City Council - Regular Meeting

this 23rd February 2026 Williamsburg city council meeting. Mr. Wood please in the I aliance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you, Mr. Wood. Item two is the adoption of the meeting agenda. Is there a motion to adopt the agenda? I'll make that motion. Thank you, Mr. Short. Is there a second? I second. Thank you, Mr. Comi. Any discussion?

All in favor say I. I. Any oppose? Eyes have it. Five to zero. Item three, matters from the mayor. Uh, just wanted to alert the public to an upcoming program provided by the Wayswood Redevelopment and Housing Authority in cooperation with the Virginia Housing and Atlantic Union Bank April 11th from 9:30 to 3:30 at Fairfax Hall. will be a class for first-time home buyers covering a variety of relevant topics including personal finance and managing credit, role of the lender, working with the real estate agent, home inspection and closing. Uh for information on that, you can call 540-4386445. I know there's some other organizations within the city like RISE that have had these as well. It's a wealth of information for those that are uh in those categories of being first-time home buyers. So, item four matters from council. I have uh one thing I was uh had the privilege of going down to the Blue Ridge Children's Museum with their ribbon cutting on on Thursday of last week. And if you haven't been down there to check it out, they've got a great uh facility down there. um it's going to help uh you know enrich and develop our some of our kids in our community in Stanton and Augusta County. So uh uh hats off and applaud the folks who uh put all that together. It was a lot of volunteers. A lot of hard work went into it. It's a great facility and they've already got a number of uh kids in there. Um and uh the only thing I wish for them was uh good luck when they have to expand because I got a feeling that's not going to be too long from now. But they got a great facility down there. So if you get a chance, go check it out.

Yeah, I would just echo that and and uh um I think an appreciation to Karen Orlando who has really been the spear um head for that uh program and um if it uh uh not to um not chat with anybody ahead of time, but would love to be able to um honor her at a at a at a future meeting. She's getting ready to her and her husband are going to uh she worked all this hard all this time to get this thing open and she and her husband are relocating and so we'd love to honor her. um in some way um formally through a resolution if you're so inclined else. [snorts] Okay. Item five is consideration of the consent agenda. Is there a motion to adopt the consent agenda? So moved. Thank you, Mr. Shaw. Is there a second?

Second. Thank you, Mr. Wood. Any discussion? All in favor, please say I. Any opposed? Eyes have it. 5 Z. Item six is to hold a public hearing and consider adopting an ordinance granting a non-exclusive franchise to Shannondor Cable Television LLC, Shintel andor other builders to construct and maintain fiber optic wine infrastructure in the city's right away. Mr. H.

Yes, sir. Uh, Mayor Lee and members of council, you'll recall that last week the staff um, Miss Michaelelsson provided an overview of these two items. We introduced, seconded, and had opportunity for discussion this evening. We'll have a public hearing and council unless there are additional questions or discussion um can um consider the question.

Any questions? Oh, we have no uh the sign sheets. Okay. I hereby open and close the public hearing. Item seven. Oh, I'm sorry. This ordinance was introduced, seconded, and discussed at previous meetings. Unless there are questions or discussions, I'll call the question. All in favor of the ordinance granting the non-exclusive franchise to Chantel say I. I. Any opposed? Eyes have it. 50.

I I didn't I didn't say anything. So, can you please clarify for me? Did you say we don't have any signup sheets back there for that or That's correct. That's correct. So, we can't do what we just Well, no, ma'am. I would assume that um that if someone wanted to speak to the public hearing that they would have indicated as much when we opened the public hearing. Okay. If the mayor would would would like to verify that. But absent that, I would assume that since we didn't have someone inquire or raise their hand, then no one's here to speak. But you're welcome to I can do that.

Open call. Yeah, I can do that. Do what? What are we doing? Verifying. Um, are we verifying? Yes. Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. Great. So, I hereby open the public hearing. Is there anyone that wanted to speak um on item six? Okay. I hereby close the public hearing. So, we'll do this again. This ordinance was introduced, seconded, and discussed at the previous meeting. Unless there are questions or discussion, I'll call the question. All in favor of the ordinance granting the non-exclusive franchise to Chintel, say I. I. I.

