street, to the sidewalk.

and you know that seems logical, it seems to make sense.

They also talked about possibly installing drainage that might run to the street in terms of like a pipe with drainage or they might want to connect to the city storm drain.

There is a storm drain in Preston Court on the east side of the building only.

So the BAER was trying to help the applicant and they were trying to find a solution but they felt they needed assurance that if they allowed them to remove these large trees that in fact that water infiltration problem would be solved.

There was also debate about if they did allow them to remove the trees what landscaping would then replace the existing trees, what would be appropriate.

And also they wanted a plan to protect the trees that were remaining because

They learned that the Poplars and the Magnolias had been topped by the property owner.

The BAR generally felt their landscaping had not been well cared for, so that was a real concern.

This was in 2012 or more recently?

The topping?

I don't know when that occurred.

I went to my source, which is Street View, and it looked like it was done between 2008 and 2012, possibly, but I don't know that for sure.

It just looks like a significant difference in the amount of landscaping.

In terms of public input, we did receive three letters since the staff report was written in support of the BAR,

including the tree commission wrote a letter.

And staff recommendation in 2013 the BAR did express a willingness to remove the ash and the magnolia that they're now requesting to remove if grading and landscaping were addressed.

So that's my recommendation is to allow removal of those two trees but first to require a professionally prepared grading and landscape plan to be approved by the BAR.

There are other alternatives.

I'm recommending that one because I think having the BAR input allows better protection of the building and the site.

The second alternative would be just to uphold the BAR position, to allow them to remove, to not allow them to remove the trees and just leave it at that.

If they wanted to do anything more, they'd have to go back and reapply.

The third alternative would be to allow the removal without further BAR review, but I think at a minimum they would need a site plan to be submitted.

Because our zoning ordinance requires if you remove a tree that's over 15 inches caliper, a site plan is required.

And under the site plan, then the planner could require

the tree canopy requirement and the street tree requirement under that.

I spoke to the engineer today that reviews plans in that area and he said if he thought that if they just did the grading of the site and didn't propose any new piping that he wasn't sure that the city could actually as part of the site plan review that because it was less than 6,000 square feet.

He said if they did propose any type of piping into the storm drainage system, then he could ask them to show that on the site plan.

So if you do that third alternative, which does not involve the BAR but just goes to site plan approval, I don't think you're getting as much assurance that the site would be protected.

I just tried to figure that out, and it's complicated because it's an existing building.

So that's the end of my presentation.

My recommendation is to uphold the BAR's decision, or not to uphold it, but to allow the removal of those two trees that the BAR had previously said would be okay, but as a condition that they bring in a landscape plan and a grading plan.

I think that's important to protect the site.

So one question that I have just after reviewing it in the packet and hearing your presentation.

As I can understand, I somewhat sympathize with the applicant because initially it seems like they were told that it was okay and they were proceeding as if it was okay and then

It comes back that two trees aren't OK.

So I wanted to know, how did the BAR vote?

Was it a unanimous?

Well, they always said it might be OK to remove the trees, but they always condition it that they said, but we need more information.

So I don't think they ever said, fine, and then changed it.

It was just that every time they came, you know, they asked for something a little bit different and they presented a little bit different information, but it was never what the BER really wanted to see, you know, and so it's hard to explain it without, and I didn't, you know, want to list out this whole thing, just try to focus on this current request, but it's hard to do that.

I can go back and look at the votes when I sit down if you want me to do that.

So your first recommendation, because it seems like that's kind of what the planning commission, or the BAR did, is saying, well, kind of yes in principle, but you have to bring this thing in.

And time after time after time, they haven't brought it in.

Right.

I think in the end, well, the chair can speak to that better in terms of their intent.

I think they just got frustrated.

I'm a little frustrated.

They kept saying, you know, over and over.

I don't think that's the solution to the problem, though.

And, you know, sometimes trees, I mean, these trees have been topped, a lot of them, and

I'm not sure that just leaving, yeah, it's not a good practice.

The city never does it, for example, and I don't think it's ever recommended.

It's an attempt to stop the growth of the tree, I believe.

So the very unsightly.

And is there any assurance that if they, I mean, from the wording that you have here, if we did that, your first recommendation,

Well no, I said the grading and landscape plan would have to be approved by the BAR.

So they have to go back to the BAR anyway?

They would, yeah.

I don't think it would make a lot of difference.

I think if the City Council said to the applicant that they need this plan, I think that might go a long way.

And we're going to hear from the VAR.

Okay, real quick.

So this is confusing.

I was at the meeting where this was discussed and the same sort of confusion arose and we will be hearing from BAR.

Oh, okay.

So while the mayor is occupied, the vice mayor can give me permission to proceed?

OK, sorry.

And this is procedural because I want to better understand what we mean, precisely what we mean when we're asking for plans.

