Board of Supervisors - Regular Meeting

Oh, go ahead.

Okay. I'm going to call to order this meeting of the Montgomery County board of supervisors this Monday, June 22nd. Our first order of business is to go into closed meeting. Be it resolved the Montgomery County board of supervisors of Montgomery County, Virginia, hereby enters into closed meeting for the purpose of discussing the following. Section 2.2-3711, five, discussion concerning a prospective business or industry or the expansion of an existing business or industry where no previous announcement has been made of the business or industry's interest in locating or expanding its facilities in the community. One, project number 2026-001. Two, project number 2026-0088. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. Kitts?

Aye.

Mr. King? Aye. Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Mr. Grafsky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Chair DeMont? Aye. Seven ayes.

We are in closed meeting. okay is there a motion to come out of closed session is that moved second hey madam clerk if you'll call the roll please

Mr. King?

Aye.

Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Mr. Grafsky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts?

Aye.

Chair DeMont? Aye. Seven ayes.

And now we need to certify the closed meeting. Whereas the Board of Supervisors of Montgomery County has convened a closed meeting on this date pursuant to an affirmative recorded vote and in accordance with the provisions of the Virginia Freedom of Information Act, and whereas section 2.2-3711 of the Code of Virginia requires a certification by the board that such closed meeting was conducted in conformity with Virginia law. Now therefore, be it resolved that the Board of Supervisors of Montgomery County, Virginia 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 public business matters Matters as were identified in the motion conveying the closed meeting were heard, discussed, or considered by the board. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Ms. Figgs? Aye. Mr. Grafsky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King? Aye. Chair DeMott? Aye. Seven ayes.

Next, we have a moment of silence and Pledge of Allegiance led by our County Administrator, Ms. Angie Hill.

Please rise for a moment of silence and then join me as I lead us in the pledge. Let us pledge. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, liberty and justice for all. Thank you.

Thank you, Angie. Okay. So our first, um, public hearing that we have this evening, um, is related to, um, part five of the Montgomery matters future land use map and village plans. Um, Justin, I understand you have a short presentation and before we open the public hearing on this subject, I'll go over, um, the rules that apply to public hearing and citizens comment. Welcome, sir. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Um, well, again, the, the end of the series, uh, for you this evening, uh, regarding Montgomery matters, we're talking this evening about part five, which has chair to Mott's mentioned contains both our future land use map and several other growth plans for the county. Our Bethel growth area plan, the Merrimack growth area plan, and four village plans. So we've gone over this extensively with you, so I'm not gonna go point by point through the plan this evening, but I thought this was a good opportunity to sort of circle us back to two years ago when we began this process with the charge that the board gave us, that the plan would be citizen driven, that we would have it as staff led and then consultants supported. I will say that this Montgomery Matters process has been the most robust amount of public engagement that the county has done on any plan to date. The statistics are there in the pyramid for you. Again, nine village meetings, 11 public intercepts, five work sessions with the board, 13 work sessions with the planning commission, public open houses, surveys, stakeholder meetings. We really did run the gambit. in our planning toolbox on engaging the public. And something that's unique about our Montgomery Adders plan than other comprehensive planning processes is that we made sure we continued engagement through the entire process. We didn't just draft a plan and then put it out for public comment. We included the public's feedback throughout every step. Because we were staff-led, I wanted to just give you some numbers. Again, over 2,800 hours of staff time from the Planning and GIS Services team. That does not include the support we received from other county departments. And I do wanna give kudos to all of our county departments who in one way or another were involved in this process over the past two years. I think that buy-in is really important because for us to actually implement the goals and strategies that are outlined in the plan, we needed that buy-in from the departments. So I want to thank the department heads and all of the department staff and county administration for facilitating that for us. Again, because we were staff led, we were able to remain on time and under budget throughout the entire process. And then as I mentioned, we were consultant supported. They provided an additional 2300 hours of staff time. And because we were working in such a collaborative way, we were able to share data and information with our parks master plan process, the fire and rescue study, and the Public Service Authority study. So again, I think this was money and time well spent for the county as we move forward. So I wanted to talk a little bit about how we gained feedback on this last part of the plan. We ran ads in Cardinal News. We placed the documents on the Montgomery Matters website. We sent out a notice to our comprehensive plan mailing list, which had over 800 contacts. Hard copies were made available at the public libraries and here at the government center, and we had drop boxes to receive feedback. Um, and throughout the drafting of part five citizens provided comments throughout the process and those were integrated. That's why you saw so many different versions coming to you over the past month. The planning commission held their public hearing on June 17th. We did have five members of the public that spoke regarding the prices for village plan, specifically about the property known as price park. The planning commission ultimately chose to take action on the prices for village plan separately to address those citizens concerns. The commission held a vote on part five, which was the future land use map, the Elliston Lafayette Village Plan, the Reiner and Shawsville Village Plans. Those were passed without any changes on a vote of nine to zero. The vote for the Price's Fork Village Plan passed on a vote of seven to two with the change to include language regarding a future park in the Price's Fork Village. I will note that the two commissioners that voted no did not feel that the inclusion of a new action item was warranted. So based on the Planning Commission discussion and what we heard during the public hearing, we added a new action item, so action item number 20, to explore opportunities for private and or public park facilities to serve the Prices Fork community. And again, with all of our action items, those were categorized, this was an initiative, and then the lead department will be Parks and Rec. So that's all I have for you this evening. I'll take any questions that you might have.

Thank you very much. And I know board members have also received significant feedback on the subject of Price's Park in the Price's Fork community. So I'm going to start with Supervisor Graske. Do you have any questions or sorry? No, it's fine.

No, I don't have any questions, but I do appreciate, you know, the... the work that went into getting this done. So, you know, turned around so quickly from last week's, um, meeting. I know that this is a, an important asset within the community, right? Regardless of, of whether it's County or private or, you know, whatever. So, um, I'm, I'm glad to see it's inclusion in the plan. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay. Do any other supervisors have any questions? Nobody is indicating any questions. Okay, great. Thank you very much for the update and thank you to the Planning Commission for reconsidering and making the amendment at their meeting. Appreciate that. Okay, I'm going to review the guidelines for public address before opening the public hearing. These guidelines do apply to both the public hearings this evening as well as public address. A public address sign-up sheet was available outside of the meeting room, so speakers were able to sign up in advance. We do have some people that have signed up, but following the names on the sign-up sheet, other speakers will be allowed. Each speaker has four minutes, whether speaking as an individual or representative, and all comments must be directed to the chair or other supervisors from the speaker's lectern at the front of the room. Please begin by stating your name and where in the county you reside. Debate between speakers and members of the audience will not be allowed. Speakers may leave any written statements and or comments to the supervisors with the board clerk, and speakers will be judged out of order should they engage in personal attacks, use profanity or abusive language, or debate with the audience and not address the supervisors. Accepted etiquette is to not applaud or make loud responses. So on this public hearing, Montgomery Matters Part 5, Future Land Use Map and Village Plans, we did have three people that signed up. So we'll start with them. And I apologize in advance if I completely butcher anybody's name. It is not intentional. We'll start with John Anufrock. Oh, okay. If you want to come on up. And then following John will be Randy Lemon. Welcome, sir.

Thank you. My name is actually, uh, you know, Jack on a frack, but I go by, you know, John is my real name. I'm a retired teacher and resident of retirement community, warm hearth village, uh, in Blacksburg. Currently I, uh, had a group of resident, uh, warm hearth village volunteers. who help to maintain and develop our own five and a half mile trail and park within Warm Hearth. We cut grass, we remove fallen trees, limbs, plant native plants, maintain the safety of the trails, it's important, control weeds and simply enjoy our own park. I am here today to support the continued development of H.L. Price Park as a walking trail and park, historic site, and an additional beautiful nature venue for our county. I lost my place. Our WHV trail volunteer group has and continues to, we work together with the volunteers that are in HL Price Fork. HL Price volunteers have helped us and we mutually work together. We also share equipment used in these endeavors to take care of the parks. For example, we share wheelbarrows, rakes, shovels, lawns, lawnmowers, weed eaters, chainsaws, loppers, hand saws, and hand clippers. Plus we simply, and maybe most important, I think, is we all enjoy working each other's trails. and working together any of any assistance that the county can give to help develop and preserve h l price park would truly be appreciated by warm hearth resident trail volunteers and those warm heart village residents who enjoy visiting the park thank you thank you sir anybody have any questions

We don't do questions during this time, yeah. But thank you for your comments.

Jen's going to swap out the public hearing rules because these are actually for the Planning Commission. Oh, okay. Hold just one moment.

Thank you, Jen. All right, next we have Randy Lemon. And following Mr. Lemon, we have Fern Michella. Welcome, sir.

Yes, my name's Randy Lemon. I live at 1191 Oakland Square, also in Warm Hearth Village. And I'm on that trail committee. And we do, we share all the equipment because both of them are volunteer outfits. And so instead of buying multiple equipment, we just share each other's equipment and share each other's work. So... Most of these trails are maintained by older folk, you'll find. I'm going to cut to the chase. We took 45 acres back in 2010 when Anne Price Yates was turned down by the Board of Supervisors. She offered the 45 acres to the county at the time, but it was at the same time that the roof went bad, and then you found out that the rest of the school had issues and had to replace the whole school. So it was understandable that, you know, you all didn't want to take on new responsibilities. I went to, I was working with Ann And she asked me, well, can you find another qualified group to take it? And so I went to the New River Land Trust. And they said, we've never done anything like this. They do now. They do it now, but not then. This was 2010. And so I went to an organization. I am on the board, have been for 30 plus years, Friends of the Rivers of Virginia. Even though this is not our forte, we took it as an interim owner in December 2010. That's a long interim. And we have been maintaining it ever since. Now, we're lucky that we have the Price Family Historical Society and other friends of Harvey Lee Price Park and other groups that have fallen in love with the park. provided money and support. One of the things that happened at the public hearing with the Planning Commission was the question of action plan because the park is really not an approved park. It doesn't meet zoning requirements. Most of the reason it doesn't meet those requirements is that all the owners have to sign permits for, you know, and obviously the Ed Swessinger Foundation wasn't going to sign it. And so luckily, you people have been merciful to us and not coming down on us for something that we could not correct. We took ownership of this park and have been maintaining it. We can't meet zoning until we acquire the rest of the ownership in this property. We simply want you all to support the park as an important part of Price's Fork. We're not asking for a dime because we are sure we're going to raise all the money that's needed for that. We've already exceeded 68,000 already. We just started recently. when we learned that it was going to go to auction, that the foundation or the Schlesinger's were putting it up for auction. They have held off on that now because I keep them up on what's going on, including they will see this hearing. They saw the Planning Commission hearing. They're keeping a close track on what's going on in this county. So we're quite confident we can work with them. We need you all to consider maybe having as an action plan a low-water bridge crossing of Strubles Creek. Right now your PSA crosses the creek, even in high water, to get to the gauging station. It's on our property. Oops, I'm out of time.

Yes, sir.

I submitted this in writing, so you all have the thing. Thank you.

Thank you. I hope to get with you at some point. And the next person that had signed up is Fern Michela. Welcome. I hope I didn't mess your name up too bad.

