Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Alright. Good afternoon, everyone. I would like to call to order the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors for our May 6230 meeting here in Lane Auditorium. The, supervisors who are present are Supervisor Mike Pruitt of the Scottsville District, Supervisor Ann Malik of the Whitehall District, Supervisor Fred Missal of the Samuel Miller District, Supervisor B. Lapisto Kirtley of the Ravenna District, Supervisor Sally Duncan of the Jack Jewett District, and myself, Supervisor Ned Galloway of the Rio District.

We also have with us our county attorney, Mr. Andy Herrick, our county executive, Mr. Jeff Richardson, and our board clerk, Ms. Claudette Borgeson. We want to thank and introduce the Albemarle County Police Department officers who are present with us today, Officer Tayvon Richardson and Senior Police Officer Ryan Esquirel.

Thank you both for being here. And now if everyone would please rise as you are able for the Pledge of Allegiance. And now if everyone would please join in a moment of silence. Thank you very much. Board, we need to adopt our final agenda.

And prior to doing so, the applicant for Item nine, SE twenty twenty five-forty, five twenty eight Clarks tracked building site modification has requested a deferral. So we need to take action on that request, and then we will move to adopt the final agenda as amended following that.

I'm

oh my god. I broke it.

Did you

break your mic?

I did not break it.

Would somebody other than supervisor Lapisto currently like to make that motion?

Are we gonna discuss it or what?

I move We'll discuss it once the motion is on.

I move that we defer the item.

I'd like to move for a new mic, for supervisor Lapisto curtly. Would you like to use my mic?

Have one. Let

I move that we defer item nine on the agenda to a later date.

Second. All

right. The motion has been made and seconded. We'll have discussion on the matter, and I'll go, ask each supervisor if they'd like to make any discussion points. Supervisor Duncan?

No comments.

Supervisor Malik?

In the past, there has been a reason given that has to do with planning or legislative process

as a reason

for a deferral. So if this is a convenience matter for the applicant, and they've had two years to resolve their zoning things, I don't know why this is coming up at the last minute.

Well, one, I should ask if there's any legal response to the points there. I'll speak to the other matter.

So if the applicant's representative had alerted us that she's unavailable due to a personal matter.

But this is not a public hearing.

Doctor. That's correct.

There wouldn't have to be a presentation. Usually staff has done these in the past, correct?

That's correct, although quite frequently applicants in special exception applications will take time during the matters from the public and speak to it then. So you're correct. It's not a public hearing. And it's not a matter of the applicant delaying. It's simply that the applicant's representative is unavailable due to a personal matter.

Even by telephone.

That's my understanding, yes, ma'am. Wow.

All right. Supervisor Lapisto Kirtley?

JAMES Yeah. I have no problems, concerns delaying this issue.

JAMES Supervisor Missal?

No comments.

Supervisor Pruitt?

No comments.

Alright. I do not have any points to raise. So without further discussion or objection, if the clerk will please call the roll.

Mister Missile? Aye. Mister Pruitt? Aye. Miss Duncan?

Yes.

Mr. Galloway?

Yes.

Ms. Lapisto Kirtley? Aye. Ms. Malik? No.

All right. The motion carries five to one. Now that item is removed from the agenda. So we need a motion to adopt the final agenda as amended.

So moved. Second.

All right. The motion has been made and seconded without objection. If the clerk will please call the roll.

Mr. Missile.

Aye.

Mr. Pruitt.

Aye.

Ms. Duncan. Yes. Mr. Galloway.

Yes.

Ms. Lapisto Kirtley. Aye. Ms. Malik. Yes.

All right. Very good. Ta da. We do not have any proclamations or recognitions today, so we will move past number six to number seven. And that is public comment on matters previously considered or currently pending before the board other than those scheduled for public hearing. Supervisor Missile will read the rules and walk us through the guidelines.

After comment, we could come back to announcements.

Did I miss what did I miss?

Board announcements.

Oh, I missed board announcements.

And we can do it

later on.

Nope. I walked right past that one. So we'll jump back in. Thank you for that, Supervisor Malik. Supervisor Duncan, any announcements today? No. JULIET Supervisor Malik?

JULIET Thank you. Just a couple of things. Remembering Barney Frank, who was an absolutely wonderful moderate congressman from Massachusetts, where I lived for sixteen years, who died today at 86. Today, Monday, May 25 at 10AM at Earleysville Green is the Memorial Day ceremony hosted by the VFW Post twelve forty four, which is a combined Crozet and Earleysville Post. Everyone on the board here has received invitations.

We hope you will come. NGIC commander, colonel Jay McGee, will be the keynote speaker. So it's a great chance to visit with him as well. Six one June 1 at 6PM at PVCC's Balick Center, DEQ will be hosting a public hearing on adding 1,700 more acres to the Albemarle County bundle, which is over 5,000 acres already, on eight properties in Southern Albemarle for adding more acres to put, spread sludge. And this is a time for individuals to learn about the process and to share their concerns.

And it's since it's right here at PVCC, it'll be, more easily accessible than when it's way down country, either in the Northwest Corner where I live or in the Southeast Corner. There'll be more information on townhall.virginia.gov for anyone who would like to know more. And general assembly this year passed the Farmers Right to Know Act, HB fourteen thirty three Lopez and SB three eighty six Stewart, to require testing at the source and before spreading on the field. Farmers are in a bad spot because for fifty years, they've been told this is all fine. So I'm concerned about adding more acres, but people need to make their own minds up and get what information they can. And thank you very much.

JOSHUA All right. Supervisor Lapisto Kirtley.

JOSHUA Yes. I just want to note that I was able to fix the microphone by myself. Thank you.

Supervisor Missile?

I'll just make one comment. It's less of an announcement, I guess, but more of just an awareness thing. It was last week. Supervisor Malik and I attended a PEC presentation regarding the Dominion line at the Keswick Hunt Club, and it was standing room only. Very informative.

I'm sure the information is available for you to look up and look at. It's very impactful to the rural areas, to view sheds, to historic districts, etcetera. And I just would encourage you all and the listeners to take a at that information to learn more about it. There are opportunities coming up in the future for us to have our voices heard, both for and against. And so again, I just would call that to your attention. That's it. MR.

Great. Supervisor Pruitt?

MR. I have nothing to add. Thank you.

All that I will add is I know that several of us have been attending different high school commencement ceremonies, which is always I think one of the best perks of the job of being an elected is to be able to join families and celebrating their children's graduating from their different programs. So I know that there is still Westerns coming this year. Things are a little earlier this year because the school calendar is different. And I believe there's another ceremony for the post high school program this Friday as well. So there's still a couple of ceremonies coming up.

But we wish all the students who have graduated good luck, and congratulations to them and their families. All right. Yes?

Yes. I'm coming back because I was not able to attend the meeting at the Hunt Club. However, I did receive a presentation of the same thing. So it's mainly in the Ribana District, not totally, but mainly. And if anyone wants to contact PEC, they will be more than happy to give you information regarding these transmission lines and what Dominion or soon to be Next Era will be doing.

Thank you. Oh, and the other thing, attended the Farm Bureau meeting along with Supervisor Malik, and that was very nice to be able to chat with our fellow well, her fellow farmers. I'm not a farmer. But anyway, it was a very nice event. Thank you.

JOSHUA Got it. All right. We do now go to item seven, public comment on matters previously considered or currently pending before the board other than scheduled for public hearings. And Supervisor Missile.

Happy to read it. During the time set aside for public comment on matters previously considered or currently pending before the board, individuals may address the Board of Supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the board or matters that are pending before the board other than items listed on the agenda for public hearing. Individuals are allowed one opportunity of up to three minutes to speak at each board meeting. A sign up sheet is managed by the clerk's office. Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and a light system at the podium. The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins your allotted time. The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking. The red light indicates your time has expired, you will be asked to end your comments. In order to give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the board requests that speakers adhere to the following guidelines. When addressing the board, state your name.

And if you live in Albemarle County, your magisterial district, address comments directly to the board as a whole. Any written statements or other supporting materials may be given to the clerk. If representing a group or organization, you may ask others present to raise their hands in recognition. Speakers may not share any unused time with another speaker. Back and forth debate is not permitted. And do not speak, please, from your seat or out of turn. Just as a reminder, all comments are livestreamed, recorded, and published on the Albemarle County website. Shall I call the first Yeah. Person? All right. We have five signed up. The first one is William Christians. Okay.

Mr. Christians, William Christians. Alright. Alright.

We'll go to the second. It's Jim Webb.

My name is Jim Webb, and I'm here representing the Love Thy Neighbor coalition. I live at 1880 River Inn Lane in Albemarle County. I reside in the Rio Magisterial District, and my district supervisor is Ned Galloway. I'm here today to talk about an interfaith coalition that is formed out of concern over immigration enforcement practices. Last summer, a working group at Charlottesville Friends Meeting, Quakers, organized a gathering on faith and immigration at Northside Library. A call went out to

all faith

communities, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Baha'i, in the greater Charlottesville area. And some 130 people from an array of religious congregations and other people of conscience gathered to discuss ways in which we could support our immigrant neighbors. Over the past ten months, love thy neighbor has organized educational sessions and film screenings at churches to raise awareness of the fearful and inhumane conditions that our immigrant neighbors face. We have convened an interfaith gathering on the downtown mall, attended by hundreds, to show support for our immigrant neighbors. Toward this end, the Love Thy Neighbor Working Group promulgated the following statement on immigration enforcement.

We, as members of faith communities and people of conscience, are guided by moral values to support the family and to show compassion to the stranger. We condemn the enforcement of policies that shatter immigrant families when neither parents nor children have been charged with violent crimes. We condemn detention without informing family members of the whereabouts of their loved ones or permitting communication and visitation. And we call upon our elected leaders and fellow citizens to ensure that immigrant families remain together and are treated with fairness and humanity. This statement on immigration enforcement has been endorsed by numerous faith communities, including Charlottesville Friends Meeting, Quakers, Sojourners United Church of Christ, Grace Church Red Hill, Taber Presbyterian Church, Westminster Presbyterian Church.

It has been signed by hundreds of individuals in the greater Charlottesville area. We call upon you, the members of the Albemarle Board of Supervisors, to do everything within your powers to keep immigrant families safe and to assure that all immigrants are treated with fairness and humanity. Our moral obligations to each other, and no less.

Thank you. Next is Vicki Bravo.

Afternoon.

VIKI Good afternoon. I'm Vicki Bravo here representing IMPACT. I'd like to speak about the revised guidelines for the Affordable Housing Investment Fund. We were pleased to see the updated guidelines, and we have comments on two areas. The first is proposals for rental housing at 60% AMI receives 10 points.

And funding for for sale residents at 80% gets 10 points. We believe that building apartments at 60% should get more points. We understand that it's more expensive to build housing for sale, but the most need is at 60% and below. This range covers working people who serve our community, such as teachers and firefighters, who aren't paid 80%. We maintain that the need in Albemarle County warrants favoring building at 60% AMI, which better serves the need of our community.

The second thing is we've seen reference to the community stakeholders review committee. We'd like more information on what expertise or experience you're looking for for the members of that committee and how it will operate. And lastly, I want to thank, first, the Board of Supervisors for the great amount of time and energy that you've put into the issue of affordable housing to get us where we are today. I'd also like to thank County Executive Richardson and your staff for your thoughtful work on affordable housing. And a special thanks to Doctor.

Stacy Pethia. She has had the hard job of bringing everyone and their varied positions together. She has persevered over years. We thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mister Gary Grant.

Gary Grant, Ryle District, an older American twelve months of the year. Thank you for the signs for the month of May all over the parking lot. A variety of questions for you today, not in any particular priority order. First, a question that I asked at your meeting on April 15 that has gone unanswered by the board, by the county executive, or by any member of his staff. The question was and still is, can I sit or stand on the Route 29 pedestrian overpass sidewalk and distract drivers below with the sign attached to the fence?

When can I expect a yes or no answer to this question? Now for some other questions, which I would also like answers to. Does this board or any county employee examine the IRS nine ninety tax returns for all nonprofit agencies that request or receive funding from Albemarle County? Does the county publicize anywhere through any type of media that private donations can be made to the Albemarle Housing Investment Fund? As of April 30, according to your budget office, 0 private dollars have been donated to AHIF in FY '26, showing, once again, in my opinion, the impact of those who prefer to spend other people's money for affordable housing.

Are wooden pallets considered yard debris or trimmings and allowed by county ordinance to be included in residential open burns. Why are there no CACs, Community Advisory Committees, for your constituents who live in rural areas of the county's magisterial districts. Would this board be willing to consider the creation of six rural area CACs to increase engagement purposes. Finally, a last question, to which I do not want an answer if it divulges any information about the county's security plans. The question, how is something made of metal, like my metal water bottle here, able to get this close to you at your meetings through security?

Thank you. Neil Williamson.

Good afternoon. I printed off copies of this to read and left them on my desk. My name is Neil Williamson. I serve as the president of the Free Enterprise Forum, a public policy organization focused on Central Virginia's local government. In today's meeting, you'll receive the fiscal 'twenty seven Albemarle Housing Investment Fund process recommendations.

I found the AHIP matrix to be a little challenging to understand, and I've got to believe it's going to be challenging to administer. It got me thinking, what if there was a simple way to achieve the goals of the fund to equitably assist in the creation of affordable housing? What if Albemarle had at least one AHIF recommendation that followed the so called TIS principle? What if there was a way Albemarle could assist every affordable unit without significant administrative evaluation or bias regarding the builder. There is one simple affordable housing recommendation that has been made many times to this Board, yet does not appear in any of the AHIP options.

You may be aware there is a major increased housing cost coming to Albemarle County. It has not garnered significant attention. In tomorrow's meeting, Albemarle County Service Authority will be looking at their new budget, which increases connection fees by 15%. If you look at their five year plan, it will increase 15% annually for the next five years. That's a lot of money.

What if AHIF paid all the connection fees for all housing developed as affordable under Housing Albemarle? You want to think bigger? What if it paid all the building inspection and permit fees? All of those things are possible. Those are real fees, but you could use this money to make housing affordable on units that have already been deemed affordable.

There will be no needs for subjective review. For profit and nonprofit developers would be treated equally. It would not preclude the other developer incentives that this board has already discussed, including tax abatement and other strategies. But it's an elegantly simple way to equitably impact and increase affordable housing. The Free Enterprise Forum believes Albemarle County needs to embrace the KISS principle and add connection fee payments as one of the recommendations for AFIF funding. Thank you.

JOSHUA Thank

you. Thank you. I'll do a bounce back to William Christians in case he came in the meantime.

It looks

like he has not. So that concludes our list.

All right. Thank you to everyone who provided public comment today. We will move to our next item on the agenda, number eight, our consent agenda. I'm not aware of any items being pulled. Are there any items that need to be pulled? Alright. Is there a motion to adopt or approve the consent agenda?

So moved. Second.

Alright. Without objection, if the clerk will please call the roll.

Mr. Missile? Aye. Mr. Pruitt? Aye. Ms. Duncan? Yes. Mister Galloway?

Yes.

Miss Lapisto Kirtley? Aye. Miss Malik? Yes.

Alright. The consent agenda is approved. Thank you, board. Alright. We will move past item number nine. That is the item that was deferred to number 10, which is the fiscal year twenty twenty seven Albemarle Housing Investment Fund process recommendations. Good afternoon, Ms. Demick. Good afternoon, all.

I'll pull up my presentation. Good afternoon, Chair Galloway, members of the Board of Supervisors. I'm pleased to be before you today to seek your guidance on the elements of the proposed competitive process for awarding AHIFSRA.

Jackie, you might have to get right up on that mic. It seems like anybody not speaking into this mic is, I mean, including supervisors, I mean, need to be right on top of it today.

