Okay, if I could have everyone's attention, let me welcome you me tonight. I'd like to introduce to you acting Mayor Trotner, who is a fourth grader at Daniels Run Elementary, his parents were in the back of the room, were kind enough to win a mayor for the day, auction at Daniels Run to raise money for the school. We spend a very active day today, but he is going to call the meeting to order. So I'll turn it over to Mayor Trotner. Good evening. Welcome to Tuesday's September 2nd, 2008 City Council meeting. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, into his home with liberty and justice for all. Andrew, we actually spent a very active day. I had a chance on the first day of school to have lunch at Daniel's Run Elementary School with him where he was at instant celebrity. We then went over to the police department, the fire department, to City Hall, to our plant facility, to our fire safety facility. And you met the city manager and the chief of police and the chief of fire and our school superintendent and our chair of our school board and a whole lot of folks. So hopefully, Andrew, you enjoyed it. And thank you very much for coming here. Would you like to introduce your parents for a second? Mom, dad. I'm going to go back home. They're in the back row. Todd and Monica. Thank you very much, Andrew. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great. coming out here and good seeing you all. Thanks for coming. Thank you Mr. Mayor. You're welcome. Okay. Let me echo what the Mayor just said in terms of welcoming you all to the September 2nd meeting. We have a agenda full of very important items to the community. This is actually our first meeting back for the August break, but I know for many of us it didn't certainly feel much like a break and I know Councilman Greenfield who is very aggressively and Councilman Meyer been spending a lot of time on our budget committee. I know it doesn't feel like you all took a break at all, but I know all of us have spent an awful lot of time during the month of August for working. The first agenda item is one that we know has a high level of interest to the community, and that certainly is a discussion on our community center. When we last left this topic, actually we had a joint meeting between the old city council and the new city council over at the police department where we took a tour of the park. We had an opportunity staff introduced us to our architectural team. We had a very good and productive discussion and the discussion focused on what was then a very strong consensus that we did not want to build the community center in the middle of the park and much rather preferred it to be over to the west side in front of the police department which I think was kind of the general direction from that meeting that we gave the architects and Mr. Assistance my understanding that we're going to hear the follow-up presentation from them. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I'll introduce Mike McCarty, our director of parks and rec, who will make the introduction of our Consulting Mr. Mayor remembers of the council. Thank you for having us this evening with me tonight is Wayne Hughes who's with the Hughes Group Architect firm in Sterling Virginia in the Design and Engineering firm on this project As you stated we had a work session on June 7th As you stated, we had a work session on June 7th. We had our work session on June 7th and staff as well as the Hughes group worked very closely over the last couple of months. Not only parks and recreation community development and planning, the police chief and the police department to look at all the various options that Van Dyke has for us. We operate on a couple of things. First of all, we received the $5 million donation from Mrs. Sherwood back in December of 2007, and operating on the guidelines of designing, building, site work, furniture, fixtures, and equipment all within that $5 million donation. We'll take you through what our site analysis is and the options that we were looking at. There was one east option by the primary option on the west side, which is located near the Bell Willard property line near the police station. So we also have some operational costs including in your packet for this presentation as well. And I'll turn this over to just a huge. Thank you very much, Mike. Mr. Mayor, members of the council. It's our pleasure to be here this evening. The first slide, if we could, we wanted to assure you that we have spent a good deal of time at the park site, walking the park site, attending different events. And just to try to understand the pedestrian circulation on the site, the vehicular circulation on the site, and a general feel for the character of the park site itself. Based on that we did investigate two site options. One is the West site option which is adjacent to the existing police station. And it's a very prominent site. The proposed building will clearly be visible from Oldly Highway. It is axially positioned with the police station so that it forms a very harmonic relationship. Access to the site will be provided by the existing driveway. There'll be no nude curb cuts, totally, oldly highway. And we're also going to make very good use of existing parking spaces with shared parking spaces. The stormwater impact is minimal. The one thing that did pop up, but we did confer with the chief of police. And the chief of police and the chief of police suggested that we provide another exit way of secure gate access for police cruisers should traffic get clogged up in front of the police station. I think this is a very real concern and we have priced and costed that particular element into the proposal. We also investigated a site on the east side, which is adjacent to the tennis courts. It's a relatively low site. The building would not really be visible from oldly highway. Access would have to improve the existing roadway that goes back to the existing parking area. And a concern on this site too was stormwater management. The way the ground falls we would have to take out some trees north of this proposed site. The parking requirements we've conferred with the administration and we believe that we're going to need about 90 cars. One of the assets of the West site option is the fact that we will only have to build an additional 46 parking spaces on the West site as opposed to having to add 66 cars on the east site option. In terms of development costs, I think a lot of our intuitive feelings have proven to be correct. The west site option is significantly lower cost to develop than the East site. We're estimating about $650,000 for the West site and about $925,000 for the East site. That's a combination of additional required parking, additional utility runs, and additional grading that will be required on the east site. We've decided to develop the West site option to a greater degree and we think it really has a tremendous amount of potential for the proposed site. Again, the police station and the community center would have an axial relationship, their architecture would be very, very similar. And one of the things we're proposing is a civic green in front of the Community Center that links the proposed Community Center with the Park site itself. And design and special pavement on the entry drive and right in front of the Community Center. pavement on the entry drive and right in front of the community center. So it's very clearly an unciated link between the park and the community center building itself through the open civic green. The circulation for vehicular circulation is really terrific. We circulate through three lanes of parking without having to build any additional roadway. And once again, we are sharing parking places with the police station. And so we think it's a good mix. The exterior, we're very in the preliminary stages right now, but we want to assure you that the building will be a very similar Georgian character to match the police station, very similar to City Hall, very similar to the library. And I think the City of Fairfax is just in a superb job of creating a civic imagery. And this building we hope will add to that portfolio. The view from old Lee Highway, you can see will be very very dignified presence, perfectly symmetrical, very palladium and character, and we'll use the exact same materials, the exact same matching brick, as well as the roof metal roof and metal roof color. The interior, the sketch on the upper left hand is the event hall, it's about 4100 square feet, it's divisible into two separate facilities, and I was trying to picture what, how big, I would say that each of those two rooms is about the size of the room we're in here tonight. So imagine this room doubled in size and that would be the approximate size of both spaces opened to each other. We are going to take very special measures to make sure that the acoustics are correct in the space and we're also allowing space on the wall here for all of the walls for gallery space. When you walk into the lobby it will be a gallery for community artwork and likewise those walls will be available in the event hall itself. The floor plan is a very simple floor plan. One enters the vestibule and lobby immediately turns left into the event hall. There's another entrance to the event hall should those two spaces be subdivided. And there are a total of, if one counts them individually, for five multipurpose rooms that will be available for public use. So it's going to be a wonderful community space. So these can be used for any number of uses for rehearsals, for dance, for arts and crafts, and truly make this a cultural community center. The seating capacities approximate now are about 500 people for a musical event. This is people sitting in a configuration very similar to the audience here this evening. And for a banquet using 15 square feet per person, about let's say 250. And that would be with the banquet tables, etc. So we think it's a good size community center. It's a very flexible plan and can be subdivided any one of a number of ways, both the large space as well as the support spaces. The project cost summary, we're happy to report that we believe that we are on budget. We have a $5 billion stipulated budget. We have programmed in everything. Furniture, fixtures, equipment, sound, lighting to get this building fully operational. And so we've got the hard costs, soft costs. We've also added in the police vehicular traffic control gate. And right now we're at about $5 million, and that's where we will be. From an operating cost standpoint, Mike, I think I'm gonna let you address those issues. Sure, looking at the facility and the way the makeup is a cultural arts community center, we would use the existing staff that we currently have within the Parks and Recreation Department that currently do recreation programming to staff the facility through the majority of the week. We would have some additional staffing costs for temporary employees, for evening activities and weekend activities. When you have events where rentals going on. I think I might be one side ahead. We also built in our housekeeping costs, utility and maintenance costs and roughly total operating budget of $179,000. We looked at some potential revenues based on the fact that we do have facility monitors there as well as our program staff. And we estimated our event hall rentals because it is a multipurpose space even though the donor was stipulating a performance space, it is allowed to be used for multipurpose uses based on the old Tom Hall peak and non-peak rates. The other rooms we based it on, green acres rates, the weekday and weekend rates, and a total occupancy for a first year at 40%. With that we feel pretty confident that we can fill those spaces. The facility monitor coverage and backing that out, we roughly look at about a $48,000 negative net for operating in this facility. One thing, a couple of things to point out, one that does not take into account revenue that could be generated from programming costs or revenues that come in for a dance class and so forth, that would be using the facility. Okay. And lastly, we wanted to assure you that we will meet the stipulated completion date of September 2010. We are planning on submitting