It was perfect. I'm Fern Mischella. I live in Christiansburg, and I'm here this evening representing the New River Land Trust. I serve currently as the president of their board of directors. And I speak for the land trust when I say we are in support of Montgomery County taking a more active role in the ongoing development and long-term maintenance of Prices Park. Prices Park is a treasured resource in the Prices Fork Village area for many different reasons. Historically, the trails are magnificent. It's just a beautiful area with a lot of conservation value. And with the county's involvement and support, it can become a much greater resource and attract more people, more users and become a much more accessible park for the residents of that part of Montgomery County. and i see no reason why it shouldn't be because it's there the forva has done a magnificent job up till now and we believe it's time for the county to step up and when you look at the comprehensive plan draft for prices fork village there are so many comments strongly worded comments about the need for public parks and trails in that part of the county and Prices Park fits the bill. So thank you very much.

Thank you. And we have reached the end of the sign-up sheet for the public hearing on Montgomery Matters Part 5, Future Land Use Map and Village Plans. Is there anybody else in the room that would like to come forward and speak on this topic? Welcome.

Good evening. My name is Beth Obenshain. I live at 2010 Prices Fork Road, but my family has long had a deep involvement in the Prices Fork community. We have a beautiful farm that my father bought before I was five years old, and we spent almost every weekend down there on farming. we feel a real investment in that community a real pride in the community and want to again encourage we are not asking the county to buy or to take over uh the price park but we simply do want to urge you to uh support the efforts there to as we are out raising money to clear the title and buy the final land, go for grants and other things. And again, this park is so important because the French and Indian War was fought right here in our neighborhood. And this park has the original site of the fort that was built in the French and Indian War. It is also the home place of a great educator who helped to shape the development of Virginia Tech as Virginia Tech became a nationally known university. He was the Dean of Agriculture for 25 years, 1920 to 1945, and was my father's boss. But this park is wonderful. I know many of you have been there, but if you not urge you to go, it's been transformed by Again, under Randy's leadership, but with support from the Corps of Cadets, from construction department of Virginia Tech, from community people who spend their free days mowing and helping clear. It's on a beautiful stretch of Struble's Creek, just deep enough for children to play in. It's a wonderful access for that community. And I guess I would also ask you, we know originally you couldn't take it because you were building two other parks that cost over a million dollars. What are your plans for the fastest growing area of Montgomery County for a park? I don't hear any talk about going out and raising the money to buy park land when land is selling for $50,000 an acre and more in the Prices Fork area. And here's a park that, again, if we could clear the title, simply taking ownership and managing a park is expensive. but it's not nearly as expensive as having to go out and buy a park, or else perhaps you're just going to tell this fast-growing area, sorry, other parts of the county have parks, but you're not going to get one. So I just encourage you to, again, if you haven't been there, to go visit this park and consider supporting it in any way you can and including it in the long-range plans for this very important part of Montgomery County. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Would anybody else in the room like to speak on the topic of this public hearing? Welcome.

Hi, good evening. My name is Kelly Brennan, and I live in Reiner. I just wanted to say, as I've said here before, that these folks have done an incredible job. My wife and I attended most of the public meetings and sessions, and it was really encouraging to see a lot of different people, including some of the supervisors at some of these. And I think the the plan again it reflects the citizen input and of course they've done a Great job attempting to get as much citizen input as possible, and I think we can always do more I think it doesn't really reflect our the needs or concerns of lower income folks, but again, it's really hard to reach those folks. But I think it's an outstanding plan, and I think it's one we can work with and go forward with. And again, in my view, this is how public government should work. These folks have gone above and beyond, so thank you.

Thank you. Would anybody else like to speak on this topic? Okay, seeing no one else come forward, I'm going to close this public hearing. We do have this item as a new business item later on in our agenda if people want to stay or tune in on YouTube if you don't want to stay for the rest of the business before it. The next public hearing that we have, I've scrolled too far in the agenda, excuse me. The next public hearing that we have is a proposed ordinance amending chapter eight of the Code of Montgomery County And to increase the fee schedule for erosion and stormwater management, this is an item that the board of supervisors had a work session on earlier in the spring. We don't have any staff presentation on this tonight.

No, we can answer questions if you have any at this time, but we don't have a presentation.

Do any board members have any questions about this that have come up? Okay, seeing none, I'm going to open the public hearing on amending Chapter 8, amend fee schedule for erosion and stormwater management. We did have a sign-up sheet in the hallway. We didn't have anybody sign up to speak on this topic. Is there anybody in the room that would like to come forward to speak at this time? Seeing no one, I'm going to close that public hearing and we'll move on to public address where anybody can speak on any topic that they want. We also had a sign-up sheet in the hallway for public address. We didn't have anybody sign up in advance for public address, but anybody in the room is welcome to come forward at this time to address the board. Is it, okay.

Welcome.

Hello.

My name is Crystal Mello. I live at Poplar Hollow Road, Charlottesville, Virginia. I just wanted to thank you all again for the resolution of opposition and for looking into the Railroad Crossing Elimination Grant that I can't remember the name of unless I write it down. Um, and I know it was going to cover Cove Hollow and Newtown road, but I just want to emphasize Cannery, which is also blocked by the pipeline in the Roanoke gas tap station. Um, and I just wanted to say on May 1st, they were blocked from 5, 10 AM to 6 50 AM on May 13th from 4 30 PM to 4 26 PM, May 14th, 6 30 AM to 9 30 AM. June 8th from 3.45 a.m. to 10.15 a.m. Two weeks ago at this Board of Supervisors meeting, they were blocked for six and a half hours and last Friday for three and a half hours. So I think we can't forget them. Penny lives there. She's the one that kind of got this ball rolling on this. She worked there for 30 years. She knows everything. the railroad, she's your girl. I know she sent y'all an email. She hasn't gotten a response. I think it would be good to reach out to her. Um, and it's railroad crossing number four, six, nine, four, eight, five w canary road four Oh eight seven. And it's MVP mile marker 23, two, three, 4.5. So I just wanted to keep that in y'all's mind as this grant goes forward. And thank you.

Thank you. Would anybody else like to come forward to address the board? Welcome. All right.

My name is Josh Van. I live in District F and I work with Art of Visit Virginia. I wanted to talk about the issue of the proposed MVP boost project and the discrepancy that is currently, I guess, being sorted out between Montgomery County Board of Supervisors and the DEQ and regarding the site suitability issue of the Swan Compressor Station that is proposed for Elliston. This was covered in the Roanoke Times on Friday, I believe, but I am looking at a letter between the county administrator and regional director for DQ Weld, and there is a sentence where Ms. Hill states FERC has reviewed and approved the siting of MVP pipeline project and will do the same for this one compressor station location. And I just want to identify that I think that might be the misreading of where things are and what is happening, unless there are decisions that are already made unbeknownst to the public. MVP is the applicant, was the applicant for the site suitability form. FERC is not the applicant. FERC has not issued a certificate of public need or a public convenience and necessity for the project. So no one has, FERC hasn't approved anything. AND I'D LIKE TO REMIND THE BOARD THAT ALL OF THE IMPORTANT ISSUES THAT THE BOARD DECIDED WERE IMPORTANT IN THE DECEMBER RESOLUTION AGAINST THE SITING OF THE PROJECT, NONE OF THEM HAVE BEEN RESOLVED. I UNDERSTAND THAT THERE'S ONGOING COMMUNICATION ABOUT NS BLOCKAGES, THE RAILROAD DOWN THERE. We're still facing major potential issues with air pollution. My colleague Crystal Mello and other folks from the Power Coalition or the folks that conducted a door-to-door study in that area can elaborate heavily on the issue of the community of Alliston being basically an environmental justice community and that projects like this cannot be cited in communities like this because they place an undue burden on communities like this, according to the Virginia Environmental Justice Law of 2020. That may be something for the board to look into. But in addition to those issues, you know, no environmental assessment has been issued by FERC, no environmental impact statement. The more thorough version of that has been issued by FERC, which the board requested. you know, every issue that the board identified in its resolution remains. And I understand that, you know, there's like ongoing communication with the DEQ, but, you know, as I would like to provide a little bit of context that, you know, though FERC has the last say on a lot of things, they are often wrong and often incorrect. approve permits that are basically illegal. With the Mountain Valley Pipeline, that history is clear. FERC three times let the project go back into construction after US Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service permits that had been issued were found illegal by Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, federal court. The only reason that project was completed because it got stuffed into an act of Congress last minute through an act of blatant corruption. So FERC is not looking out for the folks at the Eastmont.

Thank you, sir. That is your time.

And I really encourage the board to stand by its resolution. Thank you.

Thank you.

Welcome. Hi, my name is Carola Haas, and I live in Reiner, and I'd also like to speak on the proposed SWAN compressor station. And I would also like to thank you all for the resolution against that compressor station. I think the previous speaker mentioned your reasons were all valid and important. I'm glad to see things possibly moving forward for resolving the railroad crossing issue. And I certainly hope that the quality of life of the community is the main motivation for that, not so that you can just go ahead and approve this permit. And I'd also really like to question the process that DEQ has this land use suitability and value form that is sent to the local government. It's asked for the local government to check one of two options. It says the local governing body has resolved the location and operation is suitable or is not suitable. But it also gives, so it's, you know, there's not a lot of wiggle room there. It's just a check, one or two boxes. But it does say you can attach any comments on the social and economic value and any other information the locality would like DEQ to consider. And so, you know, if the legal opinion, which, again, I think is strange to say, oh, you know, federal authority always takes precedence. Well, again, this is not a federal proposal. It's a private corporation that wants to do something. And if the state has no authority to deny an air quality permit, well, then why are they asking you for your opinion, right? And I don't think it's our county lawyers you know, like we shouldn't be telling DEQ what to do, right? If DEQ asked, do we think it's suitable? They want to know if we think it's suitable and they can decide to ignore our opinion if they think it's irrelevant or if they think federal policies, you know, supersede that. But I don't see why we should just give up the right to have an opinion because somebody else might have a bigger opinion than us. So to me, that was that was very odd. And apparently DEQ thinks it's very odd because They feel like the process is now frozen because they asked for a resolution. You all resolved. You don't want this to go through. And yet you sent a form checking that the body has resolved that it is suitable. So I do think it's... It's an important matter to consider. And as far as I can tell from the maps, it is not consistent with our local ordinances based on our current zoning. But land use map is very hard for me to navigate, but it's either zoned A1 or residential, neither of which are suitable. And again, if the state doesn't believe that any local ordinances are are useful, then why do they have a form saying, does this comply with local ordinances? And if we're not sure which local ordinances might be relevant, we could certainly ask DEQ that rather than just checking the form. So I really think that's something that the board needs to take a stronger look at. But I would also like to appreciate the position that the board is in. that when you constantly have people telling you, we don't want you to raise taxes, but we want all these services. We want a nice park. We want our schools. We want all these services. The only way that we can pay for these services is either you tax the current residents and the current businesses, or you bring in some new businesses and tax them. And so I think as residents, we have to be really clear that if we don't want anybody just coming in using our farmland, building polluting things in our neighborhoods, then we have to understand that we have to pay the appropriate taxes to get the services that we want. But I would ask you all to use the expertise of the community. We can't expect you to be experts on everything. All these developers are asking for a sales pitch. Thank you.

Thank you. Would anybody else like to speak during public address? Welcome again.