The BAR is requiring a site plan for the removal of a tree in order to get in order to issue a demolition permit.

Yet that authority is not specifically

identified in sections 34.271 or 276 or 277.

And I'm going on to the next point.

It also reads in 34.277 that a certificate of appropriateness may be waived if a building code official determines that there is a hazardous condition.

And has a building code official even ever looked at this property?

Because there are two, there's an engineering report

And then there's also a report by a local tree specialist that says the roots of these trees are impacting the foundation and are causing a lot of water seepage into the basement.

There's also an understanding that the roots

of the Asher going into the sewer line.

So I just want to keep in mind that there is a real danger to this historic building, and I don't know if there's ever been a building official that looked at it, and I'm not sure if there's a specific authority for the BAR to request a site plan.

And then when I read the zoning ordinance,

It is the Planning Commission that has the authority to review site plans.

And that is where the condition of no demolition of a caliber 15 inches or more is identified.

It's in the zoning ordinance.

So it's not really the BAR that's supposed to be looking at site plans and the council has a provision in the zoning ordinance under 34-801 that allows the neighborhood development director to administratively review these plans if the council so chooses.

So I'm seeing some kind of a missing link as to why the BAR is the entity that is authorizing or requiring a site plan

Well, when you say site plan, that's a technical term.

I think the BAR is certainly charged with reviewing the removal of large significant landscaping in a historic district.

That's within their purview to do that.

I think they were trying to get enough information to make an intelligent decision.

I don't think they were specifically asking for a site plan per se under the zoning ordinance.

They wanted a grading plan that showed enough information to tell that they wanted to know that the applicant had a specific plan to proceed.

They wanted to know what that was rather than just kind of leaving it up in the air.

So I think that was, I think that's their, I think they had the ability to do that.

And that's under, because I didn't see, that's under section

277?

I mean, because it indicates that the plantings must be historic and in keeping with the neighborhood context and the historic character of the facility.

When you talked about the site plan on the 15-inch caliper trees, you were talking about option three, right?

That's right.

The BAR's authority extends to the property, not just the building.

Do you mind if I, do you mind if, because you're paraphrasing.

Mr. Brown, are you comfortable?

I'm not sure.

Was that conversation with me?

Mm-hmm.

And but what you did say was that unless the property was zoned, which required a site plan, that they would not have the ability to require that the applicant replace the landscaping.

But in this case, it actually is R3.

So I think that

You know, maybe the ability to require a site plan is a little bit muddled at this point with the BAR's ability to require whatever.

Just for clarification.

The decision of the BAR that is on appeal to this council simply denied removal of the trees, is that correct?

That's correct.

I'm looking at, I think it may be an email from you dated December 22nd, and in terms of the vote that Counselor Bellamy asked about, not moved to find that the BAR

Denies to promote proposed removal of two trees, ash and magnolia, as submitted.

Deloach seconded, motion passes 8-0.

So I think that's the decision.

That's what's on appeal before you.

OK, and we're going to have time also, because we're hearing from Melanie Miller and from the applicant.

OK, so.

That'd be great.

Okay.

I'm Barbara Lucas, Facilities Manager, Preston Court Apartments, 1600 Grady Avenue.

Welcome.

This is a picture of the Magnolia.

This is what happened to one of our partners because of the ash tree.

When I started at Preston Court, the building on the inside needed an enormous amount of work.

And most of our efforts, my efforts and the fellows who worked with me, was devoted to rebuilding the inside.

So then I turned to the outside.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I have to walk right, talk right with Kate.

Thank you.

And I, there were two trees.

You've seen the ash.

No, you haven't seen the ash.

This is one more, and then you guys, these are all the places where Ruder Ruder indicated that the ash had broken our main sewer line.

and was just a very happy tree and just tremendously happy.

I was told there was an outfit called BAR in town and that this is something we would have to reckon with because we're a National Historic Structure and a Virginia Landmark.

But the main thing I was interested in was getting these two trees, the ash and the dying magnolias, we refer to it, down.

The magnolia, not simply because of its cosmetic nature, but because it sits at a juxtaposition where tenants, graduate students, come out, turn the corner and start walking.

So it's a health and safety issue as it drops its limbs because it's dying.

I was concerned about the ash tree because one of my projects was to see what happened to an apartment that had never been taken care of and they had just kept sort of, because there was an elderly lady there, putting the thing to one side.

Finally she left and I was able to get in there.

and I saw all the damage the ash was doing.

And I called Roto-Rooter and I said, would you please come take photos, etc.

We went to bar requesting two trees to come down.

That was enough.

We are not a deep pocket outfit.

We have 15 partners.

All the monies have to be in to the partners at the end of every calendar year.

so that it takes a while to accumulate monies to do outside work and things like that along with the regular tenant problems.