Okay.

Or talk louder.

I'll both.

Okay. Thank you. I'm pleased to be before you today to seek your guidance on elements of the proposed competitive process for awarding AHIF funds for fiscal year 'twenty seven. As we discussed in March of this year, our intention is to open this competition up for applications this summer so as to avoid any overlap with the board's budget decision making process and to ensure sufficient time for applicants seeking additional leverage from other sources. I'll share a brief history of the AHIP and then our proposed process and evaluation criteria for your feedback and questions.

We'll present this information in three phases, including some background on the AHIP staff proposal for the '27 process, and an opportunity for board direction and questions about the AHIP process and broad evaluative criteria. Before we launch into the AHIP content, I'd like to remind the board of planning future discussion around housing matters, some of which are already on your agendas and others are yet to be calendared. These include staff recommendations for the remainder of the twenty sixth fund for AHIP on June 17, the review and renovation of housing Albemarle policy on August 5, and the Southwood performance agreement for phase two, establishing a formal housing advisory committee, an affordable dwelling unit ordinance, and establishing housing development targets, which will be scheduled after we receive the regional housing needs assessment report. The AHIP was created in 2019 with the intention to fund projects that created or preserved affordable housing in several forms, including rental units and homeownership. Funding would be one time, not ongoing.

Until fiscal year 'twenty six, applications came in on a rolling basis, first come, first serve, until the funds were exhausted. Board members, area nonprofit partners, and developers, staff all wished for a more predictable method for distributing these funds. As a result, significant process changes were implemented for the fiscal year 'twenty six process in May of 'twenty five, creating a competitive application process with a target split for use of the fund balance, review team member expectations, and the scoring threshold for eligibility. In the months since the completion of the '26 process, staff have received feedback from community partners, county staff, and the board to improve the '27 process. I'll walk through the elements of the process and the application components proposed for 'twenty seven now.

A reminder that the process that we just completed, where we had some, I think, Supervisor Missel described as bumps in the road earlier, related to several of these components. But I'll remind the board that this most recent process included a proposed or target split of the balance for 40% for grants, 40% for loans, and 20% for staff identified emerging needs projects, particularly related to housing Albemarle, and that applications would be reviewed by non office of housing staff. And there was an eligibility scoring threshold of 75% identified. For fiscal year twenty twenty seven, staff proposed opening the application portal for a full four weeks in July and reviewing applications during August. There are three changes in the process that are reflected in this slide worth some attention.

First, the full thirty days for application submission that the review team would include county staff and outside housing subject matter experts, and the creation of a standardized agreement which simplifies the post award process for county staff and award recipients. While the team may expand between now and this summer at the moment, our fiscal year 'twenty seven review team includes Amanda Chandler, asset manager for Riverview Residential Management Liz Webb, housing program coordinator for the City Of Harrisonburg Michelle Rodriguez, director of property management for the Better Housing Coalition Luke Morgan, Brandi Sullivan, and Thomas Unsworth from our Department of Finance and Budget. Based on feedback we received from the twenty sixth process, we plan to provide technical assistance to all applicants prior to submission deadline, including at least one orientation session similar to what we do for the human services funding process. And we'll make housing staff available to reviewers throughout the evaluation process for any questions or clarifications. We believe it's important for the Office of Housing staff to not be formal reviewers to avoid the potential appearance of bias, but also want to make sure that their expertise is available to our outside experts.

The 27 process, we recommend that there remains this eligibility threshold for scoring of 75%. So eligibility is determined whether you can achieve at least 75% of the available score. And then their ranked applications were ranked based on that, similar to what we did this year. Given the amount in the fiscal year 2027, it makes sense, I think, to increase the amount available for grants and loans to 90%. In the 'twenty six process, we had a proposed target split of half and half, 40% for loans, 44 for grants, didn't reflect, I think, the way applications are going to come to us.

And so I don't think it makes sense for us to have targets necessarily for loans or grants. We would like to do both, and we'll see what comes in in terms of our requests or proposals with an overall anticipated use of 90% of the funds for grants and loans and 10% reserved for staff initiated projects. This allows sufficient funds for the staff to move forward with staff initiated projects that meet community needs and address action items from Housing Albemarle. As you're aware, there is $7,033,000 in the AHIF for 'twenty seven. So this means $6,329,700 would be available for distribution as grants and loans as part of the competitive process.

And 703,300 would be available for staff initiated projects. As always, all AHIP awards will be approved by the board regardless of their origin. AHIF continues to be available to developers of affordable rental units and affordable homeownership, as well as to organizations that will preserve existing affordable units. Scoring criteria will be specific to each of these three areas. I'll walk through the scoring matrix in a moment.

All three types of fundable projects will have a total of 185 points available, with a 75% threshold eligibility score of 138.8. This reflects an evolution in staff's work on this process. Among the draft documents you received in your materials for this item was an evaluation matrix with a different available points total for each type of eligible project. Based on feedback from community providers, we work to align the questions to ensure that each type totaled to the same amount. This eliminates any potential, albeit mild, scoring bias inherent in the evaluative process.

It's important to note that while the score totals are the same, the expectations and components of the answers will be different and specific to the type of housing being proposed. I'll share a more detailed look at the evaluation factors that are scored in the AHIP application next. Important to note on this slide that one of the changes that we are proposing for 'twenty seven is a sliding scale answer option for our reviewers. Last year, some of those questions were either you had them or you didn't. And now we would like to allow for more nuance.

And so some of those questions will have essentially a Likert scale that allows for zero, five, 10, or zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten to be able to get some more nuance in the scoring options. Applicants to the AHIP are evaluated through four broad categories readiness to proceed, capacity and experience of the development team, project budget, and consistency with county priorities. I'll present details for each of the categories now. For readiness to proceed, the questions are, does the applicant have site control? Has the project been secured project entitlements such as zoning compliance and site plans already?

Does the applicant have sufficient funding to proceed? Is the proposed construction schedule reasonable? Is there a strong likelihood of starting within one hundred and twenty days? This category is consistent with the board's interest in supporting shovel ready projects with the AHIP, bringing resources to the community as soon as possible. The second category is capacity and experience of the applicant, including demonstrated record of success working with localities doing similar work, demonstrated record of completing projects on time and on budget, knowledge and experience with energy efficient building practices, fiscal and organizational soundness, as evidenced by audits, experienced development team, track record of compliance with property management, affordability, and physical condition requirements, which would only apply to rental projects.

This category is consistent with the county's value and expectation around stewardship, ensuring we are investing in an organization who can deliver on the proposed project. For the project budget, we're interested in whether the finance plan is sound, whether we have a strong preference for projects in which the county provides less than 25% of the total project cost. For our rental housing pro form a, we're interested in whether it demonstrates that property income consistently exceeds expenses and debt service payments. We have strong preference for projects in which the requested funding is less than or equal to $30,000 a unit. This category reflects the county's interest in leveraging funding from other sources into our community and meeting the county's stewardship expectations by ensuring that the proposed project is financially sound and a good investment of county funds.

Finally, the last category is consistency with county priorities. This covers a lot of ground. Questions include whether the project is consistent with existing policies, such as housing Albemarle, AC44, and small area plans and the like, whether the project addresses at least one strategic priority area, a strong preference for an extended period of affordability, for high level of energy efficiency, for proposed units would meet universal accessibility standards, and that their proposed project would be focused on meeting the needs of the most vulnerable members of our community. In this case, vulnerability is defined as extreme housing instabilityrisk of homelessness. It includes community members 65, families with children under six, and people with disabilities.

This category reflects the county's interest in serving the most vulnerable members of our community, maintaining affordability and supported units as long as possible, ensuring we aren't funding anything that works at cross purposes with existing plans and policies, assisting to meet our energy efficiency and climate change goals, and ensuring that we increase the number of universally accessible units in our community. We look forward to your feedback and questions on both process and criteria. I'll present each of these separately. So we'll move to feedback and questions related to process. We're specifically seeking your feedback on items that were part of our discussion back in March, including the proposed timeline, eligible activities, the proposed split for the fund balance, and the minimum threshold score of 75% of available points for funding consideration.

JULIET All right. So we've got this first set of questions and then other items that fall, I guess, in that same category. Supervisor Duncan? DUNKIN:

I like the timeline change. That makes sense. And I printed out you were helpful enough to give me last year's list. And just looking at this whole thing, it looks clear and feels like it makes a lot more sense, kind of all of the changes. I guess I know we have more meetings to talk about housing stuff, so I'm willing to listen to all of it and kind of learn about all of the housing stuff before.

But I guess sort of big picture, I just wonder if this is the best way to spend all of our affordable housing money. Actually, I'm super interested in tap fees or a variety of other ways that just sort of big picture, I'm curious. But for this specific thing, my one I had a question about accessibility. So you give five points for if they include affordable units that are accessible. Isn't that a requirement that they have to be accessible?

Yes and no. I think there are a variety of standards for accessibility. So there are standards around accessibility that allow for anyone to come visit your unit versus anyone to live in your unit. And it wouldn't be surprising to learn that the accessibility standards for some conditions are either not the same as other conditions or working at cross purposes sort of in the way of other conditions. And so this is really about the standard.

So we're sort of trying to be as broad as possible and refer to the Virginia home standards for accessibility as well as for energy efficiency, given the fact that we're not experts in this area. We'd like to sort of work on somebody else's defended criteria. JULIE

That makes sense. And then the comment that was made about homeownership below 80%, I do wish that could be 60% as well. But for this, that's kind of all my comments.

JOSHUA Supervisor Malik?

MARY Thank you very much, and thank you for the helpful homework to get here today. I think you've answered lots of questions, but I still have a few more. So let us go back to the very beginning of what you were saying. Who is doing the housing needs assessment?

JULIE The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission has been working with the Regional Housing Coalition?

Partnership. JULIE

Partnership on the creation of a housing needs assessment

Mostly for the developers.

I thought

they ran it. THP. Okay.

I'm not a developer, and I'm on there.

Right. Okay. Good. Yeah, RHP. Okay, there's that one. Good. Now, you mentioned some names on the review panel. Was that this past year or the one to come?

That's the proposed for 'twenty seven. It was a demonstration that we're working with others outside of our jurisdiction and outside of the county to bring expertise. There was commentary in March that while we had county staff reviewing the applications, that we were sidelining our housing experts. And so we took that feedback to say, our reviewers this year should include county staff and also outside housing experts.

JULIE And so these are not people who would be I remember lawyers are not allowed to represent somebody who then would be an applicant in front

of JULIE There'd be no conflict of

interest So in this is that kind of separation is what Okay, we're talking that's excellent. And the ninetyten percentage for the active things as opposed to the small staff initiated things, which I still don't quite understand what those are yet. But I think that's better. I'd like that. And you've been very clear about the process for that, which I find very helpful.

So in many of the other investments which the county has made in CIP land, it's been for the last dollar. And it struck me when we were going over an applicant that the first million dollars for a project went to land purchase. And then nothing has really that money's been spent, but there isn't the next step. So I guess this is a dramatic change from the sort of last dollar investment that we have done in other things. So I would like you to think about that and make sure that this is that we're getting the projects to advance, that we're certain they're going to advance.

You have a lot of descriptors in here that I think imply that it's important. But performance on prior projects, data, timeliness, continual postponements, and tenant satisfaction in current managed projects is very important to me because I have so many in my district that are problematic. And so I think that before more money is given to some, they need to be showing that they can do a better job than they're doing now. The and I mentioned less. The consistency with the county plans, I think your vulnerable description certainly is ideal, but it leaves out a whole section of working poor.

If we're focusing on the very young, with young children and the seniors, then there's still a whole lot of people in the middle. And I don't know what to do about that, but I just it struck me that that was a big, big gap. And just of interest, the, having a separate experimental column where it could evaluate something such as mister Williamson's suggestion to see how the dollars would compare and how much bang for the buck could be achieved. I mean, people have been talking about that for a long, long time, and it'd be great to have some sort of chart that one could look at and see how they would compare. I don't know how to do it, but that's just an idea. Thank you.

Supervisor Lapisto Kirtley.

Thank you for the presentation. Wanted to know, do we know how many do we have data on how many rentals that we've helped through our program and how many ownership programs that we've helped. Do we have any data on that?

We do have that data. It's normally provided to the board sometime in the end of May as part of the Office of Housing annual report. We're in process of developing that report right now for the last year. And we can certainly resend the ones from previous years.

What I'm wondering is, is it about a one to one relationship or two to one or five to one, something like that?

JULIE We have significantly higher investments across the board in rental housing to date over homeownership. For some of the reasons that were already identified, it is significantly more expensive to generate.

Right. And it was explained to me by Doctor. Pethia that we might approve someone for homeownership, but then they have the burden of going to the bank, their credit score, etcetera, etcetera, whether or not they actually get approved. So on paper, we look we've approved these. But in the final end or at the end, they may not be able to qualify through the banks in the process, correct?

True, for traditional loans. There are other ways of getting to the equity involved in purchasing a home. Certainly Habitat for Humanity has a model in which they contribute, intentionally draw down the overall cost of the home to make sure that any potential buyer who is in that community, particularly in Southwood, but in other communities as well, that have a mortgage that matches the HUD requirement of 30%, no more than 30% of your monthly income. And so that essentially serves as the first mortgage on that home. And that over time, they earn the capacity to pay more on that mortgage and own a bigger stake of that home.

It's an unusual sort of financial model, but one that's used by Habitat for Humanity across the country, and one that is reflective in the idea that homeownership

is

a wealth builder for community, for individual households. JULIE

Right. And that's something I certainly support. And I've stated it before that I would like to see a program where if there's some way of homeownership being offered to our first responders, because I think those are the people that you want in the community, living in the community, when there's a disaster that happens. And who knows what's going to happen in the future? But when there's a disaster that happens, I think it's important for them to live in the county and not one or two counties away.

My Okay. And I brought this up about rentals and homeownership because I was wondering if and I don't know if the other board members agree or not but having additional points given to those who are renting. Because I'd actually if we're holding on to some money for homeownership and we're not spending it, I'd like to see that given and helping out more renters.

One of the things the board could do is determine, sort of similar to the human services needs process, that we have applications that come in to meet the requests for nonprofits that are negotiated during the budget process. And staff evaluate them based on a score. We have an application. We score that. And then they are ranked according to priority based on what the board has said is the highest priority, vulnerability, those kinds of things.

To that end, should the board be interested in, the board could rank in order of preference the three eligible activities. Right now, they are all identified as sort of equally valuable. They do meet individual needs along the housing continuum. If you all remember the housing continuum, we need resources on almost all of those buckets in order to have a successful affordable housing strategy. And so there's data and defensibility in serving and meeting the needs of all three of these categories. However, what's in the board's discretion is to say you'd like to award additional points to one or rank them in the order of your particular preference.

And perhaps, perhaps with additional monies for rentals, you could even, in some cases, lower the it wouldn't have to be 60%. Maybe it could be lower than 60% AMI, something like that. And the last thing I'd like to bring up is it was mentioned that regarding fees for ACSA for sewer and water hookup, is that something that would be viable, simple to do, that would help out, that would encourage developers to actually put in units for affordable housing? The hookups only for affordable units.

We've heard conflicting information about that. We've heard both an interest in tap fees being one of the sort of a menu. Past years, we've talked about tap fees as being one of many developer incentives we might offer developers. And we've also heard from developers that financial support isn't sufficient to meet the need. And so they would prefer that that's an and item. Yes, tap fees and also some additional support. And so I don't mean to steer us away from that conversation and anticipate that being part of the conversation in August 5 when we talk about housing Albemarle and the full range of incentives around housing policy.

Good. Thank you very much. That's all.