Thank you again. I am Kelly Brennan and I live in Reiner. You know, I sent you all an email Saturday morning and I hope most of you saw it and read it. I have to say I've heard several things since then and in communication with Ms. Hill just this evening. So my mind is kind of scattered on the whole thing at the moment. But what I'm reflecting on is what I saw in public address on June 8th. And it was a real contradiction of messages from this county as to whether it was a suitable site or not a suitable site. And I've spoken to a couple supervisors independently this week before the June 19 article in the Roanoke Times. And basically, the answer I'm getting is it's a FERC project. We can do nothing. And again, as the previous speaker said, I think that's a fallacious way to think about this. DEQ is asking for the county's opinion on whether it is a suitable site or not. YOU KNOW, IT'S EITHER SUITABLE OR NOT ACCORDING TO THEIR PRESCRIPTION. AND I WOULD AGREE WITH THAT. AND THIS BOARD HAS SAID IT'S NOT A SUITABLE SITE AT LEAST FOR THE MOMENT UNTIL THOSE TRAIN ISSUES, WHICH WE JUST HEARD MORE ABOUT, ARE RESOLVED. We've got environmental concerns for sure. So I think it needs to continue to stay on hold and we need to continue to further clarify what our position really is and make that known to the public. I think, again, that was a big part of my email concern was the optics of what I saw June 8th and then later what I read in the newspaper. And that's what the public has. And the optics don't look good. It really looks like there's a conflict here, a misunderstanding and perhaps Multiple authorities working here behind the scenes and that just doesn't look good. So, you know I've always felt like This board needs to be more forthcoming with information you know, and I'm not I'm not attacking the Attorney here, but you know, he regularly has no reports and Does he do anything? I'm sure he does. I'm sure he does a tremendous amount. But it would be very interesting if we could learn about what he's doing, because I'm sure he does very important things. And it's the same way. I think your reports at the end of the meetings are really good, because it tells us what things you're doing, what you're participating. So those kinds of things I think are really important for building and maintaining public trust. I've said I think this local government is well run and I continue to believe that. But this issue has shaken that a little bit because of the optics. Now I just hope that with some further information that's publicly shared, not just with me, but with everybody, we can address those issues. Thank you.

Thank you. Would anybody else in the room like to come forward and address the board on any topic? Seeing no one, we're going to close public address. We do not have an addendum this evening, so our next item is to go into work session. Tonight we're gonna have a work session on two different topics, the Fire and Rescue Services Comprehensive Assessment and the Fire and Rescue Volunteer Member Personal Property Tax Relief Incentive. Is there a motion to go into work session?

So moved.

Second. Any discussion? Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Ms. Spitz? Aye. Mr. Grasky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King? Aye. Mr. Krzykowski? Aye. Chair DeMoss? Aye. Seven ayes.

All right, and it is my understanding that our Deputy County Administrator is going to introduce our speaker this evening.

That's correct. I'm first going to introduce Chris Lawrence, and I have the handout for you. I'm going to pass that out. It is the slideshow that you're going to see. Thank you, Chris.

Great. Thank you, madam chair and the board. Uh, good evening. Just over a year ago, the, this board of supervisors authorized and funded a comprehensive assessment study of our fire and rescue needs. Our goal was clear to ensure the delivery of high quality public safety services across the entire county. including both our towns and the university. Through a highly competitive RFP process, a cross-jurisdictional steering committee was formed. This team included Chief Geary with the county, Chief Hanks with Christiansburg, Chief English with Blacksburg, our deputy and assistant town managers, and myself. Together, we ultimately selected Mission CIT as our consulting partner to guide us through this vital work. We're joined this evening by Mr. Frank Edwards with Mission CIT who will come up in a moment and he'll provide an executive summary of the final study. This assessment delivers a forward-thinking strategic roadmap. It ensures our entire community has the robust infrastructure and resources necessary to protect our residents, our businesses, our visitors. While our service model is unique, spanning the county, two of the largest towns in the Commonwealth and Virginia Tech, our commitment to excellence is shared by all that provide fire and rescue services. This study honors and strengthens our combined system, balancing our deeply dedicated volunteer network that carries a proud history of community service, as well as our exceptional career staff in the county as well as both towns. Mr. Edwards will walk us through the presentation highlights. We'll be happy to answer any questions that we can at the conclusion and I will also note we're presenting the same presentation to the Town of Christiansburg Council tomorrow evening in their work session at 5 p.m. and then followed by that the Fire and Rescue Commission tomorrow evening at 7 p.m. All of that is streamed just like our meeting is. So anybody who has been following this initiative and is interested can certainly watch it live or at a future date. And with that, I'll turn it over to Mr. Edwards and I'll see you in a little bit.

Chris, one question before you give up the mic. Do we have a schedule for when the town of Blacksburg will be hearing this presentation?

We don't have a specific date from them. Okay. So once they invite us, we will make that known and schedule that. Thank you.

Appreciate it. You're welcome. Mr. Edwards, welcome.