Any opposed? Eyes have it. 5 Z. Thank you, Mayor Ki, for bringing that up. Item seven is to hold a public hearing and consider adopting an ordinance granting a non-exclusive franchise to Lumos Networks to LLC doing business as SegRa andor other biders to construct and maintain telecommunications facilities in the cities right away. Mr. H. Um, same report, sir. These this was presented to the council last week, introduced, seconded, and discussed. We'll open the public hearing and then council can consider um final action.

Any questions, Miss? I hereby open the public hearing. Did we get some sheets back there? Yes, sir. Yes. Does anyone Does anyone want to speak at the public hearing on this topic? I hereby close the public hearing. This ordinance was introduced, seconded, and discussed at the previous meeting. Unless there are questions or discussion, I'll call the question. All in favor of the ordinance granting the non-exclusive franchise to segre say I. I.

Any opposed? Eyes have a 5-0. Item eight is to receive a report updating the f fiscal year 2026 revenues and expenditures and upcoming debt issuance. Mr. McCormick. Thank you, Mayor Lee. Um, so this starts on page 19 uh in your agenda packet for the uh enterprise funds and for the general fund for the high level view. I'm going to get our assistant director of finance, Katie Keser, to take you through some of that and then we'll circle back and I'll go over some meals and some upcoming debt uh issuances and items we need to discuss.

Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and members of council. Tonight, I am going to be presenting the city um fiscal year 2026 second quarter financial report. This is as of December 31st. Um I'm going to begin with an overview and then follow up with general fund revenue and fund expenditures. Um end with enterprise funds and then pass it over to Cameron for meals tax and debt overview. Okay. Um now that we are 6 months into the fiscal year, revenues and expenditures across all the funds are trending as expected. In the general fund, revenues are 69% collected and expenditures are 51% utilized. In the enterprise funds, revenues are tracked are tracking with what we expected with the billing cycles and expenditures are remain aligned with the budget and incumbrances. Um so we've collected 69% of the annual revenue that we have budgeted. Uh this is primarily driven by real estate property taxes which are front-loaded. Uh you'll note in the full report the real estate tax is currently at 99.3% collection. Sales and meals taxes are trending ahead of prior year and budget. And it's important to remember that revenue timing is cyclical, not linear. Um, which means that revenue timing is based on tax deadlines and billing cycles rather than spread out equally over 12 months. Uh, general fund expenditures, uh,

51% utilized as of the revised budget. Um, this includes earlier incumbences as well as the current um, year-to- date actual spending. Some of the are our annual and semianual payments recorded. Uh, this could be such as insurance or certain debt service obligations that are recorded during the first half of the year. Spending is trending with what we expected. And then finally the enterprise funds update. Um overall uh both are trending with what we expected with revenues. Um with the billing cycle we were looking at a 37%. So we are um trending within what our expectations were. Storm water is at 88% of revenue collected. This is high based on the bill. It's build semiannually and then expenditures across the enterprise fund as I said are tracking with expected levels. There are some larger percentages in certain funds and that's influenced by capital projects that uh were encumbered earlier in the year. And then overall all of the funds are trending to what our midyear projections were. I'm going to turn it over to Cameron to conclude the update.

