Board of Supervisors Meeting   7/12/2022

We will now call this meeting to order.

All right, moving into the public comment section.

At this time, we will have public comments.

I had some folks who have signed up.

There will still be an opportunity for those who forgot to sign up to speak as well.

You are given three minutes to speak.

Please state your name and address for the record.

If you are with a group, you are allowed five minutes to speak.

Please identify the group that you wish to speak for.

At this time, we will have Mr. Reed, are you going to be timekeeper today?

All right.

So at this time, we will have Rebecca Allen.

So my name is Rebecca Allen.

I reside at 114 Grimes Drive, Madison Heights, Virginia.

However, I am a Nelson County Public School employee

So good afternoon members of the board.

I am Rebecca Allen and I am the president of the Nelson County Education Association.

I am appealing to the board to reevaluate your position regarding the Nelson County Schools budget and to approve an increase in the local contributions by reinstating the additional $1 million in accordance with the vote on June 14th.

NCPS is grateful for the board's approval of an increase in funding this year and the allocation is being utilized to address

known salary issues within our division.

I know that this is an unprecedented request, but our school division is navigating unprecedented times as a result of the pandemic and now inflation.

Before I elaborate, I want to publicly thank Mr. Reed for the time he spends each month attending NCPS school board meetings.

Through his attendance, he gains firsthand knowledge regarding the needs and issues our school board faces when making decisions both in operations and financially.

He also has taken the time to meet with me personally to gain insight about the division from my perspective as a teacher, NCEA officer, and parent.

NCPS is the largest employer in the county and as such comes with its own set of responsibilities.

Some of these responsibilities are just what comes with being a rural school division.

Others are the result of trying to be the best school system we can offer the children of Nelson.

As of the end of June, the division employs a staff of 293, with 58% of those employees residing within county limits.

This monumental monetary request primarily impacts our own residents.

It is important for you to know that 86% of our support staff live within Nelson.

The bulk of these additional funds would go to an increasing the minimum hourly wage to make it competitive with what surrounding businesses are offering within the county and beyond its borders.

NCEA believes that this not only is something that our instructional assistants, custodians, cafeteria workers, office staff and bus drivers deserve, but something that is essential to the success of our students and schools.

By implication, the additional money these residents earn will likely be spent here continually fueling the Nelson economy.

Increased wages for our hourly workers will make an impactful difference in the lives of these staff members, easing the burden of today's economy.

By voting for this increase in funding, you are showing these employees that you recognize their values as key components of our community and school division, which, without, we could not operate.

If the school system can't offer competitive wages, then we can't expect to attract or retain the best employees.

Our children deserve to be cared for by the best as they are our community's most important resource and represent its future.

By not supporting this additional funding, the board is communicating that the stated purpose of these funds is not a priority.

A vote to provide additional funding is an investment in the future of Nelson County.

Regina Campbell is one of the three Doron Hollow Road Roselands.

I am a Nelson native.

I attended and graduated from Nelson County Public Schools.

I am currently employed as an instructional assistant for our school division and have been since 2015.

I also have two children that attend Nelson schools.

I'd like to start by expressing my thankfulness for the $1.5 million that you all did to the school's budget.

That is truly a historic number, so thank you.

Although historic, I think we can all agree these are also historic and unprecedented times.

The recent actions by the board regarding the additional school funding were disappointing to hear, but those questionable actions have turned open eyes and gained the attention of so many Nelson residents and employees.

Those numbers represent the people and families of Nelson, including myself and so many others in this room today.

And your actions can and do impact our lives in both positive and negative ways.

As I become more informed, I ask the board to take the time to re-evaluate your priorities.

I find it irresponsible and inconsiderate for current departments and employees

For the board to continue.

to push forward with 20-year plans by purchasing land, contracting developmental studies, and reserving millions in bank accounts for future collateral while so many departments are experiencing financial hardships and continually requesting additional funding.

Our county departments deserve full funding, and our employees deserve both sufficient and competitive pay.

Goals and plans are great, and I don't disagree with Nelson-Meadon to offer a little more in the future.

I do, however, disagree with pushing forward

with future hopes and dreams while neglecting current funding needs.

If you can't adequately fund what you already have, how do you plan to fund and maintain future expansion projects too?

Hi, Amy Woodson.

I reside at 500 Long Cabin Trail, Lovingston.

So my name is Amy Woodson.

I was born and raised in Nelson County.

As a parent of three children and an active volunteer in my children's school, I can tell you firsthand how important teachers, teacher aides, substitutes, support staff, janitors, cafeteria workers, and bus drivers are to my children.

These individuals go above and beyond the education and overall well-being of our children and treat them like their own.

These individuals are not only county staff, but they are also our neighbors, friends, and family.

These individuals create relationships with their children while educating them.

Given the importance of support staff to the success of the nation's schools, teacher and support staff pay today is shamefully low in many parts of the country.

The days of patting them on the back and telling them great job is over.

If we want to provide continuity and consistency for our children, then we need to provide monetary compensation.

I was elated to hear the initial funding that our schools would see and disgusted and frustrated to hear that what was voted on and approved was withdrawn.

What a slap in the face to these important individuals who support, educate, transport and nurture our children.

Those who made the decision to recant the approval should be held accountable.

When are we as a community and a nation going to start realizing the importance of these individuals who are putting their children above all else?

Due to the stresses of COVID and school shootings, it seems counties are losing school staff at an all time high.

So for the ones who continue to stay as hard as it may be, when do we start showing them how much they are valued?

My name is Michael Huebner, 1146 8 Isle Road in Plauber, and I'm speaking as the co-founder of City Elders, a group of about 40.

Mr. Chairman, I'm here representing the City Elders to speak about the incident on June 28th following the school board meeting involving Mr. Cesar Perkins, the school board member representing the south district, and Mr. Jesse Rutherford, the chairman of the board of supervisors representing the east district.

We've all read the article on July 1, 2022 of the news advance written by Ms. Emma Martin.

While we know that news articles are not a substitute for an investigation and official statements, the scene that was portrayed was disturbing.

We recognize that sometimes passionately representing those that have been elected to represent can erupt in intense disagreements.

We believe that when that happens, everyone directly involved, along with the community at large, should deserve the protection, the right to protection of our law enforcement officials in a non-biased manner, both at the time of the incident and subsequent reports, both internal and external to the department.

We are waiting to read the official report filed by the Nelson County Sheriff's Office.

We have filed a FOIA request and are awaiting that response.

Thank you for your time.

I reside 513 Sunset Drive in Amherst, Virginia and I'm here representing the Jefferson Council.

The Jefferson Council is a group of University of Virginia alumni and

and a number of other concerned citizens.

And I recognize that this particular issue is not on the agenda today for the Board of Supervisors, but I did want to make a public comment in opposition to the change of the name of the Jefferson Madison Regional Library.

In today's headlines, it seems as though the change of the name of the library is a minor event and merits no attention, but we cannot lose sight of the importance that Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison represent for this country, our community, and all of the freedoms that we enjoy today.

They formed the foundation for, perhaps not reaching it in their lifetimes, but they formed the foundation for equality and justice for all that we still strive to reach today and to remove their names from a public institution such as the regional library.

Just, it was reprehensible.

I implore and encourage

Thank you for your time.

Thank you, sir.

Moving on, we do not have anyone else who has signed up for the public comments.

Is there anyone else in depth?

Feel free.

Oh, did you want to speak?

Yeah, yeah, come on up.

You got three minutes.

Robert Dubish, 334 Rainbow Ridge, Fobbe, and I say bravo to that man.

I've been hearing stories about the 20-year plan for Nelson County, and I think we should have a one-month plan to figure out what exactly was the real story behind the COVID story.

because the COVID story was very deceptive and if anybody researches it, as many in this country have, there was actual criminality behind that.

Deception, lies, and speaking of school systems and children, nobody has its mask or children ever.

That was completely uncalled for.

The reaction to the COVID story was worse than the COVID.

So I think we should have a one-month plan for the board to find all the information that's available to many people, which I've seen.

There are books written.

There are lectures being given around the country.

The facts are coming out, like it or not, and we've been duped.

There's a lot to this story that is criminal.

That's all I have to say.

Frank?

Thank you sir.

Anyone else wish to speak at this time?

Okay, hearing none, we close the public comments.

Moving on to the consent agenda, we have minutes for approval budget amendment BA 250 commission and tax refund.

Barring any questions in reference to these, is there a motion to approve it as presented?

So we have a motion from Mr. Parter, you have support.

unless there's a question.

We have a second from Mr. Reed.

Any discussion?

Hearing no discussion, we'll do a vote by acclamation.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any objections or abstentions?

Hearing none, motion passes unanimously.

Moving on to presentations.

Firefly Fiber Broadband is not safe.

We have Mr. Creek Moore and Mr. Wood.

And first and foremost, we'd like to congratulate Mr. Creek Moore for his child.

Yeah, come on up.

And as I was jokingly said in the Broadway Authority, he's so committed to the Firefly Project, he named his child Firefly.

I think Jesse would have something to say.

But thank you all for coming today.

We appreciate it.

I'm going to run through this real quickly.

I brought the end up product because he

You may know more than video straight on any number of things.

So, several board members saw this earlier, so I'm going to step through this fairly quickly.

This is a map of the county with the yellow areas showing the areas that have ADP electric service where we are doing work of map year end to complete the build out of the ADP area.

The blue area is all either Central Virginia Electric Service area or in areas where we get CARES funding and it moved outside the CBC area to provide broadband service.

And there are a couple of large areas in the top that I'll talk about on this next map, which is what the county will look like at the end of the year.

So the blue area at the end of the year, this represents all the areas that will have fiber,

connected, gigabit speed broadband service available in the blue.

The orange up at the top and there's a few upper end Afton along 250 there and over at Love there's about 30.

We'll finish that up next year as part of our overall rise processes.

There's some different ways you have to build to get into those, but the blue area will cover about 10,500

Out of the 10,000, I'm gonna say 10,550 out of 10,700 locations of businesses, homes, cabins, places that could take broadband service.

This map I think is important because it's a real testament to what the county has done going back to 2009 or 10 when they first started the very first broadband project.

They had a lot of foresight to start building fiber.

The level of fiber connectivity in Nelson County will be one of the highest in the state and nation.

If you look at some of the largest counties and wealthiest counties in the state and think of Fairfax and Loudoun and Chesterfield, they have a lot of cable that they depend on, which doesn't give you the speeds to skip this service where I've been.

So in terms of the fastest internet and it's very competitive prices this is where we're going to be a year in as far as the connections uh being available and then we'll talk a little bit more about the details how we've still got a what we got to do to get there um we will still be connecting people who want service into the first part of next year but we should have the backbones available throughout the county if everything goes well.

Here's where we are today.

We've passed just under 8900.

We have a service available today of about $32 billion already in investment.

