County Board - Regular Meeting

Hi, welcome to the Arlington County Board meeting. We're so glad you've joined us. Before the meeting gets started, here are a couple of things you can expect. The Arlington County Board meets monthly with the exception of August. Meetings are typically held in two sessions, Saturday regular meeting and a Tuesday recess meeting. These meetings are where the board makes decisions, hears updates, and receives public input on community issues. Today's recess meeting includes three parts, business and reports, regular agenda, and removed consent agenda. Recess meetings typically include board member reports, county manager reports, public recognitions, and appointments to advisory groups. The board then enters a closed session, which is not open to the public, and it is limited to matters permitted by the Virginia Freedom of Information Act. Regular agenda includes staff presentations, public hearings, and a full discussion from the county board before a vote. If you are signed up to speak, please note your speaking category. Individuals may speak for two or three minutes, and representatives of civic organizations may speak for two, three minutes, or five minutes. After the regular hearing section, the board will consider items removed from the regular consent agenda. The same speaking rules apply. Individuals may speak for two or three minutes, and those organizational representatives have up to five minutes. Remain seated until your name is called. The clerk will call the current and next speaker. When called, come to the podium and use the button on the right to adjust the height. You can also adjust the microphone. A timer will be visible on the podium. Please stay within your allotted time so that everyone has an equal opportunity to be heard. For virtual speakers, keep your camera and microphone off until your name is called. When acknowledged, turn on your camera and unmute. Your timer will appear in the team's meeting and will begin once you are recognized. If you need a reasonable accommodation, please speak to county staff outside the boardroom or the clerk at the dais. If you have any questions, staff are happy to assist you. Thank you for being here and sharing your voice with the county board. Have a great meeting.

Good afternoon. Welcome to the Arlington County Board's July recessed meeting. Full board is here. Thank you for joining us here today. We will begin with our appointments, awards, recognitions, and reports, followed by closed session and a break for dinner, resuming no earlier than 6.30 p.m. with our scheduled hearing items. Before our usual slate of appointments, over to Vice Chair Coffey to introduce a charge for new affordable housing working group. Ms. Coffey, over to you.

Great, thank you. And while this is a new work group, the substance of it should not be entirely new. Last calendar year, so 2025, our housing commission put together a subcommittee to look at the constraints and recommendations around our affordable housing ordinance in terms of what we are able to require and negotiate with private development in terms of affordability covenants. Their recommendation from that ultimately ended up being rather than asking the state to change the specific code which determines the formula that Arlington is able to use, that really what we need to be asking for is the ability to make those changes locally in the future and going forward so that we don't have to engage in a routine multi-year process every time the macro economy or local situations change, but that we can really make those decisions as appropriate for our own community. And so we introduced this as a legislative priority for the General Assembly session that occurred this year, and Senator Favola and Delegate Alfonso Lopez introduce legislation to further that. However, some of the committee members of the cities, counties and towns in the House of Delegates were concerned that stakeholders had not yet been consulted adequately. And so we are forming this work group, which will have an equal balance of our commissioners and development industry professionals in order to come up with the process by which we would in the future initiate changes to our affordable housing ordinance. And so to be clear, this is not initiating any actual changes to the formula itself. It is a process to create a process, which may be the most Arlington thing that we could be doing. And it's an important thing, though, for this board to Really put forward because it will carry much more weight when we go to the General Assembly session Knowing that this group has been able to meet that we had the right stakeholders at the table And it will be supported of course by our housing staff our legislative staff all of our policy staff and then We will be consulting with the county attorney's office as needed through the board and so believe mr. clerk if you want to put the charge on the screen everyone has already seen it and we do list out who the members are but I think we will have a separate motion probably for the actual appointment of those folks and so With that, I move that the county board adopt the charge for the affordable housing work group.

I'll second that. Do you want to discuss it any more than you already have or not?

I don't think so. I think a lot of work has gone into this. I appreciate the repeated blessing of the board. I know, again, since we put this in the legislative priorities last year, there's been a general sense of support. And this is a little bit, we don't get a vote down in Richmond. And so when you have to pivot, you make the best of of what we've got and i think that's what we're doing here and i think we'll come back for the next general general assembly session um stronger and in a better position to make sure that we're doing all that we can locally when it comes to affordable housing thank you vice chair coffee i think you said plan for a plan but i also think it's important to sort of note that we worked hard on this last session

but didn't quite get where we wanted to go. So planning for a plan this time may be an Arlington thing, but it's also a good preparation piece. Ms. Cunningham.

I just want to say thank you, Ms. Coffey, for your leadership and staff for their very thorough participation to make this come together. Wish we could have gotten it done last year, but we will do it this way since that's what the General Assembly has asked us to do. So looking forward to and happy to help in any way we can.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's an amazing piece of work. Here the charges fantastic response to decades of advocacy actually. This is not the first time that we are looking at this. The most important and salient part here is that we have people from, you know, people who work with us from the industry and our commissioners. This is an important balance in this since what we are looking for is actually local rule because we know our market the best. Our constituents actually know our market the best because they suffer the consequences of not having managed to be able to change the ordinance until now. So thank you so much for this.

Yeah, and just to add a little bit onto that, I think one of the concerns from the General Assembly was whether this would decrease or prevent housing production. And I think Arlington has such a strong track record and such a strong commitment. None of us want that to be an unintentional result of changes to the ordinance. And so we really are committed. The reason for the balanced membership is also to reflect our balanced commitment to both supply generally, but noting it is hardest to serve our lowest income residents when it comes to affordability. And we really do have to balance the needs for supply in general with our needs to serve very specific parts of our population and making sure that we can, as you said, Mr. Karantanas, locally know what that correct balance is, is very important to us.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey.

Mr. Spain. I'll keep it brief. Just again, thanks to our vice chair, her leadership. What I don't take for granted is the, you know, the makeup of this work group. And something I'm kind of laser focused on is, you know, I often say if you're not at the table helping shape the policy, you're on the sideline getting Scooby Snacks. That's a joke, everybody. That aside, if you look who's on here today, I think it's a great compilation of folks from not just industry, but also some of our renters and people in our commissions who I think are noteworthy and really committed to this call. So again, thank you, Madam Vice Chair for that. And looking forward to the great work they're gonna be doing here.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. Everything's been said. Almost everyone has said it. I'll just say thank you very much. Now we'll move on to the vote. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

That passes unanimously 5-0. I think suffice to say we have a lot of work on housing that's coming up over the coming months, 12 to 18 months. We've got work to do. So next we will move to our appointments for the month. I move the following appointments. To the Affordable Housing Ordinance Working Group, apropos of our just preceding conversation, we appoint Brian Coleman, John Casteris, John Musso, Scott Pedowitz, Tinley Peterson, Kathy Puskar, and Danny Ross and Tony Streiner. To the Commission on Aging for terms ending July 31st, 2029, we appoint Travis Rindle and Patrick Carr to our Crystal and Pentagon Cities Council. We appoint Dana Bress and Steve Moss for terms ending July 31st, 2028 to the Fire Prevention Code Board of Appeals. We appoint Greg Carl, I believe it is, for a term ending July 31st, 2030, as well as the following individuals for terms ending July 31st, 2030. Karen White, Katie Atwater, Brian Fricke, and JD Martin. Those last four are all reappointments, while Mr. Greg Carl is a new appointment. Fiscal Affairs Advisory Committee, we reappoint Tony Weaver for a term ending July 31st, 2028. Forestry and Natural Resources Commission, we appoint Marissa Wilson for a term ending July 31st, 2029. To the National Innovation Quarter Board of Directors, we appoint Anna Nissenan as a non-voting representative for a term ending July 31st, 2029. To the Neighborhood Complete Streets Commission, we appoint Nick Stoicalou for a term ending July 31st, 2029. To the Sports Commission, we appoint Megan Sullivan for a term ending July 31st, 2028. To the Transportation Commission, Justin Furman for a term ending July 31st, 2029. And to the Trespass Towing Advisory Board, we appoint Peter Owen as a voting resident for a term ending on July 31st, 2029, and Jason Harris as a voting towing representative for a term ending on July 31st, 2029. Second on this motion is not required. I do have one question. We will go ahead and vote, but I do hope that, let's see if we can loop Mr. Karantonis. Is there a need at this stage on the Trespass Towing Advisory Board, is there a need for designation of a chair or not at this time?

I don't believe that we designate the chair.

If you give me just a moment, I can review the charter. I believe they designate their own. Sorry? If you give me a moment, I'll review their charter. I believe they designate their own. Give me just a moment.

Okay, if we can.

If it's okay with you, Mr. Kushner, let's vote on all those appointments and then we'll give you more time so that we're not playing the Jeopardy song in our mind. So all those appointments, there's no need for a second. All those in favor say aye.

Aye.

So that passes. We'll come back to the chair question for the towing board. I'll go next to proclamations and Mr. Spain, because we have to come back to the slide on federal workers, immigrants, and refugees. Mr. Spain, over to you. Disability Pride Month. Yeah, yeah, but he's got other stuff, so we're coming back to that. So if it's okay with you and Mr. Payne, if you're set, we'll send it over to you for the proclamation. You lead the way, Mr. Chair, and I'm right there with you.

Okay. Well, it gives me great pleasure. This month we just have one proclamation, and what we're here to do briefly is talk about Disability Pride Month. July is Disability Pride Month and marks the anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act on July 26, 1990. Disability Pride Month, my friends, celebrates the identities, culture, contributions, and resilience of people with disabilities and recognizes disability as a natural and valuable part of human diversity. More than one in four adults in the United States report having a disability, including many members of our Arlington community. Arlington is committed to advancing accessibility, challenging stigma, and removing barriers so that people with disabilities can fully participate in all aspects of community life. We also want to recognize organizations including the Arc of Northern Virginia, who's not with us today, but SPARC and Independent Center of Northern Virginia and our Department of Health and Human Services for their continued advocacy, leadership, and support. And so I have a proclamation here. I'm not going to read it in its entirety. But now, therefore, the County Board of Arlington does hereby proclaim July 2026 as Disability Pride Month in Arlington County and encourages all residents, businesses, and organizations to join in celebrating the contributions of people with disabilities and to continue the work of making Arlington a community that is inclusive and accessible for all. Signed under the seal of Arlington County, Matt DeFerranti, Chair of Arlington County Board. And if I can have those organizations and representatives that are here with us come up front so you can receive the proclamation. Thank you.

Come on up front and we will serve as a backdrop. Please, thank you so much and congrats.

Let's go.

Hi, how are you? High five? There you go. How old are you, young fella?

How old are you? Four? That's why you hit the five. Good to see you.

Mr.

Chair.

Dominique, go ahead.

A minute and a half. If you want. I know you asked. David, can you help? Go ahead.

Do you have the mic there? David will help you.

Thank you to the Arlington County Board for recognizing Disability Pride Month. ECMB is proud to be a disability-led organization working toward the collective liberation of all disabled people. through advocacy, support, and community connection. Our new three-year strategic plan reflects our vision of disabled people experiencing equity, access, and choice empowered by interdependence, community, and collective human rights. It also signals our commitment to not only to providing services, but to advancing systemic change. For all 44 years of our history, ECMB has called Arlington home. We deeply value Arlington County's shared commitment to equity and its recognition of the compounded barriers experienced by people with disabilities who also face unfair treatment for other reasons like their race, religion, where they're from, who they love, or how much money they have. This month, ECMB received an Arlington Opportunities Grant to strengthen community engagement and leadership among disabled South Arlington residents. We're grateful for Arlington County's partnership and look forward to continuing our shared work toward equity for all disabled people. As we mark the 36th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act this month, we are reminded that pride and progress go hand in hand. The ADA opened doors, but full inclusion is still a work in progress. ECMB remains committed to being Arlington's partner in that work, ensuring every disabled resident has the access, choice, and belonging they deserve. Even as we celebrate today, ECMB staff are also on Capitol Hill, today and this week, meeting with legislators to speak about policies, both intentional and unintended, that threaten the rights, services, and safety of disabled people. Pride and advocacy go together. We celebrate how far we've come. We simultaneously are holding our ground and looking forward to progress. Thank you again.

Thank you very much. That deserves applause. Appreciate you coming and your partnership, leadership within Arlington, I will note just again, and also the ongoing work. So thanks very much, grateful, and you all are welcome to stay as long as you might wish. You also, if five minutes from now you say, we don't need every piece of that, then that's also your discretion, your call, we won't mind at all. Next, we will just loop back briefly, Mr. Kushner, to the federal workers and immigrant resources slide, if we could do that, just because Arlington, last night I was at a, a conversation where an individual shared that he had lost his job and had been searching for a job for months from the federal government. So if you know someone for whom this is an important resource, please forward this to them or ask Mr. Kushner for a copy of the paper copy of this. And then there's also resources for our immigrant communities and families, which are such a key part of central really to all of our country, but also central to Arlington. So those are our resources. Next we will turn to board member reports and we have a discussion from Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Spain with sort of a cameo of sorts from our County Attorney, Mr. Samuel. But I don't know who's coming first, but if you pull up perhaps, if there are slides, Mr. Kushner can help. We'll go to Ms. Cunningham first, unless you guys have a different plan.

I think we have a procedural item first. Do you want to take that first, Mr. Spain? You're up to it.

Yeah.

Or I can do it if you want.

So Mr. Spain, thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Oh, yes. The procedure. I have a motion. Go ahead.

So I have a motion. I move that the Arlington County Board approve a limited waiver of the attorney client privilege and work product protection as follows. The board authorizes release of the county attorney's Virginia forms of local government report, sustainability in the form of Presented in a form presented to the board today, the waiver extends only to the specific text approved for release and does not extend to A, any prior or subsequent drafts, B, any underlining research notes, internal communications or analysis not incorporated into the release text, C, any metadata, and D, anything else not in the specific text approved for release. Two, except as expressly waive all attorney-client privilege and work product protections applicable to anything, including but not limited to, other legal analysis, advice, or recommendations prepared by or at the direction of county attorney's office concerning Arlington's form of government are expressly preserved. This waiver shall not be construed as a subject matter waiver and the County Board does not consent to disclosure of any information beyond the specific content released pursuant to this motion. The County Manager and County Attorney are authorized to take all actions necessary to effectuate the release of the public report consistent with the terms of this motion. I further move that this limited waiver is granted solely for the purpose of public release of the county attorney's Virginia forms of local government report and shall not be deemed a general waiver of privilege for any other purpose, including but not limited to litigation, administrative proceedings, or future public records requests for the report or related legal analysis. Is there a second?

Second. Ms. Cunningham seconds. I think that the... Unless you have pieces you wanted to share, I think that the motion stands for itself. Motion stands for itself. Great, thank you. All those in favor of that motion say aye.

Aye.

Any opposed? That motion passes. We have provided the appropriate protections legally with respect to a product that we are now going to talk about. So Ms. Cunningham, Mr. Spain and Mr. Samuel, it's over to you. I don't know who's going first, but leave it to you.

Go ahead. It'll be brief. So one, this brings us a moment in time where we are here to hear our analysis legal analysis from our county attorney and we want to thank you in advance county attorney for all of your hard work on the board structure and the performance of legal analysis that has taken place and I'm just going to let your content speak for itself as you have this discussion Ms. Cunningham any thoughts before we turn over to the county attorney

No, thank you. We're on track and really deeply appreciate the attorney and his team for the deep analysis here and excited to share it with the public so that we can continue on this journey together. Thank you.

Mr. Samuel.

Well, thank you. And the report, my understanding, is now published on the website. I have 10 copies here if anybody wants a print copy. I can pass those down. Yeah, so I have a brief presentation for you all to orient you to the contents of the report. But first, I do want to thank my staff, who everybody in some way or form contributed to the research here, especially Assistant County Attorney Donny Autry, who really leaned in and was instrumental to getting this report done. So next slide. So just to review, these are the four points I was asked to review and research. The first is Arlington's current form of government under Virginia law and government structures used in other localities, the current process by which Virginia's jurisdictions with populations above 150,000, including Arlington, can legally change their own structure, looking at number of seats, districts versus at large, timing of elections, the election of the chair, et cetera. the impacts on the school board and constitutional officers, and impacts of transitioning from county to city status. Next slide. So a high-level summary of the report is you'll find that the county manager plan, it only applies to Arlington. It grants Arlington numerous powers that other forms of county government do not have. And they would potentially be lost if we go through a transition to an entirely different county form. That's different than if we made legislative amendments to the county manager plan. But it would have to be weighed against the gains. We would potentially have election districts or a directly elected chair, which The county manager plan just does not provide for it, sort of locks in the board and its current structure. There's three different pathways for structural change. There could be a legislative amendment, which is the simplest way. There could be a referendum to change to a different county form. And then there's conversion to city status. They each have their own distinct trade-offs as are laid out in the report. And I would note that conversion to city status is currently blocked by a statutory moratorium, at least until July 1st, 2032. Next slide. So for the first charge, I thought it'd be helpful to go to the next slide to just orient how we compare to other Northern Virginia localities, first by population. You can see we're one of the larger population-wise local governments. I think the ones ahead of us are obviously Fairfax County, Loudoun, and Prince William. But we are quite large population-wise. Next slide. Then looking at the different forms of government, we're the only LOCALITY UNDER THE COUNTY MANAGER PLAN, THE CITIES ALL HAVE CHARTERS, FAIRFAX COUNTY UNDER THE URBAN COUNTY EXECUTIVE FORM, LOUDON UNDER THE TRADITIONAL FORM AND PRINCE WILLIAMS UNDER THE COUNTY EXECUTIVE FORM. YOU CAN SEE EACH HAS SELECTED A DIFFERENT FORM OF GOVERNMENT. NEXT SLIDE. So then as far as the governing body and the number of members, the county's locked in at five. You can see Alexandria has six members and a mayor, even though they're smaller population-wise. Fairfax City has six members. Fairfax County could have five to 11. Falls Church has seven. Loudoun has a board of supervisors. It's not specified in the Virginia code, but it could be anywhere from three to 11 is our analysis on that. And then Manassas and Manassas Park each have six. And then Prince William could have three to nine different members. But the county board is just statutorily set at five. Next slide. So how the chair or mayor is elected, you can see Alexandria's by the voters at large, Fairfax City's by the voters at large, Fairfax County's by the voters at large, Falls Church is like the county where it's selected from council's members, Loudoun's by voters at large, Manassas by voters at large, Manassas Park by voters at large, and Prince William by voters at large. Next slide. And then for the election of governing body members, it varies whether it's at large or by district. And it's just a mix, depending on the locality. Next slide. So the General Assembly has created various county government forms that localities can elect from. Each have different levels of executive independence and board involvement. So the county manager plan is probably the most rigid as far as county manager independence. But again, that comes with a lot of numerous powers that we have that other localities do not. But we are the only one that requires at-large elections for all board members. All the others permit or require district-based representation. But as of July 1 of this year, if we hit 400,000 in populations, it would trigger a direct election requirement. or district election requirement, excuse me. So next slide. Now we're transitioning to charge two. Next slide. So there's really three different ways, and in my opinion, the easiest way is legislative amendment, where you would have the General Assembly amend the County Manager Plan itself to add flexibility or modify structural features, but that requires the General Assembly's support. The next option would be a referendum to change the county form of government, and so that would be moving from the county manager plan to urban county executive or another county form, and you would have to analyze, as laid out in the report, the different powers and features of those different forms, because you then would be locked into that form. And then conversion to independent city status. I think if the moratorium is lifted, the county meets the requirements to do that. But you would have to go through the process laid out in the Code of Virginia, which is currently under moratorium. So it's not an option right now. Next slide. So then the impacts on the school board and constitutional officers. Next slide. If we converted to the county executive form, the county manager form, which is different than the county manager plan, or the urban county executive form, all of those forms replaced the treasurer and the commissioner of revenue with the appointed director of finance, but otherwise I did not see impacts to the constitutionals and the other forms. And a change in form does not have to impact the governance of Arlington Public Schools, and I've gone through the analysis there on how you could ensure that no change would happen. Next slide. So the impacts of transitioning from county to city status, so say the moratorium is lifted, transitioning to a city you gain a huge increase in public fiscal obligations and it's gonna be very dependent on what the specific effects would be on how the General Assembly drafts the charter and what they're willing to approve. But again, right now there's a moratorium on doing so. So that is the report at a high level, and I'm open to any questions.