So, just a couple of the revenues to drill down in. So, in the general fund, the majority of your revenues is in um your real property tax and your personal property tax. Uh personal property tax or real property tax comes in two payments, July and December. So, both of those have passed. So, we would expect most of that revenue to have been collected. So, 99% is a good number. um personal property tax due December 5th. You would expect most of that money to be collected by this point since we're past the due dates on those. Um the big uh revenue item that's still outstanding that hasn't started collections on is business license and those start in the next month or so um for collections. And then your local sales tax and your meals tax. So, your local sales tax um through December is trending up um a little bit from the prior year, not the significant amount that we've seen in the past, but it will it should, assuming it doesn't um the last six months don't fall off, should meet budget expectations. And then since council did some adjustment to the rate and meals tax, we thought it might be helpful to see um kind of some of the effects of that. So during the 2026 budget cycle we increased the rate from 7 to 7 a.5% which resulted in a budget of about 7.7 million uh collections through December on an acrruel base. So when we ran these reports at the beginning of February um we had numbers through February 1st. So collections through February 1st which would be receipts through December for businesses they pay their December meals tax in January were 4.3 million. So again in meals tax we continue to trend ahead. Meals tax this year is actually doing a little bit better than sales tax and should be one of the revenues that again assuming that the assuming that the trend line holds should be one of the revenues that we see a decent bump in during the 2027 budget process. And there's graphs for those on page 25 and 26 if you want to look into the details in your um council packet. The other

item that we wanted to include and touch on is on page 18. There's a lot more detailed I'm sorry, there's the um back up. That's the detail of the meals tax. That's also in your packet. But on page 18 of your packet is a list of kind of upcoming debt issuances with a quick uh primer on when the reimbursement if we've done a reimbursement resolution, when it was done, the estimated bid date, estimated borrowing date, funding, payment source, which is just which fun, what fund it's going to come out of or anticipated to come out of. Uh low-end estimate on the borrowing, high-end estimate on the borrowing, and then low-end payment, and high-end payment for each of the borrowings. Um, so the first three are ones that we are looking at probably in the next couple of months to six six months to a year, which is your Nature's Crossing Technology Center, Wingsboro High School renovation, and Shandro Village Drive um upgrades. What may end up happening with those, the Shandro Village Drive upgrade has a portion that's a VDH loan, but also a VRA or local borrowing piece. for those three loans. We may end up going out um and you might run into a situation where all of those hit in the fall of 2026 and we come back and say, "Let's do one larger local issuance for all of those," which would save you on some issuance costs. Uh the other ones are just more FYI, the sewer plant upgrades, the public work administrative administrative space, and the collection system capacity. Those are things we'll be planning for during the 2027 budget, but the first payment likely won't be due until the 2028 budget cycle hits because usually there's about a six-month lag from when you borrow the funds versus when your first payment's due. Um, and we can do some things with the interest on those so that maybe the first year's interest only. So, we can step into those. So, those three are more of an FYI. You'll see those things in your budget um for this year to start

some planning purposes for, but the first three will be the ones that we primarily focus on this year, making sure that we have the majority of the payments ready to go um starting next starting next year. So, that is all I had. If council has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them now. Uh no actions needed on this item, though. Any questions for Cameron or Katie? All right. Not at this time. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you both. Item nine is to consider amending the following sections of the employee policy manual. Dates of employment, sick leave blank policy, annual leave policy, paid time off policy, drug and alcohol policy. Mr. McCormack. Thank you again, Mr. Lee. Um, I'm going to enlist Mr. Cochril's help on this. He's our human resource director. He's going to grab items A and B for us and then I'll circle back around and get C, D, and E. Good evening all.

Uh so the first two are pretty much an adjustment to um clean up either a decision that was made in previous iterations of the policy or to factor in current uh administrative practices. So for the dates of employment uh back in 2022, we elected to add terminology to consider prior VRS designation for other um potential candidates that we would then consider that VRS service to factor into recruiting them with us to um basically adjust their cool date to then come in at a higher bucket of um their appropriate leave, whether it be whatever category they were designated as this was effective. We have since seen an improvement in our recruitment tactics and our attraction to uh talent that has prior government experience. Uh but in doing so, we did find that there was a discrepancy that we didn't take the extra step to clean up any current employees that had prior VRS designation. So over uh many um efforts, we're working to get a collective list of those employees that we missed at the time that we implemented the 2022 and we'll adjust our cool dates accordingly. So that's what the terminology uh that you guys have um will then allow us to do and that effective date is to be July 1 so that we do have time to actually execute the change appropriately for all that are affected. Uh the next one is to clean up uh language in our sick leave bank policy. This is a very um dated I don't know the origin of this particular policy. So, we had to do a full revamp as far as um structure of the policy, the language to carry over into the new um you know 2026 language that we use for most of our policies. But then we also made some clarifying adjustments on several areas. So, I'll walk through them very uh quickly for you all, but you'll see the the full detail. So the first one is we wanted to clarify that