Supervisor Missal?

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. It was really helpful. Can you do me a favor? I want to make sure I'm categorizing my comments appropriately. Can you go back one slide, please? Process and evaluation criteria. Okay. I'll start with process. So first of all, it's great to hear the 7.033 read out. That's empowering, I think. And it's great to see that. Still more need, of course, and and we're working towards that. Also looking forward to the two by two two and two on twos, two by twos. The four of us getting together at some point in the near future on this.

I think flexibility is important. And I can tell just by looking at this and even speaking to some constituents over the last couple of days that you've heard them even in the last couple of days and made some edits to it. So a lot of what I was thinking and wondering about has been addressed by even just this simple approach. So I really appreciate that. Couple of questions. In terms of the timeline, I think what I understand is that the edits to the timeline are to align with the ability for the developer to find other funding sources and know in advance that they have these at their disposal. So it can help to build the capital stack. Is that right?

Yes. Ideally, we make our internal decisions, present them to the board for your approval in time for a LITECH application for any rental units, as it happens. And none of the folks that we've talked to are actually pursuing LITECH applications this year, which is why we can be in front of you proposed for October 8 instead of before October 1, which is when it would be due. But that would be our ideal sort of timeline, is that we provide enough information so that they can pursue those. If we agree, the county agrees to provide funding to someone, that's an important part of their application for LITAAC and drives additional points for them.

And so that was going to be something that people are going to want to have. They don't need to have the performance agreement signed, but they need to have your decision prior to that application date line. And there are certainly other sources of funds, community foundations, etcetera, that people will be seeking. And we want it to not be in the way of your budget decision making process and also create as many opportunities for people to get their leveraged funding in time to use the funds prior to the end of the current whatever that current fiscal year is.

That all makes sense. So when you say October deadline, that's for 4% LITECH, right?

Yes. There's another rolling, there's another one. Yeah.

So it doesn't really align with the March deadline, right, in a sense for 9%?

Sure. They can if we have made our decision in October, that's in their funding deck for the March application, so it meets both.

So then you're getting right at my question here. So as you're establishing that capital stack and you're looking at your full pro form a, this funding will be part of that. As I understand it, and maybe I'm misunderstanding, but part of the criteria of being awarded these funds is that you have an established financial plan. Is that a chicken and egg thing? In other words, is your financial plan established by saying we are applying for LITECH funds? Is that enough to establish a secure financial plan?

That's enough for us to believe in your financial plan. Okay. Suspect I that there could be financial plans that will come in that aren't relying on LITECH, that already have funding secured, they would get additional points over somebody who is yet to be applying. Somebody who is applying, however, meets both our sort of financial plan a set of criteria for financial plan and also a set of criteria for us around readiness to deliver on the project. If you're anticipating applying, preparing to apply, that counts as readiness for us, even if it means you're not going to have a shovel in the ground in one hundred and twenty days.

That's great to know. Because sometimes, obviously, if you don't get the award, if the LITEC awards, you have to pivot and try to find other ways to fund. So that doesn't preclude you from getting these funds.

Agreed. Okay. Agreed. And that's great. Would be in pretty significant conversation with anyone who had been awarded funds by this board to make sure that we are creating a performance agreement that is both viable and some maybe applying some pressure to deliver on something.

So if we got to the end of, you know, the spring or early summer of next year and we didn't think that there was a viable path, then we'd come back before you and ask for you to reconsider distributing those funds in a different spot. But we recognize that the construction environment and development environment is tricky, and there are many chicken or egg situations around sort of planning out your construction plan. And we're most interested in those units being delivered, period.

JOSHUA Okay. That's really helpful. I agree. I mean, you want the focus to be on things that can be delivered, 100%. The one hundred and twenty day start time, I mean, that's tight, right? So don't want to spend more time getting into more details. But at some point, maybe on the two on twos, I'd love to learn more about the one hundred and twenty days and how that plays into this. And if that is going to preclude any awards here, really what the rationale was behind that. So that's one. The other is the threshold, it's quite one of your questions, number four.

The 75%, how did you arrive at a 75% number? Why is it 75% and not 80% or 65%?

JULIE Three quarters of the available points seemed like the right place to land. There are others that have 80% thresholds, and then there are some who have a 69% threshold. And so 75% seemed like you got most of the points. There would be no way for you to get just points in one category and none in the others. Got it. But I don't think that's proven by science.

Okay. You were asking whether we think that's the right threshold. I'm not sure what to base my yes or no on there. But if that makes sense, I mean, what you're saying makes sense, at least.

I think at our last round we had enough proposals who met the threshold and some who didn't to reflect that not everybody's going to get in there based on that 75% threshold. And that there's still it's still a high enough expectation or a low enough expectation that enough of our local providers are going to be able to compete for these funds effectively.

Got it.

The balance of the stewardship expectation and the flexibility expectation.

Yeah. Working backwards a little bit. So the split, the 90%, 10%, perfect. I think that the way that's been edited and changed, I think, is the right approach to that. I think that the equal allocation of those three eligible groups is also correct, to not bias that in one way or another.

However, I would see that as more of a kind of like an evergreen process, where the market might and this gets a little bit, I think, to what you were saying the market might dictate the need for more, I don't know, homeownership. Or one year, the next year, it's like, well, we've got a lot of homeownership. That would be nice to have. But, we don't have very much whatever AMI. Right?

So I think we just have to see that is not a fixed approach, but something that may need to flex based on the market and what's being seen. And to that end, about the proposed timeline, as we think about the inputs to us to make the right decisions, it seems that to add to your timeline a report like what is coming out of the TJPDC, the Regional Housing Needs Assessment, aligning that with the decision process on this subject would be a helpful thing to do, as well as providing us with information on the prior year's effectiveness of the AHIP and how that works. So that that data can all be kind of combined. And that'll allow us to sort of think through what is a priority, right, as we as we look at that. I think I will stop there.

Thank you.

Supervisor Pruitt?

JOSHUA Thank you. I first want to very briefly, in response to Bea's comment on affordable rentals, My understanding is that one of the most persistent concerns, critiques of our current process is almost literally opposite of your point, which is that there was a perhaps unintended structural bias in the ranking mechanism that created an unintended just statistical preference for rentals based on the total number of points allocated, which has been changed by the fact that they're all now on a 185 baseline. I'm looking to CACI to see if that is accurate. They weren't previously the exact same point value.

JULIE Correct. They were two ten, 185, and 130. And we corrected what mathematically is a bias, albeit mild.

Yes. I think the argument was that it was changing how easy it was to get over the cleavage point of 75% based on your missing points. I agree with Vice Chairman Saul's point that this is probably a moving target. And I also, his comments, I think, spoke to what I was going to begin with, kind of an opening observation. We are currently doing a lot of thinking and doing a lot of investing around housing, but I think it's also important to recognize that it is like a five year old process, which means it at least is my perception right now that A, HIF and our inclusionary zoning set asides are currently trying to do everything, and B, everything on housing, which means they're containing certain intrinsic contradictions.

And before Supervisor Missal had even mentioned it, I had already written down that I think there's an intrinsic contradiction in our preferencing. We're trying to simultaneously preference being the first dollar and the last dollar. Want high leverage for my county contributions, which I think means a first dollar role, right? We want to be able to be in a position to help draw down 94% subsidies. We want to be in a position to potentially attract better bank rates, which would be a first dollar thing.

But that sits in contradiction to trying to be shovel ready within one hundred and twenty days. There's also, I think, probably going to be some inherent contradictions in I don't think it's the time to address it, but I think we will need to address it as this becomes a more mature project, as we build out inventory, and as we potentially develop our tool set for other local tools, which is we're trying to do deep affordability using a tool built for shallow affordability. Others may disagree with that, but I think of a housing trust fund as something that is very much designed for relatively shallow affordability. And that's particularly true with loan based funds. And we're trying to prioritize sub 60%, which is hard.

It is not the easy way to do that. When you're trying to target that percentage of people, you are often either doing it with a direct tenant facing subsidy, or you're stacking subsidies. Right? Like I'm thinking most deeply poor people I know who are housed in high cost living areas are receiving double subsidies. They're in a subsidized department on a housing voucher.

And our housing voucher portfolio is limited by the feds right now, and we don't have a local voucher. Which is just to say, as we build that out more and I'm being careful because I know this is a very particular ask of impact, and I think it's the right ask while we only have one tool in front of us. But as we develop our portfolio of tools and as we also build our inventory, I imagine we're going to want to revisit our target AMI levels because I'm not sure it's the best and highest way to leverage a dollar using this particular tool. But right now, it's where we have to make up ground most acutely. So that's my opening salvo of a rant.

Now to actually get to what I'm being asked to comment on, I zoned out very briefly while writing some of these notes when we were talking about the transition and where we're getting feedback in the process. I know there's been requests for some kind of publicly serving board for evaluation. And I was briefly zoned out on the slide that discussed that. Can you refresh me very quickly? I'm sorry.

The housing advisory committee or council is on for future conversations that would follow our housing admiral conversation. So our housing admiral conversation is scheduled for August 5. The Housing Advisory Council or Committee is a component of housing admiral, one of the recommendations. And one of the recommendations we'll be seeking your guidance on at that time. And so the follow-up would be based on your guidance provided in August.

We've talked before about chicken and egg problems with how I'm about to ask this question. Are you and your staff anticipating the Housing Advisory Committee being able to fill this role on AHIP allocations or a separate committee that is also doing that? Because this is something I've been asked before, and I'm like, I don't actually know which way we're going if it's got to be two committees or

That's among the things we're seeking your collective guidance on in August is what the role of the Housing Advisory Council ought to be. There's good suggestions that the selection committee for an AHIP ought not to be the same SHARFSTEIN: group of people providing you with policy guidance. And so I think we're going

to present that question to you all in August.

Sure. I would say regardless of how we want to cleave those, this kind of speaks to, I think, a bias that Supervisor Malik was just sharing that I agree with. I would want dedicated seats for tenants in both of those if they exist, even recognizing that a tenant doesn't come with the same expertise on funding stacks. I am reminded of a little over a decade ago, right, CRHA was there's got be so many acronyms CRHA was contemplating doing a bunch of project based rental assistance demonstration programs, converting public housing to private in order to redevelop and retain subsidies. And every I don't want to typecast.

I think every person on this board, if they were in the CRHA position, would have been like, yep, that makes sense. That's a good technocratic thing to do. It leverages more money. And the position that the FAR Tenant Association sat in said, dollars to donuts, I don't care. This is going to change my experience as a tenant.

And we're very forceful in resisting that. And that is a perspective that, had I been on the CRHA board in that capacity, I would not have known otherwise. And so I do think there's always going to be the importance of that tenant voice in whatever structure we create. A few very specific questions on how we are structuring this with the proposed changes. Are you expecting to carry through the 10% rather than the 20%?

Or is this in response sorry, for the staff led activities? You've reduced it from 20% to 10%. But I'm also recognizing that we are carrying over a balance from last cycle. Are you expecting to stay at 10%? Or is this more in appreciation of the fact that we have an unused fund balance?

We'll be before you in June with recommendations to use the remaining fiscal year 'twenty six balance. So it is still very much my fervent hope that we have exhausted the AHIP by 06/30/2026. So I would not say we're prepared to carry over money from 'twenty six into 'twenty seven at this moment.

And so with that, can I also intuit that you're thinking 10% is maybe an amount that makes more sense moving forward?

JULIE Agreed. And I think having some degree of flexibility, both for staff to push forward some things that might be sort of in the pilot program kind of category to test some things around housing. If we're smaller, just more discrete populations, we've had a conversation with this board about the number of families who are involved in child protection services simply because of unstable housing. What would it be like if we provided some stability? How would that affect family well-being?

How much stability or subsidy would that take to do? The smaller amounts of money, probably likely available nowhere else. And so those are the kinds of things we can imagine asking for your support to sort of test some things for families of particular vulnerability. But also, because the markets are so changeable and because our context is so changeable, it allows the board to have some funds to use to respond to an emerging need that comes up during the year. It would be my hope that we don't carry those funds forward, that we don't have a rolling amount, that we spend that money appropriately during the fiscal year in which it's been appropriate.

JOSHUA Okay. Thank you for that. I don't think I fully appreciated that our loan periodicity, when we do disperse loans, is five years. And I've heard some as I'm guessing you probably have concern that a five year amount of time for that to sit on the capital stack isn't that useful. And I don't know that it's a pressing fiscal priority for us to have that speedy repayment, but maybe it is. Is that something we're prepared to be flexible on? It also doesn't seem like it's written into the guidelines that I'm looking through, but maybe I missed it. So is that something we can flex on in the immediate year?

It's one of several items that I think we're going to sort of chew on operationally to see what's the right amount of time. This board was particularly interested in the opportunity to use loans because it becomes a self seeding tool for the fund. So there's some payoff there about sort of being able to use the loans right now, but also delaying the opportunity to sort of self water the fund. So I think we can look to other best practice models in other communities and see what the standard is elsewhere. I have heard that concern that five years is not enough, particularly in this sort of construction timeline for that to be immediately useful for a number of nonprofit providers.

So

that's one of a number of things that we'll sort of chew on between we now and July 1 when we open this process up again.

Sure. I know when we were doing kind of an ad hoc opening up of this discussion previously, because we were dispersing the funds, I had expressed the thought that we were currently using an identical system for evaluating grants and loans, but they had different costs and benefits. Loans, kind of again, think are better suited for shallower levels of affordability that are serving a broader group, whereas grants are less so. I think I'm seeing that we're not substantively changing how we evaluate those. Could you speak to that?

Is there a plan on how we might qualitatively evaluate them differently? Just how that fork happens in the evaluation process?

I think two phases. One is to think about the way other, for example, the city of Richmond or the state home process evaluate loans differently. We did not see substantial differences in the way they evaluated those two approaches. But we can do some additional digging. We could not do that level of work in time for the fiscal year 'twenty seven process and meet the timeline expectations of the board at the same time. So much like the human services funding process, I imagine ongoing process tweaks to this as we learn and go so that the door's not shut on that. But we need to do some more due diligence on best practice.

Thank you. Do have one most of those were questions. I do have one very prescriptive thing I'm going to say and actually look to the board to see if we have support once we've gone around this. And it's kind of a small thing, but in the guidelines, you talk about tenant displacement. And it's kind of a solicitation of a commitment to principles of tenant displacement as a thing that is looked for.

I was thinking recently, because of the Cavalier Crossing development, about how tenant displacement tools get integrated into a housing ecosystem. And that they all have to be done prospectively. You have to do them at the beginning of a development so that when it gets redev'd thirty years later, you actually have it in place. And this seems to me, absent enabling authority, the main place we can implement pretty robust tenant anti displacement. So I'm wondering, and I want to see your take on this, but if we can adopt a requirement for a tenant displacement plan that is reviewed by staff and or a future housing committee.

This is a tool I've seen in other localities that when they come and they're like, oh, we have received AHIF funding. We are preparing to do a redev that's going to result in displacement. Here is, as policy, as a criteria for the award that we received from you 25 ago, here is our tenant displacement plan in which we are going to say how we're going to place these people and what maybe transitional subsidies we're going to offer them to ease that. Granted, that's normally done as part of a review for a second round of subsidies for the redev. But I'm just wondering if that is something we could implement in the guidelines at this stage, and how you would feel how that comfort level strikes you.

This board has repeatedly identified an interest in creating some restrictions around tenant displacement. And so I imagine there would be a strong interest in this board in exploring that. I think I would need to consult with the attorney's office to make sure that we're that we're not extending an obligation that's beyond our scope of investment over the twenty five or thirty or ninety years, since sometimes we're asking for ninety years affordability around that. So I think we would need to do some digging on that as well before we could commit to having that be part of this process. That's not saying we couldn't do it.