Thank you, Mr. Samuel. We have all, I believe, looked at a draft of this, and we just passed a motion to retain such legal rights as we have on that. But that doesn't mean, at least for my part, that perhaps I've absorbed all chapters and all 30-odd pages plus attachment. There's a lot to this. openlets to questions if folks have them with the additional thought that questions after we've all absorbed this may be more eloquent than questions before we've absorbed this. But I'm not, take your preference. Are there questions or thoughts or brief comments or whatever works for you? Yes, Mr. Spain.

I will not have any additional questions at this time because I know the body of work that it took to get to these 30 some odd pages. And really I would hope and expect that not only, you know, we here on the county board will, take much needed time, during much of August maybe, to sit around and digest a lot of this. Because I think there will be questions, right, of course, down the road. And for the public, these documents, which you have not seen, the 33 pages, right, is going to be published. So there's a lot of good content here. And I think, again, I just want to thank the county attorney for the efforts. This is a really tight job. informative and onward to the next stage, I would say at this moment, that's all I have.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. And we've kind of discussed this, but, and you guys may know off the top, but process wise, you, Ms. Cunningham introduced this as part of our process that we're going through and there will be additional steps and those steps are still to come with the clerk is leading that. Do you want to speak to that?

Sure, very briefly, just that the public can follow along on the board structure and performance page on the website. There's a place to sign up for updates there or to share your interest in serving on any future work groups or committees that work on this. And as well the the timeline which we went through in detail last time so we didn't again this time But we are proceeding along that timeline. I think the next piece will be the partner the research partners Feedback interim feedback and then final and mr. Clerk. Maybe you can give us a brief update there and

Yeah, of course, very briefly, just to note that we have selected a vendor and we are in the process of negotiating the contract at this point. We expect that award to happen imminently, I would say. We're on track for the rest of the timeline tracking towards a October 30th of this year preliminary report, November 30th delivery of the final report.

Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Kushner. Vice Chair Coffey.

Yeah, thank you. First and foremost, again, I will echo the thanks to our county attorney and his staff. If Mr. DeFerranti said he has not fully absorbed everything in this, and if he had, I'd be extraordinarily impressed given the amount of other work we've had going on. It is lengthy and it is deep and detailed and that is going to be very, very helpful. One thing I would say for our public following along that it is not and should not be is it is not an assessment in a normative or directional way. And I think that that is really important. I had a couple of folks at a recent Open Door Monday ask, well, are you putting out the pros and cons? And I think one of the complex parts of this is that what might be a pro for one person is a con for another person. And so making sure that this document stays very neutral and the work we continue to do over the next few months remains really unbiased and impartial in terms of what the outcome might be is what our community should expect of us. And so I think, you know, I know that there may be people out there who are wanting this to point them in a particular direction, and that's not what this does. And I think that that is the correct and appropriate thing. But I hope that everyone will read it and think about it. There's a lot of interesting things. Virginia is quite the interesting place in terms of how governments have developed. And I, you know, I know I learned a lot more than my 10th grade government class taught me. So thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. With that, colleagues, we will continue the process with Mr. Kushner having indicated next steps, but we'll work on absorbing this over the coming weeks and month. And Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Spain will lead us forward as to our next steps. The next item that we will take up, oh, we have already passed the waiver, I believe. That is all that is necessary on the form of government, if I'm correct. We're next turning to our legislative priorities public feedback process. Ms. Coffey.

Great, and this is basically just a repeat of what we said last month in June, which is that for the first time ever, the board is doing a public engagement forum when it comes to our legislative package. And we have also moved the legislative package process a little bit earlier in the year, such that we can be more proactive working with our legislators to make sure we have things to them in enough time for them to craft or consider crafting bills that reflect our priorities. And so the form will be open until the end of the month. We have had pretty solid engagement, but we always need more. And so if you haven't filled it out, if you've thought about filling it out, if you have a friend who doesn't normally fill out our engagement forms, but has a lot of thoughts about the county. Now is the time. And we'll be back to you all in the fall with a readout of what we learned from this. So it's a first. It's a learning process. I'm not saying we got it perfect, but it's a lot better than not having anything. So thanks.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. Mr. Karantonis, yes.

Just to remark that it's the first time ever that I've experienced that I've been stopped in a grocery store twice with, you know, receiving positive feedback on this. I mean, admittedly, the people who happened to be there are, you know, more likely to be prolactin, but not the usual suspects, if I may say so. So they were extremely thankful for the outreach.

Thank you, Mr. Karantonis, and thank you. That is remarkable in that I'm not always stopped in the grocery store for items on this, but that does not mean I'm not sometimes. We will turn next. Thank you for bringing that to our attention. We'll turn next to a report and we'll come back to one other item. But first we'll turn to Mr. Karantonis who's gonna introduce our Northern Virginia Transportation Authority leadership for a presentation, Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and welcoming our, I mean, today guests, but actually we see them as our, you know, peers and collaborators and the people who make this region literally move together. And so Monica Bachmon and, you know, in representation of her team, Northern Virginia has a transportation authority. The word authority means it is the place where transportation money is apportioned and planned for. And I believe that Ms. Buckman is here today to tell us about a very important initiative over the next few years. You can use the podium or you can sit and introduce yourselves. And I believe, Mr. Kushner, we have the presentation, right? Good, awesome.

and I am Monica Backman, the Chief Executive Officer for the Virginia Transportation Authority. I have with me today, this afternoon, Sri Manjari, my team member, who's the Interim Director of Transportation. And I will be brief, I do want to be respectful and mindful of your time, but we do want to talk about the Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan, which the authority adopted July of last year.

Ms. Backman, sorry, that's on us. Is that?

Red means on. Oh, OK. Thank you. I thought that meant off. My apologies. Do I need a do-over?

You're good.

So again, wanted to talk about the BRT, Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan, in which the authority adopted July of last year. And it was unanimously adopted. Next slide. Before I get into the elements of BRT and why we're here this afternoon, I did want to talk about in VTA and some of our regional revenues. Board Member Cariton has noted that we are responsible for the transportation planning and programming and funding of multimodal transportation projects in Northern Virginia that primarily reduce congestion. I wanted to give a snippet of the regional revenues that have gone to Arlington County, a little over a half a billion dollars. I'm not going to read over the key projects that we've identified, but you can see transit, bike ped projects, roadway interchange, and that last line says local distribution transfers that total $142 million. We at the authority, we get 70% of the revenues, 30% goes back to the localities where the taxes and fees are raised. And to date, we've distributed back to Arlington County, $142 million. Next slide. So the BRT action plan, it's really a blueprint for jurisdictions and agencies to develop BRT lines incrementally in addition to supplying the information necessary to demonstrate how they can be successfully implemented. This BRT action plan, next slide, we call it one system, 28 routes. At MVTA, we are currently advancing five different BRT routes. The one, which Fairfax County has deemed it the one on Richmond Highway, Route 7 BRT, West End Transitway, Duke Street Transitway, and the Arlington Metroway. These different lines are in various stages of development with one operational. What I want to point out, though, these five represent five of the 28 BRT routes that were included in the Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan. The Bus Rapid Transit Action Plan was born because we at MVTA, we're responsible for doing the region's long-range transportation plan, which we call TransAction. The current transaction plan was adopted by the authority in December of 2022. When we do that plan, it gives us a keen opportunity to look at any gaps in the network because transaction is a needs-based plan. It is fiscally and geographically unconstrained. So we get projects, what we call top-down and bottom-up, submitted from jurisdictions and agencies, and then we have the opportunity to add additional projects. transaction include projects that are not only in Northern Virginia, but are in the District of Columbia and Maryland as well. Because we all know in this DMV region, bottlenecks are all across the region and no one wants to be stopped based on jurisdictional boundaries. But when we were doing the current transaction, we noted that we needed a system, something that could provide high capacity, high quality, safe, reliable, and efficient, transportation and something that could be implemented sooner than metro. Now, I do want to note that this does not take the place of any future metro rail extensions, but this would provide high capacity transit options that could be implemented sooner than metro. And during our analysis in the BRT Action Plan, we noted that this plan would have, by 2045, 47 million riders a year, which comes out to 143,000 daily riders. 27,000 cars daily shifted from single occupancy vehicle trips to using this system. And then 23 tons of carbon dioxide avoided daily, which is really important given some of our air quality issues that we've had over the last few days. Next slide. So Arlington is a key part of this BRT action plan. Nine of the 28 routes involve Arlington County. We have the Metro Way from Pentagon to Huntington, West End Transit Way, Van Doren to Pentagon, Route 7, Tysons to Mark Center, Glebe Road, Marymount University to Potomac Yard, Columbia Pike to Crystal City from the Skyline, Columbia Pike to DC, Annandale to Farragut, Arlington Boulevard, Dunloring to Crystal City, Langston Boulevard, Dunloring to Farragut, and then I-95 Express, which is from Dumfries to Crystal City. These routes are central to Arlington County, but in addition, central to the region. Next slide. So one of the questions we've been asked is, what is BRT? Do we need to have fixed guideway? Fairfax County, for the one on Richmond Highway, they are doing fixed guideway. VDOT is widening Richmond Highway Route 1, and the BRT system will run in the median. That means nothing else, fixed guideway, nothing else will run in that median. But that does not represent all types of BRT. It may be preferred in some cases, but it does not represent all types of BRT. We can have signal preemption, dedicated lanes all day or certain times of the day. But these are some of the things that we want to hear from you about assuming there is a full board buy-in on the routes and the BRT action plan. But I wanted to note that because I often get asked, well, will we have to take away lanes? Or will VDOT have to add a lane? Or will a lane have to be added? Not necessarily is that answer. Next slide. So the next steps, why I'm here today. I'm here today, and I hope that this will not be the last time I'm invited, is really to talk to you about incorporating these BRT routes into the county's plan, your comp plan, your long range plan, your capital improvement plans, mobility plans, transit strategic plans, whatever plan you have that you need to include these routes in to really align yourself for potential capital funding from NVTA. Because once it's in your plan, which means you as the governing body for Arlington County has taken action on it, it makes it easier for us to put it in our long range transportation plan. And I'm gonna jump a bit because the 70% that we fund, we can only fund capital. So the other question I'm often asked, where do we get the operations fund? It's the F word. Where will the funding come from? So right now, we are in the process of updating the region's long range transportation plan. The current plan is called Transaction. This plan will be called Transaction. I think we're just going to keep with that name. But a part of the update of Transaction, we're doing additional analyses on these BRT routes. We've heard from your staff, the localities and agencies on some fine tuning that they would like to see on the routes. Are there some modifications that can be done? Additionally, we're looking at some of the potential funding packages and strategies that could go or be implemented to operate BRT. While we are prevented from using any of the 70% for operational, there are federal monies, there are state monies, and there are other opportunities that we will look at for operational and that we are looking at. I want to note this is not overnight. When we say 2045, some of this is more near-term, some of this is longer-term. But we want to make sure that we're building upon this to have a seamless, integrated system. I have talked to Secretary Donahue and his team, because in addition to getting it in your plans, we want to see these routes in the states. transportation plan, which is V-Trans. So I've talked to him about that, and he seems to be on board as well. But as I noted, we're continuing to partner with all the localities and agencies. One of the things about this plan, when we undertook this plan, even though MBTA can only fund what's in Northern Virginia, Our bus rapid transit working group included Prince George's County, Montgomery County, WMATA, the District of Columbia, DDOT, because again, as a user, and we're all users in some shape, form, or fashion, we do not want to be bound by jurisdictional lines. So again, I'm here this afternoon to talk to you about the next steps and really getting you hopefully to a place that you're comfortable to embrace some of these routes. But I do know we are on phase two in doing some refined analysis. Next slide. The logo slide, just speaking to the level of collaboration around the region, and when I say region, in this case, it's the DMV region, the level of collaboration that went into the plan, the level of collaboration that is ongoing. We still have our Bus Rapid Transit Working Group, and we're actually talking to some of the jurisdictions that currently have BRT or those five that you see that are further along than others. Next slide, which is the last slide on how to contact us, but you all know how to get in touch with us. So thank you for your time this afternoon, and we are here for questions.

Thank you, Ms. Backman. Go ahead, Mr. Carantona. Sorry.

No problem, Mr. Chair. I mean, thank you indeed for this. We really appreciate that you're here and you present. I mean, it's a good thing to talk to the general public about this work. And I know that, I mean, we have to credit you with, and your staff and your team. By the way, I should know that NVTA was the best commuter workplace The second year in a row? Second year in a row, yes. Right. That was a big one. So you actually walk or, you know, take the transit walk.

We do.

And not only talk the talk.

It's important to practice what we preach. Right.

So one of the One thing that is very clear and should be said also is that this government here, in Arlington County, you have seen from our demographics, we briefly mentioned that we are small, but we are very intense. So we have a lot of residents, also our daytime population is significantly higher than the resident population, and everybody moves. So making it possible and easy to move in a well-enmeshed transit system is a primary goal of ours. And this is the reason why I think that we have and we will continue to invest and support your work. This is no question about that. Over years, we have indeed, you know, funded as much as, you know, our part. And for many years, we have seen also that, you know, we didn't get always the return on investment that we want. There is a long game here. but we always wanted to to make sure that your work goes uh goes forward and uh the um the the systemic view on on rapid transit bus and otherwise and how it meshes with other models is extremely important as a more dense community we have more of an emphasis on multimodal This is our gateway to reducing congestion. Other communities in the region need to get there. We understand that. So this is why we need the NVTA to manage and balance these needs. Colleagues, any questions for Ms. Backman and her staff?

Thank you, Mr. Karantounis. Vice Chair Coffey.

Not a question as much as just appreciation. I think especially for thinking of BRT kind of more flexibly. I know that there are BRT purists out there who really only view bus rapid transit as that kind of, you know, you showed the gradation of different options there and really view it as it can only be BRT if it has all of the elements. And I think that that can actually be really helpful Disuasive, frankly, especially in an area like Arlington where we are so built out and our right of way with sometimes is what it is because the building lines are where they are. And so I think it's great to really see the options and opportunities and not just an ideal version that might be impossible to reach. And so I really do appreciate the endorsement of that vision that, you know, we can... just because we don't hit the Route 1 thoroughfare that some people might want. It doesn't mean it's not BRT at the end of the day. So I appreciate that. And I think also just, you know, for our board thinking about the investments, I think operating is always the question at the end of the day. But really, you know, what can we do on some of our corridors, particularly Columbia Pike where past promises have been made and not fulfilled. And we really do have now that now that our capital project on Columbia Pike is done. We have a lot of thinking to do about how we get the operations up to where we are serving the community in the way that we need to. Because I think people in Arlington want to take transit, which is one of our best qualities. But we need to meet them with the service in order to facilitate that. So thank you. And then I guess the only question I do have, and I know it's still incredibly early in the process, is the state did charge A study of the bus systems, and I don't know, are you all, is NVTA a participant in that study, or what do you know that's shareable at this time, knowing it is very early?

It is very early. We are not a participant because the state is, DRPT is looking at the consolidation of the bus systems, and we're not an operator. However, having said that, Ms. Zimmerman, the director of BRT, is an authority member, and I meet with her monthly, and we talk about, you know, we're they are going with the study effort. Great.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thank you very much for that context. I'll follow up, but first I'll go to Mr. Spain.

I'll keep it brief. Thank you, Monica, and to the entire team for being with us today. And as you talk about BRT, a broad conversation, I just want to kind of pivot for a second and really You know, the work that is happening in and around your fear of influence, MVTA, you know, a couple of us, we serve, right, several commissions, IBM, the PCAC. I just want to thank you for all the work you did on the six-year plan. You know, Arlington, at the end of the day, even when we think about, the multimodal projects we we did pretty good and know that you have a partner here and one thing I've tried to do is really lift up throughout the community I know you have the transaction bees aspect where you want more community engagement into these processes and and I just want to Thank you again for that. And we've had candid conversations about how do we hear from our folks because these projects, whether it's BRT or you name the transportation, it affects so many of us. So this is just a shout out. Thank you for being with us today. And thank you for all the hard work. And I think this board here really commends you and all of your hard work. Look forward to seeing you at another commission meeting, a committee meeting.

And thank you for that, Board Member Spain, and you yourself and Board Member Caritonis. And I do want to know, you were at the pop-up. My team sent me a text. They were like, Board Member Spain is here. Look for the selfie. And we really, really appreciate it.

You got that right.

Because that is more promotion for other people to see it and then go in and take the survey and ask questions. And we're drawing in more people. So we're appreciative of that.

I just want you to, we see you. And I was just shocked, you know, going to the farmers market. I said, wow. I mean, y'all were set up. It was just amazing. So continue to do that throughout the region, of course. And you're always welcome here in Arlington. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. Ms. Cunningham.

I'll add my thanks as well. I didn't catch that pop up, but at Bike to Work Day, your team was out in force as well. And just the ability to pull back and envision where we're going as a region is such a gift. So thank you for your work and for your team's commitment and expertise in that area. I know there are a number of folks along the Langston Boulevard corridor that are very excited to see that yellow number 10 as they're working through as the Roosevelt Bridge is getting rebuilt. The three, the beloved three Y is on pause for a little bit. So lots of excitement and it's great to see what's coming and we look forward to continuing to partner.

Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. I'll just say to Ms. Coffey's comments, if you can send me the slide deck, I am still working towards the precision of not purity on BRT of dedicated lane, but more frequent buses is not quite what I think of. So I've got to get clear on that policy area. that's one thought a second is every time this back when you speak you bring good energy you do not repeat and you are precise which if I did that every time my wife would love me a lot more no so and you're making me a little jealous that Mr. Karantonis you know I'm is now our liaison but just grateful for all that you've done and you continue to do and any closing thoughts Mr. Karantonis

Yes, two things. Besides thanking Ms. Bachmann and Ms. Rappaport for being with us today, the work on BRT, it's not just work on BRT. It's actually work on connectivity in the region. We have been, you know, it's logical for the more urban, more dense jurisdictions, us, Alexandria, maybe, you know, Falls Church. Sorry. and the more dense parts of Fairfax County to insist in multimodalism and higher connectivity, high frequency, high connectivity. You shouldn't have to plan your trip. The trip has to have you as a rider planned in. And we begin, I mean, on Columbia Pike right now there is an A40 bus every six minutes. That's something, I can tell you that. I mean, people have to get used to that, but once they get used to that, they experience a completely new level of service. I do think, I mean, if you take your slide, I don't remember if it's four or five, where you have this weaved You know, it looks kind of like too much and too colorful, but actually it shows, it's a slide that shows the possibilities and what we are talking here in transaction is one of the many very serious places where prioritization has to happen. We are beginning to see how this begins to materialize and what is the driving, in my opinion, there are two driving factors You said that very well, needs-based. Now, needs are everywhere, but needs is also a function of how many people need that. It's also a function how, you know, well-served, I mean, sometimes it makes more sense to serve those who are less served, this is the equity argument, and, you know, postpone a little bit the service for others and vice versa. So for me, this is the work that you are engaging through this process here, and I'm extremely excited to be your companion on this, and I believe all my colleagues are as well. So I look really forward to discuss that more and to see how better we can enmesh our own work. I noticed that one of the biggest operators in our region, which is WMATA, and now has a BRT program actually. They talk very loudly about that and they talk in very serious terms about that. Route 7 is home of hundreds of thousands of people actually. Columbia Pike, which is the annex and the connection to the central part of the city, to Pentagon City, is home of another 40,000 people, at the very least, in the capture area of the system. So we're talking very serious service here. And I think your presence here gives us a point where to take another selfie and say, yeah, remember that. This is really serious. We don't We don't just talk about that. We are actually putting also our money where our mouth is on this. Thank you.

And thank you. And thank you to your team that's been working with us diligently. So thank you.

thank you miss backman and tree and and the whole team at nvta thank you for the presentation and with that we will move on to our next item i allowed for 90 seconds previously so make an allowance here in an audible that won't shock you too much miss cunningham you had a brief topic that you wanted to cover

I did. I just wanted to share, I was grateful to represent the board last night at the farewell party for Ayers Variety and Hardware in Westover. It's been an institution in Arlington for about as long as Arlington's been anything like Arlington is today, starting in 1948 with John Ayers and then in the Kaplan family, currently until Sunday, run by Christie Perturkin and Keith Kaplan. So just an enormous joy and sadness yesterday as the Westover Village Civic Association celebrated and hosted very graciously by Grace Abenajim Shea from Lebanese Taverna. So it was just delightful. I'll try to get some video posted up later. We had Ms. Alma, who worked there for 65 years, and then kids as young as probably two months, and then some, I guess, centenarians as well. So just to give a little brief view of what's coming next, Matrimonte at the Italian store is taking over one of the beloved events, the Spring Egg Hunt. The Historical Society has collected a number of great things that will be on display, landlords working on a new business, and I think all of us are invited to celebrate all of our small businesses and shop local as we can and i know we'll be hearing more from our economic development director who has just joined us thank you thank you miss cunningham next we'll turn to the managers and and uh

I had a few other things last night, but we appreciate you representing us there and others. I know others of us wished to be there, but thank you. Mr. Manager, over to your reports.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. And I have a lot of items to cover today. First one I'm going to start off with is an update for folks on our Permit Arlington customer enhancements. And so it's five years ago, 2021, when Permit Arlington launched. And for those of you who do not know, Permit Arlington is our online customer portal for all things related to permitting. And it was created to provide a more streamlined customer experience for permit applications, plan review, payments, tracking, and then finally for permit issuance. And over those last five years, we've made a lot of progress in modernizing how residents, businesses, and contractors interact with us throughout the permitting process. In a moment, you're going to hear from David Kiefer, who is our customer service manager, about some of the specific improvements. But I want to highlight the reality is we have come a long way. Unfortunately, I remember when we used to walk around with these printed 24 by 32 inch plan sets that had to be hand stamped by various county departments. But we know there's a lot of work still ahead of us. Permitting is complex and we're trying to always improve the customer experience and improve communication. So we have a lot of work underway right now and a lot of things planned. And so before I turn it over to David, though, I did want to talk about one thing and sorry that Matt left here because going to make a little joke, but I'll do it anyway, that there's an effort underway at the Northern Virginia Regional Commission. And as you know, our chair, Matt DeFerranti, chairs NVRC in his spare time. And that Takis Karantonis also serves on the commission. And I've been in discussions with Craig Pfeiffer, who's the new executive director there, who is teeing up a process to partner with George Mason University to look at how each of our regional jurisdictions approach permitting. This plan, now with the details to come, is meant to establish a baseline to examine the quality of the permitting process in the region. It's going to analyze across jurisdictions the overall time for steps in the process, the role of the quality of applicant materials that are submitted and other topics. This review is not meant to pick a best in class jurisdiction, but hopefully help us learn from our neighbors and helps lend some objective truth to something which I hear all the time, which I know you do. Frequent statements from our customers that if only you did what jurisdiction X did, everything would be fine. By the way, my colleagues in the region, in a completely unsurprising turn of events, say their contractors frequently say, hurry up and do it as quickly as Arlington. Perhaps as often as we hear, hurry it up and do it as quickly as Fairfax. So I hope that will provide some perspective. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Dave Kiefer for a lot more details on what we've been up to. So over to you, Dave.

Thank you, Mark, and thank you everybody for having me here today. I'm going to present on some things of improvements mainly in the way of resource material to help our applicants, specifically those first time, less frequent users of the system. But before I do that, I do want to jump into some just overview of Permit Arlington as well as some volume stats on that front. If we can bring up those slides, please. Thank you very much. So the overall customer experience related to permanent Arlington includes our online system, which is our system, the website, which is very vast with information and virtual tools. Our in person office, our permanent Arlington center, right in the bottom building as well as our call centers across our 3 main permitted units. Um, the, the system itself at houses over 50 record types and permit applications across our planning zoning and departments. My house is online plan review and the revision process as well as online payments, email notifications and permit process tracking. Next slide please. So just to give some perspective on how much volume we are working with on a daily and yearly time frame, we're working with well over 20,000 process record types within the system. That includes the permits, The enforcement cases, amendments and so on. So it's a, it's a large volume coming into the system as well as the other channels I had mentioned on the previous slide. We're working, we have staff dedicated to answering over 250 inbound calls on average daily. That's across our 3 call centers that we have for permitting. Approximately 500 inbound emails across those permitting units as well as 90 walk in customers on average per week at our permit Arlington center. So all that to say, we're working with a large volume. a majority of those folks coming into us have rather, you know, uneventful experience in terms of they're getting questions answered, they're getting through the process. However, we do not want to come over the fact that there are several customers that don't have that smooth experience. And so what we're doing is putting together some tools to try to help those folks along, specifically geared towards our newer customers and less frequent users. If we can go to the next slide, please. So, how do we identify improvements we want to make? The main way we do this is actually talking with our customers, our end users that use our permit-oriented system one way or another, engaging with the county for permit needs. and so one of those ways is our customer satisfaction survey that is offered to every person that comes into the permit arlington center they are offered a chance to sound off on their experience either that specific day or the experience overall that they've had if they're working a permit they are offered the chance to answer some questions as well as a free form text that they can provide feedback that has proven pretty invaluable on the county's end to chase down some of the improvements we want to make to make those interactions smoother, the process smoother. It's not uncommon for myself or other supervisors to use those responses and reach out. If we see something of interest, good or bad, we can double click on that for anyone that has opted into receiving contact from the county. It's been an invaluable resource in enlisting that feedback. Permit, the other avenue we gain some insight in on future improvements to gain the impetus to make those improvements, permit process internal audits. These can both be proactive and reactionary if a permit is escalated at any point. we take a thorough look at that and look at the back and forth between customer applicant side and the county side. We also do that proactively and going to start to be doing that a little bit more of choosing some random permits just to go over and making sure the process is hitting where we want it to. The other the other item here is where we're getting feedback from customers is actual meetings that can be a little impromptu if it's in the permanent Arlington center, overhearing something, get them in a meeting room to discuss their experience or formally calling folks into the office. to have those meetings on their permits and gain some insight there. So all that to say, those avenues have driven us to what I want to present today, which is really focused on our newer users, some of that feedback. That's where we're seeing a lot of friction points, someone that's not used to using the system as much as our frequent users, who for the most part have it down. And even if our frequent users are running into issues, they know the avenues to rectify those relatively quickly. The focus on today's presentation is going to be on some of the tools we're adding to the mix and reorganizing to help those first-time and infrequent users. Next slide, please. One of the items we constantly hear feedback items that we constantly hear is how can I as a property owner stay in the loop on some of these permits? I've hired a team to do the application, but I want to stay in touch not only with my team, but what's going on in the county side. And so we put some things together that I believe are going to help customers achieve that. If you click on that first link, learning the process, please. You might just have to do a control click. I'm looking to get to slide 8 if possible.

You may need to give me a moment to trouble sure. Sure, thank you.

No, nothing.

All right. Sorry about that. And we are looking at slide eight now.

Okay. Thank you. I don't see it on the virtual meeting, but for We're looking for ways to introduce the process again to those newer infrequent users. So one thing we have put together rather recently is a welcome video from two of the Permit Arlington sponsors, Greg and DES as well as Sumiya and CPHD. It at a high level introduces somebody and sets the expectation of what to expect when you enter into the permitting process at a very high level. what kind of things to be aware of, what kind of things you can apply for. So it does a great job of introducing somebody to the process and what to expect. Other items we're putting on this page for our newer users and our property owners, listing all the permits that are available, which allow you to click into the permit, see all the information that we have readily available on the website. If you can click the back arrow, so back to slide five, please. Other items we are pulling out of existing resources to better highlight and get that in front of people to use. One of those is creating a collection. So this is available in permit early today in the system. Let's say a homeowner that has hired somebody to pull permits for them. They can still stay in the loop by just following different permits on their property. So they can create an account. they can build what's called a collection and be able to just follow those through from from a view of let me see when the status change and i can stay in the loop with my team on the application as well as the county taking that a step further you can actually be added as what we call a contact or delegate if you can click into that link the embedded links may not be working is there a slide this is supposed to jump to yes that is going to jump to slide 10 please there we go thank you yes and getting added as a contact by providing your email to your your permitting team this really allows the next step of staying connected on permits um that are being that are being pulled on your behalf perhaps It allows you chiefly to be in the loop on any email communication from the system. So if you want to stay in the loop when that permit is either accepted, it could be rejected, it could be that it has been issued or ready for payment, you'll be in the loop on seeing all of those actions right in your email. You'll be pinged as a contact as well. The other bulletin items are functions that a contact will receive who's not necessarily the applicant. Ability to renew your permit, ability to make payment, ability to schedule inspections. Back to slide five, please. The next part of this is really understanding where you are. So while you can be in the loop, know my permit has changed statuses. Feedback we've received from actual end users has been, okay, I've seen the status. Quite frankly, I'm not sure what that means entirely. And so what we've done is put together a very vast list of all the different terms as well as contacts, excuse me, status definitions that exist in the system. If we can click on the status definitions, which will take you to slide nine, please. This is just a snippet of what exists on our property owner's help page now, just to give you a view of what is on there and what the purpose is. So when somebody is looking at the status of their permit, they're able to look at that, get a brief definition. And I think most importantly here is that last column, which clearly explains who has the next action on this permit. Is it me and my application team, my applicants? Or is it the county? We're waiting for the county to take action. And this spells that out depending on what status your permit is at, as well as clearly defining who takes the next step. And I will say this is relatively new that we posted. The more we've gotten this in front of customers, it has been received very well as something that's been helpful for folks staying in the loop on the status of their permits. We can go back to slide five, please. The last item I want to highlight that is relatively new over the last year or so has been a very big lift across several departments to get some of our documents online and accessible online. If we can click on the document search, which takes us to slide 11, please. Thank you. This is a big win across the board for both staff as well as our customers where this is focused towards. What it allows us to do, it allows a user from anywhere that they can access the internet to get these documents right there on their home computer. So imagine you're applying for a permit, you get to the stage where you're uploading the materials and a plat is required. Previously, you could come into the county, look that plat up if it's available at the county, put in a FOIA request. In either of those scenarios, you're kind of closing your application for the time being. Grabbing the plat, adding it to your application so it's not the most efficient with this now available online it allows a user let me go see if i have a plot available with the county i can download it right there online i can add it to my application it's it's gonna it's it provides a lot more efficiencies on the application end um as well as as well as for staff being able to provide this uh to our to our different users to get those documents um back to slide five please And if we can move to slide 6, so those are the items I wanted to highlight that are in existence today. We're doing our best to promote awareness of those through through different avenues. But the others, the other items I want to put on your radars in the, in the same vein of this, helping these 1st, time customers, the other items we're looking to bring out relatively soon here. clearer and posted, easier to read turnaround times for each of our permits. So as you click into the permits, you're gaining knowledge about what's going to be required in your application. One piece of feedback we've gotten as a common thread is it's hard for me to dig through that to see what phases my permit will go through and then how long each of those phases should take. So what we're doing is we're building a uniform table within each of our permit web pages so customers can easier see, hey, this is the track my permit's going to go through. This is the amount of days for these different reviews. So that is going to be something coming for each and every one of our permits being rolled out. The other one, permit contact definition pages. So much like the status definitions, we're building another glossary that relates to any contact type within our system. And this just helps define what contacts you can add to a given permit. Sometimes they are required. So it better explains what that contact is in addition to the functionality and permissions they have within the system. So this is going to just help spell some things out for our users. That could otherwise be a little bit confusing as you're asked to either add contacts or you see the option to. This is going to help folks determine who they want on the permit and what functions they're going to have in there. The next one that is coming soon, expanded access to comment letters. The comment letter really drives our process. If a permit, a project is rejected at any time in a process, a detailed comment letter comes from staff detailing what still needs to be done on a permit. So, with that said current state, those are sent via email. What we're working on is getting a central location for easier access to those. So you're not asking your applicant to always forward those along or. going into the system, asking the applicant to go into the system, this is gonna be more of a central location for the greater permitting team, the customer side, to go pull those letters, stay in the loop and on the same page of where a permit is at a given point in time and what is still needed. And then the last one is gonna be more of an effort, but it's really gonna promote the use of all these tools being put together and that have been put together in the past that are very useful. What we're looking to do is add more help context within the actual application itself. So when someone's filling it out, Rather than again, leave comb through all the different material we may have online to try to find the best answer for a particular question. What we're looking to do is provide more context on certain questions to help you identify what's being asked for and get you to that to that more complete submission from the get go. As well as to not only help text, but also help links linking out to all these items that we're putting together. And before I wrap up, if we can go to the next slide, please. So with all the work we're putting together on these resources, promoting them more, bringing more awareness to them, one thing we don't want to forget about is we have dedicated personnel to all these channels that I have in front of you here to reach out if you still need help. So I want to reiterate that. We have in-person support at the Permanent Arlington Center. We have our three call centers with dedicated staff answering calls. We have email support that is available throughout the business week. From a tech support standpoint, we have an online ticketing system where people can place tickets and have those addressed right from our tech team. There's a virtual contractors meeting that happens monthly led by our chief building official, Shariar, and we also have our code consultations available upon request where you can talk get with the county personnel ahead of a project application just to kind of hear about the process what you may need to pull together as you enter into that application phase and then lastly the online resources that I have mentioned throughout this presentation we're continuing to always keep those updated and relevant as well as expand those as you saw with some of the newer ones, newer items today. So I thank everybody for their time in hearing about these and hearing about what's to come. And I'm happy to address any questions that I can as well as hear your feedback on this. So thank you very much for the time.

Thank you. I mindful this is a topic that it's timely that you brought the presentation for very grateful for that and this is a topic that we all have we all it's easy to have opinions about this without having you know precise knowledge it's kind of. with due respect to the presentation it's kind of if you if you want to be grumpy about something be grumpy about lawyers or if you want to be some grumpy about something in the county permitting isn't easy and fixing it is a different thing I guess I'd love to see the slide deck and then I feel as though it would be helpful for me and the board to try and do some thinking about what we hear and then mesh it with the knowledge that you guys just shared. And so I'm not, on the fly, not trying to pick out two people or raise their hands, but I'm just, maybe we can brainstorm because we're all likely to have questions and we have only until five to wrap up all four of the presentations. And so I'll just put a point on that as like how I would propose that I follow up and I won't have any more questions. I'm not saying you can't, I just, to the extent we can ask questions later via email or follow-up or develop a work plan, that's what I propose to colleagues. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I will be brief. I spent some time because I just found it not only it was brought to us, you know, different levels of, you know, frustration with the permitted system for many years. So I had the opportunity to dive in a couple of times, and every time I was discovering new things. Like, for example, there is no one product here. The homes are extremely complex, they are prespoke, different architects, different things. the more expensive these homes and these buildings are, the more likely it is not to have replicable processes of permitting, et cetera. So this costs time. So one thing that I was struggling with, and it doesn't have to be answered now, is how we measure, you know, You know, there is, I sat down with a small home developer, you know, contractor, et cetera, and we went through that. And I figured out that he was expecting like nine months in total, up to which one or one and a half months permitting. once we began to look a little bit into what he was getting out from the system, I was saying, oh, here it's a bespoke thing. And here's another thing. And here comes a different heating elements and a fantastic heat pump over there. And all this was complicating. So how do we account? I mean, he felt that it was slow. And I honestly have to tell you that I saw that it wasn't. So there was already an original gap between the perception that we had going step by step. So I just am interested to know what's a good way to measure the workflow. And I would appreciate if we find a quiet moment to walk through, you know, kind of an experiential experience. Thank you.

So the question I think measuring the workflow or the counting the time or communicating on the work that's being done on a permanent.

I think one of the, I know we don't want to have a long conversation, but you're trying to, the challenge of coming up with objective standards as I was referencing are other jurisdictions. For us, I think that we can come up with them, but frankly for me it's the way you feel going through the process because every one of these permit applications is different. And so I would just say that at least for context.

It was stunning to me how much variations there are.

Great. Great. Thank you. Ms. Cunningham.