When we started our CBEC project in 2018, I came to you and told you that we would be putting $25 million worth of investment in the county.

That includes some areas outside of the CBT area, and we still have more to do.

We have 45 and 85 total connections in the county right now, internet and phone.

Nelson County has the highest number of passings from the fireflies and of connections from the fireflies out of the 13 counties in Greenville.

Barbara Hutt, last week this is the final piece of the Central Virginia Electric Co-op Service Area.

Barbara Hutt was set at Nancy's Mill last week and electricity was connected to it today.

We are actually about 75% complete on one part of the build out up there.

We're about 50% complete on the entire Nancy's Mill CVC area.

We still have some work to do to finish that up.

We wanted to finish it up by July.

We have 40 poles that we still have to either change out or do work on to make room for fiber.

Our make-ready contractors

We're a slow down at the end of the process.

We had some issues getting the contractor and then the subcontractor to stay on the job and get it complete.

So they're back and doing work now.

And we're down to about 40 poles to change up.

Then we'll get the fiber across all of that area.

After that, in August, we'll be doing splicing.

And then bond connections in that area will start after that in CDC.

So think September time.

Now let's get outside the CBC area.

This is ADP down in Arrington.

We put up all the fiber there.

We have a railroad crossing that keeps us right now from being connected back to the lit side of the network on the other side of the track.

So we've got the fiber up.

We had to put in a temporary light source here to kind of fake delay the light so that we could do splicing and get it connected.

And that's all ready to go.

We just need to get this crossing at the river.

We've had to permit for three months, but they have been able to schedule their flaggers for the couple of hours it would take us to put up our top.

We're continuing to work with the railroad.

We have the same issue at Shipman.

The permit, we haven't had it long there, but it takes them a while.

We pay all the permit fees.

There's nothing that's holding us up other than them deciding it fits in their schedule.

In Shipman,

We've completed all of the fiber construction all the way down to where you come into the Central Virginia area on 156.

Again, the road we're crossing up here is keeping us from getting connected to the fiber on the other side and the light to be able to light this up.

They're about 75% or more complete on the splicing here.

Once the splicing is complete, really the only thing that we need to be able to connect people is that railroad crossing.

So this one,

The permit took a while to get.

I think we may have that last month.

We're still waiting on that.

But then we've still got to get a crossing to get to there.

Then at Schuyler, we have finished makery construction.

AEP has been a little behind on the makery construction.

There's actually a lot behind.

We've been pushing to try to catch it up.

We asked for all of these three areas to be complete last December.

Parts of this area were sent over to us in March and April.

Schuyler was just finished about 80 feet last week.

So we'll start putting fiber up soon.

As soon as we finish the CBC fiber build, we'll put them right over and build that in the office.

In these three areas,

The Arrington, Shipman, and Schuyler area, we have about 400 people signed up for service today.

We have about 630 homes and businesses in the past.

That's 400 are signed up for service.

So there's a significant need.

And we need to get the drillery crossings and then get AP to move quicker so we can get to these services.

Here's a couple other areas where AP is working today.

They have three crews working on their main readiness.

We've asked them for it.

We think they need eight.

And they're having a hard time finding the resources and assigning them out of American Electric Power.

So any support you can give us on that would be helpful.

They have finished the Buffalo-Lines-Harewood area.

That is complete.

Here's Claypool, Cow Hollow area off 151.

They're doing some work in there.

They've done some work down here from Lovington down towards Shipman.

and then they've done some work coming out of Shipman down in Woodbridge down in Mariah D. Mill.

They're making good progress down in there.

So those areas that we know they're active in, here's some other areas that we've turned over to them where they haven't started work.

Along Roseland Road, Dark Hollow, along Percede Road up around Maxis Mill, Blade Road,

down out of Schuyler.

This is Lake Road West, coming over from Hanelye Road where it ties back into Shipman.

Here's Taylor Street up in Afton, and a little bit of Salem Road, Rockfish Crossing down outside of Schuyler.

All of these, the engineering is complete, and we have written checks.

Right now, Afton has about $600,000 that we've paid him for work.

that they haven't gotten signed yet to be completed.

So the problem is not having it engineered, it's not having the money, it's just getting through the doubt and getting the work done.

So we're encouraging them daily and weekly, calling everybody we can at AP and asking them to send us some help because as soon as they get their work done, we can get our work done.

We asked them last year to finish this work in August.

It's the second week of July.

And you can see that we've got several areas that haven't even been in yet.

So for us to get to that map in blue by the end of the year, we need absolutely everything.

Thanks.

And we fall in, when they turn over in the area to us, we put contractors in and build it out quickly after that.

But we really are dependent on them to make ready work done ahead of time.

So let's just look at what I just told you.

We asked for those first areas to be finished in December.

They finished them after that.

They've been behind a little bit.

This isn't to throw anything under the bus so much as to just let you know where we stand.

That's the only thing holding us up.

And they haven't paid to do the work.

We just needed to get work done.

We created a project

Underneath our fireflyda.com main page, the RISE project.

Under that page, there are links on the logos for every county we work with.

So if you want to know what's going on in Nelson County, you can go to that website and you can find these specific maps and updates on where we are in terms of construction.

Real quickly, we have a town hall scheduled for the 28th of June.

July, I'm sorry, we finished June.

Buffalo-Miles-Harewood Road will be one of the areas that will be in that town hall.

We do virtual town halls, we're used to them as live, but we're back to live soon.

Although the virtual works pretty well because it lets people who can't get there in person also participate.

We do a town hall when we move into an area to start construction just as we started so that people will know what to expect

The service truck being connected to their house, where it'll go.

How we deal with any impediments there, what it looks like, what to expect on the outside of your house, and then what to expect inside your house when you schedule and we come in to put in the router and set up the service.

So it's a question and answer session after a little presentation.

And we'll send that invite to Gary and have Russell and Juan come here if you'd like to sit in on this one, or any of the others if you have.

That's a really quick run through of where we are.

I'll be glad to take any questions.

So on this map, I know you've got some delays with AEP at the moment, but let's say everything works out with AEP.

They get the crews, you get going.

This comes to fruition December 31st of this year.

What's the difference between that map and the residents

in that map being able to stream board meetings and being able to pull up Netflix or whatever.

So when we finish splicing in an area, generally the service extensions will start within 30 to 60 days after that.

So as we finish Massies Mill in September with splicing, we'll start connections either in October or November.

If we can finish splicing in August, we'll start in September or October because part of scheduling in.

Then the next holdup is the number of services you can put in in a week without overloading the 811 marking system.

because a lot of them have underground components and you can only have so many a day there so that limits us somewhat but we get to it as quickly as we can and put it in after that.

I would anticipate by the first quarter of next year we'll have everybody online who

wants to be online in Nelson County.

Our goal is to have at least all the CBC members on this year, and there aren't that many more to go in and finish up.

As of today, we've got those 403 areas I have to talk to you about, and we probably have another well-kept

We're not going to be 2024.

I'll be glad to bring that up.

Thank you, sir.

Nelson County is further ahead of the curve.

One of the items that we had done at the Broadband Authority and of course is expediting internet connection is of course a health, safety, and educational piece for all of us and our children in Nelson County.

One thing that we pushed in the Broadband Authority is to write a letter to ATCO as well as Norfolk Southern and reminding them and also putting pressure on

Any entities that may be regulators, whether that, I don't know if the SEC, Transportation, hopefully Firefly or the CBSI could coordinate with us, it is my suggestion that this board complement that with a similar letter, if not the same, just so that we can put some more pressure on getting AFTO to do the make-ready so that places in Piney River and Montebello and here in

Sounds great that Schuyler's finally getting it because this is an impediment on, you know, people's ability to function and our job, you know, is to, of course, push as hard as we can and this is one mechanism we can't, we have the ability to do as a board is start writing letters to those groups.

Another further suggestion I have is coordinating with Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission

and speaking with our legislative liaison and hopefully writing and drafting a letter with our respective legislators such as Matt Farris, John Abole, and Cree Deeds to also put pressure on both regulatory groups and these corporations so that we can expedite this to be done.

Like I said, our commitment was to get this done this year.

We want to see it get done this year.

And as we had said when we had committed to this getting this done, please let us know what we need to do.

So is the board supportive of doing that?

Absolutely.

All right.

You mentioned the transportation secretary.

We'll coordinate with them with who they might be.

They're regulated at the federal level somewhat, but these railroad crossings have minimal direct oversight.

So I think on top of that, since I know you had mentioned in the prior meeting, railroads are typically more often federally regulated.

We'll go to the congressional side of that as well and see if we can get him to write a complimentary letter and do a constituent inquiry for us.

All right, so what are we doing with that?

Candy, if you could draft something up and we'll meet with Mr. Strong and Mr. Creekmore and we'll get some pressure out for you hopefully in the next week.

Just any of the smaller sections that kind of got missed?

So, I didn't bring the maps up, but we have an area along Jenny's Creek.

We have that little area right at 56 and 151 where it comes together around the substation.

We've got a little area right at Colleen.

There's a few EPCO locations that are north of the health center there on the side of 29 on both sides.

Wilson Hill Road down in Arrington.

Did I miss anything?

Well, thank you.

You covered it well.

Thank you so much.

Great job.

Please give us a prize, and we'll look forward to coordinating with you all and drafting some letters and putting some pressure.

Great to see you, Brad.

Thank you all.

OK, moving on to the TJPC Regional Transit Plan, Lucinda.

Yeah, we're all over the place.

Can you guys hear me okay?

Yes.

So I'm Lucinda Shannon.

I'm with the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission.

I'm a regional planner there.

And I'm here to talk about the Regional Transit Vision Plan.

It's a plan that we've been doing for about a year now.

I'm going to go over the background to give you a little bit of background about the plan, how it was started.

It's a technical assistance grant through the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

and the matching funds are provided by Alumara County and the City of Charlottesville.

They kind of initiated this and came to the TJPDC to manage it because it's a regional study.

And then some of the comments that we got during our first round of engagement included more rural integration into the plan.

We had a stakeholder meeting pretty early on and

So right in our very first steps we engaged a bunch of stakeholders and people were really engaged and wanted to see more outreach to the rural counties and have more involvement with the rural counties.

So we were sure to include them in the plan and the networks as we developed it.

are presenting to all of the Board of Supervisors, which is why I'm here today.

And we've also been doing some focus groups.

I did a focus group in Nelson County with older adults to hear about their needs for transit as well through this.

So I just want to give a little bit more background.

The vision study is kind of like the vision of what we would like to see transit in our region look like and then the next step to that would be how would we fund it and how would we decide how the funds were spent and prioritize the services.

So this vision study is going to say, like, here's what we want transits to look like.

Here's where we want the buses to go.

Here's how we want them to run.

And then the next step would be a transit governance study, which would say this is how we could fund it and implement it.