It could be really straightforward. But the board's interest in ensuring that tenants don't get displaced through redevelopment is longstanding. GREEN:

But it could also work in the other direction, right? Like, we're contemplating these all being greenfields that AHIF is going toward. AHIF can tomorrow be used, in fact it was just the cycle used for some redevs. We could include it as a component for redevs, right? Because we can issue funds for a redev tomorrow.

But currently, read this as creating a strict requirement on how they look at tenant displacement during that redev. Although I'm not sure if we are sitting in a capacity where you could even make that change. If there was a small change that could be made for this funding round, I'm not sure if we are sitting in a capacity where we could approve that for this round, seeing that there isn't a textural change in front of us and we have to vote on it. Or we have to No.

But it's August or later, right?

Well, the funding's dispersed soon, right? Dispersed next month.

To the extent that that can be that's an operational change that we could include in the scoring criteria as if an applicant is seeking redevelopment, that we would ask for a tenant non displacement plan from them as part of their assessment about their overall plan. I don't think that that requires us to

come back to the board for Okay. That. JOSHUA That's all I had. Anyway, I would voice to the board that to whatever degree we're able to require tenant displacement management plans in this process, I think we would be well suited to. Because it's really the only opportunity we have to create structural requirements on that. That's all I have. Sorry, I know that was a long time.

Are there any other questions or comments on this process slide? Just because I know we have another set that we're going to go to. So that's what I'm curious. But I heard some criteria things in here. So we will have a chance to speak more on that. Yes.

I will just add on, pile on to Mike's excellent idea about the nondisplacement. Because nine years ago, the reason the board wholeheartedly said yes to Southwood was because of their promise that people who wanted to stay could stay. And that is the only place where we've seen any kind of respect for our long term residents. Up and down 29 in Crozet, the new owners cannot wait to kick out the old timers. And they do it by changing the rules and tripling the ground rent in a mobile home park and refusing to help little old ladies mow their grass and things like that.

It's just and so we have no teeth right now in this nice paragraph we have. So I would like to see some teeth. Otherwise, we're just talking. We're not doing. So thank you. I will share that with you because it's something I meant to talk about earlier. And, you know, that habitat model works. And so I hope that we will get more in that direction and less in the, oh, do it if you can. And feasibility always makes me mad because people can describe the statistics to make feasibility go any way they want to. We I think we just need to figure out that we want to care for the people who have lived there so long and not just throw them under the bus because townhouses are coming. Thank you.

Doctor. Others on this slide before we move? I mean, from a process standpoint, think there's the improvements here with what

you suggested for the next round. And I don't think this is going to set it in stone for the next five years. I think

there's been a lot of things, I guess I'll say publicly, that a lot of things that I probably have comments on in the interest of time won't be best suited here, knowing that we're going to have multiple times to discuss affordable housing over the coming months with what

we had planned and then going into next year's budget and during next year's budget. So I'll save my grandstanding for then.

So we can go ahead to the next item there.

I hope that wasn't meant as a smackdown.

Grandstanding? No, because I know I was smackdown at me because you all know I can climb up my soapbox. I'm saying that I'll reserve that right until a later date. That was not a commentary on anybody else here today.

Much of the application is based on good stewardship or legal principles to gather information from potential grantees to make sure that they're going to use our money well. There are opportunities for the board's discretion, particularly in category of county priorities. And so we want to spend some time with this slide to make sure that we're reflecting your interests. And there are, as you have noted, a number of ways in which your priorities show up in the operational component of this process. But there's this very specific section on consistency with county priorities that I'd like your specific feedback on, particularly focused on the cost per unit.

There was some discussion in March at the meeting about whether we ought to be evaluating having a scored section on how much each unit costs in production. There's both a strong stewardship sort of argument for doing that. The consistency with existing policies. The extended period of affordability, we ask in the application for a hope and a wish that applicants were going to commit to 90 of affordability. That's an extremely long period.

But inherent in that is a strong interest in making sure that our investments remain, make sure that we can keep affordable units for our community as long as possible. The high level of energy efficiency is defined in a number of different ways, but we would rely on the sort of state home funds as the basis or the criteria for ways achieve and arrive at energy efficiency. The same with accessibility standards and then, of course, the focus on vulnerability in our community. All of these are additional point earning opportunities in this section. And so it's worth hearing your feedback and guidance on whether they reflect your interest.

All right. Supervisor Duncan.

I realized as I was asking my accessibility question that I probably had jumped ahead.

The

amount per unit. So you're taking the applications kind of as is on each one. Do you compare them at all? I guess I was thinking about the ones that we looked at earlier this year. There was a wide range in cost per unit.

And I was a little frustrated that some of the much more expensive per unit ones got funded over more less per unit ones. And so is there a way to sort of, I guess, maybe prioritize, like increase the points of if they're less than 30,000, you get maybe more than 10 points or something to sort of incentivize funding more that are cost less per unit.

And then

it feels like a lot of these are sort of, we want these, and I guess you have the sliding scale of points. But for example, for the green energy and stuff, are any of these required in it? Or it's just if you include this, you're going to get more points? Like, is there a way to require some of these things?

Certainly there would be a way to require these things. I think the question is related to sort of how you arrive at that. There are some projects, again, serving all three areas of funding projects. The standards and the definitions are going to be different for rehab than they are for rental units, are going to be different from home ownership. And so it's hard to identify a hard threshold, which is why we ask for a plan.

In the criteria section, we do identify some name branded sort of practices that we think are ones that people can get there. And we ask them to identify, are you certified in these? Have you had experience? Is this part of your plan? Given how tight the process was, competitive process, the first go round, now that they're all 185 points, I imagine that it would be really hard to get zero points in any one of these categories and still proceed with the process, which sort of de facto acts like a requirement without being a requirement.

I think we'd need to do more homework to identify sort of where we would identify that threshold for requirement. And the same, I think, with the cost per unit. The board has made plain its interest in not being a sole funder. And this is another mechanism of saying we want to fund and support units that are cost effective. And also, we want to make sure we're not the only one investing in it.

There's one other thing. Oh, to me, like the ninety year affordability sounded like really a lot. And then I looked it up, and that's sort of like a national best practice. And so I guess that's great. So yeah, those were all those were the only questions I had.

Supervisor Malik.

MARY Thank you very much. So my dilemma with the cost per unit earlier was the loans and the grants were treated the same, even though their inputs were totally different and the pay of returns. So if you're separating them for looking at, then I'd like to learn more about how that turns out in the next round. The extended affordability question, I remember several times in the last nineteen years, the board has invested in a project which was about to end its contract to preserve the affordability there for the next thirty or forty. So that would still exist, guess.

Is that what you're replicating here, or is there something different that I just don't understand? Because the same building is not going to be the same for ninety years. I mean, it's going to need constant every twenty five years or so stuff rehab, new roofs, and plumbing, and electrical, and things like that.

Agreed. I think that sort of development of a new project that will remain affordable over ninety years doesn't mean we're not likely to be asked to contribute public dollars to its maintenance and support, whether that is through grant making or loan making or through a request, for example, for subsidized units through voucher programs to sort of offset the operational costs for those units. I agree. I think as we've seen, particularly in this market, any level of sustained affordability requires the sort of layering, I think, is what a supervisor Pruitt identified earlier as layering of subsidies in order to maintain them either in the competitiveness of our current market or for any kind of sustainable period of time.

Okay. So I get that. More to say. Energy efficiency, passive design, and weatherization is really important. But I do not think that the extra expense of going to LEED or some definition that's always changing out of Washington is a good idea because it's going to triple the cost of everything and for what.

So having things that orient south and have overhangs on the west and north to to make your house function so much better, preservation of trees is absolutely essential if you're talking about energy efficiency. And the original executive director of LEAP described me as the poster child for how we all do things wrong. And she was very sweet about it. But she she said, here we have this board member here who goes out fifteen years ago and gets her geothermal and then she puts up her solar panels. And only last does she do the $1,500 worth of weatherization that she needed to do first.

So that's sort of the hard truth that I think we need to make sure. If new things are being built, let's use those really basic stuff that people did a hundred years ago. Intrinsically, they didn't put west facing 30 foot tall glass walls. I mean, that was just that's ridiculous. Nobody can afford to heat and cool that. So I'm just trying to get down to basics here, and hopefully, the geniuses in the room who can do the designing will figure out how to how to do that. And that's all I had. Thank you.

Supervisor Lapisto Kearnley.

Yeah. I cost per unit, I think we all want to make sure that we do the best regarding the price and such and no problem with consistent with existing policies. Extended period of affordability, you said ninety years, right? And how we keep up with that, I'm not sure. I mean, I think in ninety fifty years, the building's going to be falling down.

I mean, if you get one that they build brand new, ninety years I don't know how long the average apartment building or home lasts, but I can tell you ninety years you're going to need a lot of repair and such. Is the developer responsible for that? Are we responsible for that?

Question? It sounds simple what you've asked, but it's more philosophical. I'm not sure how to answer that question. I think collectively we're responsible for that if it's ninety years of affordability. And there are communities who have extended periods of affordability who have used multiple tools for making sure, ultimately, it means that piece of property could not be purchased and turned into sort of higher end condos because we have designated as a community that this is a property that will continue to be affordable.

How remains a question to be answered in that forty five years or fifty years, which could include grant subsidies, subsidies through vouchers, and other forms to maintain its viability.

Okay. So the land remains, the whole process, affordable. Yes. And I'm assuming that in forty five or fifty years, there'd be a new board here.

I'm not going to comment on that.

Except maybe Mike might be here. High level of energy efficiency, I was happy to hear you say that the developers could use other monies that are out there from federal or state governments or whatever to be able to put in these energy efficient, be I don't know, washer dryer or building or making sure that the windows, AC, and everything is good, that would be good. Because if they have to absorb all that process, because in your proposal, have all these things. Supervisor Malik mentioned it, LEED certified and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I thought, that's going to cost a ton of money.

There are, I think, at least six different certification methods for sort of meeting this requirement around energy efficiency that are included right now in the guidelines. And there's flexibility in hearing a plan from a developer to say, this is how we intend to do that, whether that's through design or whether that's through renovation or whether that's through certification process, whether it's through Energy Star appliances that are sort of at least all of them are Energy Star. I think there's lots of ways for a developer to get to that requirement and still get full points. I think what we've heard from developers is that they don't want to be and can't be boxed into one particular LEED certification might be amazing for a large rental redevelopment process and might not be at all for a homeownership. So we want to retain as much flexibility to say, here are the ones that other communities who use government money to support affordable housing development use.

And so we're triggering you to say this is the kind of standard we're interested in. Then tell us what you do.

Okay, because I did notice you had an array of different options and everything, which I thought was good. And you're not saying you have to do all of these, that they No. Can pick some Okay. Of Proposed units will meet accessibility standards. Is that all the units?

Yes. We're suggesting that all units would meet a universal accessible standard. It's different from an ADA standard, and so we do have some cleanup to do in our application to identify the difference. And I think we know now in our community that there are not enough accessible units. As our community is aging, we're going to need more and more universally accessible units.

So one way for us to ensure that they're being developed is to require that if people use our funds to build affordable housing, that they make sure that they incorporate these accessibility conditions. Okay. Could you define accessibility standards versus ADA? ADA is more required for condition, universal standard accessibility standards. I should send you more information because I'm not going be able to speak articulately clearly about the difference.

If we want all the doorways to be wheelchair accessible, whether that's somebody who comes to live there or whether somebody comes to visit. But that doesn't necessarily mean we need all of the countertops to be wheelchair height. That's a distinction between the two. So I can send that information out to the board for follow-up.

That would be good. Thank you. I'd appreciate that. And when you're talking about the most vulnerable members of our community, could you define that?

Yes, ma'am.

JULIE It sounds simple, but I'm thinking single mother with four kids, young. I'm thinking of older people. I'm thinking of have

the definition of vulnerability used last year is also the same definition of vulnerability used in our human services funding process and is rooted in our human services needs assessment, which is housing instability and risk of homelessness. HUD identifies that as likely you'll lose your current housing in the next fourteen days. Community members who are 65, families with children under the age of six. Families with children under the age of six are the highest risk of becoming homeless based on all kinds of other kinds of stressors and are the hardest to serve, and people with disabilities. So that's the sort of baseline threshold for vulnerability that this board has supported in the past.

Okay.

Thank you.

Supervisor Missile.

Thanks. I'll make my comments quick. One is just a general comment. What I've learned in as I've learned more about affordable housing, I realize that many of the requirements to obtain funding add cost, Yeah. Which is counterproductive.

And we've just got to avoid that as much as possible. And some of that's been addressed with the comments others have made. I think, you know, the cost per unit, the $30,000 number, that's an example where if an applicant is coming with LITECH funds or if they have that as part of their funding sources, there are costs added because they're going through the LITECH program. If someone chooses to not do that, then it seems that they should not be penalized for getting a lower amount of funds from Albemarle. So just thinking about how that plays out in terms of the larger picture, there may be a choice to not move forward with LITECH funds but still get funding from Albemarle because LITECH was gonna add so much more cost, at least the 9%, that it became cost prohibitive.

So there's gonna be a decision by the applicant as to how to balance that and how to work that through. I think as you talk about sustainability, I'm all about sustainability. I think it's critically important. I think if we you know, the the nice thing about saying it needs to be lead platinum is that you have an objective measure. Right?

I'm not saying that we should do that because it adds costs. I agree with what I think everyone else is saying here. However, if you enter into a conversation with one applicant and you say, hey, just give us your idea of what you what you're planning to do, it becomes more subjective. Mhmm. I think that's dangerous because you might decide that, oh, well, I liked what they said.

They articulated it better, and therefore, they should get more money. So I think we need to think about what that means to be sustainable without adding cost to the project, and yet finding a way to be objective as as opposed to subjective. The ninety year affordability limit. You know, most developers have a planning horizon of ten to fifteen years. Right?

So there are other initiatives going on locally that have a benchmark of ninety years because that planning horizon of the owner of the land is much longer, I'll just say cryptically. Right? So I think we have to be careful about that ninety year. And I would just be interested to know what impacts the cost and feasibility that has on affordable housing. I'm not saying we shouldn't have affordable housing for long term, but I think there's a sweet spot there that we should look at.

And maybe it's asking the applicant community, what is it that that you know, what what does that look like? Is it is it does it make more sense to align with our housing policy? Maybe that's too low of a bar. But just asking and wondering what the realities of that are. The other is that, you know, I mean, projects like this get recapitalized every fifteen or twenty years.

And and so there's gonna be a decision point in fifteen or twenty years. And it gets back to, I think, what supervisor Malik said. Maintenance, property management is absolutely critical. And I'll just echo the need to have some measure of that in this policy, I think, which is what I think Supervisor Malik said. MACHT: I'll stop there. I've got a couple other general comments at the end, but that's it.

Supervisor Prut?

Yeah. I will begin by apologizing to the chair. I had accidentally collapsed my previous comment into this. But there's some pointed questions on this that I didn't respond to. So don't worry, I'll still find something to I want to kind of first jump in on the kind of ninety year discussion.

Because this is a requirement like Supervisor Duncan mentioned, this is a requirement I see as very ubiquitous in other local models that resemble AHIF. And Supervisor Missile probably has more current knowledge on this than I do. When I was last deeply familiar with LITECH, I was under the impression that just the almost bidding like process that people compete for tax credits for has pushed it so that ninety year is a pretty common expectation GREEN: for LITECH, too.