I also would welcome additional deep dive and really appreciate the work that's been done to date. I know there's been a lot going on and Permanent Arlington goes from the tiniest of little changes by someone who's never made a change to their home to, you know, the most intense redevelopment. So I know it's a wide range. I'll just tag for the future conversations a few topics that I'd love to reach into. I think as Mr. Karantonis mentioned, sort of the understanding of elapsed time for both the CPHD review and the DES review, recognizing that they often go, you know, not in parallel necessarily. We hear from folks who've been around a long time, I just want to come back, you know, and walk through the building with my plans and be done in one day. So trying to understand that a little bit and understand what we as a board can do to invest and support you. The second category is around required materials. As the manager mentioned, it used to be exactly a certain size paper that was needed. And I think sometimes business owners and homeowners still run into that, that we upload it as an 8 by 11, but it has to be xyz because we expect this particular dimension. the plats and how to find them, as Mr. Pfeiffer mentioned, that's great. And having the link right there will help folks. And then the perception that you're repeatedly uploading the same document in a couple of different steps along the way. And again, we can double click on what permits that pertains to. Third area is really about the user feedback. We hear really different things from power users who are home builders or developers who are doing this all the time. The thing I hear most from them is, especially on the DES land disturbance side, is there an easy button or a replicable set of plans or a typology or pattern book that they can just choose from rather than feeling that it's Bespoke each time and then for our smaller projects and new users both homeowners and small contractors I think they're we hear mostly that they're They're getting lost in the in the woods and that you know They're just trying to put up a fence and they need sort of a simplified. What's it usually look like when you put up a fence? or replacing a gas appliance or etc and We also hear from them inspections and consistency, and I think we particularly hear that from our small businesses who are doing tenant build-outs that different inspectors sometimes have different opinions, and that can cost them time to open. And then finally we hear overall costs and affordability, not surprising, both our fees, but in particular the soft costs associated with those elapsed times and or the multiple interactions. And then finally, I'll just say the last section you addressed it is the communications. I think the most common thing that gets to us, which is not the most common thing to happen because only the complaints get to us, is I called, I emailed multiple times, and I never heard back. And so the turnaround time is great, but how are we tracking that those calls happened? Who's the primary contact? And then I love the expanded access to comment letters. So thank you very much. Look forward to more discussion.

Certainly thank you. Thank you, Miss Cunningham, and there are two final is in a good list and you tracked much more than I did. The LDA I was involved in a conversation, but I so what I'm suggesting is that from your list there will be sort of some shared responsibility to work the problem going forward. I really appreciate the detail of your list. Miss coffee and then Mr Spain go ahead.

Yeah, I'll be pretty quick. I think the transition to having the online system should be absolutely celebrated. I think sometimes people take for granted, because technology has moved so quickly and we have so many systems and everything, that surely these things can just happen online. But as we have, I think, seen and learned, it's not that simple. And so I'm really, you know, I'm glad that we have something in place and that, you know, we are kind of ready to start making these fine tuning discussions, decisions going forward. And I think one of the things that, you know, most of the things that come to the board are some sort of edge case, right? Like the normal things usually don't quite make its way up to us, which is for the best. But I think that that's where, you know, I definitely am curious what kinds of additional supports may or may not be possible with the electronic system is when people do have those kind of weird out of the ordinary cases. How do we make sure that those get flagged pretty early so that we can do a little bit more manual work? Because I think sometimes automated workflows kind of hide those more unique situations. Um, and we don't want people struggling because they just have something that was never anticipated by the system, um, waiting, you know, within the system, trying to go through the normal steps when maybe the normal steps were never going to work for them in the first place. So that's just the thought that I have. Um, and in general, I think You know, I certainly hear from all of our jurisdictional colleagues as well that I don't think anyone's happy with any local government in terms of permitting. But if we could be the first, I think we'd all appreciate that.

Thank you, Vice Chair Coffey. Yes, and that doesn't mean we're trying to pile on. We're just trying to reflect the reality of our sense of things. And then my sort of sense from the list that Ms. Cunningham and your comments is that we're gonna have to partner with you to work on this area, I think. Mr. Spain.

Well, thank you, Mr. Chair and colleagues. And also thank you to staff for your hard work and diligent efforts here on these enhancements. I too would be very open to an additional kind of two by two so we can really dive into the weeds. But as we have this conversation about permitting just in general, and also I look forward, Mr. County Manager, to see what MVRCs, you know, where they want to go. Let me just say this. I'm always at the train of thought of evaluating where we were, where we are, and where we're trying to go. And I think in this moment when we have the potential to use some aspects of AI, and I know there's some limitations there, but what that may look like, our online permitting, tracking software, real time so people get a pulse of what's going on. The opportunity even for same day permitting and how do we work that. I think that also will cause us to think about manpower and personnel. But then some guarantee type review timelines. A person out in the community comes in and says, I have X project and we have some level of guarantee that X will go done in 10 days or 15 days. Kind of reassuring folks. But I have a lot of thoughts about this area because as long as I've been here permitting as what you've heard has never been, people have a lot of grumbles about it. But I think there's ways to be continually find ways to improve ourselves and be efficient. And I just want to thank you for the movement you've made up to this point and look forward to additional conversations, okay? Thanks.

Thank you very much. And I know it may shock you all to hear that rather than comments on how each of you perform as county board members, the thing I hear the most about is our permitting system.

And so... Well, once we fix that, it'll be really exciting.

So, you know, one of the things is, and I know we're jammed for time and we have a lot to get ahead on, but And I'm bringing this up intentionally because Dave Kiefer is working nonstop to try to improve things. He doesn't have all the answers at all. And we are trying to improve the feedback we have. And I welcome you all as partners on that. So thank you very much. And I'm going to move on to the next item, if that's okay. Thank you. And Samia's going to stay here. This is a little bit more in the way of just an update to the community. And I don't mean to diminish this because we've gotten a lot of questions as the legislative process went on about what is quote faith in housing and what does that mean and so we have a few slides that are going to from a staff perspective restate things that we know but the community may not know and I know that the board and we are making sure that we spend some time on what's going on but if we put up the slides I think we should have them yeah thanks Mason The first slide talks about there was an act that was passed that amends the Code of Virginia, and the county's going to have to come behind that and change our county code, that requires local governments to allow qualifying affordable housing projects by right. And that is going to be effective January 1st of the upcoming year, 2027. And so right now we're spending our time focusing on what does this mean and what's required. So let's go to the next slide. So in doing that, we are going to establish a webpage. And also I did want to, you know, thank, we have Brian Esty who's here, who's our legislative liaison. And Ariel Adora who's in your office is spending a lot of time. We're going to work on developing frequently asked questions. Because right now what we have is a lot of questions in the community of potentially 500 sites that are involved. How is it all going to work? I just wanted to let people know that as we go through this, We're going to make an effort to, and we're going to go live today with a page. I don't want people to think it's going to have all the answers, because it just doesn't. But I didn't want to wait until we got to December and say, hey, by the way, here's how we're going to handle it all. We're going to go through this process where we post information and make sure that people have an opportunity. to ask us questions and also see the answers that we're putting together. And I think if we can go, there may be one more slide. No? Okay. The other thing is, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on this, but I know board members may want to comment on this briefly, but this question about what it means to be by right, is really important for people to understand. That essentially means that if you meet the requirements, the public doesn't really have an opportunity to come to the board or go before the BZA and say, we don't like it, it's going to happen. But what those requirements are, for example, I'm not going to get into all of them now, but You have to be a 501 that's been around for at least five years. You need to have a certain percentage of units that are going to be designated for affordable housing. You have to be within 500 feet of a public water and sewer main. There's a lot of details in there. We're going to lay that out so that people can see what it is that's going to be involved with that. And frankly, we're going to get a lot of questions from those parties who are 501 who might be interested in embarking on this process. And I know that there are a lot of potential parties out there. At the end of the day, and I know I've said this to each of you, embarking on that process is one thing, but actually having the funding to go ahead and move ahead with those projects, and we'll talk about that separately as part of the CIP, there are gonna be very few projects at the end of the day that are actually going to see the light of day. I will stop there, any questions that you might have, but it's really meant to address some concerns I've heard from people that, hey, the legislation passed, you guys aren't doing anything about it. That's really not the case, but we're at least laying out the webpage and we're going to start providing information.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz. I'm sure all of us could have thoughts on this and leave it to colleagues, but I also would envision, is it a fair sort of inference from your comments that Over the coming weeks and month or month and a half, you would have updates that would go to the webpage and there would be ongoing work to prepare us for January 1st.

Yeah, absolutely. And we're also checking in the region. Everyone's going through the same situation of trying to interpret these things to make sure we have some consistency.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz. The first slide I saw this time was Mr. Spain. Go ahead.

Thank you, Connie. Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, County Manager. Look, in my opinion, you're ahead of schedule. I remember a few months ago, I had asked about, we, many of us had asked, and I'm glad we have something. I just want to take this moment and really drive, think about Words matter because the presentation though titled Faith and Housing, the legislation in and of itself, right, is not titled as such. And it also talks about, so what I want to be mindful of is that we don't as a community imply or don't think about the nonprofits perhaps that are also qualified. and giving too much emphasis to just faith can be very controversial to many folks. So maybe we want to think about alternative word language because, again, that's not how the legislation is written. It is actually written affordable housing, religious organizations, and other nonprofit tax-exempt properties. That's a word salad. You tell me how we can massage that however you want to. But I think it's important that we think about the titling of this similarly, if you look back to it, missing metal, EHO, right? It matters. So outside of that, I just want to thank you. You mentioned that the website will go live today, which I'm thankful for, and you're going to update periodically with, so I'm satisfied. Those queries that come in from the public, where will they reside? Who will receive those?

And I'm going to have to see on the web page if there's a I think there's a contact point on there. You want to.

I think right now we may have it linked to the legislative page, so they would go to Brian, I assume.

Okay. And I know I would hope, you know, I'm sure I don't want to get in front of our vice chair who's run out there. We'll have to somehow capture down the road data, you know, what people are saying. Thank you very much. That's all I'll say.

Thanks. Thank you, Mr. Spain. So next, Ms. Cunningham, and then to you, Ms. Coffey. Go ahead.

I just want to thank our legislative team, both Ms. Coffey and Brian and Lynn and everyone else in all through the departments trying to respond to an astonishing number of bills and new laws coming from Richmond this year. And I know there was a lot of anxiety in the community about this particular bill. and in particular why they hadn't heard much as soon as it passed. But I think just lifting up that staff were triaging and getting the bills that were coming into effect the first of this month solid as possible to make sure that we were in compliance and really glad to see us turning now to Faith in Housing and others that will be in effect on January 1.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Ms. Coffey?

Yeah. This will be an interesting process for all of us. I think, you know, I just ask the community for patience and cooperation. I think there's a lot. One, we do not have the option to not do this, right? Like, I think that that is really key for people to remember. The General Assembly has passed this into law. It is the law of Virginia regardless of anything that Arlington County's staff or board do or do not do. And so with that in mind, I think it's also important to remember that this is not a bill or a policy that Arlington County wrote. And so in terms of reconciling what this looks like with our processes and how we do our day-to-day business I think is gonna take some time and probably also if a project ever does come forward through this I think you know patience as we work out the bumps in the road because the General Assembly passes laws for the entire Commonwealth they're not thinking specifically about how our you know, permitting process works, how our zoning and planning works, how our staff run their workflow. And so that is it's different from every locality. And there's going to be challenges in terms of of working through that. And so you know, the frustration that will inevitably come out of that. I just ask everyone to be very patient with us because we, you know, probably are going to find things we would have done differently if we had been given the opportunity. At the same time, you know, We just don't know what's out there right now in terms of actual interest. There's always hypothetical interest in things. And I think it really is like patience is just the name of the game right now. While we wait for the policy to be implemented, while we figure out what we need to do in terms of potential ordinance amendments, not ordinance amendments, who knows what that will generate. And then in terms of what community interest exists out there, those things are just going to have to play out over time. There's really no way to jump to a conclusive answer about what may or may not happen in the future under this policy. And so I know that sometimes there's a feeling if we're not saying exactly what's going to happen, it's because we know and we're not telling the public. In this case, we know very little and we are not able to communicate on a lot of things because there's just nothing yet to communicate. And so the patience and grace is what we will continue to ask for.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. And as we continue with presentations, the comment that seems to me to stand out most is that irrespective of the legislation, you will need funding in order to reach. My lived impression is that in Arlington, if you don't have Ahif, I'm not aware of many projects that have gone forward. So I think that is salient for us to continue as we have updated presentations. Now turn to the, unless there's objection, we'll go to the snow response.

No, we'll go to the next segment. I know we have a lot to still get through, but I wanted everybody just to pause for a second because I'm going to give you all a little bit of a tip, which you probably don't know. There's something called Community Connect, and this has been on our website for a few years. This is very, very important for everybody to know about this. You can go to the fire department's page on our website. And it allows you to voluntarily share important information about your household that first responders should know. So, for example, if a first responder comes to your house, and we're going to have Will Flagler come up a little bit later if you've got any questions about how we put premise data into our call system. It'll say, there's a person in your house who has some special needs, or you have some pets, or some special property. When our firefighters arrive, they'll have that information in hand in advance. This is something we've had for the last few years. It has not had a lot of traction in the community. So I just wanted to let you know. And that's, again, you can go to Arlington County website, type in the fire department. It's right there, Community Connect. which is a good segue for us to get into our snow response. Now, Mr. Chair, I want to apologize. I know we're supposed to be done at 5, but this is going to take a little while, and I'm going to ask a few people to come up here and... Yeah, yeah, sure. Join me. So this is what... Back in February, I said we were gonna come in July and give an update on our response to Snowcrete. And I know for many people that seems a long time ago. For me, it seems like it was only yesterday. We're gonna go through a discussion here of some of the things that we, the approach we took in January and then the discussion of the changes and improvements we're considering. Many of these are still under review so I wanted to set expectations. We're going to talk about some of the things we've been able to start. I'm going to come back in October with a final plan and between now and then we're going to have an opportunity for the public to give us input. Before I go into all the details, I did want to emphasize something that may seem obvious to me, but I'm not sure if it's obvious to everyone. There's a lot the county can do to mitigate the impacts of weather, but we can't do everything. And we're not going to be able to change the weather or basically enforce our way into fully cleared sidewalks and curbs. We just can't do that. Therefore, we need to, in addition to some grace from our community and occasional bouts of warm weather, need to focus a little bit more on some of our partnerships. So real quickly, first you're going to go through some of the slides here, and this is, be sort of a visual background so you don't have to look at me the entire time. This first is what we did. I'm reaffirming that our overall approach to prioritizing public safety efforts and the initial clearing made sense. We focused on all our main thoroughfares so our fire and police vehicles can get to where they need to get. And that has to be our first priority, health, life, and safety. Now, without making major investments, which I'm not going to recommend, keeping our priorities focused on this means that some incredibly important things, like clearing sidewalks, intersections, and access to public facilities, including schools and residential streets, come later. They just come later. And they wouldn't happen as quickly as we would like. So in January, we alerted snow crews, pre-treated where possible, streets and designated trails. We asked the community to stock up. We encouraged thoughtful decisions on parking. Our plowing commenced on primary and secondary arterials. They remain passable for emergency vehicles and public transportation. And we plowed our multi-use trails that have high usage. So next, after that, we worked on getting our community back to work and school. We treated and plowed residential streets. We focused on art bus routes, Metro bus routes. Then we had a lot of experience with the snow ordinance, which we suspended initially and urged people to go out and clear sidewalks. And I think, as you can remember, for some, that was just simply impossible, given what the consistency of the snow and ice had been. We worked on with our plows to make sure that we continue to plow. And what we found in many cases was that some of the hard work that our residents had done was undone by our plows. So we'll have a little bit more on that later. We did the cleanup phase, which means removing ice and slush from roads. and Where accumulations were heavy? We're also able to move some of that in certain parts of the county to other sites And we'll talk about that in a minute and our whole process. I think was deliberate so Now we're going to talk a little bit about what we're thinking of changing and what we are changing. And our first review started with gaps in our response for the most vulnerable members of our community, those who are physically unable to clear their own sidewalks and areas around their houses. An ordinance there doesn't really help with that. So we've developed a solution for that, modeled on programs that some of our neighboring jurisdictions have, and which the board asked us to look into in January. We're calling it the Snow Buddies Program. And I'm going to turn it over to some of my personal snow buddies, Will Flagler, who is here with Jessica Baxter and one of our community superstars, Lisa Fikes, who's going to talk a little bit about the Snow Buddies Program. So over to you, buddies. Thank you, sir.