And that was actually great news.

We had that funded as well through the Department of Rail and Public Transportation.

and again, Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville have been so generous in supporting a 50% matching fund for that study as well as this one.

So that study is going to also include the rural counties and I'll be coming back to you with more on that as we engage consultants and start working on that as well.

We want to make sure that the rural counties are included from the very beginning

and we're planning this for everybody in the entire teaching PTC region.

So our first round of public engagement for this asked the community what they'd like to see for transit in the region and we came up with the three themes of equity, multimodality, and climate change.

And so equity is expanding opportunities for all residents and that the services represent the needs of both the urban and the rural communities.

Again, we really heard from the rural communities that they wanted to be engaged in this.

The next multimodality, the next kind of theme that we heard from the community was to reduce resilience on automobiles.

And then the third was climate change.

to help protect the environment.

We really heard a strong movement of people who were very engaged in reducing the greenhouse gas emissions and using transit to do that.

Transportation in this region is one of the larger sources of greenhouse gases, so it's a good area to address those types of, to reduce greenhouse gases because it's such a large producer.

So we had a three-day kind of workshop with the three transit providers, Kat, John, and the University of the Transit Services.

And we asked them what the network should look like.

If they could go where they wanted to go and when there was no object, how would their routes look like?

And we wanted to, the Regional Transit Partnership is kind of the leader, the committee that's leading this initiative and they wanted to make sure that this vision was something that we could implement and not just kind of like

Something that would be nice but not really have any tangible effects.

So we developed a constrained vision and an unconstrained vision.

So the constrained vision is something that we feel like this region can afford.

And then the unconstrained vision is like, dream big.

What would you love to see if Lydia was no object?

And we developed the network for both of those scenarios.

The constraint vision is based on the system that the Central Virginia Transit Authority uses for raising funds.

So we looked at what they're doing to bring transit funding into their region.

And if we could replicate that system, then we could bring in about $30 million additional for the TJPPC region to implement this transit vision plan.

So that's what we based our constrained mission on, was that budget.

And the governance study, which will be starting in a few months, the next step, will be looking at how that would work for us.

Because we're different than Central Virginia, so how would our local governments

And then the unconstrained vision as I said is just kind of the

Big picture of if we could do anything, what would we do?

And that came out to be about $70 million.

So currently, we spend about $20 million on transit in our region.

And the constrained vision would look at about $30 million.

And the unconstrained vision came up to about $70 million a year.

Some of these slides I just wanted to have in your packet in case you wanted more details.

I'm not going to go into the different types of ordinary transit.

So the constrained vision, and this is a map of the rural areas for the constrained vision and it's really tiny, but on the

Left hand side is the existing services as they are now, and on the right hand side would be the constrained services that we predict that we would like to see happen.

And so that would have more, like Route 7 would operate every 20 minutes.

It would be a lot more frequency for the fixed routes that are in the city.

And then I'm going to skip to the

the rural areas.

So your Lovingston Circulator, currently it runs Monday and Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. and that usually they pick up in the morning and then the person is there in Charlottesville all day and it drops off in the evening.

So it's a really long day for people.

And with the constrained vision, the circulator service would run from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. every day even on Sundays.

which was something that we heard in the focus group was really important to people.

The people who can't drive are often taking this service into Charlottesville for medical services and they get picked up in the morning and then they're at their doctor's office all day until three o'clock or four o'clock in the afternoon when they get picked up to be taken home and it's a really long day for somebody who is not feeling well and you know

It's kind of stuck there.

So this would be, the services would be every 60 minutes.

So yeah, in Nelson County, the service, actually I can go back to the map.

The little brown lines go to all of the different areas.

So in Nelson County, there's a service that goes door to door.

John runs it right now, and so that's every day, and it would take people within the county.

But if you want to go into Charlottesville, you need to take the Lovingston, like from Lovingston into Charlottesville.

Where Nelson is is like halfway between Lynchburg and Charlottesville.

That's a really good question, and I'm going to make a note of that.

Currently, this survey, like this study, goes into Buckingham County.

It doesn't go into Lynchburg, unfortunately.

So you're servicing Lynchburg this time?

No.

A lot of the people who would work in Charlottesville, who live in the southern part of the county, like the Heritage Center, would be a good place for accumulation of the job license to stop there.

Would you consider that also?

Yeah, so where was it?

I think, Skip, to kind of point out where you're going with it.

I don't know what the version of John is for the Lynchburg service area.

I'm sure they have something, but based on the kind of the playing districts, this is kind of more based off of the Charlottesville, Trothless area.

And it's a strange thing because I agree.

Lovingston is 50th, yes.

Yeah, I think that

You know, we need to kind of draw boundaries, like a line of, you know, where the study would cover.

And unfortunately, Lynchburg isn't tall within that area.

But it's a really good point, because you're right.

The other thing that I noticed is that in all of the outlying counties surrounding Charlottesville, you have services in the center of the county, but the farther away you get to the boundaries on the perimeters, the less services there.

And certainly, given the fact that TJPEC is supposed to serve our entire county, it would be good to see service in our locality, in the Arrington area,

Yeah, let me move forward to the other unconstrained map.

So if you look at this map, you can see on the right hand side is the unconstrained version.

And so those blue routes are every 60 minutes and there's like a yellow kind of fuzzy area around kind of the main city.

And those are micro transit areas.

So again, the plan for the rural areas is there would be the circulator service that would be John's door-to-door service for people who need it.

Then there'd be a main route connection from a small, urbanized area into Lake Lovingston, into the city of Charlottesville.

And then there also are some micro transit areas where it's like Uber, except it's run by a public service, so it's cheaper.

And it's regulated.

And that would be where you could use an app on your phone, the computer, or the telephone to schedule a ride.

And the times that we would aim for would be 15 minutes.

The circulator service that you currently have now is probably at least 24 hours to make a reservation.

So those are some of the improvements that you would see if we were able to enact some of these networks.

So again, the fixed route service that would go into Lovingston would be every 60 minutes, seven days a week.

There would be the on-demand transit zones.

And for Nelson County, you can see we tried to do a proximity of transit to residents and transit to jobs.

And because it's a rural area, when it's spread out and there's such low density, it's difficult to have fixed route traditional transit.

It's not really set up for that.

But you can see that the unconstrained version would have an increase of about 5% of people would be able to take transit to their jobs.

Currently, there's no percent of people taking

I mean, there are, but with the consultant kind of system that they set up to measure it, it's not like measurable, unmeasurable or not right now.

So, and it would be fixed route.

So I'm just going to wrap up with telling you what we're doing right now.

This is towards the end of the study and we're presenting to all the rural counties.

We've presented to Albemarle and the City of Charlottesville.

We hosted a public meeting.

Currently today we're doing an event at the Transit Center.

It's kind of like an open house and we want to make sure that we're engaging

People who are riding the buses, so we're out there surveying them today.

We also did several focus groups of people who are, populations who are trans-independent.

We've got an online survey that we're asking everybody to take, and we will be doing some pop-up events at popular bus stops, like Wegman is, a lot of people take the bus to Wegman, so we'll be there a couple of days when the bus arrives to ask people

The survey ends July 22nd, and then we'll write a final report and present it to the Regional Transit Partnership.

Thank you so much.

Of course the conversation of transit is a very big deal in our rural community in Nelson County.

I would easily argue it doesn't just serve one metropolis area or even two, it serves several.

I mean my family, especially my family who lived on the Faubert side of the town, they've all worked at DuPont for many years and they worked over in the valley and so you have really three metropolis areas at Nelson County services.

And one big benefit that you know I always like to point out when it comes to

to our situation relative to other counties is we are serviced by an interstate resource, 29.

A lot of counties do not have that luxury, so mass transit has a lot more opportunity.

You know, of course, you know, I've always thought of the conversation, and I don't think it ever would happen, but it's always a dream of what would a depot look like in Shipman again, you know, as needed a conversation, but, you know, as we look to the future, what does it look like when a community has

Broadband internet, completely connected.

Well, you know what?

Maybe you can have a job in New York City with only five or six hours of transit to there.

That should go to work two days a week or something of that nature.

I don't know.

But as we do look to the future, transit's going to be a very interesting topic and a very big one.

And of course, that all pertains to how we work, how we play, and how we should educate ourselves.

Thank you so much.

And any other questions at this time before we send it?

Moving on to the Virginia Cooperative Extension Report.

We have with us Grace.

Hopefully you guys see you can talk about lantern flies today.

I feel like I haven't seen these since my childhood.

I don't know why we're...

Hi, I am Grace Langer.

I am your Elizabeth agriculture detention agent, as provided by Virginia Tech and the state.

I focus primarily on horticulture and invasive species management.

This is the report that I included in the program for the board.

I have a much longer report here with me, but not everybody wants to see that.

So I wanted to bring into your attention a few programs that I've done since I started in January.

First and foremost, the picture on the left was taken at Saunders Brothers during a regional interview for the Swisher Sunbelt Farmer of the Year.

I nominated Robert Saunders as a consensus from his brothers at the operation for a national agricultural award.

Robert won at the Virginia level and is going on to represent Virginia's

and Nelson County on the national stage for Farmer of the Year.

It's a really big deal in the agricultural world and we're very proud of him.

His national tour is scheduled for early August and he will go to poultry for an ag expo in October to get results.

But to win at the regional level, it's very competitive and it's a very big deal anyway, so we're very proud of him.

I do really enjoy the nomination process.

I've helped with virtual beef roundup, or Beef Expo, which is over in Harrisonburg.

But we have lots of local young farmers that participate in that.

I've also coordinated with other agents in the Central Virginia Life Selection Sale, or CVLS, which occurs in Lynchburg.

And lots of our kids show at that, too.

Commercial Tree Fruit School is a big thing that's been going on in the county for decades.

We're a big tree fruit production industry here that hosts specialists to come and give seasonal updates to local farmers and a full-day conference for our farmers provided here in Lovingston.

The Lovingston Fire Hall was generous enough to donate their space for us this year, so we were able to host about 50 farmers there.

I'm also particularly proud of my Master Gardeners.

They went through a little bit of a rough patch a couple years ago, but they are bouncing back.

The 2021 impacts have absolutely nothing to do with me.

I had not started yet, but they volunteered

Over 2000 hours, which is more than one full-time staff member.

These are primarily retired people who are volunteer garden educators donating their time to help citizens in Nelson County.

We are totally on track to keep that in 2022.

We're evaluating projects and hopefully including some more projects.

One of the ones that I'm excited about is they're going to help me teach beginning Gardener courses in the Denver Garden at the Nelson Center where my office is.

So they're essential to my program.

I'm very lucky to have them.

We actually have 10 or 11 more trainees at the start of this year.

That's very exciting.

Maybe one day we'll be as big as Adam Morrill, but we've got to start small.

The last thing I want to talk about before I answer questions is this spotted lanternfly problem.