Good evening, Madam Chair, members of the board, Ms. Hill. Appreciate the opportunity to be here tonight to present a strategic overview of our findings from the fire rescue assessment that we conducted. We greatly appreciate the trust that the county had in our company. I served, my name is Frank Edwards, I served as the project manager on the project, and we had three other people on our team. We had Karen McQuaid, who was a nationally known volunteer recruitment and retention speaker and we also had David Bailey who at the time was the fire chief in Colonial Heights Virginia and then we had our GIS analyst who did our mapping work for us so it was a team effort by everybody I want to thank the volunteer and career fire and rescue chiefs for their help and assistance on this project. I'll talk a little bit more about them in a second. But they were very helpful to us, as well as all the men and women of the volunteer fire departments, the career staff, and the volunteer rescue squad personnel as well in our work with them. And in particular, it's not on here, but I want to thank three other folks for helping us tremendously with our efforts. One is Jason Milburn from New River Valley 911 Center. He helped gather all the computer-aided dispatch information for us. Chief Gary was helpful in gathering information from everybody, all the players in the system for us. And then certainly Mr. Lawrence. We worked very close with Mr. Lawrence, facilitating meetings and the schedule and getting groups together. So we appreciate that. Our study process, I want to go through that a little bit. We had a site visit. We started work probably the end of September last year, but we had our site visit in mid-November 2025. We visited all the fire department and rescue squad facilities to look at the facilities, look at the equipment, talk to folks there. That was part of our assessment. We sent out surveys to all the fire and rescue chiefs for them to complete about their operations, gather information. We also had interviews with them either at their facility or in other locations, but we talked with almost all of them. Some of them were not available, but we met with the fire and rescue chiefs. We had an online citizen survey that was distributed. I believe you guys put it on your website and published it for the public to fill out. And we had in-person focus group sessions with multiple groups, mostly in this building, but we did have some others. And then certainly we did our data review and analysis from everything we gathered, both hard data as well as the focus groups and all the survey instruments. And then we benchmarked all our information against national standards, mostly the National Fire Protection Association standards. That's kind of the guiding standards group for fire and fire-based EMS systems. But we also use standards by the National Emergency Number Association, known as NENA, that the dispatch center would follow, as well as the AAA Association, which is the American Ambulance Association, for EMS response times. And then from that, we developed recommendations in kind of three tiers of immediate, intermediate, and extended. You may see the word immediate interchanged with short-term, but that was how we laid out our recommendations for the project. Again, as I mentioned, we had focus groups. I'm not going to read this entire list to you, but we had focus group meetings with volunteer fire personnel, volunteer rescue squad personnel, career fire personnel, career MS folks, uh, town officials, uh, uh, county officials, uh, other emergency services, partners, law enforcement, dispatch, um, the, the hospital facilities. Uh, so we, we met with a lot of different people, a lot of different groups while we were here in town last November. For our online surveys, we received 210 surveys from system personnel for both fire and rescue. 66% of them were from volunteer personnel, 23% from career personnel, and then We had a category where they could indicate that they were both volunteer and career in the system. We had 11% there. We had 111 citizen responses, um, to the questions we asked. And then again, we took, we reviewed the fire and EMS system data that we received. Overall, you have a very dedicated group of volunteer and career members who provide excellent fire and rescue services to all the residents of both the towns and the county, and they have a strong desire to do so. The volunteer fire and rescue chiefs have done a great job improving their systems, making them work, providing great service for at least the last 20 years. I know it's been longer for all of them, but at least the last 20 years. And the fire departments and the rescue squads all have very good, great equipment and facilities to operate with. However, the county fire and rescue services do have some challenges, as most organizations do. Nobody's perfect, but organizations have some challenges that we felt like there were some needed improvements on, and that's part of our presentation tonight. I wanted to cover this real quick. During our process, we did have some issues and concerns with some of the consistency and reliability of the data that we received from the fire departments, rescue squads, and the dispatch center. And again, that's not unique to Montgomery County or the towns. We find that in a lot of places. But some of the information we asked for from the departments was not provided to us. We used a lot of CAD data, dispatch data to get response time information. But even that had some quirks to it that we had to work through, one at the department level in that, You don't dispatch or the system does not dispatch, uh, by assigned station locations or by assigned unit staffing, which is typically how we are able to manage the data. Um, obviously in your situation, Blacksburg fire is the only one that has multiple stations, but they they're not dispatched by separate station locations. They're dispatched as just the fire department. So we had some difficulty getting the data. massaged enough and then as far as the dispatch center itself some of their dispatch processes we had to work through the layout within the CAD records and how they how they track data and some data they don't track we had to work with to get the best layout and view of the system that we could and the reason I mentioned this is that the data in the report kind of should be taken in that context that it's it's as good as we could get while we were here with with the resources that we had Some of the performance data that we looked at for the organizations when we were here and afterwards during the data analysis, we looked at their workload measures, how many calls they go to, their staffing levels, what levels of staffing they're able to respond with, their fire loss data, their travel times. Travel time is the time from when they leave the station till they arrive on scene. both for fire and rescue, their unit availability. This is more of an issue on the EMS side where you're very typically they're busier operations. And so you want to make sure you have units available to go to the next call. And then for EMS, again, specifically, we look at their total commitment time, the amount of time it takes on the call from the time they are dispatched until they're cleared and ready for the next call as far as a busyness workload. So we looked at all of that. And here's some general information on the workload within the system, both fire and rescue or EMS workload. The lines look a little bit different, but actually the growth rate on both of them is about the same. Fire calls since 2019 increased 18% over that time, and EMS calls increased 19% during that time. The fire department workloads in 2025, again, the big response agencies certainly are the towns, and then followed by the volunteer fire departments and county fire and EMS. Same thing with the rescue squads. The towns have the more tremendous responses, again, followed by county fire and EMS, as well as Virginia Tech, and again, Going back to the list of agencies we met with, we also met with Virginia Tech Rescue Squad in some of our management level meetings. We had representatives from Virginia Tech there. So again, we had folks from all different parts of the system. Here, this may be hard for you to see, certainly for the audience. But the reason I put it up is to kind of give you an indication. It's in the report. But these are the actual call locations for fire and EMS calls. over a five-year period. And just to show you that certainly the bulk of the activity is within the towns, but there's also a tremendous amount of activity outside the towns in the western area of the county and then certainly up towards Elliston area. So again, this just shows you all the call locations during that time frame. Want to make a comment about future development within the county? Uh, certainly that's going to impact, uh, the workload on the system, uh, as the county continues to grow. Um, and that's going to add higher demands for both fire and EMS. And we're saying it's important that the system, being the county and the towns, continue to track the development, the locations, the dwelling types, the size of the developments, because that's going to impact the call volume. Just to give you an example, one of the last places I worked as a fire chief, I looked at my EMS calls. And residents typically within the range of about 15 years old to 15, to 60-ish, 65, generated about an EMS call for every 10 to 12 people. Beyond age 65, particularly if you get near 80 to 85, that drops to three people generate a call. So again, the type of development, whether you're getting more senior housing, assisted living, that's going to determine the degree and the number and the types of calls you're going to receive. Our assessment overall is based on the data we received, the focus group comments that we received from everybody we spoke with, the station and site visits, the standards that I spoke about, NFPA standards as well as the other standards. Other key industry standards relative to fire flow and ISO, the ISO grading system is another industry standard that we looked at. And then certainly our professional experiences between the three of us, our experiences in fire and EMS and pulling all that together to make our recommendations. as far as our findings what we did is we broke down our findings into general themes first and then we typically develop our recommendations around the themes so again these are not in any particular order they're not a priority order but our key themes that we found from the from the review was that there was governance and oversight uh issues that that needed to be addressed in the system funding issues. That was certainly one of our charges in the RFP process was to look at the funding mechanism and come up with some alternative funding formulas for the system. We also found that there's no countywide systems approach to fire rescue EMS services. Um, there are 13 facilities in the county, uh, between the towns and the volunteer departments and the town systems. Uh, and everybody is operating for the most part as separate entities. Uh, there's some collaboration, but not as much as needs to be moving forward. Also there's, there's an issue of, of resource allocation and staffing. We'll talk more about that in a few minutes, but as far as how resources are allocated and the staffing needs within the system. We made comments relative to the dispatch center and some of their key processes, um, improvements they could make there, even though dispatch was not a direct component within the RFP for us, the dispatch process can certainly impact. the delivery of fire and rescue services based on how they process calls, how quick they get the calls out and how they operate once the calls are dispatched. And then certainly as I have already mentioned the data, the data quality that we were working with in the process. We had a total of approximately 120 recommendations in the report. They're made around the key themes and the subject matters in the report. We don't typically lay recommendations out as, you know, do this in 90 days, do this in 120 days. We laid them out in phases, like I mentioned earlier, immediate, intermediate, and extended, just because, again, we understand county budget processes. You were in the middle of getting ready for the 27 budget process while we were here. you know you have other things on your plate so we kind of lay it out as the in phases moving forward but our areas of recommendations center around like I said system planning and thinking better data collection some alternate alternative funding mechanisms operational safety and policy improvements new fire and EMS station locations which again was also a component of the RFP process to develop look at and recommend some some new fire station EMS station locations we've made recommendations regarding staffing and then apparatus and equipment in the system I'll go over the phase one recommendations. Again, these are not all of the recommendations in the phases. These are just some of the highlighted recommendations in those phases. We feel like you need to increase the strategic system oversight by the Fire Rescue Commission and or Montgomery County to the system. The Fire Rescue Commission is charged with strategic planning of the system, but they don't do as much of that as they just do the financial component of funding and dealing with the budget requests that the organizations have, but they need to do more with regarding strategic planning and moving the system forward strategically. We recommend that you create subcommittees within the Fire Rescue Commission to address some of the strategic issues such as a recruitment and retention committee, a training committee, a policy and procedures committee, just so that those groups can work system-wide on like I said, recruitment and retention or operational policies and procedures for everybody because it shouldn't matter what department somebody's in as to what type of firefighter accountability system you're going to have, what happens when you have a firefighter mayday issue or incident command system. Those should be countywide policies and procedures for everybody. And then the last recommendation in phase one is to work as much as possible to reduce the organizational silos that exist. Again, it's natural for organizations that were founded at the community level to operate still that way. But again, with the way the world is today and with fire and EMS services, the system needs to operate collectively as a system and have systems level thinking to move the system forward. Phase two recommendations, we recommend improve the recruitment and retention of volunteer and career personnel. Again, on a county-wide basis, again, some of the individual volunteer agencies are doing their own recruitment and retention, but there needs to be more system-wide planning and thinking on that. Develop a county funding allocation model for the towns. Again, we gave several recommendations or options in the report, um, and a funding process for the volunteer fire departments. There needs to be one countywide records management system. Uh, right now, every organization has their own records management system. So again, that's why one of the reasons we weren't able to get, uh, a lot of good data individually from some of the departments. Um, also how the, the, the new river Valley dispatch center, uh, tracks their calls for service in their system, in their CAD system. Um, again, that was some of the challenges we had. We feel like there should be countywide fire performance standards developed like there is already for EMS regarding time for getting out of the station, the amount of response time that should be a minimum standard within the system, and even potentially some minimum staffing requirements of getting people on the scene in particular time frames. Again, I mentioned this earlier, develop system-wide policies and procedures, operating guidelines, training requirements, training processes. Again, every department has their own training program and maybe their own training requirements for their folks. review and develop fire and EMS response districts based on closest unit response. It's our understanding from when we were here that the response areas that are currently in place were just what had been here for a long time, may not necessarily be based on the closest unit response. So again, you should move that, do a more in-depth GIS analysis to develop those response districts based on closest unit. Also develop a strategic approach to the provision of technical rescue services. Uh, some work had already been started. The, the, there was a technical rescue working group started, uh, and, and most all the players in the, in the system were members of that. Uh, there was, there was some that were not, but everybody has, again, their own equipment, their own training processes. There's no county level training and response mechanism in place for that. The other thing we recommend is to go through a more detailed community risk assessment to determine the resource needs within the system. That includes the number and types of the different fire apparatus and EMS vehicles. Again, right now, some of that's being done, but at the jurisdictional or department level, not on a countywide basis. The phase three recommendations. Um, we're are to identify future EMS fire and EMS station locations to improve response. I've got a map of, of recommended, uh, locations. I'll go through in just a second, but we're also recommending with new fire and EMS stations that are built, uh, that those be built to include both fire and EMS resources, instead of having separate individual buildings, one for fire, one for EMS, put them together. And that also helps to, to spread out your resources and to lower your response times. Again, begin the process to identify now and purchase land to build those needed facilities. Improve staffing within fire and EMS. Again, I'll go through some specific recommendations in a second on that. And then to initiate more comprehensive health and wellness and safety improvements within the fire rescue system, such as physicals for all personnel, volunteer and career that currently aren't getting them, fit testing requirements that need to be done in order for them to properly have fitted face pieces for breathing apparatus, as well as inspections of facilities and those kinds of things. Also, part of our process, we recommend that you move to the county to move more into fire code enforcement services. Currently, you're using the state fire marshal inspector for that. We recommend, again, you'll see it in a second, that the county hire a fire marshal and begin to have its own fire prevention code and to start that inspection process for new development as well as existing occupancies in the county, in the Primarily in the unincorporated because the towns have their own fire inspectors and code enforcement folks And then work with the New River Valley 9-1-1 Center to enhance data collection and dispatch processes I know some of that's already begun between chief Gary and and mr. Milburn For the county specifically unincorporated area. Some of the staffing improvements we recommend is that the county hire a human resource manager within the volunteer fire and rescue services to help with the administrative requirements of onboarding, recruitment and retention of volunteer personnel, helping them through the system helping them get complete all the administrative paperwork help if again the county moves towards physicals help them with scheduling their physicals help point them to the right station the right contact point at the station wherever they're going to be a volunteer at so that they can begin to learn the process help them with training getting the appropriate training if it's if it's an internal class they can get at the in the county here or have to go somewhere else just help facilitate that Also, we recommended again, a county fire marshal that was an, an immediate recommended, recommended hire, uh, for the code enforcement piece. Intermediate, uh, after that would be a county fire inspector, depending on the workload of fire inspections and, and follow-ups, uh, inspections, plans, review work for new construction, those kinds of things. At some point, there may be a need for an additional training staff member to help with coordinated training between the volunteer folks as well as training, again, system-wide amongst all the agencies. And then depending on where new fire and EMS stations may be constructed, there may be staffing needs for those facilities as well. For Christiansburg, We're recommending that they have a four-person staff firing EMT crew during the daytime. They currently only had, well, when we were here, they only had two. My understanding is they've since hired two more to increase that staffing for that daytime fire unit. We also are recommending for the intermediate time frame that they move to a 24-7 time full-time staffed fire crew to respond because of the number of calls that they have. And then intermediate time staffing of a full-time ALS ambulance, paramedic ambulance for the system because of their call load and their unit availability because of the call load. I'm sorry, I didn't go through that. For Blacksburg, we're recommending that they were in the process again while we were here of increasing their staffing on their fire unit. They had two people during the daytime hours on their fire unit at their main station. They were in the process of hiring two more. that have since been completed. So they now have four people on their fire unit during the daytime hours, but they need to continue to use the data that they collect either internally within the town or from the dispatch center with the improvements we're recommending to evaluate their current staffing is to know where they need to go next with whether it's 24 seven fire coverage and or for their Blacksburg rescue crews, full-time ALS coverage. Right now they're making due, uh but they indicated that in the future that may be an issue they need to address moving forward some other potential service delivery improvements that we mentioned in the report um is certainly there's there's potential for cost sharing between the towns and the county uh for any construction of firing ems stations depending on where they may be built cost sharing for hiring of additional career personnel for any new stations Certainly the countywide delivery of training across the board. So everybody is at the same level, has the same skill level and certification levels. And then again, this had already started, but again, a more robust countywide approach to the technical rescue team in process within the county. Our GIS analysts, we ran through multiple scenarios. Again, they're in the report of citing potential future fire stations, EMS stations in the county. We had like five different scenarios. But from those scenarios, based on our experiences and the call volume, where those are located, we indicated three future fire station, EMS station locations in the system. They're broad. area locations not specific because certainly we don't know land availability what's already there building wise those kinds of things but the the first priority would be the somewhere in the peppers Ferry Road location whether that's closer to the business 460 side we're recommending did it be middle way or almost middle way between there and Priceless Fork. That way you can cover both ends of Peppers Ferry towards the business area as well as the growth areas out towards the west. Next would be a station on Roanoke Street, Lee Highway area, somewhere between Christiansburg and Elliston. to to be able to improve coverage in that area and then certainly the radford road area out in the western end of the county uh that way they could then come back down to get to tyler road and to the interstate the southern end of the county there so those are the three recommended locations uh again no specific time frame given but just uh where we would recommend new facilities be considered And I wanted to show this to you. This is a chart, again, that's in the report of the indicators for change or transition from all volunteer to all career. And we're not recommended, nowhere in the report did we recommend that the volunteers go away or county or towns go away with the volunteers or hire all career staff. That's not what we recommended. But certainly there are indicators which, and everybody's going to be in different parts of the transition continuum. The towns are going to be different than the county and vice versa. But there are certain indicators for change that sometimes shows need to warrant consideration for career staffing or more career staffing. And those are community growth, community aging, missed calls, extended response times, and reduced staffing. And this is from the International Association of Fire Chiefs. But just to give you something to think about, as you're looking at that continuum process of some of the key indicators that may indicate when you make some of those transitions. And with that, that's what I have. And I'll answer any questions.