Yeah, that's right. 80 to 90,

I would also be interested to see if this does impact affordability. But I would just reflect that I don't see it as being cost for developers. I don't see it as being radically different than it's essentially a strong form of a ROFA, which we fought for legislative authority in the past for, a right of first refusal for things that we've invested money on. Because that's almost what we're doing, right? We're just saying, we want to make sure that when your development horizon ends, this will stay affordable, and we get another bite at the apple likely to receive a request to reinvest in it, which is also why I've alluded to before.

I think twenty to fifteen years probably makes more sense as our loan horizon, because it is nice to think that it's being refeeded back in for new projects. But realistically, we're going to have to capitalize the same project again, and we'll just do it with the same money. Anyway, that's all just to say. I think it makes sense. I would be interested if there's any further thoughts on how it affects developer costs.

But to me, I think ninety years, there's a reason. It's the going standard. I do actually share Supervisor Missel's thoughts on both the energy and the accessibility standards. Both of those seem like desirable things to push toward. But I don't think and this isn't meant to be a critique I don't think we have the organizational capacity to define good standards at this point that aren't overly onerous.

I understand that universal accessibility is a higher standard than what the ADA amendments require, But I don't know what they look like. And I also understand that we're not asking them to be fully universally accessible. We're asking them to comply with degrees of it. Same with energy. We're not asking them to be LEED certified, but we're asking them to consider it. And that does introduce issues. I would be interested to know if it is even feasible for us to develop more concrete objective standards with our current staffing capacity. Because I might doubt it is, right? Like, there 's only so much expertise you can have in a team of a dozen.

JULIE Oh, but we're so, so smart.

I don't doubt that. I don't

doubt No,

that. I think you're absolutely right. I think we would look to best practice in other localities and other places that have established or tried to create the sweet spot, whether that's about long term affordability or whether that's about accessibility or around energy standards. And sometimes that's going to mean that we identify a standard that we think probably there's no one in our community is actually able to achieve at the moment to get 10 points. But maybe they can get eight or nine.

It's not a threshold requirement question. It's a question of how close are you getting to the standard that we've set here. The board made the decision to fund all of the projects on the '26. This ninety year affordability standard was in the last go round. And those were proposed at thirty and forty years.

And so this is, again, not and this is about trying to push the philosophy of we want more affordable housing to last longer in our communities so we have less turnover and redevelopment that runs the risk of moving people out. And at the same time, we know the board has an interest in climate change goals and energy efficiency. This is one way to say we want to make our housing policy align with our policies in other areas. So again, not requirements, but

That is a helpful reminder that at the end of day what we're talking about are whether or not they get the full 10 points, not whether or not they get money at all. I would also just and this, I think, will be the last thing I say here. I am reminded once again with some frustration that our, I think, 2023 analysis of impediments to fair housing that was done through the TJPDC, I find leaves a lot to be desired. I can't find in it very clear answers to what our gap in unit accessibility is. I also, like, let's just set aside the fact that it hardly has any reference to racial disparities in the county, despite it being the analysis of impediments to fair housing.

And it's also frustrating that I don't think we're ever going to see another one because of the changed federal rule. I wonder, as we kind of grapple with questions like this, we get a sense that there is a need for deeper levels of units that are accessible to our elderly and disabled residents. I also get a sense that we don't have a good handle on the problem. And so this is kind of to project past this. I'd be curious, maybe at a later date, maybe we can discuss this in early June, how your office is planning to grapple with just this, what I see as a really essential information gap on our fair housing gaps on accessibility, and again, other dimensions such as race, which we also have issues that I think we're completely blind to.

That's all. Thank you.

We went somewhat past time. I'm going to make some comments. Does anybody else have any other questions or comments on this? Was this the last section, or was there another section?

The only question is the only next section is to remind you when we're coming back to you and for what.

All right. So if you'll go back then. Any additional questions or comments? And then I'll try to be efficient. Can I

just throw a couple in there? I'm sorry. I wasn't sure if that was the last. Thank you for asking that question. So just a couple of things that are in my mind. Number one, the timeline's incredibly helpful. Seeing that somewhere, maybe even online, understanding with other milestones fit in is really how to get the big picture. Skip that. Skip that. I think benchmarking other communities. You've mentioned that a few times. You know? I mean, we up here are not the experts in this. And I think the humility with which this is being addressed and approached is very helpful. I think we have a lot to learn in this community, and I think we're getting better.

So I appreciate that use. And then one last thing is, and this is where Jacob's going give me the stink eye probably, but as we think about $7,000,000 it's a chunk of change. Don't know. And when you think about I've thrown this out before. It's probably a dumb idea. But how can we make that money work for us while it's sitting in the bank? Is there a possibility or a way to do that? You know, at a 7% return, it's almost half $1,000,000. So I don't know if there's a way to do it. I don't need an answer tonight.

I'm just throwing that out there. Because it starts to make you think into the future where we might have a fund that is established that we can have as a revolving fund and be earning interest and potentially be using as an ongoing way. So just thinking forward as to how that might work.

Any others? To skip past the criteria, when the dollars go out the door, when we had the last round, the percentage, their score, turns into their percent of dollars. Is that still the case?

It did this last time. Because that was a way for us to fund all of the projects that scored above 75% without not losing one out. So in order to get there, we recommended we fund a portion of the proposed project to be able to fund all of the ones above 75%. I don't think that's necessarily a method that we should replicate. It happened to be workable without and all of the projects could move forward with that reduction in the funding.

And it was an easy way for us to say yes to all the projects who met the threshold requirement. I don't necessarily think that that's the way a recommendation from staff would come in the future or a decision that the board would make in the future.

JOSHUA So how is it going to disperse? Like, read through and if I missed it, then just say you missed it. But I didn't read in there that said, if you score above 75%, so now it's not going to equate to that score what your dollar amount's going to be. How's the actual JULIE dollar amount

I think it's based on how much money is in the fund and how much is being requested will require us to sort of back into that answer. If the board had decided today to prioritize rentals over homeownership or rehab over rentals, then we might be in a position of saying, we've got three projects all who scored in the 80 range. But the board has a higher interest in funding rehab projects. So this one is recommended to be funded in full first, and then the remaining funds to be distributed among the remaining projects. And there's so many requests that we can really fund only those projects that scored above 80.

Even though you're eligible for funding above 75, we don't have enough money to fund all of the projects. And so we rank them either by score or we rank them by priority to make a recommendation to the board about how we get there. And if we can fund the first, the project comes with a score of 99. What is it? 185. Score's 183. We would probably recommend full funding for that project. And then back into CLIFFORD funding for the remaining projects that met the requirements.

That JOSEPH equates CLIFFORD higher your score, the higher the probability you get your full ask. Is that a fair statement?

I think that's fair. Yeah.

So guess it's when looking at the point structure, because you're just assigning like fives or tens to different things. So I would think of if you had projects at 40% AMI that was benefiting that segment, that that's higher than a 50% or a 60%. They get the bonus points the lower they go?

Yes. So one of the changes for this year is not to just get the point or not get the point. You now, the raters will have the opportunity for some applicants, some questions to do zero, five, or 10, and for others to do zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, depending on how complex or layered the points are in a particular component. So we're trying to avoid this idea of all or nothing. So we get close to our goal of saying, let's say use affordability as a good example.

You can demonstrate a reasonable plan to maintain affordability for over fifty years and you demonstrate an intention to do that, you probably wouldn't get all 10 points because 90 would get 10 points. But you'd probably get eight or nine. So we're trying to move away from that idea that was reflected in the '26 process of sort of yes or no, instead more variation to reflect the nuance that we've talked about today.

So did I miss it in my reading of the materials? My first question?

You might have missed it in the introduction to the process for in the slides, which was that we're answering the questions with more nuance.

So I hope that what you explained just now, if I'm an applicant applying, that I understand that prior to the application. Because if you're somebody applying to do these projects, you have, just like we do at Smart Scale, we try to game it and maximize our chance to receive as much as we can. And that, I think, is critical to how you put your application forward.

We will certainly update both the scoring matrix tool and the guidelines and post them on the website based on the board's guidance today.

I also think that, is there a way and I was scanning back through it because I didn't really have the thought until I was listening to others talk, the creativity and flexibility of an application can receive, I guess it perhaps could be in the judgment of those doing the evaluation. But if I'm an applicant that's coming forward and have mixed together some very creative different things, and then in addition, whatever I get granted from this could make the project work. And then on our side, having the flexibility to go, oh, well, maybe if you added this in, that that could win them the award. My worry is that, like, if they look at our opportunities to work with the county, that this is just this is it. So how do you combine this with the developer?

Like I've appreciated the last couple applications that we've talked about. Some are thinking, yeah, we've got a couple different things that we could play around with. And that's the flexibility that need, that's how, when I say housing's economic development, a lot of times that's what I mean because there's all these different flexible things that you can pull together to pull off what we're trying to achieve. So I'm hoping that that's factored in there somewhere. I guess I'll make this comment just thinking forward to the work that we're going to do on affordable housing. But just, I've been thinking about this, like the connection fees specifically, and how to back into that to a renter. And I'll use the Premier Circle as an example. Is Premier Circle paying connection fees for all the units they're doing there? I'm assuming so.

I'm assuming so. We're not paying them.

So the developer is.

The developer is paying.

And this is a permanent supportive housing project. So if you take 60 units, I think for a development like that, the connection fee would be $15 per unit. That's $900,000 So if you take $900,000 and you think of that in terms of you need to add that to your loan or take out a loan just for that $900,000 at a prevailing rate. And Google decided the prevailing rate for me when I was trying to figure out how to do the math. Because anything that starts to even reek of algebra, my brain shuts down and I can't do it, so I need help.

But it factored into about $8,000 a month for 60 units would be the cost to the developer just for the connection fees. Divide that by 60, that's about $135 per unit. So if I have a permanent supportive housing project, and if I remember, the top rent at that project for the high bedroom was like $1,700 in that range. Is that ballpark for the high end one?

That would be for the Piedmont Housing Alliance component for Premier Circle, yes.

Yeah, the one we just had a few months ago. That's the one I'm thinking of. And the lowest was like $5.83 or something like that. So if you take $135 now the beauty of the connection fee from the service authority's perspective, and I'm not casting shade at them, is they don't care where it's at on the spectrum. They just want the $15,000 for the unit.

So there's no difference like our car tax changes based on the value of the car and stuff like that. Well, that doesn't work that way in the connection fee world. So a $583 apartment has got to pay the $15,000 unit cost just like the $1,700 a month. So that 135 though, at the $583 could be, gosh, 4, what would that be, dollars $4.30? And 17 something would be $1,600 That's a big deal at those affordability levels.

So if we decided to take that on out of the Albemarle Housing Investment Fund for just a 60 unit project, that's $900,000 We have $7,000,000 in the bucket. And how many projects have come before us that are 60 units? I mean, Arrowwood, I think, had 40 or 50 units in it for just the affordable units. Rattled Point had probably 60. The one next to Agner, this is at our old standards, was probably in that 30 to 40 if you break out the percentage.

If we actually started going to the AHIP fund to actually pay for the connection fees, we'd probably be wiped out in a project or two with rezoning requests. So I guess I'll say the hard part out loud. Why is the ACSA not working with us to help achieve our affordable housing project just like developers are? We put a requirement on developers in our policy that says you must meet 20% at 60% AMI. But then we turn around and look at, then just to say to our agencies, you can charge the same connection fee for a market rate three bedroom apartment that's going for $3,200 that you can charge for a $4.80, a $583 deeply subsidized unit that's going to go to somebody at a low AMI.

So I think that's something that we should be knocking on the door of the ACSA board and go, you know what, we've got a policy parameter here that we're trying to achieve. And I know that when I first started on the school board and stuff, the phrase growth pays for growth was the big mantra as to why these connection fees were there. I But got to tell you something. The growth that we see in this county is luxury market growth. Affordability is about retaining people. It's not a growth tool. This is a human retention tool. Keep them in our community, right? So I think that's a public good that all public agencies should be looking at. And I promised I wasn't gonna grandstand or get on my soapbox, but by God, I couldn't adhere to that promise today.

But that's something that when we're talking in our two by twos and we're looking at affordable housing or housing Albemarle, that I think has to be dealt with. Because $15,000 if I did my math right, and the the Niels and the other experts in the world that know how to figure out how this cost goes from a developer cost to a renter cost. If we don't understand that thread, and then how we can use subsidy to help offset that in tandem with other subsidies, then I don't know how we really get to be affordable. The group that I just shared with Supervisor Pruitt before the meeting, it's a new consultancy group out of Richmond. They had an article about Richmond.

In terms of affordability, in terms of rent burden and housing stock availability, we had the lowest in the state. We're in front of Northern Virginia in terms of stock and ability to pay, or a low affordability. That's both homeownership and renters. And that's something that we have to contend with. And $7,000,000 in a trust fund using this project, this kind of application process is as good as we're trying to make it or as better as we're trying to make isn't gonna, isn't gonna get it done.

So it has to be in tandem with some of these other, these other things. And that's, that flexibility piece, like if somebody has an application, do the people that look at these applications and go, wow, this actually might get 88% and you get the AHIF thing, but are you aware of our developer incentive program that could also get you a tax abatement along with that? That could maybe make it even more viable or go further? If we're not in the process or the committee is not in the process of having that dialogue with applicants, then we're siloed in everything we're doing. And it has to be in tandem with.

It can't just be waiting for people to knock on the door knowing what we could potentially do. We have to be proactive in saying, let's use this together with other type of things. Now, the housing Albemarle calls for the housing committee. I appreciated bringing that up. Is it this committee or that committee?

And I'm not going to get into that right now, but that's going to be a big, I have strong opinions on this, and those will, I'll surface those again. I've said most of them out loud, and I'll remain open minded because not everybody agrees with my opinions on that. But that's probably something we need to really contend with as we do the work over the next couple months in dealing with housing Albemarle and the policy update, etcetera. I agree with the track record of property managers, what Supervisor Malik brought up. And I don't mean to be stealing any thunder from a conversation that may be coming later this evening, but I wholeheartedly agree that if you're not doing your job now with the people you're doing now, that I would not be thrilled about giving you new dollars to go do new projects.

I think that's, we have very little in the way of effectiveness to be able to deal with those situations. Perhaps they should be knocking on the door for other things, not on new monies for new projects. So that's something, I think that was your point. So I endorse that one. I do hope that at some point, AHIFs, several people have made this point, of turning into something that's not just all the dollars go out the door, and it doesn't start helping and working because that's how other places use their housing funds, that the dollars come back.

And right now I'm not seeing what the strategy is even though we have some loans that we're starting to do. There are no amount of huge dollars, But when those loans get paid back, how are they going to be used? And I certainly endorse the question that Supervisor Missile asked about getting a fund big enough that can start help producing some of that and knowing some of the legalities of how public dollars can earn money, etcetera. But places that have had housing trust funds in place for twenty and thirty years, that's how they've done it. It's got to be such a size that they've had several cycles where it does come back in.

So the dollar we use now and goes out the door comes back at some point, and then how does that dollar then get reused again for somebody in the future? We don't need to know the answer to that right now because we just don't have the, you know, we've only, we haven't had that much capacity. I mean, finally have the 7,000,000 this year. But those are things that I think we should be thinking about. But end of the day, the changes that had been made, both process and criteria wise, I'm happy with, happy to see.

Add my comments and others on top of that, I think we'll have a better process this year. But I think it's something that still would be parked into the, yeah, we should probably have a conversation about the next round after the next round occurs to see where we're at. And it just so will happen, I mean, the application process will be done, but I suspect this will resurface again during budget conversations next year. I'm just checking my notes, priority household. I guess just to speak, I mean, the further we can go with AMI, the better.