So the spotted lanternfly is an invasive pest.

It came over from Asia.

It has the bird host of the truth heaven or truth paradise.

And it's particularly nasty.

It's a huge threat to the horticulture industry.

It's a huge threat to the one bridge industry and to the commercial horticulture industry.

There is not a lot we can do about it other than slow the spread.

We had a detection in North Garden in early June, which is separate from the population just southwest of Charlottesville.

So a lot of the industry is very concerned about this and in extension our job is to educate and provide resources to combat things like this.

VDACS has issued a new quarantine which affects not just my growers but also every other business that ships within the county.

If you're shipping something that's on that listed materials to Adam Arnold and you bring your vehicle back, there's an inspection process.

VDOT handles inspection training, growers and participants self-inspect, and we educate and follow up and track the spread.

So this is, the quarantine was expanded to include Adam Arnold, Augusta, Rockingham, Rockbridge County, and the City of Lynchburg.

We are right in the middle of that, and so the theory is that it's here and we just haven't seen it yet.

If this gets into a vineyard and is left unchecked, it can kill the vineyard in about a year.

There are some pretty devastating pictures from Pennsylvania.

I would really hate to see that happen to our vineyards, or our orchards, or our commercial horticulture collection.

Dax and Virginia Cooperative Extension are kind of heading with right on this, but I just wanted to make you aware that that's something that's on our doorstep and we're doing everything we can do about it.

So, questions?

So gypsy moth is an invasive caterpillar moth that was introduced and had some pretty devastating effects in forest ecosystems.

As far as we know, spinal imaging flight doesn't have the same effect in forest ecosystems.

But it's going to have an effect on the horticulture.

We're also seeing a slight uptick in juicing off activity this year because we had a little bit of a warmer season.

But the experts are not concerned about that.

Any questions?

So I have a question.

The catch is that Olympus is a very aggressive invasive weed, invasive tree weed, and I hope that you treated them when you cut them down because it's kind of like black focus.

If you've ever cut down a black focus tree, it just screams up in the rain, except worse.

Alampas is the preferred host for spotted lanternfly.

They produce significantly more eggs per egg mass per email.

If they get to feed on Alampas at that bright spot in their bird cycle.

However, it's not a required host.

They like grapes really well.

They like wild grapes pretty well.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with feeding rid of Alampas.

I would fully support that.

It's not

And they do prefer to hitchhike.

They're very good at human-assisted transport.

So that's part of the reason for the quarantine, is the inspection, to make sure you're not taking it to new places.

The recommendation for most of our commercial growers is that if you can't really control it everywhere on your property, that you control the campus at your distribution centers.

to make sure if you get a population there that you deal with it.

So most of my vineyards have detection traps up at the distribution centers.

They have distribution traps on the lampids because the insect is attracted to it and they're tracking it.

It's just as good to have a negative report as it is to have a positive report.

This is on your, I didn't see it on your presentation, but it just so happens in the last couple of weeks I've heard from a couple of land owners who live in the Rockfish

North and South, and they have a significant problem with Japanese Nahu and I know that you're aware of it, I don't think we need to do a tutorial on that today, but they were reaching out to me for assistance and they asked me, is that something that's appropriate to bring up during the comprehensive plan?

I'm always in support of having the community look at the invasive species problems that we have there.

They're a huge economic drop out of the county.

There's been a lot of money managing that, especially in the agriculture business.

We probably have a bigger problem county-wide with other invasives than knotweed, but it's certainly a problem.

And we'll put in a bunch of specialists and see what we can do.

That's what we're here for.

I also wanted to say that we have three other staff members who are not here today.

Lucinda Gray is the dedicated administrative assistant

for 16 years at the Nelson County office.

We are so lucky to have her.

Also, Eric Bowen is out on emergency leave today, unfortunately.

He is an agriculture extension agent like myself with a focus in animal science, and he's based out of the Amherst office that serves Nelson.

And then Erin Harris is our 4-H youth extension agent, and she just got back from 4-H camp, which was a roaring success.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Before we get to the VDOT report, we do have some folks here that I just kind of wanted to, since they've been sitting here at the baseball team.

Are you guys up here with just pulling that up for the VDOT report?

Very known.

We'll warn you when you want to talk.

Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, I'm Jennifer Fitzgerald, I live at 174 Capel Mountain Light, and today I come up for you to ask for support of three Nelson County High School student-athletes that will be representing Virginia next week in Louisiana in the pre-major 16-fold series.

These 16 and 17-year-old young men will not only be proudly representing Virginia, but also Nelson County.

Last year you supported our efforts and our team, finishing 5th out of 17 teams in the 15-year-old category.

We will be traveling next week for more than 13 hours and over 900 miles one way to play on the fields of the University of Louisiana in one room, as well as the Stirling's in BC Conference.

As I stated in the letter that I presented to you, most of our players have never played on a collegiate field and this will be twice a once in a lifetime experience for them.

These three young men all work full-time jobs during the summer and also practice four and sometimes five nights a week.

Their love for baseball and dedication to their team really shifts on the field.

Baseball is not just a game.

It teaches many life skills such as determination, teamwork, life, sorry, work ethic, how to deal with pressure, respect, and leadership.

We have a team of 11 athletes ready to play bar and win.

I want to introduce our players, Candice N. and Michael Fitzgerald,

He's a rising senior at Nelson County High School, left-handed pitcher, first baseman, outfielder.

Quentin Page, rising senior at Nelson County High School, right-handed third baseman, and outfielder.

Kevin Miklum, rising senior at Nelson County High School, right-handed pitcher, catcher, second baseman, and outfielder.

As you can see, we have players that can play any position on the field and feel good about our teams and look forward to competing against some of the best teams in the Dixie program.

As we ask that you consider supporting our team in the memorable convention.

Let me just go ahead and take this out real quick.

What is needed?

We've done old school, we've done car washing, bake sales, we've approached everything and things like that.

So far, we've reached about $3,500.

Like I said, we have 11 players.

So what we were proposing is last year, Ford was generous enough.

We had five players from Nelson, and we gave us $1,500 each.

So gas prices are $1,500 more again this year than last year.

We're excited for you guys.

We're rooting for you.

What does the board want to do?

There's only four.

All right, so is there any action the board wishes to take this time?

The wonderful thing about baseball is it teaches you to do it this way.

What's going to happen before it happens?

Unfortunately, the other day when we had our meeting, I didn't anticipate what was going to happen.

But that's another story.

I certainly support you playing baseball.

It's a great learning experience.

All right.

Is that a second?

Yes.

OK. Seconded, Mr. Barton.

Any discussion?

Hearing no discussion, let's do vote by acclamation.

All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Any opposition to abstentions?

Hearing none, we expect a thorough report.

Good job, don't you guys count, so everyone give these guys a round of applause.

Yeah, sure, come on up guys.

Actually, what we'll do is we're going to go into a quick reset before VDOT report.

So I'll re-introduce myself.

I'm Jennifer Fitzgerald.

I live at 174 Cabernet Point.

I'm representing the Nelson County Service Authority in the request to waive building inspection fees associated with the wind degree, wastewater research plant, and the Skyline wastewater treatment plant projects.

Both projects are under the consent order from the DEQ and must be completed within a reasonable time frame, which is both officially completed by 2030.

Both projects directly benefit the environment and improve water quality in Nelson County and all the way to the Chesapeake Bay and beyond.

The new plants will provide reliable wastewater treatment to meet the current and future regulations.

As you know, any debt that we incur ultimately is passed on to the customer.

By weighting the fees, Nelson County can assist the service authority in keeping the rates as low as possible.

The service authority is required by our funding agencies to provide full-time inspectors

by our engineering firm.

We also have specialized geotechnical consultants working on both projects.

We have budgeted to pay the engineering firm for engineering and inspections, which is right at $1.5 million for the advisory project, and $159,000 for the Schuyler project.

On top of that, we're being charged building inspection fees by Nelson County.

I feel one inspection team that knows the plan and looks out for best interest is sufficient for the project and should minimize the inspections needed by Nelson County and definitely not warrant the costly fees.

If we were to add those inspection fees together, we'd be paying $1,566,194 for Wintergreen and $170,000 for Simon and Justin's inspections.

I guess as Jennifer mentioned the $70,000 has already been paid so that would require a refund should the board decide to approve that.

And those fees are required to be charged by the building inspections department.

It doesn't directly pay for their inspections.

So I don't know.

It might be just a little misleading to say that they're paying both fees to be inspected twice.

And it's our building officials and inspections office duty to perform inspections that are required of them by code.

I think the $11,000, I don't think, has been paid yet.

So that could just be a fee waiver.

I just think if this was a consideration, maybe it should have been brought up before the projects were awarded.

Contractors bill these fees into their proposals.

I mean, that's just typical.

So currently at this time, I guess the Wintergreen project has been, that permit has been paid?

That has been paid.

Yeah, in figuring the building permit fee, they also incorporate bond, mobilization, and insurance, which is over $400,000.

But like Candice said, maybe the inspection fee doesn't really include inspections, I'm not sure what it includes, but

If you're looking at the breakdown of the base bid for the project itself and the things that are incorporated in it, the package plan comes already constructed.

It doesn't need inspections.

You know, I think, and this is just a thought process, if we were to do some kind of reimbursement

projects that service authority might have coming up.

Because essentially, if we were to waive it, we don't want to give this back in English.

There's just no way that's about that.

We also don't want to encourage $70,000 in change orders from English, because now they see the guy.

You know what I mean?

Do you guys have any major capital improvements coming up?

I'm sure you do.

I think it's right at $150,000.

Right.

I just wanted to note that there was a meeting when

There was a meeting with Mr. Carter at that time and while there wasn't any request on behalf of the service authority at that time to look at the inspection fees as part of some relief, it wasn't something that was offered on either side.

No, we approached Mr. Carter and also an agreement to help us with the fees.

Well, the overall shortfall that we had from the estimate of what we had going into the pre-bidding until after the bidding and then the bids came in at over $3 million.

It was $3,480,000.

If we were to refund the fees on the Wintergreen project,

Do you understand my question?

Yeah, the one thing that I can see happen is if we return it, in two weeks you're going to find a 70,000 dollar change order.

I can see that.

If they know the money's there that we just created, there's a good chance that could happen.

Because they're the ones who should do that money.

That is definitely correct.

It's not the service authority that's doing that money.

And I think that's something that we should deeply consider.

Well, it seems to me that I'm certainly in favor of

What I would predict would happen is because any project with this scale there's going to be change orders and you guys normally price in five percent one to five percent something like that of the overall project more than likely go towards something of that nature and but typically that has already been financed in the pro forma normally you finance in your contingency

Yeah, I don't question that money's theirs.

I think as a contractor I can feel fairly confident saying if the contractor paid that money, that money's not yours, it's the contractor's.