This is a good opportunity. One of the things I'll talk about is emergency management Arlington. One of the things that we do best here in my over a decade of working here is we look at something in a response and we figure out how to improve it based upon community feedback, working with our partners externally and our departments. And this is a really good example of where we did that. And we're able to focus and make sure that we can help the most vulnerable in our community. I'm joined, like the manager said, by Jessica Baxter, my department. And I have to say, the incomparable Lisa Fikes, the president and CEO of the Leadership Center where Violet Arlington is. She told me to say incomparable. I did, right? OK. So we did that. So next slide. Some of the things that the Snow Buddy program will be doing, like I said, this is a pilot. We want to make sure it's focused. We don't want to just launch a program and not test it out, making sure that we get feedback and talk to the right people. Yeah, we adapted it from a different jurisdiction. But again, the key word is a different jurisdiction. And we have to make sure that it fits Arlington and our community. So some of the stuff that you see here is that it's a practical preseason model to help older adults, residents with disabilities, homebound residents and neighbors lacking resources to clear snow. A way to convert goodwill into organized, safer, trackable community support without relying on county crews to solve every sidewalk challenge. And we want to make sure that we work to integrate the broader snow action plan, which includes public information, volunteer community support and department owned operating procedures. So at the end of the day, the three key elements for this plan for this program is making sure that we connect people who need the most help with people who are able to help them. That is what this program is supposed to do. And I'm going to turn it over to Jessica now to kind of take you to some of the details.

the snow buddies program thanks director flagler and mr manager i am excited to talk about the concept and the framework for snow buddies at the heart snow buddies is a neighbor-to-neighbor support program the objectives of the pilot are what we heard from feedback following snowcrete in january and february we want to improve oh next slide please We want to improve safety and mobility during winter weather, support vulnerable residents, strengthen community resilience and neighborhood connections, reduce unmet needs, and really provide a supplement to our county operations who are handling a response. As Director Flagler mentioned, it is a pilot. We want to see what works, what doesn't, and that will inform the future of the program. Next slide. So some of the things that the county manager mentioned was the after action that occurred in what we heard. Vulnerable residents experienced some of the greatest challenges, whether that was accessing their sidewalks, their neighborhoods, transit, going to medical appointments, and other essential services. We also heard that we heard that stronger community support was an appetite that our community had, and being able to provide a more organized way for neighbors to help neighbors. As the county manager mentioned, we began to explore volunteer models right after Snowcrete. I would say in February, in March, we began having internal discussions And we looked at various jurisdictional models from neighborhood-based programs to larger citizen workforce concepts. And we also wanted to talk to our internal operational partners, so whether that was DS, Parks, DHS, and obviously Volunteer Arlington. What we recognized very early in the process is that our operational departments are fully at capacity, engaged in snow response, as Mr. Manager discussed. with the priorities that they have laid forth to clear our county. And so we saw an opportunity with Volunteer Arlington, who are our experts in recruiting, training, and supporting volunteers, and really serving as a bridge between county departments and the public to garner those volunteers. And we've had many successful initiatives that we've partnered with Volunteer Arlington and Lisa. During COVID-19, they really assisted our vaccination efforts, our clinics. During the DCA aviation incident, they also were ready to go with anything related to a family assistance center should that have happened in Arlington. So we were really excited to partner with them on this endeavor. Next slide. So how it works, the beauty of the program is that a lot of it is happening way in advance of the snowfall so that we are ready to go before that first winter event. So the first step of the process is recruiting residents who need assistance. We are working with our department DHS. There's also other senior programs and other targeted groups that we can look at to target just the eligible participants of this program to get them to sign up. Volunteer Arlington obviously has the infrastructure in place to recruit volunteers. And once we have a subset of the two groups, that's when matches are made. We are following a very similar model, pretty much mirroring our neighbors in the city of Alexandria. Volunteer Alexandria manages that program, but the way that they match is through geographic connections. location, which makes a lot of sense because we want people to get to their matched households quickly and safely. Once the matches are made, we then go into onboarding and training to provide program guidance to prepare both our volunteers and residents. so that they understand the roles and responsibilities and sort of the rules of engagement. And then once the snow event occurs, that's when the volunteers self-activate because we've already made those connections and they can connect with their matched households and they can go and begin to help with shoveling their sidewalks, their walkways, and clearing their paths. For larger events, we've been discussing the potential of having more proactive communication between participants, volunteers, and program partners. So that would be, you know, if the snow ordinance goes into effect and, you know, we want to ensure that both the volunteers and our participants understand that, you know, that's what's happening and they have that situational awareness and they have the support they need so that, you know, the homes can get cleared pretty quickly. The big thing again is that this is a pilot that we will be evaluating. For example, one of the things that we need to look at is what the needs are going to be and then look at the volunteer capacity, how many volunteers we actually get signed up. questions that that we would want answered. Could one volunteer maybe support multiple households? How many? Are there gaps where there are, you know, people that need to be that are in the program, but we don't have someone within a certain vicinity? So those are all the exactly the types of questions that the pilot will help answer and help us create a very successful program. You know, targeting those that are most vulnerable. Next slide. So our focus between now and winter is preparing for a successful launch. Over the coming weeks, in partnership with Volunteer Arlington, we'll be finalizing the program structure, developing outreach materials, recruiting volunteers, and conducting those matches and training and onboarding. We do plan to soft launch in August as we saw an opportunity with the county fair as a major place that we can begin to have those conversations, engage interests, and develop a list. of potential volunteers. We then plan to do the hard launch in September in time for National Preparedness Month. And the goal is that by late fall, October, mid-November, we have those groups already in place and we begin to conduct those structured volunteer orientations and trainings so that we are ready to go with the first Snow Buddies cohort for whenever the first snowfall is. So that is the concept. We have to finalize details and work internally, but we are very appreciative of the partnership with Lisa and her willingness to carry this program forward with the county's support. And with that, I will turn it over to our county manager.

Right. We'll get back to that so you can have some questions. I'm going to go a little bit faster through the rest of the presentation, and I'm going to reprimand Jessica for saying that the first snow would happen by late November, which means it will snow in October. Okay. So a couple of the other gaps we identified, which I think I'm not going to spend a lot of time on because we're going to have a lot more detail on this, where we had gaps in the area of messaging. This is more internal. We had our emergency operations center. It had a flow of information to our joint information center. And one of the biggest gaps we found is that we hadn't looped in our constituent services team, which, as you know, is relatively new to the scene. So we're working on coordinating that a little bit better. Also, we're going to be looking at our web pages to ensure that we have clearer information. We have, for example, as part of our whole community approach, our website encouraged people to reach out to their civic associations. Some of the civic associations said, why are you calling me? We can know that we're even there. So we're going to work on rectifying that. We're going to work on our winter and pre-storm messaging to figure out how we can do better at outreach, especially with some of the communities that don't typically rely on our website. And we're going to be using some of our faith-based organizations. Another gap, and by gap, it doesn't necessarily mean things were bad, but things that we see that we can improve has to do with our snow ordinance. So We will not be able to enforce our way out of a snowstorm. And the sidewalk snow removal ordinance is just one of the tools we have. Just sort of some of the gaps we identified. We're going to talk about enhancing public outreach so people know what's in the ordinance. We're also developing a plan for temporary surge staffing. And I need to be clear about this. We cannot surge every county staff person to do this. We can't get contractors or volunteers. We have to have this done by cross-training county employees who already have field-based work as part of their portfolio. So we're going to be working on that. We're also going to be working on prioritizing the inquiries that come in related to sidewalks. So we are, I've asked DES and DPR to work on a map that will prioritize sidewalks in the county so that when we get complaints in, we can match them against what the priority areas are to see that they get attention first. We're also going to be looking in as a broader approach to CPHD's case management, coming up with an inspection software tool. You know, we had a spreadsheet. It was really cool, but we had a spreadsheet. Okay, so I'll just leave it at that. We're going to talk a little bit more about how the county snow ordinance has an abatement process. And we're able to go ahead under that abatement process and on our own as a county remove snow or ice in the public right of way and then go and recover abatement costs from the owner. So we're going to have to talk a little bit more about how we do that. We usually like to reach out to the owners, property owners, for example, and say, make an attempt to clear, and we're going to be polite about it. But if they don't do that, and that's happened in some of our business areas, we may have to step in and then ask them to compensate us. And I just did want to let you know that by way of voluntary compliance, which is our first step, we made a lot of progress in the storm. I did want to remind you that we received 628 complaints. We issued 312 warnings. And we actually cited 15 businesses and individuals. This is the first time since the snow ordinance went into effect that we ever actually cited anybody. Another area of improvement. We're going to be working more closely with our business improvement districts. And some of our commercial districts are important. We're going to be working with them to help fill the gap. Another gap surrounds the maintenance of traffic. and parking management. And so you're going to have to bear with me because there's a fair amount here. I'm going to be focused on a full refresh on how we go about making decisions of when and where to use my authority to restrict parking on streets and when and where we begin to remove vehicles from crucial thoroughfares to enhance our ability to maintain passable streets. Now the administrative guidance on this has been lost to the vagaries of history, and our snow emergency routes, you go around the county, every once in a while you'll see a snow emergency route sign. They're completely random, and they haven't been maintained. And if you look at Title 14.2 of the County Code, I have very broad authority. But rather than simply saying everybody move your car, I'm going to try to come up with some guidelines and share those with the community in October about where people should be thinking about if we direct people to remove their cars, how they're going to do that. We're also going to use an equity lens when we do that because, frankly, limiting street parking in areas where residents have driveways or garages is one thing, but telling people who actually have no other place to park their cars is a completely other thing. So we have to take an approach that takes that into account. We're pursuing making arrangements with public garages to make it easier for people to park there. We've reached out. We need to make a little bit more progress on having conversations with VDOT because they do come to our community. We're going to try to encourage them to direct them about making some efforts. I will say that we're not as far along in our conversations with APS, but we, I've had conversations with the superintendent, but we need to confirm what our primary bus routes and how they're going to be gathering some of their bus routes in a better way. We're going to be finalizing agreements we have about storing snow and clarifying the zoning rules about how that works and also exploring and adopt a block neighborhood program where our businesses would come and sort of take ownership of blocks. And then harking back to my experience as a young lad growing up in New England, we're going to be talking to our plow operators how they can better plow by lowering the impact of refilling some shoveled driveways, and also looking at pre-placement of sand and salt containers on tricky corners. We're also going to be, and Erica is here to talk a little bit about it if you're curious, we're also going to be asking the community how they, their thoughts on some of the steps I've laid out today. and making sure that we get feedback on those processes. And a special shout out to the Boston Virginia Square Civic Association, which beat me to the call for civic participation by sending us a very thorough slide presentation today. So in conclusion, a lot more to discuss, but a few vital points I wanted to end up with. These types of storms that we had are rare, and we do not live in upstate New York. We just don't. However, we need to plan and do better, but we cannot buy our way out of the impacts of these storms or enforce our way out. We need to continue to work together. And finally, before I wrap up, we owe an incredible debt of gratitude to the dozens of county staff who worked tirelessly during Snowcrete, 12-hour shifts for a week. cost of over four million dollars and even if we had all these improvements i talk about here in place i'm just going to tell you we still would have had a lot of snow and ice that would have been really hard to move so um you know the other part of my plan is obviously hoping for warmer weather after snows and with that i'm going to be happy to stop and take any questions we covered a lot of material there thank you mr schwartz um

I'm mindful that we all could have questions. We're about 15, 17 minutes, but who's counting, laid for closed as we had planned. But this is an important topic. I feel like Ferris Bueller is relevant. You had like 27 categories that we could work on. And it's easy, as a board member, I'm like, OK, finish those by next Tuesday. But actually, I'd love if someone could correct me. We had Snowmageddon and we had Snowcrete. And in the last 30 years, to my recollection, Those are the two things that we had that are at this level. Don't forget snowpocalypse. But wasn't snowmageddon and snowpocalypse the same or different? So we've had three and that's relevant. I'm not saying we should punt and give up. I just, maybe there's colleagues or some way we could or maybe you've already done it so that there's your list 12 or 19 things but there's like three or four that might include the snow buddies that like we want to put in place within a reasonable period of right and I just that's the reason why we spent a little extra time on snow buddies because that is something we have to start now and it's going to be

I think an important and significant effort, but it's going to be a pilot to see if we can work. And all the material I talked about today, not today, not tomorrow, but sometime in the next week or two, I'm going to post something on our website for public comment about each of these areas that I talked about and then some of the other areas. I'd say of all the areas I focused on, I think a little bit more clarity around our sidewalk ordinance, because I think there was just a lot of confusion about that. And, you know, as you said, Mr. DeFerranti, Maybe for 10 years people will never look at it because we won't have a storm like that. And then the other thing which I think we really need to, the community is not prepared for this and so we'll need to do a lot of talking about this. In the 1970s when the county board passed 14.2 of the county code which gave the county manager authority to essentially say you need to move your cars or they will get towed. When Porfiry tells me in Chicago they used to just pick up the cars and throw them in the Chicago River, we are not gonna be taking that kind of drastic action. But people need to be serious about their civic responsibility and I think we have a long way to go And I said this is a partnership with members of the community. It is very, very difficult for our plows sometimes to make progress, given that cars are parked in a random fashion. I'm not blaming our residents for that, because we have a long way to go to educate them. So those are the three areas I think we're going to focus on. There's a lot of other things that, it would be nice to get VDOT to come and pay attention to us, but I'm going to be realistic about what the chances of that are.

Got it. I'll yield and we'll see if we, I propose that we ask questions as we have them or make clear points and keep it to less than three minutes at the very latest if you can. We'll start with Mr. Spain.

I want to thank you for our presentation from everyone. I'll just make it quick. Mr. Manager, can you talk a little bit about the federal facilities, the EXILS partnership, the potential opportunity there? I know Board Member Cunningham and I, we had a chance a few weeks ago to go over and you've done this for years, but it appears that there is a potential opportunity here in Arlington at one of our facilities, at least for snow to be parked, placed. What does that look like? And can you come back later and let's have a candid discussion about working with some of our installations? Because they've reached out to me and say, hey, look, you could put your snow here. Right.

So I think you're probably referring to Fort Myer.

And I say Arlington, actually.

Yeah, right. And so there are some places there we've had stop and start conversations over the years. They never made it to where we need to get. But that's certainly an opportunity. Access to some of those facilities has become a little bit more difficult. But, you know, we're all about the possible. So we're going to focus on that.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair. Thank you. Ms. Coffey.

similar to permitting, we often get compared to all of our neighbors. And, you know, it was very clear in the moment that everyone was struggling. I think some of our neighbors spent a lot more money even than, I mean, we spent a lot of money, but they spent even more money. I'm wondering if there's anything besides Snow Buddies, which you're obviously adopting from Alexandria, have the city and county administrators talked about this issue? I think there is something to be said about consistency across the region, given that the way we respond You know, snowstorms are rarely ever going to just hit Arlington County. I just want to make sure that as we think about things that may or may not need to change, that maybe we think about them as a region so that also residents know what to expect and are not getting different answers and different responses from Arlington than Alexandria than Falls Church than Fairfax.

You know, I have talked to my colleagues about this. And, you know, the conversations, you know, I usually have high praise from my colleagues. But we are actually, I'm just going to say, we're in a competition for contractor staff. We're in lots of competition here. And there really aren't a lot of resources to go around. I will say that there are potential for better communication where there are the borders between our jurisdictions. And making sure, because we heard reports that we would plow a street right up to, In Fairfax County, VDOT's responsible for doing that. That collaboration, really, when we think about it, it's really enhancing the collaboration we have with VDOT, because all our surrounding jurisdictions, except for the district, use VDOT. And D.C., I think, actually does an excellent job of clearing the bridges. There's more challenges, I think, internal to the city. So, no, we haven't spent as much time on that as we probably should.

Thank you, Mr. Schwartz. And Ms. Coffey, Ms. Cunningham.

I had two questions. One is about for the Snow Buddies program, which I'm super excited about. I know we heard a lot about liability considerations, and I'm wondering how we're addressing that. If someone gets hurt as a Snow Buddy, how does that get managed?

Mr. Attorney. There will be ongoing discussions with risk management and volunteer .

Okay. Terrific. So we're working on that. And then the second is you mentioned there's sort of two levels of priority. First, the arterials and the trails for emergency access, if I heard correctly. And then secondly, getting back to school and getting transit routes back open. I'm curious, while I'm super excited about our trails being cleared, whether that really comes before getting the buses back running on the streets. Can you say a little bit more about how that consideration?

Yeah, and perhaps I wasn't as precise as I needed to be on that. You know, we have separate equipment that we use for our trails, okay? So it's not like we can take that equipment and help clear the streets. Got it, got it. So, yeah, we... I found more than 10 years ago that you know at various times people have made the suggestion to me that we should propose a cut to our budget to eliminate the funding we provided for clearing the trails that was usually made to me by cross-country skiers but a lot of people actually use our trails to get from point a to point b in our community and we see a lot of that during the snowstorm so that's important

Great. I think that's it. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Manager, this is all, you know, brings back all this conversation that we had back in, right after the Snow Creek crisis. There is one thing that I want to add to your list of to-dos here. I believe that we have a, very average if at all grasp of which commercial properties or bigger residential properties have actually snow removal contract and how they activate this contract when we know that an event is about to hit us. So I found during Snow Creek, because in my neighborhood and around, especially on Columbia Pike, you could see immediately who had actually some level of preparedness and who didn't. And I do think that these contracts are probably are mostly embedded in landscaping contracts. And so it is a good thing to have a, to do a, you know, the work of going through what is the quality of these contracts, are these contractors able at all to respond and at what level and what kind of event. One of the two most difficult things in the Snowcrete event was, A, the actual lack of specific meteorological accuracy in where and how intensive the event would be. So state, even the Army or the federal system couldn't respond to that. And also, I do believe that our region was not prepared for a situation where north of us, where the most contracted assets are, like in Pennsylvania and New York State, et cetera, that they would be so busy with themselves that they wouldn't be able to help us. The second thing is we didn't realize that the immediate freezing after the snow event meant that we couldn't just push the snow aside, we had to haul it away. And therefore, and this is a whole different operation and a second layer of operations. I'm not so sure that we can actually effectively hedge against all these. So this is something to discuss at some point. On snow bodies, excellent idea. I have only one question for you. There is a health risk with, especially for a type of population that's more, prone to offer, and this is kind of middle age. My age, for example, would be a perfect eligible person. Shoveling snow is heavy exercise. It has health risks, and I mean, we need to actually just make people aware of that. I've seen a lot of very crazy stuff out there, and that can be a problem. And last but not least, I do think that we need to model the car removal and know the parking capacity to park in the interim during such an event. We have to classify that individual cars. It's a very big thing.

Thank you. Thank you. And on your first point about businesses, we are going to work with our business improvement districts and potentially our partnerships. That is a pretty, you know, there's a lot of detail there. And offer them some advice about, you know, how they might want to look at doing contracting on their own.

I mean, I would go so far as to make it compulsory, if possible, I don't know if this is at all legally possible, to deposit their contracts with us so that we know who has, who hasn't, and what kind of contract this is. Because the moment of truth, it is really a very big problem.

So I'm going to use that as a segue into towing.

I like it. It's good. I do think we should thank Ms. Fikes in addition to Ms. Baxter and Director Flagler. Mr.

Chair, only because Board Member Cunningham, I mean, Karen Tonis brought this up, Mr. Chair and County Manager, I would hope, you made a great point, Mr. Karen Tonis, As we think about volunteers, I would hope that we, for my public health space, utilize Dr. Deidre Payers, who is our official health advisor for Arlington County.

I'm not going to make her shovel, but we will use her to get her advice.

Let's just run things by her as well. Thanks.

Okay, to wrap up, just a really brief update about towing. And the board took action earlier today to add two new members to the Trespass Towing Advisory Board. Last year we began the process of issuing new administrative permits. All seven tow operators are currently operating in compliance. For 2026 year to date, We've tracked 11,753 vehicles towed by private companies. We've investigated 91 complaints. We facilitated 16 refunds, and we have one case pending in court. And so this summer, staff's already begun studying towing fees and examining our ordinances, and we'll work with a newly reconstituted TTAB advisory board to make any recommendations to the board before the end of the calendar year.

And this concludes my report. Thank you for your remarks. We will have follow-up on towing for sure, but that provides me an opportunity Move that the board convene a closed meeting as authorized by Virginia Code Sections 2.2-3711A1, 7, and 8 for the following purposes. Discussions regarding the performance of two board appointees, consultation with and legal advice from the county attorney regarding one, the county's legal authority regarding collective bargaining agreements. Two, one active matter in litigation and one matter that will result in probable litigation where such consultation or briefing in an open meeting would adversely affect the litigating posture of the county board. and three, the county's legal authority and options to comment on and participate in review of a pending federal project that may impact the county's transportation network, emergency response airspace, certain infrastructure, and historic preservation efforts. Is there a second?

Second.

Moved and seconded. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. Colleagues, we will start at 36. So if folks can, if you need restroom, divide and conquer. And we will start at 36 or 37. If you don't need, get food. Recessed furlough or closed furlough.