the purpose of the sick leave bank was to be used on the employee only not to be um for other designated opportunities um that would be covered under FMLA when it comes to relatives or um other parties as it's laid out in those policies. So we want to be specific that it is for cases that are affect the employee directly. Uh it's also not to be applicable for anything scheduled or um whether that be appointments or surgeries that are in the future. It is to cover emergency situations. Uh so that way in the event that somebody has a situation that then translates to more time in the hospital or more time uh with whatever the case may be, they have the opportunity to then access the the leave bank in that circumstance. Um, the other clarifying points that we wanted to make sure we made was eligibility for membership. Uh, it wasn't entirely clear in the old policy whether it was an ongoing enrollment process for all new hires or um how often we did the enrollment. So, we just want to clarify language to make sure that we only do enrollment once a year and that new hires do have to wait the first 12 months for them to be able to then enroll in the bank. um that kind of took care of itself because new hires typically didn't have enough time on the front end to even donate to the bank. So, it kind of worked itself out in practice, but we wanted to make sure we add the language to make sure we were clear on the interpretation. Uh there were uh bits and pieces in the old policy that talked about a sick leave bank committee. Uh that committee never really manifested or existed. So, we wanted to change that to make sure it was clear that HR and city management were the in fact um procedural policy direction for the policy. So, we added that language in there. And then lastly, um anything elected uh surgery wise, so much like I spoke to before where it's scheduled surgeries uh are not covered under this because it's

not considered an emergency um procedure. So, I will turn it back over to Cameron to cover the other policies as they're driven by um functions, but thank you and we'll circle back for questions. Thank you.

Items three and four um come about from the same policy change. Uh we discussed this just briefly during um when Brown Edwards was here and presented your annual comprehensive financial report, but the governmental accounting standards board put a new policy in place on how we are supposed to acrue um leap balances at the end of each year based on u each employees liability balance. And so one of the things that would make or will make that standard much easier to implement or continue to implement and adhere to is having our leave balances line up with the dates with our fiscal year end. So currently if you're over the max and our leave balance, we look at that on December 31st instead of on June 30th. And so the recommendation was and is to change that from December 31st to June 30th to match the fiscal year. So that that way at the end of each fiscal year if someone is over their max leave carryover um their hours get uh reduced at that point instead of running into situations where that doesn't happen until December 31st and we have to make an accounting estimate as to what might what may or may not get paid out of that balance to affectuate that change this year. Um we did not reduce balances as of December 31st. We let employees know they have a leave holiday until June 30th to get below their max by June 30th. We anticipate we may have some one-off cases um that we have to deal with between now and June 30th um and then to have the standard in uh full effect come next fiscal year. Uh the next one is the drug and alcohol policy and that's amended. Um the required pre-employment screening to match the federal and state drug classifications for marijuana. Uh the new te testing standards um should be important to note will only affect pre-employment testing. It will not affect current employees. uh still a zero tolerance workplace, but it gives HR and city management some discretion on front-end testing of marijuana.

So, if council has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. Now, the entire employee policy manual is available online and I did put a link in uh the briefing that you can click on and take a look at any of our policies if you'd like. the um amended policies are available in the packet and are redlined uh and management recommends adoption of uh recommends adoption of the policies and that can happen this evening if council desires questions or

so so just for clarification you still can't come to work high but they're not going to test you for marijuana to start employment is that what was just said So to clarify your point, you are correct. Zero tolerance still in the workplace. That's guidelines. Um we are still screening for it because you can't alter how they do the testing at the facility that we currently have our contract under. Okay.