And if you guys have already priced in contingency, there's no sense in adding more to the pot, because those numbers would be, you know, they're going to use, you typically get as close to that 5% as possible.

Yeah, no, I get that.

If we proposed to waive the fee on Schuyler, then that would be about $11,000.

And then maybe Candy could discuss with you or come up with a scenario that would make sense

And I understand the scenario.

We don't want taxpayers charging taxpayers

What does the board think about that?

Wave Schuyler and let staff communicate about the wintering.

Well, I'll make that motion.

I'll motion just for you that the permit fee, the inspection permit fee for the Schuyler wastewater treatment plant be waived by the county.

So what we were discussing was the $70,000 that was a permit paid by English Constructions

That's more of a directive.

Ms. Fitzgerald mentioned was that there is a $160,000 permit fee that's already included as a requirement in the financing.

And so CHA has been given already that amount of money to do the inspections on everything that has to be set up for start.

Why don't I write about that?

It's pre-packaged and pre-inspected, basically.

And then once you get it there and get it turned on, yes, they have to sign off on it.

But the ongoing inspections that would normally happen with something of this size, the county's required to charge $5 per every $1,000 over $5,000 for what they're doing.

We're charging the taxpayer more money

Is that right?

That was the motion.

So where is the $70,000?

That is going to be internal discussion with our two staff.

I just feel like we're changing courses midstream.

Where do we drop the ball that we're having to have these conversations now?

That's my question.

Was this on the contractor's side?

Was it on the county side?

Was it on the service side?

Why are we doing this now?

I would easily say that the sky the one we're ahead of the game is the wintergreen one for six months from now in the conversation.

I just would not like to see us having this conversation again.

That should be addressed up front.

I would agree.

I think that a piece of that

Since I serve on the Service Authority Board, I'm kind of familiar with this, is that making requests of the county to decrease fees has been something that's not looked upon as something that's necessarily a good idea by our county administration.

So in the discussions that happened with the county administration, that was not an option that was brought up at that time.

And certainly, the intention was that because it was over budget, could the county help?

Right.

And these fees are calculated on typically the total cost of the project.

So it's kind of arbitrary in a way.

So all of a sudden you get hit with another $400,000 surcharges, well now the permit fee's going to reflect that.

And again, you're taxing the taxpayer essentially twice a way.

One in a long-term financial scheme.

All right, so we have a motion.

We have a second.

Any discussion?

Hearing no discussion, let's just go with motion.

Motion was to waive the building permit fees for Schuyler in regards to the wastewater treatment facility.

For the full amount, the $11,123.10.

Okay, motion, second, for discussion.

Amanda.

Yes.

Mr. Harvey.

Mr. Reed.

Yes.

Yes.

Great.

So you guys go ahead and you'll have your discussion.

Thank you, Jennifer.

Moving back to the VDOT report.

Sorry about that, Robert.

We just wanted you to hang out a little bit longer and have a longer drive back to Charlotte Court.

You know what?

Actually, sit back down.

We're going to go on to salary.

I'm just kidding.

I've got a little pain that's going to be coming out of my body.

This voice shuts out to be very unpredictable.

I just wanted to give a little bit of a short report.

Wilson run real rustic.

We just about finished that.

That's been surface treated this week on surface.

The next road rush that we're going to is Cameron Mountain.

I think they should start on that next week.

Our state forces, we are on some of their routes.

We've finished primary, pulled it back to four to four.

The debris pile up at the Nelson Wayside, that's been ground up by our contractor.

They've not hauled it away yet.

What are they doing with that?

Where's it going?

I know it's looking great.

I'm sure they're going to try to sell it.

Let me tell you.

Well, if you want some, but no, again, it's our intention once we get that, get that file cleaned up, we've got another file saying it wrong, I'm assuming it's true.

It is our intention to clean all that area up and do permanent seeding.

and just where that would not be a disposal or a site storage yard or normalization yard for contracts.

It's just too much going on right now to have that activity at that location.

So hopefully that's going to happen.

I don't know if any of you have had a chance to go to Tower River Road.

From 60 out to 49, we did it.

We worked on the edges of the pavement to allow us to put a solid centerline on it.

We received a lot of inquiries on the centerline, but we had to widen the pavement a little bit to get the pavement wide enough.

We did widen and

and I've got the edges fixed and that road is probably in better shape than it's been in a long time.

It has a center of mind over it and then you get some positive feedback from that from some services.

Other than that I don't really have anything else.

What is this Reeds-Gadd draft we've got right now?

That is the truck restriction for Augusta County.

You know, we did it on our side.

And we did the restriction.

Now Augusta County is doing their restriction.

Good.

And it does involve a little short section of what holds around 814 down.

That needs to happen.

Any questions for Robert at this time?

I know you're aware of this, and you know, I don't know trends based on it, but I look at all the dead ash trees, and right on it, many of them are right on the road.

Well, if they're on the right-of-way, we are responsible for them.

Are you?

Would you rather me to tell you where those streets are?

I did send an email with the locations for that.

I don't know why it was...

They weren't ash trees.

There might have been one ash tree, but there's four trees over there near Nellysford or 151 that they're going to take down, say, a couple of big dead sycamores over there right on the road.

It was two more.

Now, one of them was a bash.

So, if you see one, you'll be shooting at even though it wasn't a dash.

The last two weeks ago, another tractor trailer came from, you know, and didn't see the sign and went there and tried to back up on

and this time did extensive damage to a property right there.

Knocked that white fence down?

Yeah.

I mean, I know the sign is there.

I bet you want me to pull up.

Really, really?

You know, you can count on it.

It's unreal.

There is no answer to it.

We've reviewed that signage twice, I know, and we're still going through there.

I don't know what to do.

Some things you cannot fix, just like I was talking to

Some folks at Amherst, over in the Wright, Wright plant.

There's steel trucks going through 600.

It's been restricted for years.

And they're still going through there.

What else can you do?

I mean, the only thing we might have done with the water is use the internet.

The only thing that I can see is we have

To me it would be valuable to put up the International Truck Restriction Symbol.

I think that would help.

All the other stuff we've done over there, I don't think it would help.

The other thing, there is

I don't want to tie up a whole lot of time with this, but here's a question.

Multimodal transportation across along the 29 corridor where you've got these two proposed J cuts for both Lovingston and at Route 6.

If bicycles at some point want to take that

That route, do these J cuts kind of take bicycles out of the equation for being able to cross there?

Because the J cuts, the bicycles have to take the same J cut route, obviously.

They should go straight through.

Yeah, they have to use the J cuts.

Right, so is there any information that you have that has to do with

I don't know what the effects of J-Cuts are on potential future bicycle traffic in those areas.

Because there are proposals out there that may or may not be part of our comp plan.

I don't know, but people are starting to ask me about, well, is this something that can be done?

You mean archives or jacuzzi?

Archives.

Archives.

How does that say?

Yeah.

Sorry.

Mr. Parr.

Well, based on our conversation, I mean,

It needs to be, it needs to be, the vegetation, the bones need to be cut back, it's trees and limbs, ain't all that, they didn't mow it, eventually mow it, but we need to get in there with our, with our circle saw and mother floors and really open that thing up because it's, it's, it's so unlikely to happen.

As far as the widening, same thing we talked about earlier, I could see us do some widening down there on the

It's just with the Piney River Trail head, the second trail head being right there, that road team a lot more traffic.

people passing them there, especially, like you said, in that one spot.

What I saw when I looked at it, the greatest and most of me, was the sight distance is not good coming out of there looking back towards Piney River.

Did you see this right at the stop sign?

Right.

It's a bike there.

I think it's a dead tree right there.

That would be nice as well, but the main concern the residents have is the width of the road back as you get further and closer to the trailhead.

I do not have anything at this time.

I have obviously had a lot of concerns about the archives in Lovingston, as I have indicated, and writing, you know, it's not a done deal, just we're all going through the process of hearing it and seeing if any grants are successful.

It's just because the public continues to be curious.

So at what point are we going to have the public hearing this?

Is that going to be closer to 2030?

Well, that should be about 18 months after.

Great.

Alright.

If you hear any other questions, have a safe travels and downs out.

Alright.

Moving on to this is one item I think it didn't need to be on the Lovingston Fall Festival Street closure.

I've been in contact with

Some folks in our community talked about hopefully doing something in Mount Van Lovingston, which may involve, you know, showing down the street for a little bit.

We've done this prior.

We used to have a bike out or something of that nature.

Mr. Nix and I can't remember which church closed that put that on.

So hopefully we'll have some more things to talk about there.

I don't believe at this time there's any action the board has to do to assist with that.

And

Okay, yeah, sorry.

I didn't notice.

Yeah, thank you.

That's why nobody's here.

All right, so if we could just skip over that for now.

I'm just going to do the introduction of this.

As the board remembers, we had our financial advisors issue an RFP for a bond anticipation note for the property acquisition that we're in the process with.

And we had Olukut from Davenport here to discuss those results with you.

And Paul Jacobson is our bond counsel, and he will

Nice to see you again, sir.

Thank you, Candy, for the introduction.

Mr. Rutherford and members of the board, it's great to be here in front of you again today.

I am pleased to be here to talk about the results of the RFP process.

As you're familiar with, we did a lot of planning on this and it relatively culminated in the land purchase and the land acquisition financing here that you see today.

We did set out a

The proposal and RFP for proposals for bank financing on behalf of the county, we sent it out to approximately 100 different financial institutions, local, regional, and national financial institutions, and we requested proposals for bar anticipation banks.

That is a short-term answer that provides you the ability to close on the land.

Also, we think about the next steps for the land in terms of the use of it.

We asked for three year rates and five year rates to give you a little bit of duration to think about the timing.

It's the board's discretion as to which they would like to choose.

We did ask for three options here.

Tax exempt, what we call non-bank qualified,

That really is today's market when you think about it.

Bank qualified doesn't really give you any benefits over what would be a just a regular tax exempt rate.

Option B is taxable.

We know it's going to be a little bit more expensive in terms of the rate, but that allows you to think about a myriad of purposes, but with governmental purpose as well as non-governmental purpose, good use of the land.

And Option C was just sort of a hybrid.

We asked that, we thought about that as being a federal option.

It did confuse the banks a little bit, so that leaves a little bit of negotiation to undertake there with option C. But as I'll talk about on the next couple of pages, we don't think that we need to go down the option C route, given the flexibility that we have in some of those.

On July 6th, we received two proposals, very good proposals from the Taulman Banks, American National Bank, the first company, the first national bank.

Truist Bank also submitted a proposal.

We didn't include it in this at the time.

It came in very late and was more expensive than both of these.

So we didn't do a survey to complete that in the next year.

Proposal comparison on the next page, just to show you what the key terms are with respect to the proposals.

First National Bank offered the Academy with the ability to prepay.

But first let me talk about the Bank Council fees.