the design development phase in mid-December. We will submit site applications in January of 2009. We're going to award the contract in July August of 2009. And we've allowed 13 months of construction for the facility. And we expect to open the doors in September of 2010. So with that, we'd like to please ask for any questions. Just before we open it up, just a point of reference. You had said that you thought it was about double the size of this room. I'm betting that's not right. I think it's probably about four times the size of this room if I just did well the math Yeah, I figured this was about a 2000 square feet. What do you think no, okay? All right? I'm guessing it's Thousand maybe 1500 maybe it's a little bit. Yeah, it's 1500. Yeah, it's bigger than your normal classroom Which is a thousand right? I just look at this and double it's not very big and I don't want to give anybody that okay a wrong Impression Thank you very much for that presentation. Obviously we've covered a lot of material in a short period of time, and I only wish it was as simple as you all just outlined and it made it for us, but maybe the first, if we kind of take this in bits and pieces, the first thing is let's talk about the siding of the building if we couldn't, we'll focus on that and then we'll kind of build from there. So any questions, thoughts, discussions on the actual sighting of the building? Mr. Greenfield? Slides three and four, your west side option, your east side option. Sir. We've had discussions as you're aware that we would likely have to do this in phases. They phase one and the phase two approach. Which one of these, you didn't speak to the ability to expand building if we ever needed to do that. Or if we, some future council may want to take that one on. Yes. But what we're trying to phase one is to try to build within a $5 million price tag. Phase two is if we wanted to be able to have everything in one building and expand to a particular size, whatever that might be. Right. Do both of these allow for that to occur? Yes, they do. And how on the West Side option would you do that? Well, we could go in two different directions. We could expand to the north. In other words, on the civic green side or out to the old Lee highway side. But in both cases, let me try to address both cases. The parking is really the key issue. You can begin to see how the parking begins to infringe on the park site itself. Both sites are highly problematic when it comes to future expansion because of the density of the parking and its impact on the site. But both sites can be expanded. A possible scenario should the city acquire the bill-willard property. That would be a very logical expansion to the south. That would be the most logical, quite frankly, out of both sites. That was certainly something we had hoped for a long time ago. We're very happy to say that. I guess if you look at the East versus the Westside option, the Westside option just on its own. It is on. The Westside option just on its face really preserves Van Dyck Park. Yes it does. It does not infringe on any of of the open space it does not take Really I mean you're leaving the tennis courts where they are but everything else is Compacted into a much smaller area that is correct All right, well, I'll hold off on other questions just leave that to the site. Thank you very much Thank you councilman Greenfield actually talked a little bit about one of the questions I had and I'll just ask you to expand on it. The first is Which of the two sites has the less of the environmental impact? Well the West Side option clearly we that was the conclusion. Yeah, okay. Second thing, it's one thing I did not hear in this, which is something that is a concern of the council, but especially a concern of the communities, primarily those in the area there is traffic. Do you have any sort of discussion or have anything you can talk about in terms of the traffic mitigation? Any plans for that? Because obviously by my count, there are probably one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, a dozen communities when you count the schools and the other facilities, as well as neighborhoods that are directly impacted by the traffic. We are prepared to virtually affect traffic? Or are you- That requires a very empirical answer. And I'm not prepared to answer that antidotally. I think that is- If I may, Mr. Mayor, I think that it is an important question without having answered. OK. Because traffic is a huge concern. And obviously, the police department that's primary importance making sure they have ingress and egress. And frankly, the communities around there can have the ability to get out of their own neighborhoods. Thank you. Mr. King, for your follow-up. Just a thank you, just to follow a question to that. It seems to me somewhere we should have some information. We've for years, this has been both a community center and a police station at the old John C. Wood Complex. And we ought to have some baseline of information for traffic counts that we can take a look at to see, are we the same? Is that level? Are we worse? I do understand that Farcroft is now there. And Farcroft wasn't there, but Farcroft, do understand that Farcroft is now there in Farcroft. Wasn't there, but Farcroft, the entrance to Farcroft is further south than this site. But clearly, we do have a lot going on on what is a two-lane road. And I'm certainly not advocating changing the configuration of a totally high-weight to be able to accommodate a building here. But I would hope that we've got some of that data configuration of a totally highway to be able to accommodate a building here, but I would hope that we've got some of that data to be able to use as a baseline to see, are we worse, are we the same? That's very critical because that's something we've had there for 25 years. Yes, going through the site plan review, we would definitely go through the traffic information. We would have that information on hand from previous years when we were at the Johnson Wood building. Thank you. Thank you. Well, and I think certainly is clearly I think what we're looking for is to continue to move this process forward. We're going to have to identify all the areas of concern, not the least of which. Do we like the east or the west? And if the answer is yes or one or none of the above, then that will move us into another phase, which I was assumed as like any site plan would be traffic analysis. And, you know, I spent a good portion of today at Daniels' run and picked up a student there immediately after school. And I got to tell you, for 20 or 30 minutes, there's 800 students, there's dozens of buses, it gets out in a short proximity to Paul the 6. And it's a tough little 20, 30 minute period, but it clears out pretty quickly and this facility is nowhere near the size of that. And I would assume there would be evening use and weekend use and there would be ways to sort of plan the use of the facilities that wouldn't coincide with 3, 30 or whatever it is when both schools let out at the same time. And I have to believe there's ways that we could deal with that. But I'm looking at it, don't think the impact of this and the size that we're talking about building it, which is not huge, would have that dramatic of an impact and even close to the same impact that the two schools do now. That's my gut. Now, obviously, we're going to have to- We will get your answer on that. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Usmussel. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. From your presentation, clearly the size of this community center with the West option- Because you're my- everybody's having trouble in the on hearing? You might want to pull it close. Thank you. It clearly seems to work well. My two questions, one, if we want to expand it, can we go up a story or do we have to go out only? Well, there are two issues to address there. We often go up, I use an example, the Herndon Community Center, we recently completed, and we designed it to in fact go up. But it has a flat roof. It's a very contemporary building. It's not as contextual a piece of architecture as yours is. And to go up here, obviously, we would have to take the roof off and then move up. We have put a figure of about $100,000 on there if we had to exercise the vertical option. So it makes logical sense at this point to assume we would go out. Okay, and then secondly, if at some point we go to a larger configuration, if we, there has been talk in the past of somewhere somehow trying to get to a 30,000 square feet facility, which means another 100, 200 parking spaces, 150, 200, how can that be accommodated? Maybe that would not be able to be accommodated on the Van Dyke Park site itself. Otherwise, you know, sites, park sites are very sensitive environmental sites. And one can overload them with use. And I don't think that is the intention here. And so I think the mayor's intuition is right that it really speaks acquiring additional property in order to expand it. Except we've not been very successful in that over the years. Understood. Understood. Thank you. I just wanted to concur with what the mayor had said relative to his gut feeling that it wouldn't overwhelm the competing facilities of San Lios and Lighten Hall. Excuse me, Daniel's run. Because most of the high volume program activity at the center would occur in non-school hours, evenings, weekends, and holidays. There would be kind of a low-level maintenance kind of activity programmatically throughout the day. And if you visit any community center, you will see that same kind of dynamic. Precisely. Oh, that's the one comment I wanted to make on that. And so, I mean, it's the same issues that we've had with other activities at other sites along the way, the high school, at the Blinum site, and the churches. Mr. Mayor. Can we go back a little bit and address the storm water management on the west side? Yes, ma'am. Are you planning to put a retention pond of some sort or how are you getting the water? Yes, we will have to sculpt the earth in front of the center on only highway. But we believe we have the capacity to do that. We also, it will be a de minimus stormwater area because much of the water, the site splits right in half right at the community center. There's a no-al, there's a high side right there. And so some of that will go into the existing stormwater detention area that is sized for the police station. We might have to modify that just a little to give it some extra capacity. But we will split that with a stormwater detention area. Now another way to do it is to conceal it. And we may want to look at that, although that's not programmed right now from a cost standpoint. So if I understand this, what you propose here is sort of like a rain garden effect. That is correct. That is correct. It would only be wet and boggy after a period of rain and then it would dry. So the plant material that would be used there would certainly have to be sensitive. Critical. Okay. All of us have addressed this idea of future expansion of the building. How much more would it cost? Is it the $100,000 figure that you gave us to add to the infrastructure of the building you proposed that would pair it? That's exactly right. That's exactly right. You have to do two things. One is size the footings and columns so they can accept that load. And at the Herndon Community Center, in order to sustain operations as best we can, we actually poured the slab to get ready for it. So I would recommend that in this case as well. So that when we take the roof off, we can very clearly go up and possibly have a very minimal impact on existing operations. That's very good. The contingency fund that you proposed for this in the neighborhood of 20%. No, the contingency is actually 10%, 5% for design and 5% for construction. Okay. And just because you're in the business and you have the eye. What will be the impact aesthetically with this building to the side of what is in a very attractive building? Yeah. The police department. Will this detract from that? Crowd that? Not at all. We do a lot of work on college campuses including the University of Virginia and very conscious of the contextual issues that are at stake here. I think one of the gifts we have here is this building will be in the foreground of the police station. So from a standpoint of scale, I think the way you view the site, the way you will view this station, this facility, this community center, with the police station in back of it. As long as they are axially positioned, so it's a classical relationship, I think the both will work beautifully together. All right, and the entry to the building will be at the end of this mall, sort of. Yes, ma'am. And it'll be beautiful. Beautiful. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Okay. Thank you. One more question. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Looking at your page 13 of your presentation, your project cost summary, you have a total projected budget of $5,000,000, $37,000. That does not appear to take into account the $548,000 that we appropriated back in June. So is this total dollar amount for the entire project really 5,585,000 or is it truly the 5 million? It includes, this 5 million includes what we appropriated for the design engineer and services. It does. So the 537 does include the 548. Yes, it does. Okay. So really that's wrapped into the, okay, I got you. All right. Yeah, that's a total project cost. Okay, right. All right, thank you. Good. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As a follow-on to that, how good would you say these numbers will stand? How much time? Did the numbers fit your schedule? Yes, they do. All How good would you say these numbers will stand? How much time? Do the numbers fit your schedule? Yes they do. All right. That is the most confident we have ever heard in our contact. Well, I've been doing this for a while. I address somewhere you live. One of my mentors is in the audience here. And if I've been designing buildings with now, going back over 30 years. We specialize in doing community centers and we go into a project like this with great deal of flexibility. We're really, really flexible and right now I have a lot of confidence in that number and we have a very good way of balancing those things as we get closer to construction. I think we're going to be bidding this on a very good construction market. That's why I want to hurry up and get to market. Right. And so I am very confident. Okay. My other question is, has going back to this cross as common about stormwater maintenance? When they came on the scene, they were a lot of attempt to address runoff, but the first generation was pretty bad. You were pretty definitive about what it would cost to add the structure to allow for a second story. Given the size of the stormwater maintenance, could you be in a position tonight to say what it would cost to conceal the stormwater maintenance, could you give us, would you be in a position tonight to say what it would cost to conceal the stormwater? No, the reason I was so confident of the numbers, we recued ahead of time that that question may be asked, so I was not cute on that question, but I will get back to you with a number. I might also point out that we have not designed the stormwater management facility yet, we're still at a very conceptual level here. But I will develop a number for that. That's a very easy number to have. Pardon the pun, but I'd like to break new ground with respect to how we do a storm water maintenance project in the city. Be happy to give you that answer. All right. Thank you. Well, based on this conversation, and let me just say first of all, I think we all understand how big of an issue this is in the community on a whole different variety of levels. But I have to tell you, I never would have thought where we were and all the discussions we had that you all could find a way to design a first class community center that would compliment not compete against our beautiful police department without encroaching on the park and come into the $5 million gift is quite remarkable and also then throwing on that that we are originally talking about the possibility of half a million dollars in annual cost to run it which is now a net $50,000. So, I think that's all great news and I compliment your team and the city staff's team, Mr. Sisson, and all the team that worked to get us to this point. It doesn't mean we're past the finish line in terms of community input, but you clearly have moved this dialogue in a tremendous way. And I know we all appreciate the work and effort that went into that. Clearly, I think the next important hurdle is to make sure that the impact on only highway in terms of traffic is not going to be a detriment to the communities that surrounded and consistent with the spirit of Mr. Drummond's comments. And I would assume if we can get a consensus to keep moving forward, hopefully that would be a next quick important part of what we would do. So we can put the community's concerns to rast or validate that we have an issue. Right. I was always in the impression Mr. Sisson that we already had ingress and egress for the police department out through the Bell Willard site in case of emergencies, but is that this is just to make it more secure? You do and you have an easement. This is to make it more secure and more operational. General Pawla couldn't do it, but police car could. Exactly. I mean, they're anxious. I don't there are entrances out on all of that. You do have an easement. Okay. Well, I think we're at a point, you know, and I will tell you, and I want to just say this for the community's benefit, I think we view this as the beginning of the public input process. Certainly not at the end. Right. In discussion with my colleagues and Mr. Siss in your team. We are going to try to integrate this in a very important series of community outreach meetings in September. I don't have the data, the locations, but and the thing we call friends and neighbor, socials where we're going to have four locations. You won't maybe be able to announce it now, the dates. What we're planning on doing is having a series of public displays in the design and the layout and kind of a summary of the PowerPoint that would be available as part of those community outreach meetings. So when people came to that, they could see this and then in discussions with staff at our work session, the first Tuesday of October, we thought maybe we would just have a general open microphone opportunity where citizens could come and talk to us, even though it's a work session to start it out in an open mic format. So that very quickly in this process and very early in our next phase, we could get community feedback and sort of judge community support or concern as we do that. So I want everybody to know that we value that as a very important part. I assume we would immediately put this on the website if it's not already there. I know when we did the police department in some of the schools we actually had displays in the four year of city hall. I believe we had displays in the four year of the library if I'm not mistaken. I think all of those opportunities would be an important thing. And then Mr. Assistant, an article in the city scene if we could on exactly what we just heard so we can really get. The word out to start to make sure that the community is on board with where we are and where we're going. Let me see if that's consistent with the direction of council and if we can move in that direction. Any concerns, comments? I just had a question. Yes, ma'am. Are we going to discuss it all this evening, the floor plan and what's provided in the building? Are we at that stage prepared? Please. If you have comments, ma'am. in the building. Are we at that stage? Prepare to take place. If you have comments, Mrs. Cossets. Well, let me get to the floor plan area here. In our event hall that's proposed, and that's page 11 of the presentation, I had several things that came to mind as we, as I looked at this, it was, it's been hoped that we could use the event hall as a theater in the round at some point with portable risers and a portable stage. And will we have room to end the configuration to do so here? Yes. And the storage that's necessary for those risers, will we have that as well? No, we are not planning on site storage for those. Those would have to be brought in and taken out the way it's configured right now. There'll be no basement level of this building. Is that right? It'll just be on a slab. That's correct. Mr. McCarty, would that present a problem for? I don't know how large these are. Well, you know, a tip-and-roll type of bleacher. We can easily get in to the facility. And typically those are used for multiple park sites, for multiple different facilities. They're rentable. And so, again, given the budget constraints, we have tried to allow here for ample storage space for stackable chairs and for some tables. But bleachers, no. I would recommend that that be born of use. In other words, let's see when the building is completed. Let's see what types of theatrical performance you are in fact going to have. Just real quick, the risers for the staging and what not. I mean, again, given the constraints of the size of the building, we would have our staff try to store those and bring them in when necessary. We do envision possibly storing some of the risers there with some of the chairs and tables. Again, depending on how much we're able to afford in the furniture fixtures, when we finalize the total budget on this. I mean, the budget is finalized by when we finalize everything that's going on. Just curiosity, when we have a wedding reception or a big event like that in Old Town Hall, the table tops and all of that are they stored at Old Town Hall or they brought in? The tables and the chairs are stored at Old Town Hall, but some of the risers right now are stored offside. And we have the ability, we have the room somewhere to do that. Again, given the constraints, we find the room to do that. Again, given the constraints, we'd find the room to do that. Okay. The agreement as I understood it with Mrs. Sherwood provided for rehearsal rooms. And I only see one room here that really is titled rehearsal. The actual agreement was 4,000 square feet, which was multi-purpose, it could be multi-purpose space for performances, and a thousand square feet for rehearsal, again which could also be multi-purpose space, and both could be co-located. So in essence we have the event hall of of 41 hundred square feet for the performance area, the multipurpose room number two, which is just over a thousand square feet for rehearsal, but both can be multipurpose use. So when it's not used for rehearsal, it could be used for a dance class or a craft activity and what in the event hall could be used for a banquet, it also could be used for performance. But there will be no small individual rehearsal rooms for? Again, the multipurpose space, room number one, is divided. And again, that could be used for smaller groups, for rehearsals, basically, to be again. We looked at every area given the size of the facility of 12,000 square feet to be as multi-purpose as possible. We're doing the new music facility over George Mason right now and I know what you're talking about in terms of individual practice works. We do not have any of these have a sink and the necessary equipment for arts and crafts pottery? Yeah, you know, we're not showing that right now because it's so early, but I think that's a very good suggestion. Well, I think we definitely need at least one room that is very, very well lit. Yes, indeed. For artwork. We will have display lighting for the artwork. In the multipurpose room, we returning to that. There's an indentation here that almost looks like you've planned a patio area or or something just with two doors. Is that what that is? Yes, that is correct. You've got patios at either end of the busy. Yes, ma'am. Okay, and will will these be screened from the highway in some way? No, I would anticipate hopefully not. No. Then you would block your beautiful facade. Well, I was thinking of shrubbery or something. A shrub would be ideal. Maybe it's a low brick wall. Let's see if the budget would allow that. Right. Right. And the same on the other end. I mean, there really isn't a whole lot of... Trying to create it out to our space. Right. This patio down here will overlook the police parking area. Know that that's something that's to be strived for. I would just suggest that we make sure that Mrs. Sherwood has a copy of these documents so that we are meeting her expectations as well as sharing them with the public. But I think a personal note to her with this outline, so to speak, would be a good thing just to keep her in the loop. Thank you. Mr. Greenfield. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I recognize that it doesn't belong in here, but it would be helpful to do a comparison. One of the concerns, I think all of us have had is operating two facilities, a Green Acres and a new community center. Are you prepared either tonight or at some point in the future to be able to demonstrate to us what needs to remain at green acres and what we don't have to worry about because of having a new community center. Not fully, but the senior activities would stay at green acres. Some of the youth activities will probably shift our focus to the way we program the youth activities to more of the cultural end of it so we can take them out of the Green Acres Facility and bring them over to this site. The active things like the teen center, the groups that use the gymnasium over at Green Acres would stay. But it would free up some room space there that potentially could be looked at for other revenue sources, whether it be a lease or maybe another class opportunity to try to offset that cost. In speaking of that, and you've done a nice job here with showing only a negative of $48,000 to be able to run the building here with both your overhead as well as potential rental income. So I applaud you for that. But can we also see that same type of analysis for green acres because clearly we've got to focus on what that's going to cost us to be able to potentially lease out some of the space over there for and when I say lease out, I don't want anybody to get worried long term laces, but rent the rooms and see what that's going to cost us there as well, because clearly, having two facilities is a concern. We can do that. OK. Thank you very much. Mr. Brownman. Well, Mr. Greenfield and I seem to be thinking along the same lines. I appreciate you I'm tearing up my next series of questions. This is related to operating costs as well. A couple questions in a comment and a request. First comment is, how does the operating cost for this facility compare to other facilities of like size. Yeah, for a dry recreation center, with, in other words, without pool, without gymnasium, et cetera, these figures are very comparable. The other question is, in the park and recreation department here, the City of Fairfax over the last several years has expanded on a very ambitious program where your leadership and we've done a lot of great things. I see we have a few members of Proud here, so welcome and what they've done. And I guess my question is, is do you foresee operating costs going up as a relations to the number of activities being offered at either Green Acres or the Community Center. Because I think Mr. Greenfield hits on something that's key, which is that we are essentially operating two centers now. Generally they're going to go up anyways with cost of doing business with all the vendors that we deal with, whether it's a contracted class, a staff person you want to keep coming back, or just the supplies that are used in the program, our rule of thumb with any of our new start-up programs is really to cover the direct expenses of that program, especially given budget constraints. And you're teaming this up very well, and that is, I wanted to make the comments and then I'll reacquest that I have to Commean understand that while the amount we look here now is Roughly $50,000 right into the budget You know, we do face some fiscal challenges and that the commuter needs to understand that there's an operating cost alongside with construction costs That the five million five million thirty seven thousand dollars is not the end of it So one of the requests I'd have if it's okay with my colleagues is I would also like to see the Department to come up with a five-year estimate from O10 through O15 because I like to see, and this is for Green Anchorage too, what kind of cost the community is going to have to bear in the operation of the facility. So we can take a long range view of this and not just look at from a cost of the day. Thank you. If there aren't any other comments, I think we're moving into a consensus here. And I'll just say again, and I'm going to really repeat something I said earlier but really for the benefit of those in the community I know have watched this and certainly for my colleagues that were on the council previously as we work through this issue but you know when we start it down this path the number one concern that I heard from the community was don't don't take away and compete against our wonderful Van Dyke Park. This option, I don't think does that. We didn't want to take away into track from our brand new beautiful police department. And clearly this option doesn't do that. We were concerned both from the operational standpoint and from the overall cost that we try to find a way if at all possible to stay within our $5 million. I'm for one, didn't think we could even come close to it, but you all have solved that equation for us. And again, I applaud you, but clearly we now have a blueprint that's not ideal and it doesn't have all the everything everybody wanted, but certainly does that. Clearly the traffic issue, which I know is a concern in the community is not we haven't checked that one off the box yet But hopefully if we move forward tonight We will do that and the very near future clearly public outreach and to somebody Mr. Sister and have the dates of the fan meetings it is Saturdays a June the 20th our September the It's September 27th. It's September 27th. It's Saturday 11 o'clock, Fairfax High School, 1 o'clock, linear middle school, and 3 o'clock here at City Hall. It starts off, you have a very busy day with the... And there was one more over on the northwest corner. That must be it. Well, believe we had those three scheduled right now unless it was a fourth added and then the only other thing that was on that schedule that these are grand reopening of Draper Drive Park that morning at 10 o'clock. But Saturday, September 27th. So there's three locations all in Saturday, September 27th. Correct. All of this material will be available in sort of display, format, and addition to the other ways and then we'll have an opportunity on the first meeting in October to give some public feedback. The last item I wrote down and we didn't really talk about, I personally think and I know money's tight but for the extra $100,000 give or take to keep the option available for a future council to expand on it is an important option. I'm not sure out is the best option. I personally think up is a better option because of out of respect for the properties. I think $100,000 if in fact that turns out to be the number is, you know, in a facility that's going to serve this community for decades. The come is a good investment in the future. That's my own personal viewpoint, but I would urge us to design it that way so that we have the option of going up. And what strikes me too is while we may not be able to purchase Bellwoolard or we might depending on how that unfolds, certainly trying to get an agreement with the parking at nighttime and on the weekends that would allow for a future expansion. I bet would be within the realm of the relationship between Fairfax County and the city. I don't know how many parking spaces are over there, but after hours and on the weekends, it's virtually empty. And so that might be more within our reach for expansion purposes than purchasing the property. Although I don't think we ought to exclude that. But let us look into that with you. There are two issues that brings to mind. One is evidently, the county has come to the city wanting to build a fence between the two properties. That's one issue I think this needs to play into. The other is, just physical access, a stair access or something. Because I quite frankly think that it would benefit the city right now to have that kind of agreement. Or evenings when you do have tremendous performances, there is going to be a crowd. It'd be nice to have that option. Well, and that also strikes me that if you parked in Bellweller, you could lose late in the hall, and not everybody would have to come out and only high-waif as well. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In a single intersection there, too. So, okay. Mr. Rasmussen, please. Follow-up on the mayor's point. Would we need to look a little differently at what is now basically just a rear entrance? But make the what is the rear entrance a little bit more of an entrance. So that if we were able to get that parking, people could come in there and feel like they were coming in in a more formal way than just coming in a rear door. One of the cardinal rules of running a recreation center like this is having one entrance for supervision and control. I think your thought is very well taken. And in fact, maybe events, specific events, could have two entrances. In other words, if it's a volunteer organization, it's a concert that maybe you could staff both. But let us take of that inter-consideration and it's designed by the way that through court are there specifically placed where it is to allow for a future expansion should that ever occur in that direction. Great. Thank you. Well, and Mr. Sisson, if we could, I think we ought to put as a priority item to have that conversation now, whether we expand or do not, we can have that. And if we can get that kind of agreement, then pedestrian stairwells, as you talked about sidewalks, so that you're not walking through a mudfielder up a hill, it's hard to walk an eye year. I think we'd good for them to know what you're planning. Sure. Sure. I miss my. That fits into the other issue about the undergrounding of the storm water. I mean, it all fits together. So if you're thinking about having a little more activity on that side of the building, it only argues that you try to maximize the amount of outdoor square footers that's available. Any other comments? If not, Mr. Assistant, it looks like we have a green light on the West option and we'll have a series of public outreach initiated traffic study. Talk to the county about overflow parking and then see if we can't continue to drive this so we meet the schedules that are outlined and also meeting with the Sherwood family to sit down with them and go over it in detail and make sure they're obviously a comfort level. That may have already taken place. I don't know, but if not, that's something we should do. Great. Okay. Thank you. Great job. Appreciate you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Great job. Appreciate you. Thank you. Okay. We're now moving into a whole series of discussions and items and maybe just to set the tone for this discussion. Clearly, we're not that far away from a election cycle in the city of Fairfax. Election cycles all give all of us wonderful opportunities to get out in the community and interact, even in a more intense way than we would maybe in between election cycles. And as I sat down with my colleagues, the one thing that I heard from all of you all was sort of a strong sense that we needed to sort of refocus our attention to our residential rejuvenation efforts to enforcement of our residential ordinances designed to protect our traditional neighborhood communities in terms of a lot of the issues that we've seen lately. And it's not a new topic, but certainly I've sense that it was more of an intense topic. In some of the grounds we've made over the last couple of decades, maybe we lost and we may not have all the tools in our toolbox that we need to allow staff to do it. And then certainly the issue of enforcement is an important part of that discussion. I know staff has worked hard on this, has a whole series of different issues I think to bring up. So maybe just to start it, Mr. Sisson, I'll turn it over to staff and then I know we'll all probably have a lot to add to it as it unfolds. All right, these, we have I think four different items that are really