I don't know if lowering AMI for homeownership really accomplishes anything other than us lowering the number. Because the lower you go in the AMI, the even more difficult it is to get all the other hoops or the other checkbox checked for the folks. I'm not saying that I wouldn't be interested in doing that or helping it if folks have got creative things, but you know, the county may, you know, at times we talked about we've purchased property now for economic development purposes, that it's likely going to be in our future when we decide to purchase property for affordable housing reasons. Because the land cost a lot of times is what the burden is. And just like in economic development world, having site control helps entice economic development projects.

Well, having site control can eliminate a lot of things that are obstacles to providing affordable housing as well. So just throwing that out for food for thought as we gear up for the conversations we're having. Thank you for letting me take a few minutes on those items. Any other comments or questions? Yes.

Yeah. I just wanted to ask, you talked about rehab, rental, and ownership. And you said that most of it went out for rehab. Is that correct, or did I misunderstand that?

For the 2026 round, yes. Of the three projects, four projects we funded, the largest projects that we funded were for rehabilitation and preservation of existing affordable housing. Frankly, we were surprised to see that many applications related to rehab in that cycle. We don't anticipate that happening every year. Anyway, so we were surprised by that. I'm not sure that that's something we can expect to see every year.

Would you be able to provide us with how many applications were for rehab rentals and ownership? I mean, that might interesting to see how many people that applied and qualified. Sure. Can send

that to

Thank you. That's all.

Anything else? Yes.

Just two questions that I don't have answers for. And one is, does ACSA have the authority to have differential rates? I know they do for volume of water being used. They have four tiers for the the below wholesale rate is for the small house user, and four times that is for irrigation and other things in between. So that's a good question to get answer for.

And Yeah. Regarding the AMI and the ownership, one thing that just popped into my mind is would this be helpful when the next generation is able to keep a place instead of giving it up? And I'm thinking of one of our longtime county residents who lived their families a hundred and fifty years in Esmong, and they had 500 acres. And all those years and generations and divisions and divisions, and it got down to less 25 acres. And she said, hell no. We're not selling this. This is all we've got left, and it's a place for people to live when they need a place to live or a place to gather. So the challenges of the younger people as we know having a place to grab or stay in is maybe a byproduct that we hadn't anticipated here. That's all.

All right. Kaki, do you

have what you need from us?

I do. Thank you very much for your patience and faith in us as we navigate this new world of the AHIF. I'm certain that we'll get better and better every year. Thank you.

Ms. Demick, I see this is cast as an action item. Are you looking for a motion or approval of the board at this point?

No, feedback and guidance only, has been delivered. Sorry. Thank you.

Thank you, Andy. Fantastic. Any other comments? Mr. Richardson, you leaned in at one point. Did you have a comment you wanted to make somewhere in there?

I was thinking through the board's interest in connection fees from the ACSA, which is a board that this board appoints. So each of you have representatives that you point to that board. And if the board is so inclined, I could begin a discussion with the executive director about our interest in exploring further understanding the connection fees specific to residential. I'm not talking about the usage charges, because Ms. Malik just spoke to that.

But the connection fees with that flat fee across the board and talk and try to learn what I can and then maybe come back to the board in the two on twos and be a little better prepared to talk about that. And then that could inform this board if you are inclined to have future conversations with your board member that you appoint. Seems like

a good idea. Any objection? No. Good idea.

One, I forgot to say, is for thirty five or so years up until 2012 or so, the connection fees were miniscule. And just like so many public service agencies around the country, they had no money in which to do the reinvestment, the repairs, all of the new piping and stuff like that. Finally, when the board membership at ACSA was changed by strategic appointments from board members, the survivability of the agency became understood, and that was the end of the free ride, basically, for the new projects. Because for all those previous decades, the current users were paying 100% of the freight for the new people coming on. And there was a huge rebellion about that into my election in 2007.

They just said, we're done with this. You know, we're paying all these increased costs and the new people aren't getting assigned anything. Profits came along and that helped some. But we're sort of back to the starting place there. Thanks.

All right. Thank you very much. All right, board, we're going to move to our budget process review discussion. Thank you, Kaki, which I will lead. There's no presentation. There's nothing here. This is a board. There was some suggested evaluation questions that I had sent out to share just as a starting point to get your thoughts going. You were leaning in.

I was just going to ask the board chair, and we did not prescript any of this. Mr. Chair, is it helpful for our CFO to be with me here in case there are specific questions or are you not?

I think, honestly, I know that we're going to be doing our own meetings two by two. So I mean, if we need Jacob, he's here. He can come up, but you're welcome to join us, Jacob.

But that may not be the focus.

But I think the focus here, board, the idea, we had some we started early today. We had some found time. I thought it would be a good idea to do some budget conversation in public about how we as board members feel the process went with one another, right? So that was the focus. And with our elected school board, you're going to have an opportunity to work with staff next week in our two by twos to focus on staff work and staff process, etcetera. So this was really done in the spirit of saying, all right, how do we feel we did working with one another throughout the process, etcetera. And we only scheduled thirty minutes, so that's about five minutes per person. But you're welcome to take more time as needed. We've got a little cushion, but we are getting a late start as well. So I'm just gonna go around.

You do not have to stick to the questions that were out. I would imagine you all have your own comments. So just gonna ask you to verbally share what you have and then we'll, I may ask some follow-up questions at the end and we'll go from there. Supervisor Duncan, any thoughts?

The one thing that I I think I've said this before, but I felt like early on was that the budget is really the end of last year's process. And kind of like the discussions we just had tonight might get worked into next year's budget. And so I really approached it as sort of just learning how the process works and reading through the whole budget and kind of seeing how it's laid out, what it means, comparing it to the way that the school board budget was laid out. And so I feel really good moving forward. Like, feel like I learned a lot and understood most of what I was learning.

And so that was good. Like, that was helpful. Sort of some of the questions about, like, shaping outcomes and stuff. Again, mean, unless I'm wrong, but I feel like that kind of happens in the meetings throughout the year and kind of staff hearing us and going back and forth. As far as the school board part, I hope and sort of assume that we are going to work more closely with them this year and kind of build that relationship.

I think that's been stated by several people on both boards. I think planning somewhat together can be helpful. I also there's nothing we can do, but I wish that their budget document was better. And I wish the CIP things were in the budget. So it made it hard to even kind of figure out what the school board wants, what we should be kind of discussing in arguing over.

2,000,000 kind of felt like, I don't know, it just felt like we were arguing over numbers and not like priorities because the priorities weren't laid out. So yeah, I thought it was a really helpful exercise. It was a little challenging having it right at the beginning of the year. But I overall actually really enjoyed it.

And you felt you're we have two brand new MACHT: folks. So you do get some orientation on I mean, that's heavy, the budget orientation. And you may discuss that more with staff. But it sounds like you felt like that was

good Yeah. Had a lot. I mean, yeah, total orientations, we had five. I think maybe two might have been specifically budget. But other neighboring municipalities do not give their new incoming people any orientations. And so I just really, really appreciate the amount of time and effort that county staff gives to us. And throughout it, whenever we had questions, I also felt like staff was hearing us and knew what I wanted and were able to get the answers, got them quickly, just very responsive. And so it made it easy, too, because then I, like, wouldn't forget what I'd asked. Like, the answers were coming, you know, pretty quickly. And so it made it and it was all just very well organized.

The work sessions were organized. Like, just, yeah, it was just really, really well done. I know that that's not easy to do either.

JOSHUA Thank you. Supervisor Malik, MELECK: thoughts?

Thank you very much. I will just everything's totally out of order on my list here. But the December 3 meeting was incredibly powerful. And I think that it was the first time in literally twenty years that there was substantial interaction and board who agreed that we had to have better effort. So somewhere along the process, is there a place for expectations to be clearly printed out?

Because within the last ten years, everything has changed without the board having any choice in the matter. Number one, we used to get a budget book. And I mean, I would read on a snow day, read the whole thing and then come in with all these questions. And that really made them mad because they didn't want to have to answer the questions or explain why the numbers were different in different places. But they were calling them all the same thing.

You know, I'm I'm asking third grade questions here, and there didn't seem to be answers. So I can understand why they decided, oh, if you wanna have look it up, go online and look it up. Well, good luck with that in my broadband. That's just not gonna happen. So the, responsibility for that, a responsibility for so many things from their parents saying, of course, they weren't prepared to meet with you all because they didn't even discuss the budget before adopting the recommendation of the superintendent.

Just, okay, sure, send it on to the board of supervisors. So my expectation is that they would own the things they prioritize and own the reasoning for that, not just have something that changes every six months. And that working with the school board does not mean give them everything they want. But yes, we're willing to have a conversation, but only this board has the funding ability and statutory responsibility. And so they are not, in my opinion, to be invited in to make funding decisions.

They can advise all they want to because that's what their role is. I understand the difference between the need based budget and what we can afford to give them to carry it out. But there, I think, some very clear guidelines in communication about and others may have other ideas about what you felt was missing or not. Know, I may be the only one that feels this way. But I think some things off the bat at the beginning would be really, really helpful and perhaps give some support to some of the members who of the other board who did not like the way things were happening.

So, anyway, that's basically what I have for that. That was I sort of jumped to the end first. I think that the transparency,

the

visibility of the information is really, really important. Okay. Let's go back to the beginning here. So I think with the training that we have received over the years, I really feel confident about question one, about the stewardship and understanding the processes. I think all the time is what I wrote down, does this impact your decision making?

Absolutely. Because of knowing what the constraints are. And the same accountability can be held for the other departments whom we fund as well. And schools are one of six. And so that's or more than six, but anyway, of six categories.

So that's important. Prioritization and trade offs. I guess in philosophy, in thinking back, I've been on lots of different groups, some very politically diverse, some more in agreement. But even the one which was very politically diverse, there was more of an approach of county wide benefit than single district benefit, which I get a sense that there's a sort of more single issue, single district focus. And I hope we will continue to work on on the whole, the whole county benefit, certainly with examples of impacts that each of us knows the best from how certain things would impact our the districts we represent.

But it's it's hard to explain. At some point before the end of the summer, I hope that the board will have a discussion and understanding to help the staff going forward to the next budget about any changes that can be agreed upon as far as funding all the requests that come from city agencies. Because I will remind you that $22,000,000 has gone to or will be about to go to the city, for which I prefer that they take that money to spend on Holiday Drive and the Salvation Army and the other things that they need to do because our taxpayers have already paid for those things in the county share. And this would actually provide more revenue or savings, but it would also provide more ability to fund county agency requests that are to the benefit of our local people. This goes with the revenue sharing too, is that we need to get back into a more structured conversation about living up to the codicil on the agreement, which was passed by referendum that said these funds are to be used for benefit of city and county residents.

And yet we have no proof whatsoever except, oh, we put it into parks, but county people have to pay to use those services at the at the city pools and things like that. So that's the kind of thing that I hear about often. Others may or may not, but I think that that, that money is already being paid. Did I clearly identify prioritization in context? I have talked a lot, I'm sure, too much from some perspectives about the basics for life are the first priority for me.

So all the other things have to come after the clean air and clean water. And if we're not protecting those, then all the other decisions we're going to try to make really become irrelevant. And I think that what we're seeing more and more now environmentally is much higher risk on so many different fronts, whether it's fire or drought or floods or anything in between. So I will try to do a better job to keep reminding of that priority as we go forward. And I really think the board has done a great job of discussing and, low temperature factually agree to disagree, things like that.

I think that's really, really important to to make sure that we continue on with that. They were someone on the radio coming down here was talking about a pre civil war in Congress and the caning of some representative who, you know, didn't have the right opinion, and somebody came up behind him and just about pulverized him to death with his cane because he was it was abolitionist versus not. And so I thought, wow. You know, yes, we've been there before, but let's not go back there again. So the anyway, that's the end of my ramblings for now. Thank you very much for asking.

JAMES And if anything else doesn't surface today, just bring it up when we have our meetings next week because this will be an ongoing process. Supervisor Lapisto Kearle?

Thank you very much. Yeah, for number one, fiscal stewardship and understanding, I feel I have a pretty good knowledge of that. Prioritization and trade offs, I think we did that. And I'm proud of this board because we did have trade offs. We did have discussions. And I haven't seen that in the past where we actually had the ability, where we took the ability to discuss things. And Supervisor Malik is correct. We didn't always agree on everything. But it was a respectful discussion of where and how the money should be spent. So I'm good with that engagement.

The budget process, I thought we did a really good job. I will tell you I was thrown for a loop regarding the school budget. Didn't expect that. Didn't see that one coming. I don't know if we could have had advanced warning of that or not. But that was a real surprise. And even talking to some board members, we know now that they don't have as robust a process as we do, not casting aspersions. Maybe they don't need it. But we have a very robust budget process. We go through everything and make comments.

And I think they would be wise to do the same thing. And I like the fact that we ask for data to prove what it is that they need. Not sure about their level of engagement with each other, but that's their concern, not ours. So with the school board, that was kind of a shocker. And I think we now have certain I think that our chair is discussing things with the school board chair.

And I think that's good. I think they could learn from our process should they want to, not telling them what to do. But we do our thing. They do their thing. I agree with Supervisor Malik again that I don't want them imposing what they think we should pay for.

In other words, them having input on our budget, frankly. They're there to say what they need, and that's good. But then other than that, we make those final decisions. I would like to see any advance warning of something that could be concerning, if that's possible. I know that we received the budget on February 25, But we usually kind of get a heads up of, yeah, this or that, little things.

So I appreciate that financial things, whether or not we feel how we feel the interest rates are going or the tax rates are going. Other than that, I really did deeply appreciate our discussions this time. I don't think I've ever seen that level of going back and forth. Usually, you're kind of a we're not allowed to say anything. We just have to wait our turn. And I'm not saying it was a free for all. No, it wasn't. But we all had input and I deeply appreciated that because,

you

know, I learned a lot what other people think and swayed my thinking in some things and other things, no. So I thought that was very healthy. I thought it was a very healthy process, and I'd like to see more of that. And if we can do it sooner, that's good. If we can get a heads up from the school board, that's good also sooner because I think that would affect how our county executive, how Mr. Richardson actually does the budget. And I don't know how much advance warning he had or not, But I think all that factors into it. So thank you.

Thank you. Supervisor Missal.

Thanks. And I might echo some of the things that Supervisor Duncan mentioned too as we ascended the NMLC, which is the new member learning curve. And I also just would love to take this opportunity to thank staff. And I'm kind of skipping to the bottom first. But staff and other supervisors were incredibly helpful, answering questions and and just kinda giving sort of the general environment, kind of more of that subjective, aspect of the board of the of the budget process.

Couple things. One is I really appreciated the understanding of the debt capacity and our limits. Right? So you sort of come into this going, oh, why don't we just borrow more money? But understanding the you know, our our what our coverage ratios are and what the requirements are was incredibly helpful and something that's a really good reminder at the beginning of the process to sort of set expectations as we try to get to $10,000,000 in the housing fund, etcetera, etcetera, right?

So that was helpful. I think oftentimes that's probably not conveyed to the community as clearly as it is to us. And so there are questions that come up from the community about, well, why don't you just it's $727,000,000 What's another $10,000,000 Well, there are limitations. And so knowing that was incredibly helpful to your question about, could I apply it to the budget process? That was very helpful.

I think the the sort of maybe I'm answering the last question through this discussion. But I think the the prioritization and trade off. So the partner organization process to me, as we've been talking about, sort of needs work. Right? Like that idea of it feels like we're playing favorites to those who sent us more emails. And maybe that's what we do. And maybe that's our we represent our constituents that way. But I think we need to be thinking more about what that looks like. And is there a way to make that more objective? I think engaging the city in the discussion to me sort of seemed like a missing link.