In addition to the closing costs that we contemplated, bank council fees that we have in the budget as well, they're proposing to charge and not to exceed $5,000 for that.

We factored that into all the numbers you see here, so it's not anticipated to add to what you see in this analysis.

But the really good thing about First National Bank is it allows for pre-payment any time without penalty and whole at first.

So you take part of the land off, part of the composition of the land is off.

If you choose to use part of it in a certain way, keep part of it outstanding.

Start dividing the land if you need to.

The other piece here that we're talking about, which is a flexible option C, again, we're not really too high on that because of the way we can really go about this financing on a tax-exempt basis, but that would be something to be determined down the road in terms of what that rate would be.

So, if option C was the one we wanted to go with, it would lead to a little bit of interest rate change, not only from tax-exempt to tax-exempt, but then market change.

The last two points that we wanted to highlight under both of these proposals, they both contemplate the plan of finance that we talked about through the EDA.

We've done this before with respect to the school financing, so it's nigh on the norm.

This would be a lease revenue type financing, subject to appropriation, which has more obligation to repay.

That's a standard approach under the Commonwealth of Virginia's financing mechanisms through EDAs or IDAs.

Both financings contemplate that.

The American National Bank and Trust, one thing you wanted to point out, with the prepayment penalty, they do have a 1% prepayment penalty, but only if it's refinanced or you try to refinance.

The last thing here again with the maybe option C, they were a little bit reluctant to provide a commitment on option C, so that is a to be negotiated concept there.

The interest cost comparison on the next page, we've provided basically a three-year look at this and a five-year look at it.

And the tax-exempt ways that Lauren is showing here with respect to First National Bank and the American National Bank in a three-year, we're looking at about 296, exactly 296 for the three-year tax-exempt cost of funds.

The First National Bank, American National Bank is a little bit more expensive at $3.2 million.

And again, this is on the same basis, really, not to exceed $2.6 million.

You can see that difference is from roughly from about $77,000 to about $84,000, roughly about a $7,000 a year annual difference in terms of the cost.

And as we go to the taxable alternative, that is to say, the county decided to do it.

Taxable alternative will be most applicable in terms of use of the land.

Then you can see how that steps up to about 375 or 395, depending on which one of these you look at.

But we think the First National Bank is the most cost-effective and particularly cost-effective here.

The other consideration is if you think about going to a five-year note, that is to say you have five years to really think about the planning, digital finance, financing, concepts, and a decision making to get out of that five-year range, then we're looking at the first national bank proposal, one from

to roughly 3.2%.

So the five-year spread of time versus the three-year spread of time, you can think of that costing you about $4,000, roughly $4,000 a year in terms of that additional flexibility in time.

And when you look at it across the board, the tax goal, it's a little more expensive there.

We have about $4,000 on the first national bank approach.

So where does that leave us in terms of our interpretation and our understanding?

Now, based on these proposals, we would recommend the first national bank based on the rate across the funds and flexibility.

We would also recommend pursuing option A, which is the tax

The question then becomes to the county, three year or five years, and that's just fact.

Option A, we think the definite point of that, because ultimately First National Bank allows you to prepay any time you want, so you have the ultimate function.

A little bit of schedule down here.

We've got July 12th board meeting today, direction from the board, a secret direction from the board, approval and resolution.

Also tomorrow, we'll schedule the EVA board meeting for approval of their documents.

And looking at the balance of July and through late correspondence last week, closing on approximately August 4th.

That's shifting up just a little bit due to the nature of finalizing the last view of the state of the United States.

Certainly.

And I think one thing I said, can you go back to the slide showing the options three or five years and the next?

Yeah, so as I've kind of looked at this, they only do charge interest only, correct?

Yes.

So it's interest only over the course of three to five years with a no free payment penalty,

I do concur that First National Bank with the option A is the best idea at this time.

Obviously within that three years we have to have a bond on the back end.

So within that three years we have to bond with some sorts.

Otherwise we have to prepay at the

Correct.

You're exactly right, Mr. Runford.

We think with that three-year time frame, that gives you essentially, we're talking about the first half of that for the 15 months, 18 months, the planning, getting ready for everything to go.

Ideally, you want that bond ready to go queued up before about six to eight months before that final maturity date.

That way, you're not worrying about the date.

Great.

Sure, and maybe I'll turn it over to Paul for a little bit more nuanced discussion, but tax exempts, tax-exempt rates are generally lower rates, would affect to get across the bar.

That primarily, the reason why you get that, the benefit of that is the use of the land would have to govern in terms of tax laws to be governmental.

I'd just like to add one thing too in discussing this with Roland.

The final note that we do for whatever project results on this property does not have to have the same tax exempt or taxable basis as bond anticipation note.

I ran on Paul Jacobson, a lawyer at the Sam Anderson Law Firm.

We've been your county's law counsel for a number of years.

It would be with you today to follow up on the discussion of tax exempt versus taxable governmental versus private use so that tax exempt means that you're intending to use the property for governmental purposes.

You'd be committing to that, for the term of the note, again, it sounds like three years of

But it could be paid off, and again, there's flexibility in the future.

If the use changes, then you can make it as complicated as you want.

Parts can be used for one purpose, parts for another purpose.

The resolution, that's the only action the Board is to take for the financing.

The resolution will approve all of the appropriate documents.

This would be probably a simultaneous closing with the purchase of the financing, like often when you buy a house, you close up the financing the same time you buy it.

This is a financing structure.

As Mr. Cooper mentioned, we've done this a number of times before.

The pledge is the real estate, the leases.

That's the collateral.

So to speak, which is why there are leases involved.

The county buys the property, leases the EBA, takes the lease back to the county.

Your lease payments are more identical to the debt service, and that's what is used for the debt service during the term financing.

The resolution is somewhat lengthy, but it does talk about the project, purchasing the property.

If you will, it would indicate in motion, I guess, the preference for the three years versus the five years that we'll clarify as we move forward.

It would certainly help you with EDALR.

That's what the board's intent.

The resolution approves the plan for financing the project, speaks of the county's normal obligation, subject annual appropriation type of financing that Mr. Coop mentioned, accepts proposal from First National Bank, makes appropriate covenants and promises regarding the tax exempt nature of the project.

alone, Bob Rises, counties, representatives, employees, officers to take any interactions that are needed to move towards closing.

And as indicated, we're looking at probably an early August closing.

I've been in touch with Mr. Payne, the county attorney, in terms of coordinating the property purchase with the financing.

Could you explain option C again?

I understand A and B.

Option C was in the RFP as bank, give us your proposal, starting out tax exempt, but then what would your conversion rate be if it turned out that the county changed its mind and wanted to use property for different purposes and we ended up having to then do taxable financing because, say, you know,

I'll just leave it at that.

And the responses back were, well, it's hard to know, this and that.

How do we know that the candidate's shape was blind?

And the response was, well, there would have to be resolutions actually by this board and the EDA board as well.

And I think what we ended up with was pretty much

certainly with the taxable taxes in the world even with the taxes and financing because First National Bank says you can prepay, you can refinance at any time without the penalty, it ends up being more or less the same thing under options.

and the banks said, well, it'd be based on some formula.

We can't give you any particular rate.

Well,

The bottom line, it comes out to about the same thing because with Option A, the first national bank, you can convert to taxable financing anytime you want.

If I can clarify, option C allows conversion, they give you a formula, but it's based on where the market is at that time.

So we don't have a lot in.

We don't go from this 296 to the 375 today.

We can't know that.

So I think, we think that given that sort of nuance that they have, and they have a little bit of question or hesitancy about it anyway,

We spoke to both banks and both of them said, put this in here, but we've got to really think this through.

When you go with option A, in the final analysis, Mr. Rutherford, you're right, when you go with option A, you effectively do the same thing.

You could prepay it, you could refinance it.

If the current financing has to be taxable, you could refinance it on a taxable basis and change the content of the property.

And you get a rate loss as opposed to a float.

Okay.

Okay, so did you have anything else to add?

That's a hard question, but when you look at a map between three years and five years, it's really a very small difference.

So why not?

Our training degree, our recognition degree, why not take a five-year, gives you a little more flexibility with respect to making decisions, going through the plans, and really positioning it for that financing.

But if you're, the alternative is, if we've got the next 18 months really mapped out and you know what it's going to be on, what's going to be on that site, then three years should be sufficient.

I like the flexibility that the five-year plan gives us.

It gives us a little more time for our planning strategy as far as what the board wants and what direction we'd like to go in.

And there's no prepayment penalty.

So if we could go with the five in, let's just say, two years, we've decided to make an action.

And hopefully that would be the case, is that we're being ambitious about which direction we're headed now.

The only difference with the three-year and the five-year is you do have a little bit heavier cost on the annual interest rate, so that would be approximately about five, six grand, something of that nature a year if you maintain option A. I'm fine with a three-year note, but it's kind of the board's decision, so I think we can all agree First National Bank is probably the option

Option A is the one we want to go with, and then you know if we want to go with three or five years.

Candy says it would give us more options.

I would go for the five.

Okay.

I'll just re-write it.

I agree.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

But having the flexibility to choose whether to do that since we're in the middle of our comp plan and everything else.

Five sounds.

Because the confidence plan where we are in that I say five.

So let's go ahead and get a motion to approve.

Option A with First National Bank on a five-year note as presented.

Can we get a motion for that, okay?

I'll make a motion then.

All right, so we need a motion to approve Resolution R 2022-43

It's 43, 45.

43.

45, we next.

OK. All right.

So can we have a motion from Skip to that effect?

Do we have support?

So I give a second from Mr. Parr.

Any further discussion?

Mr. Martin?

Yes.

Mr. Martin?

Yes.

Great.

Moving on to item E. We had to do an addition beforehand.

That would be approval and acceptance of contract of purchase for real estate R-2022-25.

Thank you.

So the board previously authorized the county to

The board was executing a purchase contract with Wells Fargo Bank and part of the purchase contract requires a separate approval from the board following the study period in which time we completed the title search and we're 99% finished with the ALTA survey.

Preliminary results of the ALTA survey didn't show any overlaps, it did show

Two, I think, encroachments onto the property line, which we had discussed with the board previously.

Those were the same items that we discussed with you in executing the original contract.

It would be Resolution R-2022-45, that's the County Board of Supervisors authorization for acceptance of conveyance

Larkin Property, Wells Fargo Bank, Trustee, resolved that the Nelson County Board of Supervisors does hereby approve and accept the contract of purchase for real estate with Wells Fargo Bank and a trustee with the Thomas D. Larkin Jr. Trust and the Thomas D. Larkin Sr. Trust for the parcel being designated at tax parcel 67839 and containing a total of approximately 309.586 acres.

Be it further resolved by the Nelson County Board of Supervisors that the County Administrator, Candice W.

Gary, and Cathy Paterni be and hereby are authorized to accept the deed of faith there.