But we do have discretion for certain positions to make a dis a case that if it's only pops for marijuana that we can still move forward with the employment. Okay. And then just know that the manager has different restrictions on how to do reasonable suspicion, which is all laid out in our policy on how we handle that. It doesn't affect should they be under reasonable suspicion or have an incident that they still um fall within the guidelines of terms of employment and can be dismissed. Okay. Okay. Thanks for the clarification. Do we have many that are we're going back on the BRS part of it that we is there many employees that are going back to have to catch their time up? Is that the right way?

Yes. That's why we built in the July one. Just to be clear on exact how many. I think when we initially made the pitch, it was around um couple dozen. So like 20ish employees that we had missed when we had done this originally. Uh we've since probably had people that have left due to retirement or some other means of leaving employment with us. But yeah, it's around it's it's a good handful that we miss. At least the I'm talking about the ones who may have worked maybe in the city of Stanton or some place that was under the VRS system that came to Wesboro. We're catching them up. Does that have an effect on their leave balance? Not on the balance, just the amount that they'll acrew moving forward. So they won't have any impact on what they currently have accessible to them now.

Any other questions? Thanks. Of course. Is there a motion uh to consider amending the following sections of employee manual? I'll make the motion. Thank you, Mrs. SL. Is there a second? Thank you, Mr. Wood. Any discussion? All in favor say I. I. Any oppose? Eyes have it 50. Item 10, communication correspondence calendar. Mr. Ham, I do not have anything this evening, sir. Thank you. Item 11, citizen comment. Yes. Um, Victoria Moxom.

Victoria Moxom, West 12th Street. Good evening. My name is Victoria and I am a former employee of Wesboro Public Schools. I had the privilege of working with exceptional learners at the high school. That experience gave me a deep understanding of both the dedication of our staff and the very real challenges our schools face every day. But dedication alone cannot replace resources. And I can tell you from experience that even with our current funding model, there is still great need for more. Serving students with disabilities, st students with learning differences, and students facing difficult life circumstances requires trained professionals, specialized services, and consistent support. That last one, consistency, is what we can expect to lose first if you choose to cut our funding. And these are not optional services. These are essential and in many cases legally required. Wesboro's growth is something to celebrate and a growing town needs strong schools at its center. When we invest in our schools, we invest in long-term strength of this community. These are not frivolous expenses. They are the fundamental building blocks of a town that wants to grow even more. And in this growing town, we should not be asking how little we can provide, but we should be asking how we can ensure that every child has what they need to succeed. Strong schools strengthen strong towns. Thank you for your time and for your commitment to our community. Item 12 is close session. The city manager's request to close session. Is

there a motion? Mr. Mayor, I move to recess into close session in order to consult with the city attorney regarding pending imminent domain litigation and specific legal matters relating to a state agency's authority and proposal that require the provision of legal advice as authorized by sections 2.2-3711. 23711A 7 and 8 of the Virginia code. Is there a second? A second. Thank you, Mr. Short. Any discussion? This requires a roll call vote. Miss Borde I

We're in close session.

The council return to open session and certify the closed session. I make the motion. Oh. Oh, no. I can't make the motion. Jim, Jim, it ain't going to do no good. [laughter] I know. Sorry.

Mr. Mayor, I move to adopt the following resolution. Whereas the city council of Wsswware has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to affirmative recorded vote in accordance with the provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act and whereas section 2.2-3712 of the code of Virginia requires a certification by this city council that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with Virginia law. Now therefore, be it resolved that the city council of Williamsboro hereby certifies that to the best of each member's knowledge, one only public business matters lawfully exempted from open meeting requirements by Virginia law were discussed in the closed meeting to which this certification resolution applies. And two, only such ma business matters were identified in the motion convening the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the city council of Wesboro.

Is there a second? I'll second. Thank you, Mr. Shelton. Any discussion? Because this requires a roll call vote. M I.

Item 13. We're in open possession. I'm sorry. Item 13, adjourn. Is there a motion? I'd like to make that motion. Thank you, Mr. Short. All in favor say I. I. I. We're done.