And I know that we did go out, and I think Mr. Richardson did go out and talk about, for example, the city as it had to do with the Dogwood Memorial and how that contribution was really in land, etcetera, etcetera. But I think also with the partner organizations echoing what supervisor Malik said, the county benefits, the city, how does that partnership look? Let's see. The school board, we've all talked about that. That was a surprise to me. I've learned more about it. I've talked more about it with my with Bob Beard, And I look forward to other conversations relative to the CIP. The December 3 meeting was really interesting, even not as a board member. Ms.

Duncan at the time was texting me from the back of the room. And I think we both were interested in to see that dynamic and understand how that looked. I think the timing, the two on the two on twos that we had with the school board felt a little bit late in the discussion to me. So getting those up, getting those earlier potentially on that schedule, thinking about how that looks. So on reflection, onboarding, fantastic. Communication clarity was fantastic. Response to questions, really excellent. And the way they were posted on the website, I think, was really helpful. The change, we talked about the partner organization process. I think and maybe this is on me having a forward looking forecast.

So we talked about the ties to the strategic plan and how that looks. Having that five year plan and really reinforcing that, and it was when I really finally got my head around it, it was gave me peace about this process that we're not just working in a vacuum of one year, but we are thinking proactively into future years. And then having a list out of that process of thinking proactively into the future of what are our aspirational goals. So that would be, for example, getting from $7,000,000 to $10,000,000 in an affordable housing investment fund, etcetera. That's it.

Great. Thank you. Supervisor Pruitt?

Sure. I want to begin with the things I think were really, really good. This is always good. And we've already said it. But SAT does a really, really good job of equipping us for our budget conversations. Maybe even too much of a good job. This is almost now too much of a critique. But the degree to which we are handheld is really intense, which can be very beneficial and maybe sometimes necessary. But it can feel intense. I will also specifically call out I know I mentioned this at the time, but I will say again, I think every year I've been in this process, we've gone back and forth for clarification of language of the different types of reserves and pools.

There was a single graphic that was used once that I think is the best budget graphic I've ever seen, which was that block made of a bunch of little other blocks that were color coded of all the different names of the different things. Because operation stabilization reserve sounds like it would mean something that's very similar to budget stabilization. Like, you get the point. It was a very helpful thing. If I had had that in front of me more frequently, I would have used it more frequently.

Because that was often what we were working off of in a lot of ways in our head. And similarly, I think as we started to narrow down the conversation about what pools of money we were talking about, Once we had our revenue parking lot and our expenses parking lot, I think staff did a very good job of managing those and keeping those in track for us. That kind of all speaks to the number one. That was a thing for the public. There is a little list that the chair shared of different things he wants us to think about.

That's what I'm referring to as number one. Another thing, I think we kind of steamed past this, but I want to really put a pin in it. I think our interactions with the school board were a significant improvement over past years. And I know Supervisor Malik alluded to that pretty explicitly. But I want to say it again very explicitly, because I think the easier takeaway was they were more fractious, which is also true.

But I think it was fundamentally a radical improvement over the past in that there were discussions, right? I was really pleased with that. The level of discussion and discourse I thought was important. I think this is an important dimension of how our budget works, and we're doing everyone a disservice if we're not talking about it. I like that we had two on twos with our opposite numbers and with school staff. It might have been more helpful if that had been more structured around specific actionables. It was very blue sky conversations that we had. To your point, if we're going to do blue sky, maybe that's fine. But it should be earlier than we did it. At that stage, it probably would have made more sense to be more substantive.

And the other thing, I the union was having a discussion leader, who happens to be a friend, about how this conversation went on between us and the school board. And I expressed to her the frustration you've heard me express several times of my confusion over the last second position change by the school board that came out in the letter. And she said something that I said, yeah, it would have been great if they had just requested a work session with us. That's what I would have liked. We had extra work session holding spots that weren't used.

We had one, I think, work session holding spot that wasn't used. It seems like we should have come back to the table after December. And she said, do you think they know that they can do that? Which is a good question. The answer is probably no, right? No. You don't feel like you can just email Claudette and say, hey, I want to schedule something during the

board prep.

I think the answer is any significant stakeholder can do that. But it depends on how confident they are dwelling in their own power. Know, for example, Sheriff Bryant is very comfortable dwelling in her own power. And she did exactly this two years ago, requested a specific time to speak during a work session. And I think the issues that she wanted to highlight, we benefited from having those discussed, even as I disagreed with her on that.

It was to our advantage to have that brought to our attention and discussed in that forum. And so I think we would do better if the school board also understood that they had that authority and, frankly, other stakeholders, which is this is a thing I've been thinking about that feels kind of disconnected from this. But we have several advisory committees that are not acting as advisory committees, in that they're not advising us, not in meaningful ways. It's come up a few times. The public might have heard this leaking out.

But we've had a single member of the Police Citizens Advisory Committee asking us for a very specific budget request. Maybe on behalf of the Police Citizens Advisory Committee, maybe not. It's not clear. They should also feel enabled to request to speak to us during the budget process. I think our Social Services Advisory Board should be presenting a funding request.

I think that's what an advisory board does, right? I know other large localities have these processes. I would expect that when we have a housing advisory committee, I would expect them to be a mouthpiece during the budget process for what they think priority should be with housing. We should be using the budget is our most substantial policy document. And the purpose, I think, of an advisory committee is to act as a second brain for us on policy decisions.

And I worry that they're not being leveraged for that purpose in the most critical place they could be. So I mean, that has to be something that's led by those organizations. But I think that's a really important role that they could be stepping into. That could be something that our Housing Advisory Committee, our Police Citizens Advisory Committee, and our social services advisory committee and maybe there's others I'm not thinking of. We've got like 30 of them could all be doing during this process.

And of course, where I started, our school board. Our school board should feel empowered to be able to come to us again during the budget process. This wasn't a budget thing, but it comes up frequently because it was such a major learning experience for me. I know it's included in new onboarding like information. The most significant time I pissed off my peers was when I did not telegraph my intentions.

And since then, I have learned that it is very helpful to always say how you're going to vote or how you're thinking and what you care about voting on over and over and over and over months so that people have the opportunity to discuss that and catch that ahead of time. And ideally, I have found it is helpful to make it very like, there are things that I have very technical thoughts on. And I'm not trying to telegraph big, here's how I think we should be calibrating. I'm trying to telegraph very chunky, digestible things over months. And so I mentioned this, and this is going to feel very pointed, I'm sorry, but I don't think it's helpful to keep frustrations.

And this is the point of this. The part of the budget process I was most frustrated by, I got very frustrated with you, Supervisor Missal. And not just because of your position on the tax rate, I understand how you got there. It was not having gotten a sense and an opportunity to sit with your counterpoint until it was in front of me. And I opposed it because it was hyper technical.

You were proposing very specific moves rather than, I think, a very gross cut and move. And also, the degree of polls from the Economic Development Fund were the first anyone on this board had floated. Even I as Mr. Let's Rob the Economic Development Fund, right? That's been the hat I've been wearing for two and a half years now, had not proposed that.

And so it was a surprise, which left me as a peer unable to engage with it with the weight it might have deserved. And that was, I think, the single biggest frustration point. And it was about telegraphing. And so I would just say it is helpful for us to telegraph. I have found it is helpful, and as a board practice, that we try and telegraph these kinds of things well ahead of time so that we have the opportunity to catch them.

Because when we go around in a horn, we structure it so that we have to respond to things iteratively. We have to engage in discourse iteratively. We can't do it in real time. We literally can't do it in real time. I think that is everything I had on the feedback process.

That's all I got.

Can I respond? I really appreciate you sharing that. And I sensed that during the conversation. And I think one of the challenges for me is, again, the

new

guy, is understanding kind of how that discourse occurs, right? Because it felt like we made a lot of significant decisions in that two or three or four hour timeline that may have benefited from prior conversations, but were based on real time input from some of the constituents. So trying to balance that is something that I'm learning and trying to understand. But I appreciate your comments.

I did remember there was this is a shift. One other thing I wanted to add, I ended up supporting, as I think

we all

did, a shift around with the public agency contributions. Because it felt like a prudent compromise to make sure we were all in lockstep on the final budget. And it felt like otherwise separate priorities might be jeopardized. I am worried about I feel like it is important that this board, frankly, signal publicly how we're going to engage with these questions in the future before the budget next year. Because right now, I mentioned this as a joke, but now I'm going to say it as a serious thing, right?

Like, if we do not say explicitly, like, we are locking in that this is something we shall not touch after we get a recommendation, then I mean, I'm going to go to Cimberreras and say, hey, you didn't get as much money as I think you could if you started coming to every board meeting starting January. And so I would encourage you to come to every board meeting starting January, because it's an organization that I value a lot as a personal priority, right? And I don't think that is the kind of process that we want to engage in, where we're separately thinking, ah, what agency most aligns with both my platform and my district that I can be whipping up to be as effective during this process so that I am most capable of leveraging additional funds for them during this, right? Because I see getting more money to Simba Reyes as being very directly being responsive to my constituents. And I think that potentially undermines the goals of the agency funding process.

Same thing with, like, we have an AHIP process so that I am not saying, Habitat gets it all. Because they're building in my district, they get it all. And I don't think we do ourselves well by end running that process.

JAMES thank you for that. I will be as quick as possible on the high level or specific points. I think the most interesting change in my head from approaching the budget this year was starting to think that you're not just doing the one year. Somebody said doing the vacuum of the budget in one year. Maybe Fred said that.

But we have to start staff. I feel like staff has been there doing it this way and have been saying it. But this was the first year that I really felt like I started to contend with that from the level that I sit. And I think that that is true of elected bodies around the state that hit a certain level of size with their budgets and priorities, that you have to switch to that, where it's not just you're doing the budget, you're doing the next three budgets. And so I appreciate that staff has been there.

But at the level we exist at, that's been a real challenge. Like, do I, oh, yeah, how do I start thinking about that? I think this year, it also started to surface more, not just our individual priorities I'm not talking about that, what our personal elected priorities are but how you compete with priorities like fire positions versus schoolchildren, police positions versus an affordable housing investment fund. So I think it's important for us to deal with that and contend with that as early as possible, because fire was an obligated piece. And I found describing that to people, it was an moment.

I was like, oh, yeah. It's not like we went out and chose to add these fire positions. If we chose to add fire positions, we would have been augmenting the force somewhere. This was backfilling a need that could no longer be provided by the source that it's always been provided by. And that's a real challenge.

So I think that that's something that, in tandem with working with the school board, having the broader picture of those competing priorities, what's both occurred historically, but then tied into multi year budgeting, what we must do so that we don't have to always have this, you know, it's this, not that. But here's the game plan over two and three and five years of how we're going to try to bring all of those priorities up so it doesn't feel like we're competing. Because you can't, I mean, if it continues to just be a schools versus fire department discussion, who does that help? But folks have to understand the dynamic of it, I think. And I certainly feel like I do and have not appreciated that like I have in the past.

I think the agency point that you all raised is spot on. It can't be what you just described. That was what the whole process was designed to prevent. And this year I felt like that was something that I got frustrated by that it went there. And I voted for it too and got involved with it, but felt like, I felt like it got into this negotiating, this bartering type of situation. I don't like that. I feel like that even, and it's not something that we should deal with before next budget, but before we send out and ask for the applications. Because we've sent the message that your advocacy power equals dollars. That's what I feel like we've done.

I

don't like that message. I do think that one nuance that has never occurred to me before was you ask for your annual funding based on your normal year over year operations. But the little CBIL band, the gentleman from my district that said, this is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary, you know, our birthday as a country. The CBIL band might have extra performances this year. So a little extra would help with that because it goes beyond what we normally do.

That was the first compelling thing that has made me go, that's actually interesting. Where the board may get into those nuances that you could ask on an application that says, hey, there's a special circumstance this year that a supplement might be helpful, but doesn't need to be in our base in year two. And start getting them to think out loud in terms of multiyear budgeting as well. So I'm throwing that out that for board members, I think we're going to have to signal early and often that the process if we have problems with the process, we've got to fix it. But once it goes out and the applications are in, yeah, if we don't back it up, then we're just inviting a whole lot more to come in the door.

But I did feel like there were data questions and things like that. And even board members, I looked a little side eye at a few people going, what? What are you talking about? So I think that that, in ways, needs to be surfaced early. Mike said no surprises.

I think amongst ourselves, if somebody says or does something out loud and it's a complete surprise, then that's probably us not communicating well, not just during budget time, but throughout the year, making your point. Like if Ann's going to speak to the conservation program, you know, that, I get that. That's not a surprise because she says it often and frequently out loud. So I would encourage everyone to do the same, and I point that finger at myself. Multi year budgeting, I don't want to get ahead of myself for next week, because that's the notes I'm working on.

I think that the school board interaction and relationship definitely I think while the discussion and publicly disagreeing or having those conversations is useful and functional and necessary, I think that there's definite process improvements that could be had both from our perspective looking at our board and how we do it, how the school board handles their bit that we can't touch, and then how we interact with one another. I think it would be fair to say that the school board chair and I have been having conversations about this. And I think that the work we're doing, both self board evaluation, we'll move into some work with them and things might look a little differently next year. That will be helpful as we try to determine, as they asked us, what is the budget philosophy moving forward? And I think a changing to a multiyear budget strategy, our fiscal year policies and planning that we're doing to achieve things for all of our county has to be bought into by all the things that exist under that umbrella, not just the school board, but our agencies and our departments, etcetera.

So I'm committed to that work with the school board chair in trying to do things in a way that are meaningfully different so that while we may disagree still through the inherent tension of the state's authority to us and our requirements, that the public sees that we were all as knowledgeable as each other and can agree on what the facts are and can show that we can do this in a way that may not always produce the outcomes from the requester versus the funder. But everybody can step back and go, the diligence shown in the process was strong. And I think this conversation alone is a good step in helping do that. So I appreciate the feedback. And then I think it's always there.

Staff has always mentioned it. But I don't know if the board I don't know if this supervisor always fully appreciates the operational consequences of capital projects. And when we think, because we're all thinking high school, we're all thinking the big numbers, and I don't mean to just pick a school project, but understanding what that means on the operational side as we think year two, year three, year four, year five. I think that's something that needs to be there. And then the last thing I'll say here, and I probably have other points that will come out in the two by twos.

But I think that the way our fiscal management policies are packaged together, both in the budget document, but in the way that the public could engage with them. So when we talk about like our AAA and our debt capacity policy, and why we do it the way we do it. When we talk about, you know, should we have? There are some other counties I've noticed that will have statements on why they do multi year budgeting, right? So start surfacing and putting that into a formal fiscal management policy, fiscal management policy, a tidy spot.

The tidiest spot where we explain it all right now is in the budget document, and it should live in there. But I'm saying a separate piece that basically gets cut and pasted into the budget document that everybody, if somebody says, well, are the, how does the county determine their CIP priorities? Like the school division has a very defined process for determining at least a cycle of how it comes through an advisory committee, then the board deals with it, then it comes to us. Then it gets a little muddy. But you don't, we don't really have a clean way of that because it's messy.

A courts project or a library project doesn't just happen on a, because you say it's gonna happen in year four. There's other agencies involved. There's other factors involved. But explaining that in a way that's very clear to everybody, I think would be good. So those are some of the things that I'll be highlighting in the work with staff as well, and then challenging the board to be thinking about of how do you collectively put all that together at the forefront.

And then I do like the point about having one more conversation before we have a final vote. Because we've not needed some of the last work sessions, but that could be a way to utilize that last work session. We do our final public hearing. We know what the tax rate's going to be. We make sure we have one final conversation before we take a final vote so that we get all clean on where we're at, all the different back and forths and decisions.