Is there any questions for Candy or Bill relative to this resolution at this time?

If there is none, can we get a resolution to approve our 2022-45

We have a motion from Mr. Barton.

Is there a second?

Second from Mr. Harvey.

Any discussion?

Hearing no discussion, we will do a roll call vote.

Mr. Harmon?

Yes.

Mr. Harvey?

Yes.

Mr. Harmon?

Yes.

Mr. Reed?

Yes.

Mr. Ruppert?

Yes.

I'm not sure that it reflected unanimously.

Usually in July, the four supervisors will approve a resolution approving the salary and classification system, which

Resolution outlines the basis of employee raises and how that will work and also includes attachments to A&E, which are the county employee salary scales as well as the sheriff's department.

The proposed resolution, 2022-44, does incorporate several changes for the board's consideration this year.

So we have several proposals for the board's consideration.

First, we would like to mirror the school division's establishment of a $15 per hour minimum wage for all part-time and then an annual equivalent of $31,200 for full-time employees.

This would include constitutional offices and registrar.

We'd also like to propose an entry-level compensation adjustment for law enforcement and public safety dispatchers.

in order to address critical vacancies and improve employee recruitment and retention.

I think any resulting compression issues within pay bands that are proposed could be addressed with consideration of forthcoming pay study.

We would also like the board to consider some other proposed recruitment methods.

The first item in considering the $15 hour minimum wage or first $1,200 annual equivalent

This change would affect 20 positions and would combine grades 1 through 10 into a new pay band 1 on the post pay scale.

Pay bands 2 through 14 would have the same salary ranges as grades 10 through 27 on the current scale.

We did have one anomaly where the position of the senior transportation operator

would have to be regraded to maintain the same level of differential between it and the transportation operator.

Employee compensation adjustments would be based upon the higher of the minimum hourly rate or annual equivalent or an increase of 5%.

The estimated salary benefits cost of doing this is $88,870 and is primarily due to the increase to part-time wages.

These costs could be covered by the FY23 employee benefits line and supplemented by our current contingency if needed.

However, we think it can be absorbed within the current budget.

The second proposal regarding public safety dispatchers, we currently have critical vacancies of 42%, and there's a 10-week training period for these employees before they can actually

in dispatching calls on their own.

Our dispatchers are working 12-hour shifts, many of them working overtime, and Russell Gibson is also filling in to dispatch on shifts, and we have a significant employee burnout that's occurring.

The consultants on our pay study, MAG Inc., advised me that the market study would likely dictate a starting salary of around $34,000 for public safety dispatchers,

The proposed salary today is $34,010, which matched up with the grade 12 on our current scale.

The senior dispatcher position was re-banded using the same differential between them on the FY22 scale, starting at $35,708, which would be a new pay band for.

There are 10 full-time positions affected by this for a salary and benefits cost of $61,701.

Some of this would be offset by state compensation board reimbursement for those dispatchers that are funded by the state.

The monthly salary and benefits savings of these five vacancies is currently $17,535.

These costs of $61,701 can likely be covered by vacancy savings until we get fully staffed and absorbed within the current FY 23 budget.

This is very hard to read on the screen, but this is the current pay scale.

Let's see.

All of these positions, grades 1 through 10, are all below the minimum $15 an hour wage for part-time or 31.2 for full-time, or 32.0 for full-time.

And the scale currently has 27 grades.

This is what the revised scale would look like.

Combining the first ten grades into the first pay band.

Then after that, unless otherwise marked here, the ability of the Public Safety Dispatcher, the Senior Transportation Operator, and the Senior Public Safety Dispatcher.

The rest of the grades would all remain the same as the current pay scale.

and just the number of pay bands will be reduced to 14.

Any questions so far?

And we can always come back.

All right.

For law enforcement, we have critical vacancies now of 28%.

And there's a 12-month training period for entry-level deputies.

We'd like to establish a $46,000 per year entry-level deputy positions, including courthouse security, which would eliminate the differential between uncertified and certified deputies.

And speaking with Sheriff Hill, who's here today, he said some other localities were using this

and they were able to attract and retain entry level people more readily by eliminating the differential between the certified and uncertified.

And I should just point out that the new state minimum is 42,000.

The law enforcement pay scale, which is attachment B you'll see in a minute, was revised to maintain an equivalent differential between grades as on the FY22 scale, using the 46,000 as the minimum.

Law enforcement employee compensation adjustments would be based upon the higher of the minimum annual salary or an increase of 5%.

So our net estimated salary and benefit cost of doing this is $43,067.

This is derived by taking the total salary and benefit costs of roughly $114,000 and subtracting out the estimated state compensation board reimbursement.

for these positions of $51,424 to get the estimated cost.

The monthly salary benefit savings of six deputy vacancies right now is $34,635.

So we think these costs can likely be covered by agency savings until they get fully staffed within the FY23 budget.

This is a copy of the current attachment fee, which is the Sheriff's Department scale for full-time deputies.

So this scale has a courthouse security position at grade seven.

It also has an uncertified deputy position, and then it has the entry-level deputy in courthouse security, which is the certified position.

So our proposal is to eliminate courthouse security and deputy uncertified and start everyone at the entry-level deputy in courthouse security at the grade of nine at 46,000.

This is shown here on this scale.

This is the new approach scale.

which would begin at 46,000 and then we adjusted the other grades by the same differential as is on the current scale between the grades.

There are some other implications of making these adjustments to think about.

These cost calculations do not include overtime pay that may work at the higher rates of pay.

Dispatch will continue to have overtime until higher staffing levels are reached.

In FY22, our dispatch overtime amounted to about $64,000.

In FY23, there should be a lesser fiscal impact of the compensation study should the board choose to implement that just due to making these adjustments now.

And then next fiscal year in FY24, our salary benefit cost will be higher due to these adjustments if approved and compounded by any salary percentage increase approved for FY24.

Those are things to also consider.

Some other recruitment methods to consider that we have discussed amongst ourselves.

Offering sign-on bonuses, which would be non-recurring funds.

This is being used in other jurisdictions for hard to fill vacancies.

Freezing one local deputy position and using those recurring funds to recruit quality non-entry level DCJS certified deputies, which would fill vacancies faster and provide immediate relief for the department.

This would provide about $55,412 for this purpose and

would require board approval given it's a local deputy position.

So questions and discussion and then possible consideration of resolution R22-44, which would include all these adjustments just discussed and revised pay scales.

And like I said, Sheriff Hill is here.

I believe Russell Gibson is still here for questions regarding the error.

What is the total budget impact that would have on

When I go to conferences and go to meetings with other agencies, we're all in the same market.

We're all trying to get the most highly qualified people to serve the citizens, and it's becoming more and more difficult.

We can't lower our standards.

That's key.

We cannot do that, but getting good qualified people.

And I love to have people that live here in the county work for you all.

And that's even more difficult now just because of the cost of living in Nelson.

There are deputies that live outside the county and that commute here.

But any help you all can do would be greatly appreciated, as Mr. Gary stated.

The funds here that is presented is within the budget that has been approved using Vacancy Savings Funds.

Freezing the one position, the county paid position, will allow us to recruit.

At times, I'd say on an average year, we lose three deputies a year.

So we're always having a vacancy.

I've seen it in the last six years or so.

All right, Ford, what is your wish?

My suggestion would be to approve our 2020 C-44 ads incentive.

Wait a minute, Mr. Harvey, do you have a second?

I need a second.

I'll second.

Yeah, I'd like to bring something up.

You know, the discussion we just had, the presentation we just had, we could have just substituted who were teachers or deputies and support staff.

And it's

It's frustrating for two reasons.

One, clearly we don't have jurisdiction over how the school budget pays their staff and support.

We can only give them so much money to work with.

Whereas we get to do this directly.

And that's a problem.

It provides an inequity that

That is something that I think is a problem that we should look at very closely.

The other thing is the timing.

If we were having discussions, if it was within our jurisdiction to have, in our purview, to discuss school staffing, district staffing, administrative staffing at the same time, we would have the ability to have true parity across those.

If we wanted to have a certain minimum wage or support staff, we could do that.

If we wanted to have a certain entry level staff, you know, salary, we could do that.

So while I'm totally in support of this, and while I know that it probably isn't a good idea to resurrect our budget for next year, and it probably isn't a good idea to start working on next year's budget now,

I'm just I'm just thinking that that we should I think that it would be a good thing and I would certainly be in favor of the board trying to achieve parity across all the divisions all of the staffing and all of the employees that actually are you know paid for with county revenues

to try to deal with the inconsistencies where if we approve this, as I think we should, we're going to be a year behind trying to give that parity across the board.

And when we did discuss the school budget, one of the things that you did bring up was having parity across the board was something really important if we were to allow the schools to increase

And I understand all of those things.

And it puts them in a position of having less ability to advocate for their staff than what we're dealing with today.

I'm sorry.

I'm just going to piggyback on what Mr. Reed said.

So it's my intention to work more closely with school board staff to talk about these things during the year leading up to the budget process so that we can

kind of all be on the same page and we can establish things that won't promote county staff leaving to go to school board positions because they get paid a dollar or two more an hour.

Those types of things.

I think these are things that we can definitely work on and work towards.

I appreciate the discussion that we had and the information that was given.

And like Ernie said, it reminded me of the discussion we had about the schools and about their needs.

And after that discussion about their needs, we were so moved

that we often voted for another million dollars that they could make to help solve some of their problems.

Now, I think at that time, well, let's say, of course, when we voted to take away the million dollars, my excuse was my daughter was having a crisis and I wasn't really thinking about that.

I don't think it's too late to meet the needs of the schools if we think about it.

The reason I said the thing is I really believe that the million dollars before you got that million dollars hunk was a bad idea.

I invented that, but I also think that the money was critical and the money was there.

I would ask you, Candice, to continue to think about that, that it is within our ability to make more money available to schools this year, not for next year.

Yeah, we have to.

What you said, you know, I'm thinking.

I'm in favor because I think education offers far more to our community that we are willing to admit

And the possibilities of what we can offer to our community through education is real.

So can I just put this out there?

I was just going to say, in this proposal, we're using some of our vacancy savings to

cover these increases within our current budget.

The schools has their own vacancy savings within the current budget that they have that they could so choose to do the same.

I'm just putting that out there.

So they have the money to do what they want to do.

They just need to make the choices to do those things.

And we need to talk about those things rationally and need to do a much better job.

Because like I said earlier, the opinion of the board always was that they had always given money as much money to the schools as they needed.

I was a teacher there for over 30 years.

I know that that wasn't true.

All right, so back to the original motion and second for our 2022-44, which we approve as presented.

We have a motion, we have a second.

We're in discussion.

Are we done with discussion?

Okay, let's go on ahead and do the vote.

Amanda?

Okay, did you...

This is the motion for sheriff deputies pay and staff.