And I move that the members of the county board certify that at the just concludes closed session, one, only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements under Chapter 37, Title 2.2 of the Code of Virginia, and two, only such public business matters as were identified in the motion by which the closed meeting was convened were heard, discussed, or considered by the board.

Second.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk. Certainly.

Mr. DeFranti. Call on the roll. Call on the roll. Mr. DeFranti?

Yes. Sorry, I didn't hear you.

Ms. Coffin?

Yes.

Ms. Cunningham?

Yes.

Mr. Spain Senior? Yes. Mr. Carantonis? Yes.

Thank you very much. Mr. Kushner, would you call the first item, please?

Of course. The first item on tonight's agenda is item number 39, which is the fiscal year 2027 to 2036 capital improvement plan adoption.

Over to the manager for your report.

Yes. Thank you, Mr. Chair. This evening, we do not have a report prepared for you, though we are available to answer any questions you have. We also completed a board report, which has been available at the date of July 20th, and we'll be happy to answer any questions.

Thank you very much. So Mr. Kushner, we have not set a fulsome process, but I do think, I'm hopeful, and if you need a couple of seconds to get there, we should scroll through on the screen if we can, the final draft of the guidance, so that our community has some context. And colleagues, I propose to do that, giving credit for lots each of the piece to folks who actually drafted it and then towards the end is when I would propose we consider amendments and we can have just sort of concluding comments at the end so Mr. Kushner when you get to a space where you are able to run through that that would be our first step So, if you're able to, yeah, perfect, and then scroll to the top. I think that the introductory language is pulled from our previous CIPs and has some of the guidance. If I were attributing it, I think Ms. Cunningham, you may, we all worked a little bit on this, That's the introductory piece. The second, under environment, I think for the legions watching at home, this is actually a board unified piece that Deputy Manager Michelle Cowan helped us with. But this is a significant investment in environmental facilities. And consistent with the work session discussions, we will be having a solar site and then we'll go from there. And so we did a stress check, questions about the roof not being premature. So this is what will be in the nature of an amendment, I believe, but the distinction is somewhat limited. It will not be a bond sale as indicated by the last sentence that is following the hyperlink. The next section, certainly on EV charging rates, that's a section that we all looked through, but it actually emanated from Ms. Cunningham as well. But there is some work ahead of us to do this. Essentially, it may not be an extraordinary large amount of money, but any amount of money that we can properly situate in capital under EV charging rates is what we wish to do. We will need to do an ordinance. We have not. We say this fall as the timing for such and are hopeful that we can move forward. Next is Central Library. This has been a priority of several of us. It's libraries, parks and third spaces is the entire piece. We, in one of our wrap-up work sessions, we identified that central library planning for Quincy Park is different from the Quincy Library, and so we need to align those planning processes. I think sort of sneaky in the last part of the first paragraph there on Central Library is that it could end up being significant resources, and we would ask the manager if you would sort of work with us, and we're mindful of that. The timing of this work, scoping and possible procurement of consultants for master planning. We did quite a bit of discussion as a group to make sure FY 2029 is the correct timing and FY 2030. That is the way to plan. If you don't set some scoping timelines, then you're not going to get there. But you must also recognize that things shift, but we are planning as indicated in the second paragraph as far as timing. Third places. This is a term that probably a month ago this board member was not as familiar with, though our library's director has brought it forward to us. And so we tried to do some work to define our what of what third places are, and then we did focus on We had advocacy both from our FAC facilities, our fiscal advisory commission, as well as advocacy from among others, the Langston Boulevard Alliance. And we landed on this language that discusses corridors because we believe, at least I believe, that there are multiple corridors that have Needs or may have needs with respect to third places And so we were not as so what we did is direct the manager to scope and begin this work by December 31st of next of 2028 Lease center planning is next Our community, this is important I believe because our community has, there's been a lot of advocacy around the Lee Center and the manager has indicated both with clarity but also trying to be tactful that the board will need to scope community engagement and staff work with respect to the Lee Center and so I think these firm dates as far as when we are committing to do this work to scope and then begin and engage with the community are very important because frankly they far precede investments that we might or might not, but might get to as far as the lease center site itself. And we tried to be both broad, As far as what could be contemplated at the site. We didn't think we could Sort of figure out what the scope would be in the short term and that is the timing that is there Penrose this language was Talked about a couple of times. This is staff Engaged there and this is I think colleagues there seem to be consensus regarding this next after Penrose this is worthy of holding on the transportation. This is Arlenac. We did have discussion about the timing of need for the program. We had significant community advocacy for larger sums of money. We wanted to be fiscally restrained, but we did invest the $2 million We did, we are requesting and you'll notice in the board report posted as well as the language for the bonds that 2 million would be on this 2026 bond referendum. The W&OND trail, this is a long-standing issue that we need to engage with our community on the safety of that trail. Vice Chair Coffey brought this forward, this language. I certainly won't stand in the way of your taking point on this issue, but it is a broader issue that the whole board will have to engage on, but really appreciate your engaging here because we will have to continue to do it. Funding clarity, this is an issue that, frankly, understanding our transportation streams of funding and what is dedicated and what is not is very, very important, and so we request that this distinction is highlighted in future CIPs. Mr. Manager, if you can kind of help us think with greater clarity. You know, it's sort of the color of different types of money, if you'll indulge me, as we work on this. So next, just scrolling down, Mr. Kushner, housing. This is, you, Mr. Manager, came forward with this. I at least might end up having a question on this, but I propose we just finish the guidance and then come back to all questions using any piece of it. But the housing public-private partnership, You create an architecture of the issues that are there. It is, for me, important that if you scroll down to the third numbered bullet below, it talks about 500 million. We need to invest more and we need to find ways to do so in a way that brings together all of the potential resources as the 1 3rd, 1 3rd, 1 3rd in the middle of the page indicate. From my perspective at least, I think it is useful to write the infrastructure of some ideas and identify the fact that some of our CAF properties affordability covenants are running out. I don't know if they're covenants or provisions are running out. But I don't at least feel that this precludes broader thinking. When we passed earlier today, the AHIF legislative work i think we're going to need to do a whole bunch of engaging all of us on housing over the coming months and years not that we haven't been but it is a moment where renewed shoulders to the wheel and all of us trying here is important so that's the language that the manager worked in consultation with the board members and that's what you have here so scrolling down beyond the housing language And there is mention in there, I believe, of the possibility to explore using bonds is important to just note. And lastly, the residential program center, This is staff-identified language. We frankly have some detailed work to do there. And so that is the guidance as proposed. We did discuss other areas, and I will leave it to board members, but I'll just identify. I think that there is a broader tension between identifying policy areas that we might like to work on and the appropriate venue for whether guidance is the place to do it or whether there's what we call two by twos and board member which Only two board members can meet at a time on a public issue without noticing that issue. And so we have, we get briefed in groups of two, two and one. And so that is the venue for some of those policy issues and there are others of those policy issues where candidly I need individually and others may feel that I, on some of those issues I need to get much more educated and there's some other tools for some of the three or four or five other policy issues that we had some debate on. I've been talking plenty. I will now just pause and see if colleagues either have questions or amendments in any order. And also, I am game for closing comments if that's where you are. Go ahead, Mr. Spain. Mr.

Chair and colleagues of the board, as many know, this is my first CIP. And let me just say that it's not just a ride, it's an adventure. So I do want to thank staff, county manager, for all of your hard work that you put into this to kind of lay out a foundation for us to work upon. As I prepare my remarks here, I also want to commend my colleagues on the board because if the folks only knew how long we've been working diligently on you know, tracks change, you know, changes within a doc file and all that good stuff in the wee hours of the night. Some of y'all went over midnight. It's a lot of work. And let me say this. I worked together in unity on a few areas. Most folks know what those were and are. I'll speak pointedly about a couple of areas, one being at Lee Center and the other one being our neck. But drawing upon my leadership, I will say that leadership is about preparing for the future while meeting, of course, today's needs. And as we looked at the CIP, Mr. Manager, I know initially you talked a lot about facilities and infrastructure. But for me and many others, it's more about just building roads. It's about creating places, right, whereby people feel connected in our neighborhoods and they feel valued in this process and they feel that they can see themselves. So this CIP, in my thoughts, is all about the people. We're investing in spaces. We're investing in services and opportunities to connect. And so, pointedly on the Lee Center, I would just say that the future of Lee Center and where we end up going should be shaped with the community, not for the community, right? And as we continue to build our neighborhoods and communities block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, Again, this is just the CIP for FY27 through 36. And is there more we can do? Of course, there's always going to be more that we can do. But I think I would have loved to, you know, probably I did some more work, but we have some timelines on third spaces. I would have loved to have some additional conversations about the detention facility, but I've had conversations and communications with the sheriff. So I feel okay about where I'm at today on that. Just know that our work is not done. And I just wanna thank my colleagues on the board for helping me along the way and learning this process this time around. And that concludes my comments for the CIP, Mr. Chair and Madam Vice Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. I will look for lights, but I'll just say this briefly. I think the overall theme of the proposed CIP that we have to be sort of to use a 90s nerdy term, prudent. We have to be thoughtful about, in this moment, what new big investments. And we're really, really focused on maintaining what we have. And I think that the guidance stays consistent with that. That does not mean that I am not quite eager for a different day when we can invest in our future. Because almost every economist I've ever heard is that if the long-term benefit of investment in physical infrastructure can be significant. I see Vice Chair Coffey and then Mr. Karantonis. I saw yours first, so we'll go with you, Ms. Coffey.

Yeah, happy to do it. I have no questions and no amendments, so I hope that's okay. You know, I do think that this is Mr. Spain's first CIP. It really is quite a bit more interesting than budget, I think, with the number of different dimensions both across topic areas, projects, but also temporal dimensions of what year to fit things in and how does that relate to our capacity and debt service. And so I'm happy to be towards the end now of my second go around on this. And I think It is very unglamorous local government work at times, the capital improvement plan, things like making sure our sewers are lined properly, making sure our streets are paved. Those are the things that most of our residents really just want to happen and not have to think all that much about. And I'm really grateful that we continue to invest really smartly, I think, in maintaining what we have. And that really was the focus of so much of this CIP, was making sure that the assets we've previously invested in are in a state of good repair, are being invested in to last us for our future, for our community's future, which, you know, is kind of the base layer. And I think one of the harder parts of the CIP is that where we are in terms of need and where we are in terms of funding means that really that foundational layer of investing in what we already have is the only layer we're able to get to right now. And I think some of the draft language that Mr. DeFerranti talked through on central library and third spaces is really key to hopefully what we see in the future layers of this CIP, which is investing in new opportunities and new spaces. And really, this year's CIP in particular has pushed me to think a lot about our community spaces and looking at, you know, the Ballston-Roslyn corridor where more than 65,000 residents of Arlington County live. almost 30% of the county's whole population and where there are currently no community centers located on the Ballston-Roslyn corridor. And what does that mean about our desire for those residents to be connected to their community, to be connected with civic engagement and involvement? And how do we plan that for our future? I've said previously to the manager, I don't expect there to be a community center on the Ballston-Roslyn corridor by the time I end my service on this board. But if I can get it into the 10th year of the CIP by the time I'm off the board, I will view that as a significant victory. Because facilities these days, new facilities these days, are a substantial cost, 100 million plus investments. They do not happen overnight. And so I am under no illusions that we're going to get it, you know, soon or fast, but really making sure that it is something that we acknowledge and agree we want to work toward in the long term. I think that's so important. And then the other element of that, of working towards our future, really is the affordable housing investments that we need to make. This board has made it very clear affordability, affordable housing is a priority, and we've had a lot of conversations recently on that topic. I think someone much smarter than I was talking about some of the new federal legislation and the easing of some of the regulations that the federal housing bill has in it, and that that is great because we are building an engine that works better, but without the funding behind it, there's no fuel in that engine. And so that's really what we need to think about when it comes to our local commitment to affordable housing. We can make our zoning as good as possible. We can, as we heard about earlier, invest in permit Arlington and some of the enhancements there. But ultimately, the driver of housing is the ability to finance and build. And when it comes to affordability right now, the amount we are able to invest simply does not meet the needs that we have identified in our community. And housing is only getting more expensive, which means investing in housing every year gets more costly for not just us, but everyone in the market. And I'm excited about the idea of bringing something innovative to the front of the conversation. And also acknowledging that it's not just the county that needs to be invested in this but it's the business community It's our philanthropy community. It's everyone because affordable housing at the end of the day Is something that is critical to the entire community? It is not just a public problem the ability for people to live where they work whether they are consultants making many, many, many dollars, or our grocery store clerks and our service industry folks. Every single part of this community is critical to the health and well-being of the rest of the community. And so we all have to invest. We all have to come to the table. And I recognize that. those investments are not necessarily being made in this capital improvement plan. But I do believe we are setting ourselves up to have those come as the next layer in the future. And so I'm relieved to be at the end of this process. I'm really grateful to my colleagues, to all of DMF, all of our departmental staff. The number of hours that have gone into this are probably uncountable. it all makes a difference and it's why we're here. So thank you everyone and I look forward to voting on this.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. Mr. Karantonis.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. First of all, Mr. Chair, I think that you hit the nail on the head when you reminded everybody that the CIP is conditioned and framed in the economic situation that we are today. And we had this conversation now for a second or third year in a row with a narrowing pathway to options. And when the manager came to us with his proposal, he framed that, if I remember that correctly, Mr. Swartz, he said, well, this is not about what new and shiny we can produce, but how we can make sure that we make the best use of what we have and we maintain it and we keep what we have in the best possible condition. So to go back a little bit, I still have in the back of my head the conversation with which we closed or accompanied our budget discussion this year, which was a little bit about the demographics for Farlington and where our community is. And roughly 50% of our community is, you know, comprised by households who make more than $150,000 a year, and 50% is below that. So $4.3 billion over 10 years is roughly $36,000 per household in Arlington. I think that having in mind this disparity between the households who have a lot but contribute and need a functioning community and those who have also contributed a lot but they are in a different place. A library for a household that makes more than $150,000 a year is a different thing than for a household that makes less than that. So in general, about 40% of all this is planned to be bonded. We will be going to the voters and ask for permission to borrow. 37% I think is the exact number. About 10% of this is funded by our pay go section of our operating budget. or the one that we expect to be in the PAYGO section of the operating budget. So roughly half of that is going to be, these are going to be pieces of the CIP where we are going to ask permission from the voter. We are going to remind the rationale and the framing conditions of the request. etc. And we will have to respond also to the near future demands and framing conditions. The other half is, for example, the transportation fund, which is a big chunk of that. This is still a a contribution that we see that our businesses are bringing into the CIP. This is a significant contribution. We have to acknowledge that. The transportation improvements that result from that may benefit commercial interests, but they also benefit everybody else. Then there are other sources and other federal and state grants, et cetera. So all in all, from the fiscal complexion of the CIP, I have to say, and to the entire team here, Ms. Meredith and her entire team, this was a really good proposal. responsive to the discussions of today, to the needs of today, and also giving the board and the public options for managing as we go further down the road and we realize how things are changing. So I'm particularly, I mean, if you look what is the biggest chunk of the CAP, it's still $1.5 billion that goes for transportation improvements. This is actually to be expected. Metro alone is about $442 million. This is a place with a vibrant economy like ours, a place where we care about creating jobs and about maintaining and continuing to be job creators here. This is critical, critical investment. In the very basic scaffolding of our infrastructure, like in our water pollution plant, we are investing almost a billion dollars, $972 million. This is the biggest single dedicated investment in a very long time. It was long overdue and I'm happy to see that materializing right now. Stormwater Fund, when I joined this board in 2020, the county manager and the DMF, the Department of Management and Finance team were saying, well, you know something, this was right after the deluge of July 2019. And you said, oh my God, this is going to cost us about $300 million over 10 years. 10 years. So you were absolutely right. We are five or six years into that and the order of magnitude that you estimated back then is accurate. It's still $265 million. There is a significant amount of money, about half a billion dollars, $448 million that goes into facilities. And we had a lot of discussion here. And if you add parks to that, this is almost $700 million. And I think that this is to maintain our facilities, to bring them to not suffer immensely or irresponsibly from maintenance, deferral, et cetera. This is really basic, basic work. And I'm happy that, you know, we could articulate and we could stretch it over this 10 years and attack it from that point of view. Technology and public safety was another $262 million. That was necessary, and I think that this was also very well placed. Now, on the discussions that we had among our colleagues and the input that we got from our constituents, I was very pleased to start this discussion about the so-called third places. And we should for once try to give a definition of what a third place is. A third place So your home is your first place, your workplace is your second place. So the social space that is not your home and not your workplace is a third place. And that can be anything. It can be churches, cafes, bars, libraries, gyms, bookstores, all this. So this is a placeholder for a complex public facility that serves a lot of needs. And it's multilayered. It needs to be created to be multilayered and be in a condition of providing something for everybody. So there is a ton of attention on this right now. I think that there is a real need from all parts of our constituents, those who are more on the higher socioeconomic spectrum and most importantly, those who are in the more challenged and more vulnerable socioeconomic spectrum. I will never forget that about 63% of our population, more than that, actually lives in our most populous corridors, and that 99% of growth in Arlington comes from multi-family apartments. So during all our conversations, what I was thinking all the time is, are the assets that were located in a time when Arlington was half or less than half the population of today, are they still in the right place? Can they... be configured calibrated in a way that they can serve still despite the fact that they're a little bit off the corridors and my growing realization is that in the coming years we have to begin to focus on how well we serve the majority of the population, the absolute majority of the population that lives in these corridors. Crystal City, the Rosslyn-Bellstone Corridor, Langston, and Columbia Pike. So this is why I believe that the discussion about third places is just a introduction to think about our library system, our system and the network of our community centers and all these public facilities that are so critical for the well-being of our residents today. Finally, all this is of course related to how we continue to invest in housing. Housing is an absolute priority. Ms. Coffey and Mr. Spain and I believe all our colleagues are spot on on this. The very fact that we are asking the manager to do specific work to see whether there is a place in the CAP to fund a additional funding source in collaboration with others. We always want to leverage private money and philanthropy money on this. whether we can get to a place where we can use the CAP as an additional tool to face the housing crisis that, to confront the housing crisis that we are dealing with today is a very big step forward. So thank you again for this work. And we are looking forward to see the implementation of all this.

Thank you, Mr. Karantonis. Ms. Cunningham, and you may, you may have questions, amendments, you know, we're not all, there's no need to be only at closing statements, but we're moving towards wrapping up. So over to you.