Then it has another, some sort of time for both us to digest it, the public to digest it, knowing that if we're going to come back in and change anything, that that would be unusual, not the norm. Because I do feel like that at the end, we did some things there that, I mean, it was all valid. We had surfaced it with the public. I'm not feeling like we did anything that everybody thought was a surprise. But I think it would be valuable to have that extra point.

So I appreciate it. Thank you all for entertaining and doing this. I hope you all found it useful. And I will put a summative piece together to throw back at you all of this conversation so that you can have at your disposal when you go in, if not for the two by twos with staff. But we're going to be doing further work as a board together so that you'll have it then. All right? Yep, quick, because we've to get into close Yeah,

I know quick. I just wanted to say the only problem I had with the budget is when we went through how to get to the $7,000,000 and we were talking about the tax rate and everything, then we took these other discretionary I'll say discretionary funds or leftover funds. That was a little bit the chart and everything was a little bit I'd ask for better clarification of that because that I didn't it was going so fast. And it was like, well, we have this, but then we saved this amount. So we took that amount and added it came up to the $7,000,000 which was fine.

I didn't mind that. But that went very quickly, and I would have preferred it to slow down. The last thing is if we can get with the city of Charlottesville, I'd love to get their what Supervisor Malik said, let them tell us exactly what they're spending the money on since it's supposed to benefit both. That's it. Thank you.

All right. We have a closed meeting. Do we have a motion to go into closed meeting?

I move that the Board of Supervisors convene a closed meeting pursuant to Section 2.2-3711A of the Code of Virginia under subsection one to discuss and consider the annual performance of the county attorney.

Second.

JULIE Without objection, the clerk would please call the roll.

JULIE Mr. Miss Missal.

JULIE Aye.

JULIE Mr. Pruitt. JULIE Aye. JULIE Ms. Malik. Yes.

JULIE right. Let's go. We're on? All right. We're going to come back to order.

We are down one supervisor, but she will be reattending. If we're coming out of closed meeting, can you please read the certification of the closed meeting?

Yes. I move that the Board of Supervisors certified by a recorded vote that to the best of each supervisor's knowledge, only public business matters lawfully exempted from the open meeting requirements of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and identified in the motion authorizing the closed meeting were heard, discussed, considered in the closed meeting. Second.

All right. The motion has been made and seconded. Without objection, if the clerk please call the roll.

Mr. Missile. Aye. Mr. Pruitt. Aye. Mr. Galloway. Yes. Ms. Lapisto Kirtley. Aye. Ms. Malik. Yes.

All right. Very good. And we will move to item number 14 from the county executive, report on matters not listed on the agenda. Mr. Richardson, do you have a report this evening?

Yes, sir, I do. And members of the board, thank you very much for the opportunity for our CAPE division to help line up our report for May 2026. Well, before I get started and progress, I just want to say a second about, talk a second about Albemarle County core values. We talk a lot about high performance. We talk about aligning these presentations to the board's strategic plan and looking at the six strategic goals and tie back with metrics and report of the good work that's going on in the organization.

Tonight, I'll take a little bit of a different approach. Tonight, I want to point to one of our core values. The county has five. These core values drive a lot of how we behave, how we treat each other, how we treat our community and citizens that we interact with. And specifically, the core value I'll focus on tonight is learning.

It's the one I talk the most about in new employee orientation. So our HR staff would verify that I hone in on the learning core value in our organization, which I really lean into hard, where it says we encourage and support lifelong learning and personal and professional growth of our staff. I'd like to thank our board publicly for supporting us in this year's budget, FY '27, with $1,400,000 that we will focus toward training and education for our staff to continue to try to partner with our staff who lean into continuous education and learning. So tonight, what I'm going to do is I'm going to walk through and focus on a variety of credentials and training from across the organization. Just have a couple of minutes to just recognize some of the good work that's going on, and I'll put my finger in the ear and say that we were really overwhelmed with the number of responses back from departments of training, education, certifications that our staff is going after on a regular basis.

So this may not be the last time you hear from me on some of the good work that our staff is putting in to lean into the learning core value. So with that, I'll start. And, oh my goodness, here we go, Trevor Henry. Trevor Henry, our deputy county executive, has earned the ICMA credentialed manager designation. There are seventeen thirty four managers in the world, not in The United States, in the world, under the council manager form of government, seventeen thirty four credentialed managers in the world.

83 are in the Commonwealth of Virginia, and that's all counties and cities. We have 83, and that's one of the highest numbers of any of the 50 states. Virginia would certainly be in the top five. The International Seating County Manager Association credentialed manager designation, it's one of the most prestigious recognitions in local government leadership, awarded to managers who demonstrate a commitment to professional development, ethical leadership, lifelong learning. To earn this credential, Mr.

Henry, when he was promoted, it took him about seven years to earn this credential. He's been working on it diligently, and he does a lot of continuing education on a year to year basis. He now has the designation and he is required to continue to complete forty hours a year of continuing education and write a learning paper submitted to ICMA every year. So the forty hours is connected to what did you learn and how are you going to apply it at work? And then it is reviewed by a peer group of managers in Washington DC.

Trevor's credentials will strengthen the county's capacity to deliver effective, transparent and innovative public service. I And want to say something about this picture. I love it. Because Trevor gets in the field, he gets with our departments. This is one where he went into the field, into ACFR, and I think he actually suited up and went through the Byrne Building along with several other staff, and it really shows his enthusiasm in really supporting our departments and learning more about the work they do, and I'm certainly very proud of him.

The next person I know her very close to because she 's on our OLT, and that's Emily Kilroy. When we promoted Emily to the economic development director's job several years ago, I talked very clearly with her that I wanted her to go after her economic development institute, the completion of the credit hours in order to become a certified economic developer. So she has taken 117 credit hours over the last several years to complete this course through the Economic Development Institute. It's offered by Oklahoma University in partnership with the International Economic Development Council. She completed the coursework and then set for her economic developer exam.

So it really equips practitioners with the tools, the framework, and best practices needed to drive sustainable economic growth in their communities. It's recognized as really the best in The United States. It covers areas such as business retention, expansion, site selection, workforce development, strategic planning, all of this directly applicable to Albemarle County's economic development strategic plan. So again, we're really proud of Emily with the effort that she's done because she, as you folks know, she's also working full time while she's earning this accreditation, and she's also a full time mom. So we're really proud of her, okay?

Also on our organizational leadership team is Jessica Rice, our human resources director, and I am so pleased to report that she has completed the HR Executive Leadership Certification Program. The HR Executive Leadership Certification is an advanced credential for senior HR professionals that focuses on strategic leadership, org development, talent management, workforce planning. And, Board, you know we split apart and created our own local government HR department about five years ago with the support of the board, the school board and the school staff, and I think it's working well for schools and it's working well for us. But Jessica's focus really is on local government, and so she's helping us in a number of areas with this credential, such as aligning HR strategy with organizational goals, navigating complex employment law, fostering an inclusive and high performing workforce, just to name some of the areas. So we're really proud of Jessica and the good strategic leadership that she's providing.

Michael Dellinger in our Community Development Department. He is one of fewer than 1,000 people in the world to hold the International Code Council Master Code Professional designation. This designation is one of the most demanding and exclusive certifications in building and codes industry. Earning this credential requires mastery across multiple code domains, including building, fire, plumbing, mechanical, electrical, and accessibility codes, along with the years of experience in successful completion of a comprehensive examination process. Michael's designation provides residents and developers an expert who can navigate the full complexity of modern building codes, helping to ensure the construction is safe, compliant, and efficient.

So he has done a really good job staying current in his field, and we appreciate his hard work. Tim Paladino and Mitzi Hammer were part of the inaugural cohort from the University of Virginia's Leadership Leap Program. This immersive leadership development program is designed to cultivate the next generation of local government leaders. It's aimed at aspiring and future leaders. The program is a precursor to the LEAP program, and many of the county's managers and supervisors have attended the LEAD program.

And again, this is taught at UVA, just ten minutes from here, and we're so lucky that the University of Virginia has such nice continuing education program opportunities for our staff. As members of the inaugural cohort, Tim and Mitzi were the first participants to go through the program, and it includes mentorship, cohort based learning, leadership assets, and the participation in LEAP signals both individual potential and the county's commitment to growing our leadership from within to prepare them for future promotional opportunities. So we really wanted for you to pick them out in the crowd in this picture. So the red arrows point to Mitzi and to Tim, who Tim comes to some of our meetings and works in Parks and Rec. Mitzi is in strategic planning and does a lot of project management work, and they both do really good work.

Okay? David Dallins and Tim Scarborough recently earned their playground safety recertifications out of the Parks and Recreation Department. The playground safety certification is a nationally recognized credential administered through the National Recreation and Park Association, training professionals in playground hazard identification, equipment standards, and best practices for safe design and maintenance. Certified playground safety inspectors are trained to evaluate the equipment, the surfacing, the layout, age appropriateness to reduce the risk of injury at public play spaces. Having certified inspectors in house means our playgrounds are regularly evaluated by credentialed professionals providing an additional layer of protection for our kids and families in Albemarle County.

So I'm really proud of these gentlemen for going after these certifications. Our fire rescue logistics team prioritizes professional certifications, as this board knows, to keep the county's emergency fleet mission ready. Emergency Vehicle Technician, EBT certification is the industry standard for professionals who inspect, maintain, and repair emergency vehicles, including all of our fire apparatus, our rescue units, and our ambulances. The EBT certification program administered through the Emergency Vehicle Technician Certification Commission assures that each of our technicians have demonstrated competency in complex mechanical, electrical, and hydraulic systems unique to emergency vehicles. The team holds a wide range of credentials, including EBT and manufacturer specific qualifications pictured on their wall of credentials.

So behind these four gentlemen, you can see the wall of credentials. In the photo, we have Chip Walker, Calvin Butler, Eric Lohman, and Matt Stump. And Board, I'm just going to make an invitation to you. If you're interested in taking a tour of our PISOC, which is out at Fashion Square Mall, that's the property that we lease inside the mall to take a look at the operations of the PISOC. If you just let Trevor Henry know that you would like to have an opportunity to go out there and see how things are done, these fine folks would be happy to show you a little bit more behind the scenes of how they take care of the equipment and how they stay on top of things.

They do really good work. Giselle Garchillo has earned her QPR certification, a critical training to recognize respond to mental health crises. She works in the Department of Human, of the Department of Social Services. And the QPR stands for Question, Persuade, and Refer. It's an emergency mental health intervention training that's designed to help individuals recognize the warning signs of suicide and take meaningful action.

It's much like CPR for cardiac emergencies. QPR equips trained individuals to intervene at a critical moment by asking direct questions, engaging the person in crisis and connecting them with proper care. Giselle's certification is representative of the many trainings that CPS and Protection Services Division of DSS, that staff undertakes on a regular basis. These staff members regularly work with vulnerable individuals who are facing housing instability, family crises, and other high stress circumstances. Prioritizing mental health and crisis prevention training allows staff to provide the services they need, that our residents need when they are in their greatest time of need.

So congratulations to Giselle. We're really proud of our DSS staff. Our Housing Choice Voucher, HCV program, is the federal government's primary mechanism for providing rental assistance to low income households and requiring special knowledge across multiple disciplines to implement locally. Housing office staff have earned certifications in three key areas, executive management, program oversight, compliance and strategic leadership, specialist certification, day to day program administration and participant services. And finally, quality standards inspector certification, which includes ensuring rental units and HUD's housing quality standards that they are met before vouchers are issued.

Together, these credentials ensure that the entire process is managed by professionally certified staff. The training directly benefits program participants by improving accuracy, consistency, and fairness of housing assistance, and it strengthens the county's compliance posture with HUD requirements, which is quite complex. In the photo, we have Bill Perry, Nayatith, Arroya, Anthony Harrow, Adrian Knight, Tashi Chambers, Andy Gardner, and Cassandra Struggs. And I really appreciate this staff's hard work every day. They're on the front line and they see community members that are in their greatest time of need.

So board, this is just a small glimpse into the work that our team does with the learning and continuing education money that is provided through our budget. And I think our department heads do a really good job of trying to keep certifications up to compliance. Some of it's mandatory. This is just touching the base of some of the work that our staff does. I'll send this to the board, as I always do, after this with Abby's work to make sure if you're in the community and you think some of these slides are appropriate to share in your meetings and such, please use that.

And then again, I'll go back and suggest that if you've not had a chance to look at the Public Safety Operations Center out at Fashion Square, you're very busy people, but if you want to go out and take a look, again, just shoot Trevor an email and say, I'd love to go. And if there's more than one, we might try to group two at a time just to take a look at what's going on out there. But, Chair, I'll turn it back over to you, but thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll see what questions, comments we have. Supervisor Duncan?

No specific comments, just that it was really great to see. And, yeah, continued training is really great.

Supervisor Malik.

So much appreciation for BERNSTEIN: all the staff, even ones who have been here for thirty years, to continue to get training because you can always

learn something. Thank you very much. Supervisor Lapisto Kirtley.

JULIE I really appreciate you identifying all of our outstanding staff members. And I know there's many, many more out there. It's really nice to see all the positive things that are happening in this county and how well managed it is.

Supervisor Missile?

Yeah, I mean, think one of the greatest gifts you can give to an employee is professional development and advancement, and it's also a great way to manage retention. So congratulations, that's great stuff. And congratulations to everybody on that list.

Supervisor Pruitt?

I just love hearing about all the success we're having throughout our organization. I also love that you and these updates cover really the full gamut of our organization. We started with three C suite folks who we see every day. But then as we went on, we heard from a lot of success of folks who we, as individual board members, don't really have much cause to interact with. And it's really great to see how that touches the entire organization. I will also just say, for that photo of Trevor, it did make me think we need to, at the picnic next year, have some firefighting Olympics instead of pickleball, because I want to race Trevor in an FFE dress out drill, because I think I can be a Oh, calm down.

Yeah, don't

forget. You

be the record show.

I was going to say if you coordinate a tour of any county facility via Trevor, that he will put on the gear of that particular place during your tour. So I've often thought about that. To the point that was made about continuing professional development the fact that folks are here, mean, you're somewhere for a long time and perhaps think it's your home organization, you can become complacent and not wanting to think, well, I'm here, I need to go. And I don't mean to single out Jessica, but I mean, once you achieve your SHR, then you achieve an executive, you know, you're the head of the HR department. A A lot of times you think like, all right, I've hit the end of what the learning capacity could be.

So to take that another step and continue to want to learn and develop in your particular field, just like all of the folks mentioned here did, I think that's real credit not just to the fact that it's available to them as an organization, but to the forward blinking and interest of the employee themselves to want to continue to do that. So well done for all of them. Very good. Well, we always appreciate that report. I suspect you'll be sharing that with us.

Because I'm going have to go back and look up that code one. Fewer thousand people, fewer than 100 people may know that that is a thing you can get certified in. I want to go check out what that is, because that's remarkable what that one is. But I didn't write it down fast enough to see what it was. All right, Board, we're going to move to public comment on matters previously considered or currently pending before the Board other than scheduled public hearings. And vice chair Missile will read the rules and move us through our speaker list.

Great. Thanks, chair. During the time set aside for public comment on matters previously considered or currently pending before the board, individuals may address the board of supervisors concerning matters previously considered by the board or matters that pending before the board other than items listed on the agenda for public hearing. Individuals are allowed one opportunity of up to three minutes to speak at each board meeting. A sign up sheet is managed by the clerk's office. Timekeeping is conducted through a timer and light system at the podium. The green light will go on when you begin speaking, which begins your allotted time. The yellow light indicates you have one minute to finish speaking. The red light indicates your time has expired, and you will be asked to end your comments. In order to give all speakers equal treatment and courtesy, the board requests that speakers adhere to the following When addressing the board, state your name.