We're not talking about a school budget motion on this one.

This was just a motion for the pay salary of deputies and staff and such.

Okay, so you'd like to change your vote to yes?

Okay, that's true.

That's for our 2022-24.

Yes.

and this is for Ken, okay?

So is your motion still there, Mr. Harvey, to approve as presented?

Yes, about deputies, dispatch, okay.

Mr. Reed, is your second still there?

Yes.

Okay.

Let's just do the vote one more time.

Okay.

Let's do this one more time.

Mr. Harvey?

Yes.

Mr. Harvey?

Yes.

Yes.

Mr. Reed?

Yes.

Mr. Rutherford?

Okay.

All right.

All right.

Let's go on to reports real quick.

County administrator report.

You've seen a lot of me today.

Yeah.

It's been a long day so far.

So you all have got my report, key email.

The first item is COVID-19.

The update as of July 8th, based on a 13-week average, there are two new cases of COVID-19 and a seven-day average of new daily cases of 3.6 cases.

Today, the county has had 2,782 cases of the virus and 36 deaths.

We are still on the low-risk status as of right now.

or as of July 8th.

So Russell Gibson and I attended the June EMS council meeting where operating policies and logistics of dispatching certain types of calls was discussed.

The need for VDEM hazmat training was discussed and it was noted that the squads would also be cleaning up their active roles by fall.

It was reported that EMS agencies were spending more time on federal park land than in the past, primarily for search and rescue injuries

and Park Service does not have any responsibility for these or any responsibility to contribute resources towards this.

So lobbying for funds for this was mentioned in that discussion.

Also noted was the order of an electric car battery extinguisher at a cost of $29,000.

This reduces the extinguishing times for electric vehicles from around 12 hours to around three hours.

This apparatus would be housed in central locations for use by all fire departments and an application for an interest-free loan to pay for this was also discussed within the group.

They also talked about radio interoperability with it being there that the state RIO system was being updated which should help this within the county.

They also said that extra frequencies or tag channels were desired.

The comprehensive plan, the project website of www.nelson2042.com has been launched and the citizen survey is available for completion until August 15th.

Public workshops will be held on July 13th at the Nelson County High School starting at 5.30 p.m.

The next one is July 20th at Rockfish Elementary School at 5.30 p.m. And then the third one is August 3rd at the Nelson Heritage Center at 5.30 p.m.

All citizens are encouraged to complete the survey and attend these public workshops.

As far as the Piney River water and sewer system, the USEMCA pump station, we're still waiting on the delivery of an ordered VFD, which is a variable frequency drive, which operates the pumps within the pump station.

There's one pump fully functioning and the second one is awaiting this VFD to be installed.

Our opioid litigation settlement, Mr. Payne was notified that the county would be receiving its allocation of year one payments of the opioid settlement funds in the amount of almost $6,000.

This was 0.147% of approximately $4,066,000.

These funds must be used for opioid remediation as defined in the distributor settlement agreement, and that agreement will need to be reviewed to

to the use of those funds.

Larkin Property Acquisition, we pretty much took care of all that during session previously.

And our closing on the property purchase will likely be August 4th, if not August 5th.

So to repair the termite damage within the courthouse, here are the judges, the circuit court judge's office.

We got pricing by JL's president, that's Jamerson Lewis's president, William Cook of $15,500, which includes a $300 allowance for mechanical, electrical, and plumbing work to relocate any utilities in the work area.

They indicated they could do the work between September and November.

and then recently Paul Trestler indicated to me that he's expecting a local contractor to provide him with a quote and then at which time a decision on proceeding will be determined unless otherwise advised by the board.

We did not receive that.

We did bid it out and we got no responses to start with.

So that's why I then see the approach changed to Lewis about to be worked out.

Well, I mean, the bids close on a certain date, so the bid process is technically over.

So we were moving beyond that.

Right.

Right.

Yes.

We could re-bid it out.

probably add a few weeks to the process and to see if we get any other proposals.

All right, that was kind of Mr. Carter's thought at the time that it worked.

You know, can you give me a way to do the work?

And James D. Lewis said, yeah, we can try to fit you in.

All right, in terms of the new office building for DSS, building inspections, planning, and zoning, CMA architecture has begun work on the conceptual design project definition phase, which includes meeting with those departments on June 30th to refine their space needs.

Other work to be done in this phase includes site assessment work and development of conceptual alternatives.

Results will be compiled into a conceptual package to be shared at a meeting sometime in August with the project team, which would include staff from administration, buildings and grounds, social services, building inspections, planning, and zoning, and up to two board members of desires.

I would recommend participation of at least one board member on that committee.

So if you all want to think about that and talk about who

And with what time frame?

I think that's reasonable for you to be on that one.

You want one or two?

We can do two.

Skip?

Skip on it.

All right, so Mr. Parr, Mr. Garden.

Great, thank you very much.

All right, so the FY 23 state budget amendment funding.

There was a bill, HB 30, in the conference reporting limit that provides for $250,000 in funding from the Department of Historic Resources to support planning for the development of the Vietnam War and Foreign Conference Museum in Nelson County.

The funds will flow through the county who is a fiscal agent to the nonprofit Vietnam War and Foreign Complex Foundation.

Members of the foundation will be meeting with DHR in the coming weeks to review details of the use of the money and reporting of the funds.

The board endorsed support or provided support for this funding at this July 13, 2021 regular meeting.

So those funds have come out.

As far as the Director of Finance and HR position, we received five applications.

Three interviews are scheduled for later in the week with Mr. Reed and Mr. Rucker participating.

The Renaissance Ridge Housing Development, as of the first week of July, plans and a revised traffic report have been submitted to VDOT.

Plans and permit applications for water management have been submitted to DEQ.

and copies of these submissions along with EMS fees were submitted to planning and zoning and building inspections.

The developer also reported that the Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA loan law permitting was in progress as was environmental reporting.

The project proposes to construct 136 units in a phased development process.

The fiscal year 22-23 budget, the F-123 budget was adopted and appropriated on June 27, 2022.

Staff is working to finalize adjustments within the accounting system to generate adopted budget reports for staff, public posting, and for rollover into the new fiscal year.

The fiscal year 21-22 end of year, our auditors are conducting preliminary field work this week pertaining to the FY22 audit.

On a cash basis, revenues exceeded expenditures by $2,760,000,

The auditors will accrue back any FY22 related expenditures or revenues through the month of September or 60 days beyond the end of the fiscal year.

So that audited number will be different than this cash basis number.

I also included preliminary revenue and expenditure detail reports as of June 30th and a preliminary analysis of our general fund balance with this report.

Other department and office reports were also included with the 7-12 agenda document.

Any questions for Kani or the rest of the reports at this time?

I apologize.

This happened as of this morning.

Amanda and I had a phone call with Mark Smith of our potential partners regarding the Act Center PAR.

So where it stands right now is there was an 80% submittal of the work and that was circulated for comments along the Nelson and Amherst stakeholders and those are being compiled by Mark Smith.

It was noted in our conversation that the majority of the comments was regarding the lack of exploration of the existing well or wells for their water capacity and the expectation by the work group representatives was that this would be done as part of the study.

And this would likely involve getting a later permission to do the water drawdown testing.

Staff will then take a more critical look at the scope of work provided by our potential partners

All right.

Any more questions for Candy at this time?

Okay, moving on to board reports.

I promise, Skip, I won't make them go

Well, we've already had a report on the EMS council.

I wasn't able to attend this month, but I can't get a report on that.

I never feel like there's much to report on social services to this board.

I mean, they do their work, they do a great job, but I don't know if there's really anything to share with this board.

Well, we're just getting to that point.

So that's why I'm glad we'll be participating in that.

But that's all I have.

Mr. Reed.

Mr. Hardin.

EJPDC, like I said, working on the Regional Housing Partnership.

We have a really awesome

I've told you guys before, I'm going to tell you every month so we get there as we go.

Beyond that, nothing major to report on.

Moving on to appointments.

We have Mr. Green looking to get re-appointed into Java.

My suggestion would be Mr. Reed, he's been on there, so if I could get him to serve another term, and maybe Mr. Reed can get out of here.

Mr. Reed, back on Java.

So moved.

Motion.

Mr. Parr, is there a second?

Second.

Mr. Barton, any discussion?

Here are no discussion.

Let's do a vote of acclamation.

All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

All right.

Looks like this is the County Service Authority.

He will be served until we find a replacement, but we do need to be active in the facility of replacements.

And he represents the South District.

So, Mr. Barton.

Yeah, he talked to me.

He's going to call me back for someone to leave a thought.

Sure.

We have to do the advertisements.

Well, we're sorry to see that Mr. Sherwood has been fixed today for a long time.

Appreciate his service.

I, you know, thank you for your service.

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah, we should settle right in the letter.

We will.

Whenever we find a replacement.

Yeah.

I apologize.

I was just going to add that one thing that we forgot to add to the appointments is we do have that third Albemarle-Sarla School Regional Jail representative position that needs to be filled.

So if the board is inclined to appoint one of its members, or do we want to advertise and get assistance?

What's that?

You want to be on it?

Okay.

That does not impact me.

I'm fine with that.

Who do we have now?

Apparently it's myself and the sheriff.

So this would be a third one.

Mr. Bartlett.

All right.

We nominated him.

We need a second.

Second, Mr. Harvey.

Any discussion?

Hearing no discussion, let's do a vote by a commission.

All those in favor, say aye.

Aye.

Aye.

Objections or abstentions?

Hearing none.

And congratulations, Mr. Barton.

You're getting put on all sorts of stuff now.

Moving on to correspondence.

Well, OK, yes.

So Nelson County Library Advisory Committee

There is no applicants at this time.

This is your district, Mr. Harvey.

So, Ellen Boughton.

So, if you're looking for the North District, we're advertising for that.

And, agricultural reportable district advisory committee, Dr. Durdain D. Durdain.

He passed away.

There's no district producer position.

Mr. Barton is already serving on the Pagona Coastal District and I would be happy to

This is to put Mr. Reed on.

All right, so I'm going to put Mr. Reed on.

Nominate Mr. Reed.

So move.

Move motion for Mr. Parr's second.

I'm going to second for Ernie.

I call on the question.

Any discussion?

Hearing none.

Let's go ahead and all in favor of Ernie, say aye.

Aye.

Any discussion?

Hearing none.

Great.

Congratulations.

Moving on to correspondence, Mr. Parr.

All right, Mr. Reed.

Mr. Harvey.

Mr. Parr.

The only correspondence that I think I've gotten is displayed as well as staff is in reference to the changing of the name of the library.

At this time, the discussion with our staff and other members of the J. Spencer Regent Library,

The name change is no longer going to happen, so there's nothing that needs to happen.

That's all the questions I got now.

Moving on to directives.

Any directives?

Mr. Parr?

Mr. Harvey?