Great, thank you. Angie, did you have anything to add before we go into questions?

Well, first I wanted to thank Chris for all the work that he's done with this. It's been a big project and he's really coordinated this well and I appreciate that a whole lot. I didn't want to leave you out of that. We got a lot of information done tonight. I know the board has received in advance of this meeting the entire document. So I hope that you do have some questions tonight and we plan to have future work sessions. I don't imagine we can get everything addressed tonight and I think this is a great tool to allow us to move forward in the future that we can work through and make sure that the recommendations that we implement are best for all. And I also would like to thank the volunteers. They really helped during the process and the career staff as well.

thank you thank you and one question to kick us off this document is 370 ish pages yes ma'am where could citizens find it if they wanted to see it we're going to post it online on wednesday after the presentation is made to the town tomorrow evening fantastic thank you um so let's see about questions from board members and i'm going to start with supervisor kits because he's the board's liaison to the fire and rescue commission and he also was the loudest voice in requesting this study so supervisor kids i only have 61 questions okay and he won't be asking i wish i was joking but i'm only allowed to ask a couple

So, um, I'm gonna start off cause funding is always a big issue for us. I wanna make sure I find where I'm at on my funding questions. Um, now within the study, you've talked about a fire levy. Yes. And that is something I've never heard before. And I'm wondering which Virginia jurisdictions are using that right now. And what do you think is closest to our situation?

Um, what word did you say? Fire levy.

Okay. It's in the code of Virginia, um, that. that allows it, um, page 58. Yeah. There's a list of jurisdictions that I was able to find that are using it. Uh, Falker County, Prince William County, Manassas, Nottoway County just went to it. Uh, Orange County and Rappahannock County. Uh, there may be others in the state, but those are the only ones I could find online.

Okay. Could you go into that a little bit? I mean, I know it's in there, but I know it's going to be a thing. I've already heard a couple people that saw the rough draft. That was a big question. How would you characterize that as far as for the county, especially with the unincorporated area versus the incorporated towns?

It's my understanding, again, I will say I have limited knowledge of it, but it could be different. could be, I think, unincorporated area alone or it could be countywide. It's just a supplemental way to raise revenues that's dedicated solely to fire and EMS. And if you see Nottoway County, they separated their levies. They have a separate fire levy and a separate EMS levy. But it's just a separate way, separate grouping of revenue for those systems.

I was trying to research it a little bit more and I'm with you on the part about, because it gets kind of, vague as you talk about towns don't have an ability to do that but the counties do and it kind of that's a gray area for us especially being in a unique situation that we have and i know that's going to come up people read through it everybody wants to go to funding and i just there may be a little more clarity that we need to add that a little bit later um you you also talked about uh a human resource manager for the volunteers could you go into that a little bit more please

Yes, just somebody to help system-wide, again, whether it's unincorporated area only or the towns want to take advantage of it as well, to help volunteer applicants Well, first of all, back up. They can do recruitment efforts across the county, across the system for volunteer personnel, fire and rescue. But they also, once they get an application, they can say, okay, based on where you live, this is where you need to go. These are the steps you're going to need to follow for, you know, getting into membership. Here's a point of contact at that particular fire department or rescue squad. You know, you've got to have a physical. You've got to, you know... have certain training minimum training requirements i'll help facilitate it's somebody to help facilitate walking someone through the system as a point of contact for lack of a better term maybe a somewhat of a mentor to help walk them through the process and then also on the back end somebody to help with managing the retention incentives that the county and or the towns may have enacted

help retain volunteer personnel you know whether that's through um you know a low sap program through you know any other incentives that the jurisdictions do okay because it's it's always been it's one of those uphill battles because each one of them's an independent uh entity and people have a tendency to get a little territorial on stuff but it's something we've brought up about how we want to try to to utilize the county's resources in order to help the local volunteer groups be able to recruit more people. And it's one of the reasons we started working with the school system and the EMS program and EMT program. And then with the local community college, in order to increase that, I just thought it was an interesting way to word it as a human resource manager. And I'll ask I'll keep it to one more and I'll just keep it to three of my 61 So let me make sure I get through this Make sure I get the right questions Now you brought up no adopted fire code or fire marshal and you also brought up talked about inspections i think it's uh section 1617 station health and safety right in there and that was the position i haven't heard brought up before for within our county because that's a different swing as far as bringing in a state inspector and bringing in you said a county fire marshal So I broke it down by sections so I'd have to go back and look you said 16. Yeah, it's 16 17 somewhere in there 159. Thank you. I have another set of documents that have the page numbers on it. I'm just trying to simplify 17 starts at 178. Sorry Okay, what happens? I'm gonna completely nerd out.

I'm the one that has Contents in front of me. You're good.

I might as well have the questions for it well again

go into the fire code again there is no adopted fire code within the county and you're using the state fire marshal to do in your inspections typically they're going to only inspect the more high occupancy high risk facilities or occupancies you may need to have an inspection program for for lower risk occupancies again you need to make sure you have a good proactive involvement in the plans review site review process for code enforcement on the front end to make sure that the buildings are constructed appropriately then again as far as the stations facilities again it's a good good practice to have stations inspected once a year for safety issues cleanliness you know I'm not saying it's an ocean inspection but certainly it's an inspection just to try to reduce safety risks okay I'll stop there and I'll put the rest in writing

That's great. And we'll also have future work sessions. There was a little bit of bargaining involved in getting the questions limited by supervisor kits. So we will have some future work sessions. He had too many pages. I'm going to go to Supervisor King next, because he is a longtime volunteer firefighter. And so not only do we appreciate his service, but his unique perspective.

Supervisor King? I'll just ask a couple for now, and then I'll let you move on.

You can ask as many as you want. I won't limit you.

You say this several times in your presentation about drop calls. How many drop calls did you find?

I don't know that we found any, but I don't know that we had the data to be able to show that there were drop calls. I didn't say there were drop calls. I think I said that's an indicator of potential concern.

Concern about drop calls?

Yes. Yeah.

Okay. Well, as far as I know, there haven't been any. But on the budget process, what was you thinking on that, the funding process?

You mean as far as what we need to change on the funding? Again, we, we provided three or four options to us. That's a local decision between the jurisdictions on how you want to fund, uh, uh, the town fire systems and, or the volunteer departments.

I mean, I was just several formulas and, and I was just asked, what was your recommendation for us to change?

I guess of the four recommendations, do you have one that stands out?

No, no. We, part of the RFP indicated that we had to develop some funding options for the county to consider on how best to fund fire and rescue services. So that's what we did. We didn't make a recommendation specific to option a is the best option B is the best, whatever.

And I think that it might be when we get into those options and we talk about them at a future work session, there might be a combination of some elements of the different options that work best for us. It might not be that option A or B or C or D is the best, but a blended, or maybe even that would be our starting point, and then we'll know some other things that we might need to add or take out.

Okay.

Thank you.

Okay, and other questions from the remaining supervisors and vice chair? Do we have any questions from this side? Supervisor Grasky.

There was just a statistic I wasn't familiar with that was a fractile.

Yes, a fractal time, a lot of times when jurisdictions look at, it's based on response time or staffing levels, but they always typically look at average. What's your average response time? The problem with average is you have as many that are below that average as you have above that average. So it's kind of a false indicator. The fire service and EMS has moved to what's called fractal times. So it's based on a certain percentage compliance. So What's your response time at an 80% compliance or 90% compliance for, you know, what's your response time to be able to get there 80% of the time within that time. So for, for volunteer systems, uh, the, the national fire protection association typically uses an 80% fractal time on the career side, they use 90%. So on the volunteer side, it's a response time within, I think it's for your system, 10 minutes. from the time of dispatch to the first unit arrives within 10 minutes, 80% of the time. That doesn't mean you're not going to have calls above 10 minutes, but you're going to get there within 10 minutes, 80% of the time. So that's a fractal measure.

Thank you for clarifying that. And then I had one other question as it related to the phasing of your recommendation, specifically the one around initiating health and safety improvements within the system. And... Like as I was reading through things, I intuitively I would have thought that might have been a earlier prioritized initiative.

The reason for that is mostly because of the costs of health of health assessments for everybody. Um, certainly again, you can, you could phase that in and you could say, and just as an example, you could do, do it earlier, but say like for, for existing personnel only, or for new people only, however you want to work it. But we didn't, we didn't want to just say, oh, you got to do this early, you know, because it's, it can be a significant cost. Gotcha.

Okay.

Thank you.

supervisor biggs um i had a question i was sort of disappointed when you said on page seven that you could not get detailed call and staffing data that was requested but it wasn't provided and then you sort of talked about because you know i guess folks do it differently at different places but so part of this sounds like i mean it sounds like we need to do a lot of coordination but But as far as data, like, is there a model out there? Is there something that can be used for data collection so that we don't have to reinvent a wheel?

There are multiple vendor records management systems out there for fire and EMS. You're already using one for patient care through the state system for medical calls, but on the fire side, There's multiple vendors out there that typically will record the information we would need. Sometimes it's just a matter of the departments not recording or tracking that type of information. And again, in some instances, we made the request. They may be tracking it, but they didn't provide it to us.

Hmm, okay. You know, I was a little bit disappointed with that, but I think I'm getting it. So I think that would be one of the really important things that we would need as we put all this together. So thank you.

Yes, I was talking with the chief beforehand. It's kind of your baseline starting point. You've got to have good data in order to see how you're performing to then see what needs to be modified or improved.

Supervisor Caron. I just want to know what is the difference between fire marshal and fire inspector duty wise.

Well, typically you're going to have the fire marshal is the designated fire code official in a jurisdiction. So that's kind of a more of a title thing. The fire marshal can do fire inspections, but again, based on the workload over time, as the county grows, you may have a need to have multiple, multiple people doing fire inspections or planes review work or whatever ahead of time.

Thank you.

Vice-chair Fijikowski.

Yeah, I, um, I did not read the original report when it was sent to us, mainly because I heard there was going to be some changes to it. I'm not sure what was changed, but I did glance through it a little bit. But I do appreciate the fact that you have recommended a fire marshal. That's something I asked this board about a year ago in a work session to consider, because I believe that the county is large enough now that it would facilitate not just new building construction, but other issues that we've run across that it falls between the fire department and the sheriff's office and it really can't get resolved, but a fire marshal could do it. And so I appreciate you recommending that. The other thing is I was kind of wanting to get your opinion on mixing paid and volunteer staff in the same station, and how do you coordinate that so that everybody is actively involved in calls? Because we all know if you've got paid staff on duty, when the call goes out, they're gone. I mean, they're gone in a minute or two. Paid staff sometimes have to come in. I know I'm sure a lot of them probably have volunteers that stay certain shifts or whatever. So how would you coordinate the two of them if you have both in the station at the same time?