Great. Well, I want to say a huge thank you, especially, well, really to everyone, but starting with staff from DMF and the manager's office all the way through all of our departments for whom creating the alternatives, the options ahead of time, deliberating to get to the proposal, and then fielding in a relatively short period of time the depth of questions from this board as we get educated. Is no small lift. So thank God we only do it every two years And thank you for the incredible effort. I also want to thank our Commission's who really dug in and both early on and then towards the end after absorbing all the work sessions and shared with us their questions and concerns and recommendations. And then to our own staff, especially Arielle Ardura, who was going through her very first Virginia and Arlington and capital improvement budget with great aplomb. And then finally, to all of you up here, we have had many conversations, some of them during daylight hours, but many of them not, in trying to find the will of the board and to be able to express that in English to our staff and to our community members. I will just hit on a couple of the topics that I am proud that we were able to include, first on the climate projects and the million dollars in additional rapid payback projects. Those really are win-win, you know, win for the climate, but they also will pay back for the taxpayers quickly, and I think that is an important consideration. in this time in particular, so thank you to Chair DeFerrante and Deputy Manager Cowan and probably hundreds of other people behind them making that one work. The EV charging, I appreciate my colleagues' tolerance of that. I know it's a sort of small dollar amount, but I think it is important in these times to make sure that we understand the full carrying costs of each of these investments and the capital costs and the upkeep are non-negligible, probably with the limited number we have now, under $100,000 a year, but will grow over time and we'll want to be able to replenish and pay that back and not, you know, kind of be so far below market that we're subsidizing, so appreciate that. And then on the third spaces area, so Central Library, I think I appreciate the willingness to discuss the intersection between Central Library and Quincy Park. And I think it is likely that they will be phased in different phases and we won't take all of the construction on in one particular year, but it is important to have done the planning together so that we can get efficiencies and not sort of close off opportunities too early in that design process. And I will share, because a community member did, you know, inquire about this. I know Quincy site isn't too far from Quincy Park. It's about three blocks, I believe. And in the macro long term, thinking about the interaction of those and of Washington Liberty and then other parks and schools nearby will be important. We are not to a point, and we are very much not to it, we are very explicitly not doing a master plan effort for Quincy site any time in these 10 years, but we will kind of keep the concepts in mind as well as around surrounding areas. And then finally on third spaces, I think Mr. Karantonis gave a great introduction. He was very reserved in not mentioning the ancient Greek Agora as a perfect example of a third space, so thank you. Thank you for that. But I think the third space element, which FAC and others have really elevated for us, is so important, especially in this time. I think during COVID and in the return after COVID, we've really noticed the need for belonging, the need for sort of structure and opportunity for that belonging to happen. And I think it was Ray Oldenburg that created the concept of third spaces back in 1989. but he described them as important for democracy, for civic engagement, for a sense of place and for belonging. And I think all of us need that desperately right now. So even though it's squishy, I'm really delighted that we are leaning into that and we'll be engaging with our community about what that looks like. Finally, I think Mr. DeFerrante mentioned there are some items that are not specified in guidance, but certainly came up during the conversations and the work sessions. And I will look forward to over this next year and before, certainly before the next CIP, additional two by twos on the detention center utilization, the Quincy site mitigation efforts. transportation planning as we move to Carlin Springs Road and the eastern half of Langston, and then analysis of our small transportation project programs and any opportunities to streamline them for better effect. Thank you very much.

Thank you I think I already covered my concluding thoughts except a big thank you to the manager and to DMF and all of you for engaging it is not a small amount of work and Mr. Scott welcome this is your inaugural CIP process I hope you yeah you survived I hope you don't go running away we were thorough and we and the proposal came to us certainly solid but there's no doubt that this board really grappled with it with that I will go ahead and move and I'll move that the County Board first adopt the fiscal year 2027 2036 capital improvement plan with changes that set forth in the document titled FY 2027 2036 CIP guidance as displayed on screen and adopt the fiscal year 2027 county bonds funds appropriation resolution shown as attachment a of the staff report and appropriate one million dollars to pay go capital three point Sorry, 313.403.4002 funded by unallocated bond premium revenue, 313.491102 to support accelerated investments in public facilities, including lighting retrofits, retro-commissioning, and roof upgrades. Four, adopt the revised language to the transportation capital section of the financial and debt management policies. And five, appropriate $850,000 and $850 and $541 to the Transit Bureau. That's 101.4022002. funded by an anticipated increase in ART revenue of $44,695, as set forth in account 101.443113, and to transfer in from the Transportation Capital Fund, $805,846. account 101.481138 to increase frequency to improve on-time performance and service for the ART 75 and 77 as well as provide additional service for the ART 55. Is there a second?

Second.

It's been moved and seconded. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Our CIP has been adopted and we have made it through that piece. Mindful that we have other items and we will go ahead and turn next. Yes, Mr. Spain, go ahead.

You don't mind before you jump into the next? Sure. Again, I don't want to make this like a point of privilege. Sure. but i do want to comment and just state that you know we went through a budget cycle and it doesn't leave me that you know the process was one where i think in the public face the public they they saw a lot of our conversations and what was going on and I just want to commend all of us here on the board because this too was hard, but I think we all found the sweet spot at the end of the day and agreed. And I think we're meshing in a way that is beneficial to the health and emotional wellness of this board. And I'm very appreciative of what we just did. So thank you, Mr. Chair and Madam Vice Chair for your leadership on that.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. I will say the process is not perfect, but Ms. Cunningham mentioned Ms. Ardura, who has had a very strong, positive impact, and it's right to call her out. And I do candidly feel momentum from us as to how we're, that doesn't mean perfection by any means. And you've got a saying for that, perfection on earth can't be achieved, et cetera. There's momentum in process while not close to perfection. And so, Ms. Cunningham, I see your light.

I'm taking privilege as well. I failed to mention and meant to that for Mr. Spain, this is your first CIP, but once you pass your first CIP, you're no longer the new kid on the block. You're completely initiated, so welcome.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Ms. Coffey.

Yeah, and I think just another round of thank yous, again, Ariel, Mason, as well. I think we do a lot behind the scenes, and we appreciate it. Ms. Cowan, Mr. Miller, and all the three deputy county managers, Ms. Flanagan-Watson as well, and everyone behind the scenes at DMF, I know you all are the that we see out here, but that does not mean there are not more folks actually working on all these things. And I know that also Mr. Schwartz's deputies put an immense amount of time, they're not here at the moment, but just because we don't see them doesn't mean we shouldn't remember to thank them.

Thank you, Ms. Coffey. And with that, we will go next to critical piece of implementing our CIP, which is the next item. Mr. Kushner, will you call the next item, please?

Which is item number 40, which are resolutions and questions to be included in the 2026 bond referendum.

Thank you to Mr. Schwartz for the staff presentation.

Yes, and we actually have a one-slide presentation.

That sounds like the perfect length of a presentation.

What I wanted to do and take the opportunity, and we have spent a lot of time focusing on what the referendum questions will be. We've written a board report on that. But I did want to lay out, it's a little bit mysterious sometimes to board members of the community how we get from where we are today, which is July 21st, 2026 to November 3rd, 2026. So Kyle, you're, yeah.

Okay, so what you'll see in front of you here is the referenda timeline. Today, July 21st, the County Board adopts the CIP, which just happened minutes ago. In August, referenda questions and explanations will be published, will be translated into numerous languages. On August 14th, that'll be the deadline for the referenda court order, which happens to happen 81 days before the election. October 24th has a deadline to publish notice of the election, which is 10 days before the election. And then on election day, November 3rd, that's when the referendum will be voted on. And then post-election order will be filed in December.

That concludes our presentation. Just one point. The court does have to agree with November 3rd.

Yeah, the court does have to agree. In my experience, they have always agreed, but we have to allow for that possibility.

Thank you, Mr. Scott, and my apologies. A long enough day that staying hydrated seems relevant. So with that, we're finished with the staff presentation. Discussion is now with the board colleagues, as I believe they're not public speakers and not the possibility on this particular part of the item. So having, I will go ahead and move this again. We don't have as many as when we did the budget. So hopefully I'll make it through this quickly. I move that the County Board adopt the resolutions. We can have discussion after there's a second. Adopt the resolutions in attachment A of the staff report as summarized here. Metro and Transportation, 69,745,000. B, Local Parks and Recreation, 34,945,000. C, Community Infrastructure, 58,825,000. And D, Utilities, 20,745,000, totaling $184,260,000. And the explanation of the referendum questions to appear in publications at voter registration sites and polling places as detailed in attachment B of the staff report in order to initiate and facilitate the November 3, 2026 bond referendum. I also move that we adopt the school's referendum resolution in attachment C of the staff report as shown here. Arlington Public Schools $80 million. And the explanation of the referendum question to appear in publications at voter registration sites and polling places as detailed in attachment D of the staff report in order to initiate and facilitate the November 3rd, 2026, November 3rd, 2026 bond referendum. And three, request the electoral board list the referenda on the ballot in the order detailed in the staff report as shown in the ballot layout section on page two of the staff report. Last, direct the county manager to take all the steps necessary to ensure that the information provided to voters by the county is printed in both English and Spanish. Is there a second?

Second.

Okay. Thank you. So now I'll just speak briefly to it. It is actually, I appreciate Mr. Attorney mentioning that the court has to accept what we move forward. And it is important for us to take these steps and be, There's a balance. We need to be clear about what is actually being considered for bond referenda without being overly specific such that there isn't sufficient flexibility to get the expenditures done. Are there any other comments on the bond referenda from colleagues? If not, all those in favor of this item and the motion made and seconded by Ms. Coffey, say aye. Aye. That passes five to zero. We have bond referenda questions. We are now turning to the next item. And Mr. Kushner, will you call it please?

Of course. Item number 41 is a request to advertise public hearings on the County Board's own motion for the Planning Commission and County Board to consider an amendment to the general land use plan from Lowe's Office Department Hotel, medium, residential, and public to Lowe's Office Department Hotel for an area located at 1501 Langston Boulevard.

Thank you, Mr. Clerk. Mr. Manager, and is there any, do we need to pause? Are we all okay?

Yeah, we actually do. On this particular item, we have a couple of slides, and we're going to, through the magic of technology, I'm going to ask Natasha Alfonso Ahmed, who is our lead, and should be available to, I think we have two slides to go through on that. If you were here, Natasha?

I'm here. Can you all see the slide?

We can, and it's just awesome that you just sort of conjure up.

I know you all have a lot on your agenda.

Yeah, go ahead.

So thank you, Mr. Manager, and good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the board. So this item is a request to advertise a GLUP amendment on the County Board's own motion for the Air and Space Forces Association site, which is located at 1501 Langston Boulevard in Area 5 East of the Langston Boulevard Planning District. The applicant has submitted a site plan amendment and use permit application and is seeking redevelopment of the existing five-story office building to construct an eight-story residential building with 88 units and 1266 square feet of space on the ground floor for a museum. Due to some technical errors on the GLUP map, staff is proposing for the County Board to change the land use designations depicted on the map for this site, which is displayed as a combination of low office apartment hotel, medium residential and public to low office apartment hotel for the whole site in keeping with past County Board actions along the corridor. And to initiate this Glup Amendment, staff recommends that the County Board authorize the advertisement of those public hearings on the amendments, which is merely a procedural step that is necessary to give community notice of the proposed change prior to the County Board's final consideration. So to clarify, the authorization to advertise the public hearings does not imply that the county board supports or approves the proposed GLUP amendment at this time. Those public hearings are actually expected to occur in the fall as early as September. email notices about this request to advertise the glup amendment were sent to the north highland citizens association the palisades park homeowners association and the langston boulevard alliance staff did receive feedback from mr aaron roberts who represents the north highland citizens association and his concerns are primarily related to the site plan and will be addressed during site plan review which is currently under progress So, the existing zoning on the site is 1.5, which is the mixed use district. This is consistent with the Langston Boulevard area plan recommendations for the site. All those staff interprets that the existing land use for the entire site is a low office apartment hotel. The existing map, as you see here shows that medium residential in public also apply on the site. The medium residential designation is really a result of a mapping error after a Glubb amendment to medium residential for the adjacent site, which is known as the Palisades Park. That Glubb amendment was approved in 1993 and so as a result, a larger area of the medium residential, the Brown, was drawn inconsistent with the prior County Board action. The public designation is actually a result of how the Langston Boulevard and back then Lee Highway Corridor and I-66 rights-of-ways were displayed over time with the different glut mat prints. And that is inconsistent with the changes to the limits of the private and public property at the time. so one thing I'd like to note is that a conservation easement exists over a portion of the area that is designated public however at the time of the site plan approval for the site at 1501 there was no specific correlation between the easement and the public designation and there was no public interest or access that was conveyed with that easement So, after reviewing the history of all county board actions related to this general area, we have found that there was again no interest to create public space on that property. So the GLUP map should really be corrected to reflect the site's envisioned land use of low office apartment hotel across the full extent of the property. This approach would not alter the conditions or the requirements that are in place in the existing conservation easement. So to summarize and finalize, staff recommends that the County Board authorize advertisement of the public hearings on the County Board's own motion for Planning Commission and County Board to consider the proposed club amendment at times concurrent with future public hearings on the Air and Space Forces Association site plan and use permit applications. So thank you. This concludes staff's presentation.

Thank you very much for the slides and reviewing. Quickly, Ms. Alfonso-Ahmed. And so we are now, I believe we will turn to public speakers. Are there public speakers, Mr. Kushner on this item?

There are, give me just a moment. Our public speaker on this item is Dr. Aaron Roberts, who may be joining us virtually, although I understand he is traveling at the moment and may not be able to join. Mr. Roberts, if you're with us.

He's on a plane.

Going once, going twice. Mr. Chair, there are no further speakers.

Thank you, and thank you very much. So the conversation is now with the board, Colleagues, I have just, just for transparency as we work through this conversation, I've just forwarded something, an email that Mr. Roberts sent last night. I looked at it, but in the course of preparing for the CIP, and because this is, we're not specifying a date with respect to the RTA, I am a little later forwarding it to you than I wished. I don't believe that the issues raised in it from my standpoint preclude us advertising this. So I'll turn to Ms. Cunningham. Unless there are prior comments, what I propose to do is turn to Ms. Cunningham for a motion. We'll second it. You can speak to it. Then we can have what I anticipate to be brief discussions. It's not that all the policy issues that Mr. Roberts raises can't, in my view, be fairly discussed over the coming time because we will not specify in this RTA at precise time. So Ms. Cunningham.

And Mr. Chair, may I ask, would it be appropriate for us to just read the comments? I think there was a scheduling challenge with travel. It probably would be under five minutes if one of us were to read it into the record. What would you like to do there?

My struggle there is... Mr. Spain, go ahead.

I just want to... Mr. Chair, another question. You should probably go and answer that question because I have thoughts on what was just asked about precedents and laying this out, which I'm a little... Give me some heebie-jeebies, Mr.

Chair. So, me as well, because, you know, just for... On Saturday, we... I had to say no thank you to a funeral home director in favor of a husband. And I just, I don't know that that precedent is quite where I would be. I certainly don't mind all of us referencing some of the points that are . Sure, sure.

And it will be in the public record so folks can go grab it. And I'm sure we'll talk more about it when we do actually move to the item. So thank you for clarifying that. I will make the following motion. I move that the County Board adopt the resolutions in attachment A. Nope. Let's make sure we make the right resolution.

How about that?

Is this one right? Yep. Sorry about that. No problem.

I instead would like to move this motion. I move that the County Board adopt the resolution attachment one of the staff report to authorize advertisement of public hearings on the County Board's own motion for the Planning Commission and County Board to future dates concurrent with consideration of the Air and Space Force Association site plan amendment, SPLA 25-00018, SPA number 361, and use permit UPER25-0038 applications to consider and resolve to amend the GLUP from low office apartment hotel, medium residential, and public to low office apartment hotel for an area located at 1501 Langston Boulevard, RPC number 16-005-001 as shown in attachment two of the staff report.

second motion has been moved and seconded do you want to speak to your motion keeping in mind that um we're we're we may have additional conversation to sort of in an appropriate but uh attenuated way try to surface some of the issues and give a little bit of a sense But over to you, Ms. Cunningham.

Yeah, I think I just will very briefly surface. I mean, this is the request to advertise, again, without a specific date yet, so we're not rushing forward for sure. But to make it possible to clean up some GLUP designations that appear to be really just, you know, drawing errors, so particularly on the, the removal of the public designation it's not that it was a park or it was a school it was anything before it was just the way the the right-of-way for 66 was sketched on a page many decades ago so we'll talk more about that I'm sure in the upcoming meetings I think also issues raised are around the master transportation plan and infrastructure just making sure there's capacity any changes or inconsistencies with the area plan construction hours that the neighborhood and the owner would like to amend the general site plan conditions potentially and then finally the the details of the conservation easement and density calculations

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. So for my part, I'll just, we both have engaged with Ms. Frisarelli and Ms. Alfonso-Ahmed in preparation for these meetings. And so we try to surface some of these issues in a sort of modern world. Mr. Roberts has emailed from the plane where he is and said he appreciates that we at least are trying to surface the issues they broadly fall into two buckets for me. Some areas where I think that there are drafting errors that are there and other areas where they're relevant but policy issues that i think we can still discuss i think mr roberts um you know where to find us and certainly we are willing to meet with you uh on these issues so mr spain uh that's my concluding comments i'll be voting for it over to you mr spain yeah my concluding comments on this is one i want to thank uh mr roberts aaron for for reaching out to us and i think each one of us have had opportunity

to meet with him. He's a great ambassador for his community. And I think for staff, even though this is RTA and y'all have had, you've seen his email, I think not just site plan conditions, but density calculation, land use, construction hours, which you've heard already, things we could be prepared to kind of talk about down the road. It'd be most appropriate when that time's come. So that's all I have, Mr. Chair, and I'm looking forward to additional conversations.

Thank you, Mr. Spain. Seeing no other lights, the question is on Ms. Cunningham's amendment. All those in favor, say aye.

Aye. Hold on, hold on, hold on.

On her motion,

On Ms. Cunningham's motion.

There are no amendments. And so the question is, sorry, on her motion. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes 5-0. Thank you, Madam Vice Chair, for keeping my process correct here. We now turn to the consent agenda items. Mr. Kushner, would you call our consent agenda items in order as listed. I believe we may have just one.

Certainly, we have one item that was pulled. It is item number 10 for the Tyndale Christian School at 712 and 716 North Barton Street. It's a two-part item. The first is the use permit review for a private school for up to 40 students located at 712 and 716 North Barton. And the second part is the use permit review for a private school for up to 80 students located again at 712 and 716 North Barton.

Mr. Schwartz, can you conjure up Mr. Southerland, please?

Yes, I will do that right now. Cedric, up here.