related to each other. They all deal with some essence or some component of neighborhood quality of life issues. And so we've been able to kind of group them, back to them together for you all to all talk about at the same time tonight. And assistant to our chief Wilson is here tonight and we'll kind of run through several of these. Also in the audience is our zoning administrator, Michelle Coleman and our loan zoning enforcement officer. Trish McMaw is also with us who carries a big responsibility since there is only one of her type position in the city. She deals with not only residential issues, but all of the commercial issues as well, of which there are. Just as many as there are on the residential side. So, Chief Wilson, if you would introduce the topic and begin the discussion. Thank you very much. As most of you know, I wear a number of hats being the building official and the Fire Marshal. And I also chair something called the Code Enforcement Team, which is actually an idea of chief rap reports who is also here tonight because some of these enforcement issues belong to the police department. And that's a monthly meeting of representatives of all of the agencies that have some responsibility for enforcing violations that occur that affect the quality of life in the residential neighborhoods. And what we try to do is where a team solution is necessary to address a specific property, then we work together on those and we also compare notes and try to work together. I've just prepared a brief PowerPoint that covers the major areas where we do enforcement in the communities. And our main tools, which are the Property Maintenance Code, the rental inspections, which is the subject of actually another work session tonight, which is an ordinance committee council. The Health and Safety Manaces section of the City Code, which is another work session item for tonight, for another ordinance. There's only ordinance ordinances relating to an operative and commercial vehicles, which is that's enforced by the police. And then the building code and fire prevention code can also be brought into play for specific properties. The Property Maintenance Code, which is handled by my office, the Office of Code Administration, is adopted as part of the building code. That's by state mandate. Enforcement by localities is optional. The City of Fairfax has chosen to carry out enforcement of this part of the code. We are prohibited from changing the code. It only applies to the condition of the building structure and then it sets minimum standards for the maintenance and occupancy of the structure. Sets minimum sizes for bedrooms requires that there be a kitchen of a certain size depending on the number of people in the home. In addition, there are some limits to what we can apply this tool to. For instance, paint is only required where it's protecting the structural elements from the weather. So if the wood is susceptible to rotting, if it's not painted, then it has to be painted. But if they are as best as shingles, they don't have to be painted. Since January 1st, we've addressed a total of 429 cases. That includes one of our new responsibilities, which is enforcement of grass and weeds. Of those cases 241 were initiated by staff as they travel through the community and observed conditions that needed to be addressed. We also addressed two properties that were found to be on lawful boarding houses and we investigated three that were suspected and were found not to be. The rental inspections, this is actually going to cover most of the work session item that will come later, so we'll save some time there. Several years ago, the state in response to a lawsuit changed our authority to carry out rental inspections, this is something that we had done very successfully for a number of years, including inspecting the rental properties. The new regulations require us to define specific districts, which cannot be citywide, where the inspections are to be performed. And as we get to the work session item on the rental inspection ordinance, I'll show you the methodology that we've proposed for establishing those districts. Under the previous program, we had 750 homes that had permits. Under that program, we inspected them when the owner came in to get the permit. We inspected them when the tenant changed. If it had been more than one year or we inspected them every five years if the tenant had not changed. Under the new state legislation will be able to inspect them every four years. The standard that we'll be inspecting for is the property maintenance code and the way the state legislation is proposed right now. It's primarily intended for the health and safety of the tenants. Our previous program we could terminate a permit based on, I believe the standard was three substantiated noise complaints within a six month period. Under the current legislation, we're not allowed to do anything like that. We're allowed under this program to charge a maximum of $50 per inspection. And we have the option of having this program cover single family homes and condominiums which we did before and also apartment buildings. In the apartment building case we would inspect 10% of the units. One of the things that we took on this year was the enforcement of the grass and weeds ordinance. This was previously the responsibility of public works. This year this turned out to be a very substantial amount of work. The basic standard is that if the grass is over 12 inches tall, generally across the yard, we provide a 10-day notice. If it's not cut in the 10 days then we cut grass and send an invoice. This year we've sent out over 300 notices and we've cut 30 properties. We've done 30 cuttings. Some of those are actually twice on the same property. I think the weather certainly impacts the number of these that we have to do because the more rain we get in the spring, the more the grass grows. And then this year we've noticed that a number of the properties that we've had to address have been in foreclosed properties. We send out an invoice. If the invoice isn't paid, then the, that bill is actually sent out by the treasurer as part of the next tax bill and then it's collected. sent out by the treasurer as part of the next tax bill and then is collected. One of the proposed changes, another work session item tonight is a change to the health and safety and menaceous section of the city code. The primary thrust of those changes is to change the responsibility for enforcement from something called the city health officer which was not really defined in City Code to my office. The state law does allow us to charge a $50 civil fine for the posting of the notice and $200 for a second offense. We would propose to implement that authority and with the hope that that would deter people, or encourage people, I guess, to get out and cut the grass. Pretty much covered that. Under the zoning ordinance, the primary areas of enforcement are or the tools that are used in the neighborhoods are the, what constitutes a permitted use for a single family home. And some of the violations that we have found are where single family homes have been divided up into two separate sets of living quarters and also by violations where we have non-permitted home-based businesses. The other place where these ordinance comes into play is with occupancy violations and this happens where the number of people that can live in a single family home, which is defined as a family, is one or more people related by blood marriage or adoption and an additional three unrelated people. This indicates that commercial and residential points from January to December of 2007 was 150 versus 171 so far this year. And then this chart shows the... Can you go back? Sure. We said 150 for the entire year and in the first six months for this year, 171. This shows how many of the residential complaints 104 for 2007 versus 127 for the first nine, eight months of this year. The second column shows which of those violates, which of those complaints related to a use or occupancy complaint. And then the number of cases closed in the number of violations that were actually cited. And then the next chart provides the same similar information for commercial enforcement. commercial enforcement. Vehicles in residential neighborhoods are frequent sources complaint these areas are enforced by the police. The primary issues are in operative vehicles which include vehicles without valid registration or no inspection or inspection or it has an inspection sticker that is expired by 60 days. The police may place a notice on it and impound the car after 10 days. Under some specific circumstances, if a vehicle is screened from view and is under active restoration, it can be kept on the property that's permitted. Commercial vehicles, the person has allowed one vehicle less than 9,000 pounds. There is a proposed change, which Chief Rapp report will be addressing as one of the items for tonight. And commercial vehicles does not apply to vehicles that are just the plumbers at somebody's house doing some work or that kind of thing. Non-commercial vehicles, the person is allowed one vehicle over 9,000 but less than 15,000. And you can't have either one commercial vehicle or one non-commercial vehicle, but you can't have one of each. And January through July of 2008, the parking enforcement section of the police department has completed 50 cases. For this, for the same period last year it was 12 with a total of 20 for all of 2007. The other tools that we can use in some cases that affect neighborhoods are the building code which regulates the construction and remodeling of homes. If there's no progress on the job for six months the work can be considered abandoned. Beginning in May of this year we can require a three-year time limit for the construction of a single-family home, or in addition to a single-family home. This is new legislation that was actually a, began with a city initiative to attempt to put some limits on how long these projects can go on. Quite frankly, the only problem with that limit is similar to the six-month abandonment limit. There's really no authority for us to do anything other than revoke the permit if this time limit is exceeded. I will be attending a meeting next week in Richmond at the Department of Housing and Community Development to talk about this and other tools that we can use to improve our ability to deal with these situations. One of the things that I'm going to propose is that we can take, consider an incomplete building project to be one of the factors that contributes to blight so that we can use our spot blight abatement tool more effectively to deal with it. And then we also administer the Fire Prevention Code, which does not generally apply to residential neighborhoods. However, the Fire Prevention Code does define that a vacant property that is not security, specifically designed as a fire hazard, and we can use that authority to at least secure the building from unauthorized entry. This map shows the five census tracts that comprise the city of Fairfax. You'll see an each census tract. The number of homes that are rentals are, and that number is based on the number of homes that we had rental permits for as of the expiration of our rental program. It shows the percentage of homes that are rented to the total percentage of homes, and then it shows the average age of the homes. In order to define the rental inspection districts, this council will be required to make a finding that it's necessary to define a rental district to prevent a neighborhood is either being adversely affected by the number of rentals or is in the process of becoming adversely affected by the number of rentals. And the factors that are to be taken into consideration is the total number of properties that are rented and the average age of the properties or some of the factors that council will be asked to consider in making that finding. The recommendation is that since we will be inspecting the properties every four years and obviously this will add a significant number of inspections to be done that we will begin by defining Census Track 3004 which is the southwestern corner of the city which has 188 or 29.3% rentals and an average age of 48 years. Define