We did make comment to that in the report that with the new facilities that we, the locations where we're recommending them, we're not saying that they have to all be staffed with career personnel. They can be staffed with paid and volunteer personnel. So we did make that statement in there. But the biggest thing that I think with staffing, joint blended staffing, however you want to call it, is one, making sure that everybody meets the same standards and requirements, okay, so that, whether they get a check or they don't get a check, they're meeting the same standards and requirements and are able to perform appropriately at the same levels moving forward. But also that, again, on the volunteer side, that there is good coordination with scheduling so that they are there as much as possible so that there is no delay. Because one of the problems you have, especially if you have a fire station with paid firefighters in it and also volunteer firefighters the paid firefighters like you said are going to go out first and and the volunteers may come and not have an opportunity to actually get to the scene or get another unit out because of that time difference so you want to you know you want to make sure you have you could have blended crews you could have paid and volunteer staffing the same fire unit if necessary you could have paid in volunteer staffing the same ems units but you want to make sure that people are available to be able to immediately respond if if you've got you know again you've got just as an example if you had a paid fire unit and a volunteer ems crew there and the volunteer crew is not in the station again the fire unit is going to go out first there's there potentially could be a delay in patient care or anything like that with the volunteer having to respond from home. So you want to make sure that you're meeting the appropriate performance standards that you're setting for firing EMS. Again, you've already got an EMS performance standard, but it's our understanding that that's really not being tracked and nobody's being told whether they're meeting it or not meeting it. So again, you've got to have the performance standards that everybody knows what they are to meet. And that can be coordinated between the volunteer leaders at that station and the career leader at that station to coordinate staffing, response, who's on what unit, all that. That can be done at the station level.

Sounds like a nightmare.

If you have good leadership and good accountability, it doesn't necessarily have to be that.

Okay. I had a follow-up to that, but I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do it. Have you ever seen a volunteer station that met the requirements that paid staff meet? and the reason I say it that way, and I don't mean any, anything derogatory that way, volunteers work, they have jobs. Um, they spend a lot of time with their jobs and their families and they don't, they don't have that. Um, it's not really a luxury, but the time to kind of catch up with a lot of the, uh, certifications I'm sure. And, uh, To me, that's probably one of the biggest issues because you have firefighters, volunteers out here that have been fighting fires for 20 years, but they don't have the same certifications as the station next door, which is paid.

I think it's a matter of what's the service delivery expectations that the community has and what service delivery expectations the leadership has. of the jurisdiction wants the service delivery to have, um, as far as certifications, uh, In today's climate and world, I think they're important. one of the first things a prosecuting attorney is going to want you to provide to them is the training records and the apparatus inspection and maintenance records for a vehicle accident or a fire ground injury or fatality by a firefighter. That's what they're going to ask for. So to say that because of the time they don't have to be the same, I would not buy into that argument. It is difficult. It is very difficult. But you can make training There are different ways to make training available for the volunteer schedules. It's just a matter of whether they want to partake of that. And again, I'll say this to you publicly. There are plenty of volunteer departments in this country that are very professional. and very regimented and do a great job. And there's maybe paid departments that don't do a great job. So it's not a matter of whether you get a check or not. It's what your standards are and your training levels and how you perform. Again, not to scare you, but there was a recent court case in, I think, Illinois, either Indiana or Illinois, where a firefighter died And the widow sued the jurisdiction and several of the fire officers for negligence and won $31 million. So again, it competency and and knowing what to do is key today.

Well, I'm sure you're aware of the fact that in one of our stations, we we we have mixed paid and volunteer. And we've also gone through the process of having like 12 hour coverage for the paid and then the volunteers get the other 12. And when it, that was not sustainable, then we ended up going to all paid, but we still need something to, um, engage our volunteers with. Um, so those are some of the really tough issues that I'm facing in my district anyways. Um, It's almost been kind of an experiment, if you will. I am sure that when we build new stations, volunteer companies aren't going to just spring up out of nowhere and take them over. I'm sure they would have to be paid, so that wouldn't be an issue. But is there a system? Did I go over your three? Oh, okay. Okay. Um, do you see a lot of volunteers that actually volunteer for paid stations? Have you seen that? Because ours are separate.

It's hit or miss. Well, again, you're a little bit unique in that you're separate. Most of what I see, they're in the same organization and the same facility. So the amount and degree of volunteer participation in those stations, it can be hit or miss. Again, depending on standards and accountability and personalities, you know, personalities play a big part into that working relationship. And so you've got to have leadership, uh, at that station level to make things work and hold people accountable on both sides.

Well, I didn't mean to ask you the tough questions, but, uh, these are just things I've been wondering. And I, you know, I know the presentation was brief and I haven't gotten into the full report, but, um, I tell people all the time that.

Today, the public doesn't care who shows up. They don't care if they're green, purple, black, white, whatever. They just want them to show up quick and know what they're doing when they get there. That's what they want.

And that's what we want, too. Thank you.

And that was an excellent wrap a little bit. So just reminding everybody that the town of Christiansburg Town Council will hear this presentation and also be able to provide some dialogue tomorrow at five, is that correct? And then the Fire and Rescue Commission will hear it on Wednesday, tomorrow at seven. um and so both of those of course are live streamed and archived on youtube so um i think part of our homework as a board is also hearing what each group is saying and and we'll follow up when the town of blacksburg gets their update scheduled so we can hear what they have to say i think we're going to have a lot of work sessions about this going forward um are we ready to move to the next one more thing oh it's very brief yes angie

I did email the final version of this report to the board on June the 8th in the evening. If citizens would like to see this before Wednesday, we have printed copies they can come by and see, but it will be available online, as I said earlier on Wednesday.

Great. Okay.

If I can make a final comment, too?

I guess. Just kidding, of course you're right.

I was waiting for the red light to come on, but it didn't come on. Oh, I can make it turn on. I have offered to Chief Gary, and this is something we do as a company, or the consulting projects that we do. If there are questions, needs, after the presentations, we're here to help. We're not a company that just says, thanks for your money, here's your report, and we're gone. We want to help you be successful. We want to help with implementation. So if there's things you need, we're willing to help.

Thank you. I guess so.

Yeah, I just, I wanted to say that, you know, a lot of my questions are my, well, questions that I asked you were based on, we are going through some growing pains. We never had paid staff a few years ago. We've just started into that. Our volunteers do a fantastic job and they have done a fantastic job in the county for many, many years before the very, for the first paid person was hired. So I just wanted to make that clear that I certainly wasn't throwing any digs at Uh, any volunteers or any paid staff, we just got to make it all work. So, and we love our volunteers and if they have a heart for firefighting or EMS, we want them to be able to do it, whether it's in a paid station or a volunteer station.

And I think the bulk of our report speaks to maintaining that volunteer component.

all right you're welcome okay and so we'll move thank you sir we really appreciate you and we'll probably take you up on your offer to help in the future so don't block our phone number um so we'll move on now to the second item in our work session this evening which is sorry i'm all over the place here it's related to tax incentives chris do you have a presentation about that

So honestly this is timely. We're trying to find ways to continue to support our volunteers and there's a number of ways we do that and this is a new way that we are responding to what the board asked a year ago was how what are ways to support our volunteers and to do that there's a state code that allows us enables us to do certain things related to our personal property tax so a little a little bit of this is a reminder of where uh for some previous presentations over the last year we've kind of touched on again you know originally this came up in url's extended work session of is there a way we can incentivize the volunteers with a certain number, a certain amount of money, but in a way that has structure to it and is accountable. And in this case, there's the personal property tax incentive that's established in the state code. It's really a two part process and we've accomplished step one. So step one was completed in December 15th of 2025, where the board created a new classification within our personal property tax structure specifically for active fire or rescue volunteers so we have a category in which you can qualify for it required the adoption of an ordinance to create this new classification in accordance with the state code that's listed and that was accomplished so you've done that part step two was to adopt the actual tax rate that would be applied to that classification We did originally have a public hearing scheduled for April 9th, and we canceled that. Honestly, like right at the last minute, we learned and understood with the advice from Marty as the county attorney that from what he learned we were kind of off in what's referred to as the uniformity of the tax rates. Originally, we had two rates. We had a rate of zero up to a certain amount of your car value, and then a rate above that value which creates two rates for the same classification, which is not uniform, which is not legal. So we pulled that off the public hearing so we could resolve that, which we, in essence, have, and this is what will be presented tonight. So the request is, and as we work through this, is to consider establishing what that tax rate is and scheduling a public hearing for July 27th. So ultimately that's what we're looking for the board, whether you wanna schedule that public hearing for the rate and what the rate will be. And we'll kind of walk through some ideas of the rate. And then second, there is a written policy that kind of articulates what is, and this comes through the Fire and Rescue Commission, of what is considered an active volunteer. You have to define that. So ultimately, you would have a policy to adopt the volunteer fire and rescue personal property tax incentive policy. So with that, some options, some ideas. Originally, you had asked for some kind of incentive, $500, and some on the board kind of said, well, what about 750? And there was general consensus like, yeah, we're in that ballpark. Um, so that's where we kind of went to work with and, uh, the original approach, which was a great way to accomplish that.

It just was not legal.

Um, cause it didn't provide the uniformity. So we, we could not do that. Um, so what you have in front of you and have you asked, okay, so the table you have in front of you, it might help you to see it a little bit better. Cause mine's really tiny up here. Um, what we tried to kind of show you is we, and there's assumptions made in this. So you kind of just follow along, but, um, we have hundreds of volunteers in the county. They're not all active, certainly not active to the definition that the state, uh, defines it. So we estimate maybe we have 160 active volunteers and that's plus or minus. So just a perspective. The average vehicle assessment in the county is $12,415. So we start with, let's just tell you what the average is, and then we'll tell you what's a $20,000 vehicle, what's a $40,000 vehicle, what's a $60,000 vehicle. So you'll find on the table, if you just kinda look at the top, as the average, if you had the $2.55 current tax rate, they would pay the full tax. So the incentive would be a lower tax rate, so a dollar. So if you paid, that on a dollar, the value, the tax that would be the incentive that you would not pay would be $192. So that would be the value that that volunteer receives. If you had a 50 cent tax rate, of course it would be of more value, so it'd be $255. So if you apply that to just different levels of how much is your vehicle valued at, 20,000, 40,000, and 60, you can follow that along. So if you had a $20,000 vehicle, at a dollar rate, that incentive would be worth $310. So they would not pay $310 on that vehicle. 50 cents, of course, would be higher at 410. When you go to 40,000 at a dollar, $620. At 50 cents, it's $820. And if anybody has looked at vehicles today, $60,000 is not. unreasonable especially if you're buying a truck or even just a normal brand new car today 50 to 60 000 is pretty normal so if you were to also apply that we wanted to make sure you you saw at a dollar that's 930 and then at 50 cents it's 1230 there's no specific way to set a specific number using the state tax legislation the way it's written so you're going in this in this model to pick a rate and that rate will apply to whatever vehicle that volunteer chooses to ask for they get to pick one uh that i'll switch that vehicle has to be owned by them titled to them even if they have a loan they're still titled or it has to be leased by that volunteer so those are the numbers and then I'll kind of keep walking through some other pieces to all this it does include this would include all of our volunteer fire and rescue agencies, personnel within the county, including those that serve within both towns as well as the university, if they qualify, meaning they have to live and have their vehicle titled, leased within the county. It only applies to the county's personal property tax, not to the town's. Each town actually does things a little differently, whether it's personal property tax or just a license fee, it does not impact them at all. Currently, we do have an incentive, which is $23.50 for any volunteer. that we would waive their vehicle license fee and that works through those agencies and it comes into the commissioner's office. The Fire and Rescue Commission did have a meeting, actually had two meetings, one on January 15th, then ultimately February 12th they adopted they recommended to you all approval of a policy and what that basically the policy says is other than a lot of the the who and the what and the why it says if you're a volunteer to be considered active which is what the state law refers to you need to have 200 hours of recorded activity that activity has a very broad range of things, and it's spelled out in that policy draft. First, you need to run calls. That's what we're looking for. But not everybody does that. There's a lot of services around the volunteers that don't necessarily have to run calls. There's duty shifts. There's some agencies that if you serve on a duty shift that night and don't get a single call, you're still active. You're available. You are ready to run out the door. They have meetings, lots of trainings. There's administrative functions, finance, grants, community events, community activities, education. So there's just a number of things that our volunteers do to commit themselves, and they are active. And there are also some that are not that active. So it does just try to differentiate between them. what is considered and they picked 200 hours and that was a consensus among all of the chiefs that were there. They have to submit a form, that form has to be certified by their chief that says yes, that person met the policy of 200 hours and then ultimately that gets submitted to the Commissioner of Revenue and the administrative process kicks in and their bill gets appropriately adjusted. So that's kind of the process side of it. In conclusion, again, the two primary questions are, do you agree with this approach and do you want to schedule a public hearing for July 27th?