Yes, thank you for having me this evening. Again, my name is Cedric Sutherland, associate planner on the current planning team at CPHD. With me today, I have Mr. Anthony Fusarelli, planning director at CPHD. And I'll just move forward with my short verbal presentation. This is a review of associated use permits for the Tyndale Christian School. located at 712 and 716 North Barton Street. Item A, UPER 24-00005, first appeared in was first approved by the County Board in June 2024, which authorized enrollment, permitted enrollment of up to 40 students. Item B, UPER 24-00032, approved in January 2025, amended the use permit to allow permitted enrollment of up to 80 students and included the schedule review this month of June 2026. which allowed staff time to assess the use during the 2025-2026 school year. During the one-year review of item A in December 2025, the county attorney advised that the 40-student use permit must remain in effect until the scheduled review of UPR 24-00032. At that time, the use permit allowing for up to 80 students will become the governing use permit if renewed by the county board. As a part of the current review for the use for up to 80 students, staff has not identified any adverse impacts associated with the increased enrollment. In addition, the Lion Park Citizens Association expressed support for the renewal of the use permit. However, several residents along North Barton Street continue to express concerns with the use and is in opposition to its continuation. Staff believes that the continued use of the private school for up to 80 students or not have an adverse impact on the surrounding community. Therefore, staff recommend discussing item A, UPER 24-00005, the use permit for up to 40 students, and two, renewing item B, UPER 24-00032, the use permit for up to 80 students with an administrative review in three years and no further scheduled county board review. That concludes my presentation.

Thank you, Mr. Sutherland, and thank you, Mr. Schwartz, for your conjuring powers. Very much appreciate it. Now it's over to the applicant for your presentation, Mr. Pritchard.

You can raise that on the side.

It's been a while. Good evening. Evan Pritchard here on behalf of the applicant. I'll spare you a presentation. Mr. Sutherland captured it perfectly. We're very pleased with the record we've set of responsiveness to Lyon Park and area neighbors. It's impossible to please 100% of people 100% of the time, but Ms. Johns, Kimberly Johns, the head of school, has tirelessly participated in the Lion Park Civic Association meetings and made every effort to hear concerns as they arrive and address them promptly. So we're very proud to have staff support and look forward to continuing school operations. We're happy to answer any questions you have. Thank you.

Thank you for being here, Mr. Pritchard, and for being willing to answer questions if and as we have questions. I believe we may have public speakers on the side of Mr. Kushner. Do we, in fact?

We do, in fact. Our first public speaker is Ms. Meredith Grunden, followed by John Musso.

Ms. Grunden, I believe you're there virtually. Is that correct?

Yes, sir.

Go ahead.

Yes, sir. I'm here. okay i just uh first thank you for hearing um our opinions as a lion park resident we've only been in the neighborhood for a couple months now but we specifically chose lion park so that we could be within biking and walking distance to tyndale school we've been welcomed so warmly into the community we're so grateful um just for an incredible safe neighborhood to be able to bike to school and just the overall positive impact we have had both in Lyon Park and with Tyndale Christian School.

Thank you very much. Appreciate your being here virtually and sharing your thoughts with us. Our next public speaker, you can certainly stay on to hear the conclusion, but we'll probably shortly have a conversation with the board. So Mr. Musil.

Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the county board, John Musso, government affairs manager at the Arlington Chamber of Commerce. On behalf of the Arlington Chamber, I just want to say a few brief words in support of Tyndale Christian School, and I urge you all to please vote to adopt the new use permit for up to 80 students. As noted by the previous speaker, Tyndale has really planted and grown roots here in Arlington over the past two years of operation, and they've worked through a lot of different challenges issues and concerns with staff and as noted by the applicant, they have been very proactive and responsive in working with us. So we believe that they've been a great partner here in Arlington. We believe that they contribute to the educational landscape of Arlington and we do have full confidence that going forward they will be great productive members of the community as they currently are in Lyon Park and Arlington overall. So I urge you to please go ahead and adopt this new use permit to allow Tyndale to continue to grow and thrive here in Arlington. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Musso. Next speaker. And our next and final speaker on this item is Dr. Kenneth Koopmans. Dr. Koopmans.

Good evening. My name is Ken Koopmans, and my wife and I are residents of Lyon Park. And we have two children, two daughters, that attend Tyndale Christian School, a rising third grader and a rising first grader. We moved here from Michigan last summer, and we specifically sought out Lyon Park as we looked at different communities and different schools. And we really fell in love with the community and the school after several visits. We really appreciated how overwhelmingly positive the neighborhood seemed and as we talked to people and we really felt strongly about the mission of Hillsdale and everything they teach from academic excellence and integrity and how you treat your neighbors. And we feel like that not just the people, the staff and faculty there, but the community of Lyon Park also treats us the same way. We live specifically across maybe a five-minute walk from the school, and we chose that so that we could walk to school and really be part of the community. And one of the most special things about that for us is that, you know, for me, before I go to work every morning, I get to hold my hands with my daughters and walk them to school. And what's special about that is that we get to interact with people in the community. So we see the same people every morning that are going for a walk themselves. They're taking their dogs for a walk. They're getting ready for work. And it's helping my daughters to just become part of the community and learn to say good morning to people and helping them socially. And it's also just great to be a part of that. We get to school. And it's important for us as walkers and to me that it's a safe walk and that the cars are cautious of people who are walking with children. And they are. The staff in particular does a great job of making sure that somebody's outside. If you know the area, Coach Bob is out there helping the parents who are dropping off students and helping them to get out onto Barton Street and make sure that that's safe. We've never once had any incidents where we felt like a car was going too fast or there was too much traffic there. It really is a safe place for us. My wife picks them up in the afternoon and feels the same way. So we just, we love the community. We love the people, the neighborhood, and I just wanted to share all the positive things that we have about the school and the people in the neighborhood.

Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Koopmans. Are there any other speakers, Mr. Kushner?

There are no further speakers.

Thank you. Conversation is now with the board. I'll turn to, we'll certainly can have discussion, but turn to Ms. Coffey or Mr. Spain, whoever is ready to do a motion and maybe one of the other of you will be ready to second. We will then discuss.

Mr. Chair, thank you. I move that the County Board, A, discontinue the use permit for a private school for up to 40 students, and B, renew the use permit for a private school, Tyndall Christian School, for up to 80 students subject to the previously approved and amended conditions of the staff report, and with an administrator review in three years, July, 2029, and no further scheduled County Board review.

Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir. Second. I'll second that. Got it, so do you wanna speak to your motion?

Sure, it'll just be brief. One, this is not my first time with the Tyndall project and what they've been going through since I've been on the board 20 months and I've also had opportunity to go over there and pay a visit to the school and ride my bike by the school in the morning. Well, actually the county bike. The e-bike. And let me say this much. I really appreciate what's going on there. We hear the neighbors. I hear what you're saying and what their concerns are. But we need options here in Arlington. And I think given what we've seen, no, you know, major issues that have come up that have arisen. I'm fully supportive of what Tyndall's doing. I think you heard some of that from our colleagues here, but I support this and I know it got pulled from consent just for a public discussion, but we've had this discussion about Tyndall before.

So I'm in full support of it. Thank you very much, Mr. Spain. For my part, just a welcome to the Michiganders and please stay. We're happy you're here. Certainly in past times, I forget, I think it may be Dr. Johns and Ms. Johns, the lead of school, has brought a whole bunch of young children who are sufficiently, frankly, adorable that it's very challenging to try to think analytically in that context. We have heard from, I believe, a couple that lives there with concerns. I think we have discussed them in full in past conversations with due respect to the truths that those those two, that couple feels and has. I'm still ready to move forward with that, colleagues, unless there are other comments. Yes, Ms. Cunningham, go ahead.

Just thank you all for coming out tonight. I know our practice of when we pull an item it goes to later in the evening rather than being heard on Saturday can be inconvenient for folks' schedules and for bedtimes and for other things. But we do appreciate hearing from you and appreciate the kind words about both the neighborhood and the community and the schools. So thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Carantona's comments or vestigial?

I have, yes, it's vestigial. I was ready to vote on the motion.

Got it. Great. And since Ms. Cunningham mentioned it, certainly when your young kids put their hand in yours and hold your hand, I'm always more thankful than I'm sure they're not really paying attention. My daughter at age two and a half, but I'm thrilled for it. So that's enough. We got to keep going and stay focused here. So thank you very much. The question is on the motion. All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Aye. That motion passes 5-0. We'll now turn to additional items. Are there additional? Thank you, Mr. Pritchard. And thank you, Mr. Koopman. You can stay, but you don't have to. And now we'll turn to additional items. Mr. Kushner, are there additional items to come before the board?

There are a few additional items before you this evening. The first concerns the appointment of the independent policing auditor.

Thank you very much. I'll cover this and then make a motion. There's no staff presentation. We were able to change state laws such that the County Board will now supervise the Independent Policing Auditor. This is to finalize an agreement between the Independent Policing Auditor and the Board. We had thought we were going to be all buttoned up, but there's one or two issues and it's better to get it right and we will perhaps or probably take this up, I would guess, on August the 11th, but I'm not in the motion committing to any such future date. So I move that the County Board defer consideration of the employment agreement with the Independent Policing Auditor until a future meeting of the County Board. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Mr. Spain. And perhaps I should have left the motion to our two leads on this as liaisons. Thank you very much, Ms. Cunningham and Mr. Spain. The question is on the motion I made with Mr. Spain seconded. All those in favor of deferral say aye.

Aye.

That motion passes 5-0. We have one more, if I'm correct, we have one more issue to come before the board this evening. I will go ahead and make a motion. I move that the county board authorize in final form approved by the county attorney settlements arising from the matter of Escarlet, Ramirez, Torres, and Scarelf Ordonez Ramirez versus Ruth Maul case numbers GV26-1304 and GV26-1305 now pending before the Arlington County General District Court and authorize the county attorney or his designee to execute any documents necessary to effectuate such settlement. Is there a second?

Second.

Seconded by Ms. Coffey. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? That motion passes 5-0. With that, Mr. Kushner, are there any other items to come before the board?

I do believe there's one additional item. Board Member Cunningham would like to offer a motion.

I have one additional item before we break for the summer. And I've debated about how to bring this up because we have been very busy. But I do want to name what we've been hearing from the community. And I think we had a bit of a robust conversation on Saturday. And we've been having lots of conversation with community members across the year. I think we will want to have a conversation sometime in the next four to 12 months about EHO, the permits, which will be, I mean, the permit caps, which will be expiring, and what, if anything, we can do in the near term, medium term, while we're waiting on the courts, the very slow courts, deliberate courts, I suppose, to get to an end of a number of tangles and conversations. And so I'm going to share this motion, and I think it's probably not the right motion, and so I want to honor that because we haven't vetted it all the way through up here. And so I fully recognize that we will probably not proceed with it today. But in the spirit of wanting to share with the community that we might get to it in the fall, I feel like it might be worthwhile. And I will say, in particular, I had the opportunity to visit with Dr. Alfred Taylor yesterday. And I asked him what's his advice for all of us. And he was very gracious and very sharp, as always. And he said, you know, the number one thing for our community is you've got to hold space for conversation. We are more on the same page than we realize. And we need to have conversations, have hard conversations, really make room to listen and deliberate and listen some more. And so it is in the spirit of that wisdom that I bring this forward.

And just for context, and while you're proceeding, Dr. Taylor is a longtime leader in our community who is in his mid-90s, I believe, or 93. Ninety-one. Who's not feeling well, and he's in hospice. And it's not a secret, but I just thought I'd add that context, if that's okay.

Yeah, thank you. So I think each of you know that I've asked repeatedly whether we can, whether there are any options to opt out of the legal proceedings and revisit and refine the policy and move on with our community that we all represent based on land use principles, refine the policy based on land use principles. Unfortunately, the legal technicalities have made that impractical. Instead, after consultation with our county attorney, I offer the following motion for your consideration. I move that the board add to its agenda at the September county board meeting an action item on its own motion to consider an initiating resolution to consider zoning text amendments related to the annual limit on permits for expanded housing option development and specifically consider implementation data comparison to other jurisdictions that have adopted similar housing diversification policies including any permit caps or phasing mechanisms employed by such jurisdictions and options for adjusting the permit cap levels.

thank you so the question is there's a motion on the table and the question is there a second I guess unless the county attorney says it's not permissible what I'm gonna ask is if there's a reason why you can't speak to the motion a touch more such that we would if there's anything addition you additional context you want to add I don't see a reason why not is that permissible

It can be permissible, but the purpose of a second is to bring something up for discussion and debate.

Yeah, I think I'm good with the introduction, just to keep it. So I would invite a second for discussion. I would not fully expect a second for discussion, but certainly would invite that.

Colleagues, for my part, this is, I think that we would have the legal authority still to do this in the intervening time before September, number one. Number two, I'm flexible and we got in the last 24 hours we resolved third spaces which you brought forward but it's brought to me recently enough that I want more to understand so for example I learned about this you know a little bit ago like within the last two hours and I didn't know that it was focused on caps my position on on EHO has not changed um but i you know we might have a supreme court decision and i also have not paid much attention to the caps timing because i don't know whether it's told or not told so that's the context i'm not in a space to second but i wanted to give context if there's anyone else who'd like to speak to it miss coffee

Yeah, I think I just want to share primarily my disappointment that this is the way that you've gone about this. I think the fact that this is news on the dais to three of your five colleagues and that Mr. DeFerranti only learned about an hour ago about this is truly just not respectful to us as your colleagues. And I think the fact that also our staff were not aware that this was something that you planned to do is, to me, just not acceptable. There is room for us to disagree on the policy. There is room for us to have discussions. But frankly, this is not the way to go about it. And to surprise everyone with this, It's a disservice to the point that you're trying to make and the work that you're trying to get done because it just puts us in a horrible position now where none of us have had the time to think it through. None of us have had the time to have a conversation with you except for perhaps Mr. DeFerranti in the five minutes between closed session and coming out here to actually discuss what the motivation is, what the purpose is, how we could or could not want to go about this. And so I just, I feel deeply uncomfortable with this. And I think that is the primary thing that I want to communicate is this is not what we expect out of each other. This is not, you know, again, it is not that we all have to agree on every single thing. Lord knows I've been on the losing side of motions. I've been the one upset up here that things aren't going my way and that's fine. But not because people didn't have time to talk to me or at least respect that I deserved a conversation. And so that's mostly what I am feeling right now. And I don't see how this board can cohesively do the work that we need to do if this kind of a thing is repeated.

Hold on, just, you know, I won't go long, but I just say, you know, you spoke your truth and also, you know, on process. And I guess what I'm going to suggest is that we see if Mr. Spain, and we're all exhausted. And so we see if Mr. Spain or Mr. Karantonis have additional thoughts. Oh, I do. Go ahead.

So I just found out about this a few, less than 30 minutes ago, Ms. Cunningham. And I feel a certain kind of way because probably an hour ago I was sitting here talking about how we were coming together. And I have said in my 20 months of being on this board that there's a wrong way to do the right thing. We don't like surprises, I don't like surprises. And I also, I'm gonna be honest with you, I'm not even gonna use his name because to use a person's name like that in the situation that they're in, in this moment, as part of discussion, it's really bothersome to me because That's not right. And it's one thing about we all need to come together in this moment. That's true. We're going to have these courageous conversations. But this feels like, you know, the 11th hour, staff doesn't know, I didn't know, and you and I have talked. You know, I'm always about being transparent. You and I have talked a lot in the past 24 to 36 hours. This never came up. So why now? And I'm just trying to figure out, are we trying to get like talking points or something or all now? Like I'm not playing that game. And everyone knows where I'm at with EHO. I am not about going back, but I think this, the manner in which it has happened today, it really, it was done in the right way. And I don't know, Mr. County Attorney, I probably wouldn't even entertain the motion. But it's just this was not the time nor the place to have this conversation. We could have had it tomorrow. We could have talked about it in our meeting come up in August. And I feel really blindsided by it. So just, you know, I love all of y'all, but I probably wouldn't have done this tonight. Thank you.

So continuing to try to sort of keep the truths coexisting and, you know, I see Mr. Karantonis' light. Go ahead.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Everything has been said. I mean, I'm very sorry, Ms. Cunningham. This is not acceptable, period. In all the dimensions that you have heard, plus the one one. This is politics. and pure politics, I'm sorry. You cannot credibly say that there is no space for discussion. That was not offered to you or in any frame. You let me know at 7.57 p.m. So the one logical conclusion would be that you are not interested in discussion. You are interested only in the public exposure and your own political benefit here. So fine. So be it. We are political. This is policy. It's also politics. But I don't believe that you chose the right instrument to engender a productive and trust building conversation, not with me, we will have this conversation, but with the community. How do you want the community to trust you? The community that is not on your side, which is a significant part of this community, and by the way, would immediately run and ask, what was that? How do you want to deal with this. If you were the one who always said, oh my god, this was forced on the community, and everybody was taken by surprise despite the four years of previous discussion, et cetera, you are basically not only replicating the same, but you are basically slapping it in the face. So you make yourself completely non-viable from the point of view of credibility. I do think that what you heard was about maintaining community trust. And I'm sorry, but I think this is a bad moment, and better we overcome that and forget that.

Thank you, Mr. Karantonis. And so I'm going to suggest, I'm certainly going to give you space to speak your truth in addition. I'm mindful that not a simple moment and It's not all simple to have a perspective that may not be shared on this issue by others. So I think I can coexist with understanding where colleagues came from and also be mindful that in the mix of trying to sort of speak your truth, difficult. I do also, I don't always live perfectly by trying to avoid surprises, but that is a point I empathize with. I want to give us a chance to go home, but I want you to also speak your truth. You may not be able to respond to everybody's thoughts. And I don't think you should feel that you have to. But I also feel that we need to preserve for all of us some process progress that we have made. And so leave it to you to finish.

Yeah, I really appreciate both the feelings and the clear and careful articulation of them. I know it's not an easy time, and we all are kind of on fumes. But I would ask the attorney if you could clarify a little bit about if we are to have, as we start this conversation, how in the moment that we're in, we have to do it as a initiating resolution, and we can't have staff spend any time on it before we do an initiating resolution, which is why only the attorney and the manager would know about it before there's discussion. So if you could just clarify that a little bit.

That's part of Judge Shell's ruling where basically he said you need to have an initiating resolution before work can be done on zoning tax amendments. And that's been the process we've been following since that ruling.

Yeah, and so in attempting to find a motion that could be stated this year at some point, this was the best we could come up with. And the intent of offering it so early is to make sure there's time for us to consider about initiating a resolution. But we couldn't even frame the language without having the discussion with the manager, but it can't go below that because of the judge shall rule in. So it's very uncomfortable in a whole number of fronts. And then, you know, I did want to make sure, Mr. Chair, that you were the first to know, and I know we had all sorts of scheduled staffers to get through an enormous amount of work on a $4.3 billion project. So I think I will leave it there, and I will look forward to talking to each of you more about it after our summer break.

Thank you, Ms. Cunningham. Colleagues, with that, I do not believe the motion not having a second. It's not for further discussion at this point. We've had some. Are there any other items to come before the board, Mr. Kushner?

There are none.

We have. An August recess. We are adjourned.

It's our August recess.