And then second, what rate would you like to...

to pick. We have $1.50. Those are certainly options. Those are also for context. So if you said 75 cents, Angie can run the math, because I'll not do that. She has the calculator.

He volunteered. I said I could take care of that.

But I think $1.50 is reasonable. It does kind of align with the general amount of value of incentive you guys were looking for. But the number can be whatever you choose, you know, that makes sense.

I have one point of clarification on this slide. The incentive for the reduction in vehicle license is for, there is a category of volunteers that's called active in the code, but it's defined differently. And this, but it's, there's certain people who've been volunteers that don't still qualify for that. And this is a higher level of activity to receive this incentive.

Right, very much so.

Okay. So what I'm hearing is we've made a lot of decisions to get the wheels in motion on this. Um, what you need from us tonight, and I'm going to ask everybody, we can't vote in a work session, but give me a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Do we want to put this on as a work session item with the discussion of rate to come? Okay. Um, and I believe you're abstaining because you're a volunteer. Got it. Thank you. Supervisor King. Um, okay. So we have consensus that yes, we want to put this on as a work session item, a public hearing, excuse me, public hearing item. Everybody is still okay with that.

And later on your agenda, if that is the direction you'll, you would take action to schedule the public hearing, and then we have to advertise appropriately.

So in order to do that, yeah in order to do that then this board needs to say or get some sort of consensus for our action item under new business what do we think about the rate and I'll it's never fun to talk about taxes and tax rates so I'll start I'll rip the band-aid off and talk about it a little bit Because this would be a brand new program and we don't know where we're going with it and what kind of fiscal impact it will have, My preference would be to advertise at $1 with the understanding that after the public hearing, if we get more information, we can always move the rate down. But if we advertise at $0.50 and we get more information, we can't move the rate up. And so advertising the rate isn't the same, in my opinion, as approving the rate or even saying this is going to be the rate. It just gives us a discussion point to get started. I am open to 50 cents for sure. I think that this incentive needs to be meaningful and if somebody is driving a vehicle of the average value, $192, $255, that's, $255 is more meaningful. I wish we could just break all the laws and not have to follow the uniform tax structure so we could go as we wanted to, which was up to a certain dollar value to waive the tax. but I understand that this is the situation that we're in. So my proposal would be to advertise at a dollar with the understanding that we could vote to come back off of that and I will open it up. I'm not starting with you first this time because I started with you first last time. So I'm gonna go over to Supervisor Biggs. Do you have any thoughts, ideas?

I think that's a worthwhile proposal but I guess the question would be are we gonna have any information about fiscal impact by then?

We won't be able to have more information about fiscal impact because we won't know how many volunteers have qualified for this. We might have a little bit more because we are going to go ahead because we're on a fairly tight deadline to get this in place before the personal property books completed, which has to be delivered from the commissioner to the treasurer's office by September 1st. We're going to go ahead and... send out the forms to the volunteers with them knowing that you're in this process so that they can start to choose their vehicle they can get the form certified so they can submit it to the commissioner's office if that happens quickly we might have a little bit more information okay thanks supervisor grafsky did you have any thoughts uh no i i agree with both your sentiment on

having to follow the the unfortunateness of having to follow the code but right we can always we can always back it up but you can't right moving forward if if we're off base so I think that's good Chris, is there a floor? I mean, obviously it's greater than zero, but is there? Zero. Zero is the floor.

Zero is the floor.

Okay. From a tax structure. But we don't have that kind of safeguard of a cap on it if we were to say zero.

You don't. I think the difficulty will be the political. If you picked a certain number and at some point the board at that time goes, hmm,

That's a lot of money.

It's going to be hard to raise the tax on that classification of person just politically. I mean, structurally, you can do it, certainly.

No, I mean, I loved that initial proposal where some people were going to have to pay nothing if you've got Really big vehicle or something. You got to pay a little but you're still getting a nice, you know incentive But I think I think we're smart enough that we can find a good compromise It provides a crown Okay Start start I if we have to go down to you two I

And if we have more information before the public hearing that kind of gives us, you know, what if everybody, and I don't think that this will actually bear out, but what if everybody has an $80,000 F three 50, you know, that's a different thing to consider than a bunch of Honda civics. So, uh, supervisor kids.

No, I'm in full support of what you want to do. Okay. There that's it. Yes.

And I'm good with advertising for a dollar.

And I understand that you are not able to discuss this. Thank you, Supervisor King. So I'm hearing kind of a consensus around looking at a dollar, so we'll cover that in our new business item later. Is there any other questions related to this incentive? I know we've talked about it for a really long time, but I don't want to go through it too quickly if anybody else has questions.

I do have numbers, the total impact for the different categories. So the highest one, if there were 160 volunteers that had $60,000 vehicles, the relief overall that would be provided by the county is $148,800. If it was 50 cents, it would be $196,800, just to give you context as to the total numbers. Okay.

All right. So I don't see anybody else flagging me for more on this. Is there a motion to come out of work session? So moved.

Okay.

Thank you. Any discussion? Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. Grafsky?

Aye.

Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King? Aye. Mr. Fischkowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Chair DeMont? Aye. Seven ayes.

We're going to take a quick break. It is 9.22 now. We'll reconvene in 10 minutes at 9.32. We're back from our break, and the next item is our consent agenda. Is there a motion?

So moved.

Second. Okay. Any discussion on the consent agenda? Seeing none, Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Ms. Caron?

Aye.

Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King?

Aye.

Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Mr. Grafsky? Aye. Chair DeMont? Aye. Seven ayes.

Okay, the first item on new business is an ordinance adopting part five of the Montgomery Matters future land use map and village plans. This was the subject of our first public hearing this evening and does incorporate the update that the Planning Commission voted on at their most recent meeting with regards to park property. Is there a motion?

So moved. Second.

Okay, is there any discussion Okay. Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. Kitts. Aye. Mr. King. Aye. Mr. Pichikowski. Aye. Ms. Spitz. Aye. Mr. Grafsky. Aye. Ms. Caron. Aye. Chair DeMonts. Aye. Seven ayes. Thank you very much. Justin is celebrating.

Yay.

The next item on new business is the proposed ordinance amending Chapter 8 of the Code of Montgomery County to increase the fee schedule for erosion and stormwater management. This was the subject of our second public hearing this evening. Is there a motion? So moved. Second. Okay. Is there any discussion? Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. King?

Aye.

Mr. Fitchikowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Mr. Graftsky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Chair DeMonts? Aye. Seven ayes.

Okay, and then the next item is to schedule a public hearing on the Fire and Rescue Volunteer Members Personal Property Tax Incentive Program.

and angie can you give me just a little bit more information about how we handle this now that we've kind of discussed yes we have a resolution that has a blank for the establishing the tax rate and so if what i think i heard you say this evening was you'd like to establish the rate for the public hearing at one dollar per hundred dollars of assessed value okay is there a motion to that effect so move second okay is there any discussion

And can you remind me the date of that public hearing? Yes, it is July 27th. Okay, great. Okay, seeing no discussion, Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please.

Mr. Fitchikowski?

Aye.

Ms. Spix? Aye. Mr. Grafsky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King?

Aye.

Chair DeMont? Aye. Seven ayes.

Okay, next item is a memorandum of agreement with New River Community College Educational Foundation, the ACE program. This is a resolution to renew the MOA for the ACE program. Is there a motion?

So moved.

Second. Okay, is there any discussion?

Just that it's a really good program and I think we had mentioned at our school county liaison meeting that they had 131 students this year participating. Fantastic. From Montgomery County. Any other discussion items?

Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please. Ms. Biggs?

Aye. Mr. Grasky? Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King? Aye. Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Chair DeMonts? Aye. Seven ayes.

next item of new business is a res a proposed resolution of support uh for the vdot design and limited access control changes for the i-81 widening project from exit 128 to 137. motion second okay we have a motion in the second is there any discussion on this item Seeing none, Madam Clerk, if you'll call the roll, please. Mr. Grafsky?

Aye. Ms. Caron? Aye. Mr. Kitts? Aye. Mr. King? Aye. Mr. Fijikowski? Aye. Ms. Biggs? Aye. Chair DeMonts? Aye. Seven ayes.

Okay, next let's move to reports. Our county attorney is not with us this evening, so we'll move to the county administrator's report.

Thank you. I first am going to address some of the concerns that were brought forth in the public comment portion of the meeting, and then I'm gonna tell you about some exciting staff updates. I do think that it's important that we address the questions that were brought forward. I know Marty and I have kept the board up to date throughout this process. And I wanted to review an email that I had sent earlier today to Mr. Brennan. And I can kind of summarize in this. the timeframe of when things occurred. And when I finish, if any of you have questions, I'll be glad to try to answer those. In October of 2025, our County Attorney, Marty McMahon, administratively completed two DEQ forms and they were completed as an administrative duty that didn't require legislative action. The boxes that were checked indicated that the compressor station complied with county ordinances and was suitable. And the reason that those boxes were checked were because it's not within the county's ordinance to approve or deny those compressor stations because they are regulated by FERC. It's preempted under federal law and so that's why it was an administrative task at that point. Then on December 15th, if you remember at our board meeting, we had several citizens come forward and speak about the pipeline compressor station and addressed concerns. The board approved a resolution at that time that discussed concerns involving the things that were brought forward tonight, making sure that the air quality was okay for that area, making sure that there was safe access as a result of the Norfolk Southern trains that go through that area and sometimes stop at important crossings. So we did file that with FERC as well. Then on May 5th, I received correspondence from the Virginia DEQ requesting the county to complete new forms. New forms had been developed by FERC related to the air quality concern that they wanted the county to complete. It was similar checkboxes, not much room for... a lot of interpretation but the wording of those was changed slightly and also we filled out the correct forms at the time those forms were in effect. So Marty and I had a virtual meeting with three representatives from DEQ. We explained that there was not a need to fill out any more forms and I explained to them how the board's resolution was not contradictory to the completion of those forms. I also followed up with a written letter to DEQ that explained what we talked about. And there was a sentence that was brought forward this evening that I wanted to address to you. I think this is really important. One of the sentences in my letter says, FERC has reviewed and approved the siting of the MVP pipeline project. And we'll do the same for the swan compressor station location. I did not mean to imply they had approved that. What I meant in that was that they would review it and consider it for approval or denial as they did with the pipeline. So just to clear that up. And I know there was an article in the paper I think on Friday. I I have not received any more communication from DEQ that said the project was stopped or that they were not going to move forward with the air quality permit. So I reached out to a representative from MVP. I talked to him today and asked him if MVP has received notification that the air quality permit is on hold and he said that it is on hold because the county has not completed the new form or

approved a different resolution so that's where we are if anybody has questions i'll be happy to try to address them does any does anybody have any questions about the process supervisor biggs i don't have a question but i want to thank you for um putting that out there hopefully to help people understand the process that was gone through thank you thank you any questions on this side okay

All right. Thank you, Angie. And now to the best of your report, to the better news in your report.

It's lighter. It's definitely lighter. On the weekend of June 13th through 14th, if you remember, that was a very hot weekend temperature-wise here. And that weekend at the Frog Pond, there were 1,200 patrons that attended. And that is really a great number of people coming out and enjoying that weekend. fine facility and then also parks and rec that same weekend was able to host for the first time ever an all-star tournament with the uh they hosted both baseball and softball at teal park it included u10 and u12 ages And our Parks and Rec staff was really appreciative to the surrounding localities because they provided staffing support. It was such a big tournament that they wouldn't have been able to do that themselves, but they had a whole lot of support and that was really great. So thank you for your support in helping us get that park.

I think we really need to collaborate on our reports in the future.

Okay. You can say it all again if you want. All right, I'm going to have one.

Thank you for bringing those up. Those are awesome. Okay.

Also, I wanted to give a shout-out to volunteer Montgomery staff. You approved the resolution to adopt the MOA with the New River Community College Education Foundation for the ACE program. which stands for Access to Community College Education. That volunteer program is so important and I want to give a shout out to one of our employees. She's our ACE program coordinator, Karen Anders, and she does a really great job. She works with staff from the foundation to monitor and support the ACE recipients from Montgomery County as they navigate completing those volunteer hours. On May 6th of this year, she worked with representatives from the town of Christiansburg Parks and Recreation Department to host the 2026 ACE Fair. And at that fair, the students were able to explore volunteer opportunities throughout the county. There are 32 nonprofits that set up tables that year. that provided information to 309 students. Some of them were graduating from Montgomery County high schools or homeschooled high school programs in Montgomery County and some were preparing for their second year with the ACE program. I think that the most popular place to sign up for is the Animal Care and Adoption Center. It is like sold out in seconds, so that's another shout out to our Animal Care and Adoption Center folks. Care will continue to monitor that. and help work with the students as they report their hours over the summer to help them be successful in that. So I just really wanted to give a shout out to her. And then finally, this was brought up a little bit this evening with the fire and EMS and rescue study. Montgomery County received two NACO awards this year. As you know, we were presented last meeting with a VACO, which was a state award for the Virginia Associations of Counties. And then the National Association of Counties awarded us two awards at the national level. The first was the Coordinated Crisis Response Montgomery County Hurricane Helene Boil Water Notice Advisory Management, which we got an award from the state for that as well. And then the other one was the montgomery county public school team first responders academy building the next generation of first responders the county had been interested in collaborating with the schools for quite some time on a project like that and megan atkinson with the schools came on as the cte and business partnerships administrator and she's done a really phenomenal job she was key to getting that project going also our chief michael geary deputy chief for EMS Bradley Hancock was heavily involved in that and Deputy Chief for Training Drew Smith was involved with that as well. It was a really great program. I went when they had their graduation ceremony and they were doing some scenarios there and it was really neat to watch too because some of the students that were participating in that had parents who were volunteers or I think they might have all been volunteers. There could have been some career folks as well but To watch them work together was really neat, and to get to talk to the students about how much it meant to them and things that they had accomplished that they didn't ever think they would have the opportunity to do. So that was really great, and I'm glad we were able to receive that award as well.

Thank you. Thank you. Now we'll move into board members' reports, and we'll start with Supervisor Biggs.

Just one note, those NACO awards, well, the VACO awards, Virginia Association of Counties, they're competitive. But when you get to the national level, you're competing with counties all over the country. So to get an award from the National Association of Counties is a big deal. And to get two of them is just remarkable. So kudos to staff for doing that. The only other thing I wanted to say, and I know some of us, you know, might want to report, I did have the... time to go to the prices Park and and go through it and I was amazed at the work that had been done there and was glad I took the opportunity to go down there and To see that and I'm glad that that sort of got included with what we talked about tonight.

So thanks so much for that That's it supervisor King

don't have no report but uh on this fire and rescue study i talked to chris about it a while back i like have a paper copy of that plus i would like a copy highlighted what was changed in it from the original version we'll be glad to provide that all right thank you supervisor grafsky

yeah um so i'm happy to report uh and thank you chair de motz for uh re-escalating the uh pothole issues on merrimack but i'm happy to report that both of those potholes have since been uh repaired uh and also the intersection of merrimack and uh franklin road there has been repaired so Again, thank you for also helping to escalate that you have some time you have you have superpowers that Don't don't advertise that And and then just just a couple of other quick updates, you know, I've talked about the the New River Valley Regional Commission relocating their offices to Christiansburg and if you've been up and down in that neighborhood You notice they're making very quick or at least very noticeable progress on the renovations there. So they've built out the new conference room. It's got a roof on it. It's kind of dried in. So we're real excited about that. And then one other just quick update I wanted to share with you all is this board voted in support of some funding for the community health center of the New River Valley. and last week they received their sealed bids from uh contractors on the construction of the facility and so the a e firm is is reviewing those now and so they're getting closer and closer to actually breaking ground at the new site so it's really exciting so thanks again for your support there and that's all i have thank you supervisor kids

So my big thing over the last couple weeks has been that fire and EMS study. I've been knee deep in that one. So I'm very appreciative of my fellow board members allowing me to at least suggest that and to get it to move forward, that that's a big deal. As we begin to look into this and we begin to move forward on it, I think we just need to take it and remember it's a study. Because I know Christiansburg is going to get their brief tomorrow. Blacksburg should be in the near future. I think it's 5 o'clock tomorrow in Christiansburg. And then we've got another meeting with all the chiefs tomorrow night. But I would encourage everybody, once it goes online, to take the time to sit down and look through it. It's got some very good information. But again, these are recommendations. And then we'll move from there. But thank you very much. I appreciate it. That's all I have.

Supervisor Karan. All right, one thing that I enjoyed after Supervisor DeMott's invitation, I attended the live, work, eat, and grow garden party, and I am very impressed and love to have one of those lots, but I don't think my allergies can handle, so I will let others enjoy those lots, but it was wonderful what they are doing there for the community, obviously with the kitchen and everything. The other thing also, I toured, like Supervisor Biggs, I toured the Price Park and I had no clue that there was a park there, so I was actually very excited to go through the trail and learn the history and learn the difficulties behind WHAT WE CAN DO OR WHAT WE CANNOT DO. SO IT WAS A LOT OF LEARNING FOR ME IN A VERY SHORT TIME. AND I THOUGHT EVEN MIX THE DISTRICTS AND I PUT MISS PIG'S SUPERVISOR GRAFF'S DISTRICT AND ALL THAT. A LOT OF LEARNING HAPPENED IN A FEW DAYS. but I'm glad to discover the park and I'm glad we added that even if it's not the name that the need of the park in that area and I think that the citizens appreciate our gesture and hopefully in the future more can be done I WILL HATE TO SEE THAT PLACE SOLD AND DEVELOPED. SO I HOPE WE CAN KEEP IT AS A PARK. THE OTHER THING IS I AM GOING TO RICHMOND THIS FRIDAY TO FINISH MY SECOND MODULE OF THE WACO CLASSES. SO I WILL BE DONE WITH THE LAND USE AND THE LAST ONE WILL BE LEADERSHIP. SO I'M EXCITED ABOUT THAT. AND I HAVE A HOMEWORK ACTUALLY. Thank you. Thank you.

Vice Chair Pijakowski.

I attended the liaison meeting with the schools with Supervisor Biggs, and the one big takeaway I got from it was the superintendent is looking to – make the students more aware and be thinking about their careers and not just in college, but the trades and also the military, which I was glad to hear that. Um, I think that's great thing to get kids thinking about that. Um, they, of course they don't have to make a decision when they're in the fifth grade, but Hey, you know, it doesn't hurt to get them started. Um, at our Montgomery regional solid waste authority meeting, um, we had a lot of discussion about the, um, upcoming requirements as it relates to microplastics and also the PFAS. This is a big mystery, not just for our organization, but for all the ones across the country really, because the PFAS and the microplastics are everywhere right now. You have them in your body. didn't put them there intentionally but I'm sure they're there so that's going to be a big issue in the coming years for sure so it was good to discuss some of that but we didn't come to any conclusions other than it's going to cost money and last thing I wanted to mention is the resolution that was voted on for the compressor station on December the 15th was not a unanimous vote I did not vote for that resolution because part of it had to do with a catastrophic incident at the compressor station. We have lots of compressor stations in Virginia and none of them have had a catastrophic event and the likelihood is I'm sure in the millions and then when you throw in it, a blockage of a train at the same exact time as a catastrophic incident, now you're into the odds where the lottery people want you to be. Because that's going to be highly unusual to have both at the same time. And that's why I opposed it. Thank you.

right and i'll be quick i just have a couple of things um first thank you to supervisor karan for coming to the live work eat grow garden party it was a great event we did have a follow-up board meeting last week but we had not we're still getting donations from that fundraiser event it was extremely successful and people were so impressed at the breadth of work offered by that volunteer organization so i do appreciate you coming to be a part of that i also wanted to quickly congratulate downtown blacksburg inc on a very very well attended and successful solstice festival this past weekend and mark your calendars for the first weekend in august i actually the turnaround on this is crazy because they come off of solstice and then that very first weekend in august go right into stepping out on friday and saturday which is another do not miss event in downtown blacksburg hosted by downtown blacksburg inc and then you did steal my thunder a little bit on parks and rec which i'm totally fine with um but i did want to mention we were excited yeah it's okay forgive you but I did want to mention two other parks and rec related items from our meeting last week summer camps are full which is always the case but again this year summer camps are full we could probably fill them again if we had space to host more summer camps and so that just to me speaks to the need of high quality programming for for children in our community in the summer so our summer camps are full and another this is like the highlight um like i i almost had a tear in my eye um this is a really big deal we have talked for years about how our rec baseball coach pitch t-ball teams once they they get a couple of practices in and then once the season starts we no longer had space for them to practice and play in a week and the practice part of development for youth sports is really really important that's where you learn your team building that's where you practice your various skills and stuff if we're only having space for playing games after two weeks of practices. We're kind of not serving the kids as much as we want to that are signing up for our reg sports. And with the opening of Teal Park, we now have enough room, getting a little emotional just thinking about it, but for the kids to practice and play every week and that is just a super huge big deal it's something that i am just absolutely delighted to say that we now can do and it's because of the support of this board and the support of the community for making sure that we have adequate parks and rec facilities for our kids so uh anything else or can we end on that high all right this meeting is adjourned

Did almost cry. I know. I got a tip.