that one the first year and then add an additional district each year. And that way we will begin with about one fourth of the rental properties to inspect the first year. And then by the time we get through all of them, we'll be back to the first ones. If I could just on that number, 30% that sounds stunning to me. But does that include apartment complexes and condominium buildings that they have rental and is the reason it's so disporging it into the... Yeah, this... Is it that there's more rental or apartment buildings in the sectors or... Yeah, that one is very high and and I'm not sure why. The Sunstrike 3,033, which is the Northeast corner, that includes Foxcroft and there's of the 300 nod condominium units in Foxcroft, probably over 100 of those are rentals and they would be included in that number. I'm even trying to figure out in whatever it would would be, South, West quadrant, 29.3%. There certainly are some apartments on Cambridge Road, but there's not a stunning number of apartment complexes versus traditional single family, which would tell me, boy, you're right, if there's an area with a major problem of moving from traditional residential neighborhoods to Yes, and that certainly would be one of Reading that right. Yes. Yes. We would we would propose to obviously to take that one on first and then at the as Each succeeding year we would add add an additional district we have each succeeding year we would add an additional district. We have, we did have a delegate boulevard put in a bill last year to allow localities under 10 square miles to be able to define the entire jurisdiction as a single district. That bill was put on hold and was considered by the Affordable Housing Committee of, which is a joint committee of delegates and senators. I did address that committee last week. They have decided to continue that bill, holding status while we initiate this program. And they will reconsider it when we report back to them what our success has been just by defining this district. But Ness is what you're saying is every year we can add a new section or a section or district. I don't believe the legislation says we can't cover the entire city, it just says we can't define one district. The legislation says that we have to define districts and it says that one district can't cover the entire city. I don't think it means that we can't cover the entire city, but we have to define it by multiple districts. Either all at once or phased in. Yes. Well, that's a distinction without a difference. I don't know. I mean, is that going to hold? It doesn't make any sense to me either. But it's a law. I understand. Yes. It's just another form of sausage. But clearly we could decide to be more aggressive or less aggressive than depending on the will of body in terms of pushing it, see where it takes them also. Well, we could, the reason I'm considered would suggest that we define the one district for the first year primarily is because of the workload that would add 188 inspections immediately for that year. I'm going to ask and it was really directed to me but I can see in the audience we're having trouble both on TV and hearing so if you would lean into your microphones and kind of draw it to your mouth so that folks can hear it and including the television Mr. Drummond did I see her? Yes you did. That good. Okay. I know we're going to be kind of going all over the place, but since we're focusing on the issue regarding the rental occupancy permit, Chief Wilson, I've had several discussions about this because as we've seen lately in the community about the condition of the housing, especially those that are rentals. So I have a statement then a couple of questions. The first one is that it has actually a question to us. My understanding, if I'm hearing you correctly, is that it really, from taking away the issues of district, jurisdiction, boundaries, the issue is that we are not able to sanction the notice for the actions that's in it right now, which previously we're able to do. Is that, from an enforcement standpoint, is that the power that we lack that really can make a difference? I think that's one of them. There are, the initial concern was that people could drive down a street and you could pick out the rented properties based on the general appearance of the property. And by going back to rental inspections, I think we can help to address that. The other thing that disturbs neighbors obviously is parties and tenant behavior. And as this law is housed under the building code, the only thing we can address are building code violations. So, in under the previous ordinance, there probably were very few of the rental properties where we actually took any action based on substantiated noise complaints. I can think of probably, Tim. The reason I ask is because I've had some discussions of our recess with representatives of the real state community, as well as the apartment owners, community landlords, they don't seem to realize that the law did not, or the law did take away these teeth, if you will, regarding behavior. And I would just put it in front of my colleagues to have the city again take the initiative and go into Richmond having our having the elegant below the center of Peterson going back with some language that puts that back in there because I don't think we're going to find as much resistance as we expect I think the issue was by understanding from Chief Wilson was the issue of fines and fees and whenever our other jurisdictions on the Commonwealth apparently had had an issue with, but for our standpoint, teeth really are the sort of the behavioral and given the fact that the number of complaints is going up, I can imagine that the number of sanctions you might find would come inside with golf as well. So that's something we want to look at as part of our legislative package. I'm thinking we want to consider putting teeth into that. And the other thing is just question from your experience, and you've been doing this for a long time. Are you seeing a higher number of rental units coming online in single-family houses as a result of the foreclosure crisis? I don't know that we've observed that yet. Once we get into this program, the way the legislation is structured, we put out public notice that people that are renting houses will have 60 days to notify us that they are renting houses and to seek the permit. It has to do with the quality of a traditional residential neighborhood where families want to raise their kids. You know, typically what I find is, and not a generalization, but I'll go that far, but certainly there's exceptions of this, but when there's a real house, there's strangers that live there. They come and go. They're not involved in their communities, they're not involved in their streets. Yes, clearly the houses look different, but those are the houses that are being more subjected to multiple cars and all the things that go along with it that change the dynamics. And I will tell you, having lived in the city of Fairfax my entire life, years ago when we started down the path of Fairfax my entire life, you know, years ago when we started down the path of a task force that Councilman Greenfield and myself served in, we were sort of in that dilemma where we were starting to see our traditional communities go farther and farther in that direction. That's when we formed the how... tried to address the other things we went with it. And then when the cost of real estate went up and we brought on other communities, it seemed to dissipate, it seemed to get better. And I think, and we're seeing this in this dialogue and all these numbers, for some reason we've, it's changed again. And I will tell you, in my neighborhood, which is Cobdale, which has always been a very traditional residential community, if five houses go up for market, I'll conservatively say three-go rental. And I don't think that's unique to just that section of the community. My sense is it's going farther and farther than that. I don't know why. I, for one, did not see it coming. I, you know, I loathed myself, I guess, into sleep of, you know, what we put on the books in the 80s and the 90s and the unrelated and the junk vehicles and the grass ordinances and all the things that we did to stem it has now gone backwards. And I don't know why, but I know in discussing it with my colleagues, I think there's a consensus that there's almost a crisis point in some communities that we're reaching again. So rental properties to me certainly is at the top of it, but it's more than just grass and parties. It's livability of the community. It's never known who your next-door neighbor is, and knowing if livability of the community, it's never known who your next door neighbor is, and knowing if they live in the community or they're there for the wrong reasons. And when you have kids, and it just came up recently in another community, it really puts the community at ease. And then the communities can go either direction. So Mr. Mayor. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I'll share with you my experience in Oli Hills. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'll share with you my experience in Oli Hills. When I was president of the Civic Association, it was about the same time that the livable city task force was also addressing the issue, because I actually served on that committee and rode the bus with you, Jeff, when we went through certain neighborhoods in the city. So we had a group that went and looked at every home in Holy Hills was 334 homes. Now the data is obviously dated but we came up with 31 homes that were rentals. That was 9% of the neighborhood. And we walked every street and had a map, and we made notes on every house. What was interesting is that the city did not have, as I met our record, at least half of those homes. Also, what was interesting is that there was no pattern to which homes needed attention, because we also identified, concurrently, those homes that we thought just not as a professional, such as yourself, needed attention. Vines growing out of gutters and etc. And it was about half and half, some were owner occupied and somewhere rentals. Also, we had people on our civic association board who were renters. So that didn't necessarily fit the pattern that they were not involved in the life of the community. It's a very complicated issue as to why these communities, these neighborhoods, Evan Flow. Some of it just, I have noticed anecdotally that people that bought their homes in our neighborhood 15 years ago may have inherited some family money and decided to buy a second home and keep the one that they have. So some of it is a generational turnover. They don't want to let go of the house, but they want a different house. So there's a lot of different factors that figure into this. Depending on each neighborhood has its own kind of atmosphere. But I agree with you, it is, these numbers, probably, what I've been noticing that there's been an increase. And while I don't want to make gross generalizations, it does, the number of complaints certainly is irrefutable. And we do need to take some actions to address it. So I hope that this proposal can get some teeth. Miss Cross. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Sort of stepping around here. What responsibility is assigned to the real estate companies that are listing for sale property or a bank that's foreclosed on a property. Do they have a responsibility to maintain that property and if so, how do we enforce that? Well, whoever is the owner of the property has the responsibility to maintain it in accordance with the property maintenance code and the grass and weeds ordinance and all of those different things. As I said, the foreclosure rate has had an impact on the number of properties that we've had to cut this year. The mortgage companies that end up owning those properties are almost certainly going to pay their bills. But they won't, they don't take any steps to maintain a property. Some do. Some do. But it's... Do we make an effort to contact the... Oh, yes. Responsible owner? Yes. Yes. We mail a notice of whoever is the owner of record listed with the real estate office. We have... We require to mail out a notice. We post a notice on the property. And the notice gets mail to whoever is listed as the owner of the property. In the case of the grass they have 10 days. Respond. What we've tried to do this year is in the past, when public works had the program, they would actually send a registered letter to the owner and then wait 10 days after that was received before they would cut the grass. In an effort to try to eliminate the problems more quickly, with the concurrence of the city attorney, we post a notice on the property or try to give it to somebody and then we start the 10 days with that, although we still mail the notice because we're trying to get to these. Obviously, if the neighborhood has seen the grass grow to the point that it's 12 inches high and then we still have to give 10 days notice we want to tighten that as just as much as we possibly can. I think just to- You are recovering some of our costs here. Yes, yes I don't know yet it's too early in the year to know exactly how we'll do because most of the, some of the 30, we probably cut about 35 properties by now. We've mailed out most of those bills, some of them when the real collections will come will be when that's attached to a tax bill and that hasn't happened yet. Okay. Okay. The complaint process, the number, well, first of all, the number of complaints is significantly higher. Would you deduce from that that the city may not have a good inventory, right? At the present time of rental properties, do we actually, if you're confident that we know of most of the rental properties in the city. I think we do. I think that I have one inspector that primarily does property maintenance code enforcement, but then I also have in order to get all of the grass and weeds worked on. We've leveraged some of the building inspectors to take part in those and the zoning inspector. They all talk to each other. When a problem property comes up, we usually already know about it. What would you attribute, why the huge explosion in level of complaints, number of complaints? Well, the statistics I showed actually were zoning complaints from Ms. Coleman, so she may have some insight, But I think a lot of it is is an economic factor. I think the the economy right now plays into the question of why we're seeing more houses being rented. I live in Alexandria and I'm seeing the same thing in in my neighborhood. There are a lot of houses that are for sale and underneath the for sale sign is a for rat sign because the people are Potentially still paying a mortgage on that house and if they can't sell it then they'll take a tenant that can Contribute to the cost of keeping the house. I don't think that's unique to the city of airfax I think that's happening all over and we are seeing we have seen 30 or 40 for closed properties and they generate Complaints when when when they're not kept up. And if you would, we have recently heard from, or I've heard from residents that they don't feel like their complaints are being heard or being responded to. Can you kind of go through the process from the time the phone rings and a neighbor calls and says, we have an occupancy problem next door. There are too many people in this house. Where do we go from here? Where do you take it from there? Well, there are a number of ways that we can receive complaints. There is an email address, which is complaints at FairfaxVA.gov, that people can send emails to. They can call my office. They can call the planning and community development. They can call the City Manager's office. And all of their complaints are investigated. If the person requests that we call back, we will. If the person requests to remain anonymous, we will still investigate the complaint. I think that we really do try to get back to people. Now, some of the cases, if a person makes an anonymous complaint, and for whatever reason the complaint is unfounded, for instance, there is a concern that there are too many people living in a house. But when the complaint is investigated, the house is large enough to support that many people, and they are all related. And there's no violation. And so the person might not see a change, but it has, they have been investigated. If you're investigating a home, are you allowed to go to the door and seek admittance to that house? Can you? Yeah. You have the authority to say, you must let me in. I must be. No. We have the authority to go up and knock on the door and ask. Uh-huh. How much further than that, we can go really depends on what we know about the property. If we have very good information that there are violations inside the house, a statement from somebody that's been in the house that would be willing to do so, we could pursue or search warrant. But our success rate of knocking on doors and getting into houses is actually very, very good. We actually had an email from a citizen who had concerns about four houses on his street and by the end of the next day we had had people in all four of those houses. Great. Why would just conclude by saying that I would hope? I occasionally get calls inquiries about where to go with a complaint or could I look into something a matter for people. And I've always found the chief's office to be very cooperative and I would encourage people to do that if not through their council person, through the office directly or the manager's office or whoever, we have had some unfortunate incidents in just the last month where perhaps the incidents could have been avoided if we'd just taken a little more proactive approach to the problem. So if you think there's a problem in your neighborhood, I'd encourage you to make that known. Thank you. We do have in front, you do have this sheet that's attached to the work session item and all of that is also on the website and that lists some specific things that we can address and has the phone numbers for the various agencies that directly address them. I know we're bouncing around all over the place in terms of addressing this issue and there's a lot of specific recommendations here, but I know there's a lot of hands up too, so I'm going to try to get some of the general ones and then we'll go back to the very specific recommendations you have, Mr. S. Moussen. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Muin. Just to follow up on Mrs. Cross's last point, Mr. Wilson, the attachment to agenda item two is the two pages are really excellent. I've urged a couple of civic associations to put this in their newsletters, and they have published the whole thing in their newsletters to let people know how to access the city with problems. So I think that's fantastic. Question, or a question to comment I have is on the slide that's on the screen, in the census track. Could we get that broken down by single family and apartments? I think that's very important because I'm just a comment. Yes. I don't, I think as we approach the rental program problem, we ought not to get bogged down in the apartment, and I see, seriously, let's say, bogged down in the apartment complexes. Our real problem, I think, is in our single family home neighborhoods. And so I would hate to see us do a whole lot of inspections in apartment complexes. If we can find a way not to have to do that and put more emphasis on the single family homes. So as we move forward on this, I just want to make sure that we keep that as a, as a, I don't know. This map, based on the information I got from the real estate office, this is only single family homes and condominiums. Oh, really? Wow. It's stunning. I do think that adding the apartments is an important component to our process because I think that we do need to get in the apartment buildings and inspect them. The total number of apartment units in the city is just over 1,500. So the inspections in apartment complexes would be 10%. So that would actually only add 150 inspections. If I may, I think the difference might be that at apartment it's a complex no-by-leasing company. As opposed to individuals, is that how we break it out? The previous the previous rental ordinance included treated a condominium as a single owner property Just as a single family home, but it did not include the apartment complexes Well, but I think the point being made is our Well, but I think the point being made is our apartment complexes aren't unique to the region. I mean, there's a safety issue in group housing and all the things that you would be normally addressing. But our traditional single family communities because they're older homes, they're in many cases they're less valued than even the surrounding regions that we have as we well know, create unique challenges that I think from our standpoint, we want to make sure we focus on and doesn't get lost. Yes, a shuffle. And the sense strength, 300-04, which identified as the one that we would propose to target first, does not have significant apartment communities in it. Yeah, that was Avalon Bay was doing earlier and not so. Okay. Why don't we, I've got a lot of questions, but they're more specific to enforcement and things related to that. If I could suggest just so we can start to organize the discussion a little bit. Why don't we take each one of these recommended changes one by one and see if we can get in sense in some moving those for based on the staff recommendations. And then after we're done with those for whatever it is for five, then we'll kind of just open up the discussion to general conversations. The first of which is, I guess that's item number two. We're on item number two. This will be item number three is the next one. Okay, but item number two, are there specific, that's just a status report? I mean, there's things that I want to talk about like, we're taking credit for a lot of good things. We've implemented over the years, but I would strongly suggest some of them sort of dwindled and gone by the wayside and the level of energy and attention has changed over the decades that some of these ideas have been. I'd like to come back to those, but so there's nothing in two that's a specific zoning change or ordinance change or legislative initiative in two. Is that what I'm hearing? There are some, in item two, there do discuss some legislative changes that affect some tools for the zoning can use, but we do not have a specific ordinance for that yet. That legislation took effect in July. Okay. That's the changes the state made. Yes. Okay. That's the changes the state made. Yes. Okay. It gives increased enforcement authority for search warrants and can require something that you're going to come back to us on. Ms. Coleman will be bringing that case. Mr. Greenford, did you have just one on the agenda item number two, just one quick suggestion really to follow on, expand upon Mr. Rasmussen's comment. It would be great if we could email this to all of the Civic Association and HOA presidents for them to email out, but I think it would also be nice if at some point we can either put this in with a water bill or something that it can be pulled out in, in maintain because there's one thing I hear from people is, I don't know who to call, or I call this one office, and they didn't help me, and they didn't know where I should go next. That's frustrating for somebody that's trying to get resolution to an issue. So I would hope that while encouraging them to do it is great, if we can email it to them and then put this in Something that people can pull out and keep. I think that would really be helpful Well, and you know why not mr. Sissin is there a way that you know The most helpful thing to me is the whole first the code administration and the phone number and when you call them and the police department and their phone number and when you call them and that first code administration police department public work zoning and treasury is there not a way to include that in a standard section of every city scene that goes out it doesn't take much space if it were laid out and designed so that it's not something the other stuff I know we need to get out and but it's more voluminous of I can use that word but that first section I mean I didn't know this. You know I sat in a discussion today that a staff member was part of where a citizen had a complaint and it took three or four minutes of dialogue to figure out what the complaint was and then two or three minutes of discussion of what you call this department for that part of the complaint and this department for that part of the complaint. And this summarizes it pretty nicely with phone numbers. And if we could just repeat that one section, the first three inches of this document on everything that we put out and then get all the information of the civic associations and things like that that are a little bit easier. It is on the website in a couple of places. And I get that. For some of us, the website is not the end and be all. I think print it and get it out in other forms. Certainly would be helpful as well, Mr. Meyer. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I agree that the website is okay, but I also notice that this doesn't have the hours of operation. So if you call these numbers on the weekend or in the evening, you're going to get a recorded message. And oftentimes the citizens are so frustrated and it's at night or in the evening or on the weekend and they call these numbers, they get a recorded message, they may leave a message or if they want to talk to somebody, they have to make a note of it, remember when they get to the office, make a phone call during the hours and what they wind up doing is they wind up calling 9-1-1, which ties up our dispatchers. And they may, if they know about the non-emergency number, they may call that. But talking to a non-emergency dispatcher with the beeping and the recording can be somewhat intimidating to some citizens. So I would hope that we could have some, if they call and leave a message that we have some standard that the staff would call the citizen back if they leave a message and the recorded message should encourage them to, if they want to leave their name and number, that we have some standard that they be called back within one, within the next business day. So that because some of the complaints that have come to the council have been simply that they don't believe that they're concerned or their limit as being responded to. And it may very well be that the staff is responding to it, but they just don't know it. And I think part of these complaints is really as a breakdown in communication. So I would just encourage us, I know we're trying to do everything we can, but I would encourage us to redouble our efforts to reach out to the citizens. To follow up on the suggestions, one of the things that I fear about when complaints standpoint is, where do we go for information that single source and one idea might be to, know we have a sitting neighborhood hotline for complaints but all these are the numbers is it possible to make a particular one hundred number or an information number like a 711 or something like that where people can call and you know press one for for code administration plus two for police department that can be routed that way There's a single number we can promote that as opposed to Giving people one two three four five six numbers of call for whatever they need to call that way You know people are sort of conditioned if you will to call in one single source It's kind of like a website. You know we tell them to go to the website well. We could tell them to go to 1-800, you know, Fairfax or whatever, they could call that number. So I don't know if that's something that we could look into as well. Got to, I agree with my colleague. I think it's more of a matter of communication, following up, but also making sure that the citizens know where they can get the information as well. Okay, Ms. Cross. I just had a request. I would like to have a copy of this if you would send it out in the package. Sure. Thanks. It would be nice to if you could send it out via email to us. So if we want to cut and paste and send it to our own list and our own little forms of communication, we can and maybe we have it. I don't know, but if we don't, if we could make copies yet tonight, I don't know why they passed around the overheads. They're a little hard to read, they're very hard to read for me. Right, I agree with that. Okay, if we can, and I know we're going to have a bigger discussion and we're going to do a kind of a catch on discussion at the end of it. Let's go to agenda item number three and the staff report on this series of recommendations. All right. Yes. Item number three is a proposed ordinance that demands the city code relating the enforcement of health and safety menaces. In reviewing all of the aspects of the city code that we could use as tools to deal with the common complaints that we get to improve the quality of the neighborhoods, the Health and Safety Manusage section really wasn't very clear about who did it. We put the post to change that from the city health officer to the Office of Code Administration. There are some other, that's the primary change to it. The other changes would be a change in the grass ordinance that would implement the civil fines of $50 for a first offense and $200 for a second offense in a 12 month period. There are some minor changes to the noise ordinance section. It never really made sense why pile driving could start at six o'clock in the morning, but construction noise couldn't start until seven o'clock in the morning. And the other day, we added federal holidays to the days when construction noise hours were restricted. It has changed added federal holidays to the same restrictions as Saturdays. All of these are designed to further protect, I assume, not to loosen up, but further protect the residential communities from noise and things related to that. Yes. The one area that council may want to consider and discuss is that the state legislation does not specify that the maximum height for grass has to be 12 inches. It could be lower than that. Most of the localities in our area use 12 inches. There is, I believe it's staff or county uses six inches. I would go with six. It gets 12 inches. It's already a problem if it gets to 12 inches and then you have to add 10 days, by the time you post the notice and it's 10 days before we can actually go on the property and cut it. Yes. It's already an eye sore for the community. Well, could at six inches that trigger the process and at 12 inches, we're in there cutting it ourselves. I mean, is there a way to we could do that? Right now we're waiting until 12 to trigger. Can we trigger it at six? I followed the earlier discussion. The first thing is a letter and then they get 10 days to yes address it if it's six 10 days later it's going to be 12 especially if it's a decent rainy summer is there a way to do that where yes i believe that i believe the way it's written that we can do i mean we've all gone on vacation and you get back and you're grass is six inches long and you oops and you run out and take care of it but i don't think that's what we're trying to get at. We're trying to get at, you know, a house with the entire lawn, 12 inches or higher, is a problem. I would suggest it's even a health problem because that's where you get the ticks and the mosquito bed down in it and all the things that go along with it. Yes, well, I mean, the authorization from the State to cut grass is primarily as a health and safety issue. So can we get a consent? And I don't know if that requires a change from what's in here, but that we start the process at six inches by time it's 12 inches if they're not responding, we're cutting it. Yes, okay. I'll look at a way that we can we can structure that. Well, and just so I frame this, I think the intent on the draft agenda for next Tuesday is whatever we come out of here with a consensus on where actually have slated for the introduction of the ordinance, which then mean there would be a public hearing, but that we're moving this process pretty quickly. So we're going to have to get whatever feedback we get and incorporate those changes. Because assuming there's a consensus, it will show up as an introduction next Tuesday if my correct in saying that. Yes. And that, and then of course two weeks later, they'd be a public hearing before a council action. But okay, so it sounds to me like we're okay with three. Correct? Okay, so it sounds to me like we're okay with three. Right? Go ahead, Ms. Cross. Thank you. On page six, in item J and on the next page, item K, it seems to me that we need a little definition or a little cautionary statement that the city is not responsible for waste disposal generated by contractors, but they have to take care of that themselves and the property owner's responsibility to see that they do. So somehow I think that needs to be pointed out in J or K. But I think we have some abuses there by contractors who rely on the city's disposal facilities. On page 10 there is a reference to a board of housing hygiene. We have that. Yes. We do. It's it's it's we will actually be coming back with with another ordinance that isn't ready yet. It's unrelated to this. That we defines the city building code. In the building code section of city code right now, there is the board of building code appeals and the housing hygiene division of the board of building code appeals. Those neither of those boards meet very often at all. And what we're going to propose to do is actually combine them so that it will only be one board because the meeting level right now is very infrequent. Then perhaps we need to flag this for a change of title here. Your board of housing, IGN hygiene becomes known as something else. And we need to have that record. Well, I did discuss that with the normal, the way it was structured was that the board of building code appeals would hear appeals of the construction side of the building code and the housing hygiene division would hear appeals of the property maintenance code provisions. In discussing that with the city attorney, it didn't seem to be a problem to designate that board as with both names so that this section would not need to be changed. Apologize, I didn't even know we have it. And I apologize to those who serve on it. I'm sure they're doing good work. Okay, thank you, that's all I think. Mr. President. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. On page two at the bottom of section four, there are two things that one is, noise disturbances after 11 p.m. I would urge us to change that to 10 p.m. And the other thing that I notice is that in the next three lines, it talks about disturbing people in their office, their hotel, their dwelling, but doesn't mention homes. It seems to me we really want to prevent disturbance of people in their home first. Now I realize that's just a semantic, but I think we ought to keep our eye on the ball here. I think that is actually covered by the word dwelling on line 61. I know it's covered, but when somebody reads this, they're not going to think of homes, they're going to think of an office building. And we're not interested in, I don't think, in worrying about people at 11 o'clock at night in an office building very much. I've realized we have to be somewhat. But we're really are interested in people's homes. So let's reword that. And I assume or in any dwelling is that where the home gets right, incorporated? Yes. This, we maybe make that first and say in any residential home and or dwelling and just kind of bring attention to it. Yes, sir. I'll discuss that with the City Attorney tomorrow. We can make that change. This first section of this ordinance, which only has a very few changes and it is actually enforced by the police department. And I would just want to make some comments on that and other things related to enforcement, but I would suggest we catch the enforcement thing after the specific of these ordinance, because I think it's a bigger one than just any one ordinance that we have here. But, Mr. Meyer, I have one quick question on the bottom page four. You have a definition of blowers. And does this definition capture gasoline powered leaf blowers? I would think so. Well, we have a lot of people who use them. You don't have any hours of operation for that. You might want to take a look at that paragraph and see if we can tweak it a little bit. In another section of the code, there are hours for long cutting, long work. So obviously this was not intended to address leaf blowers, was it? No, this is not a new section. This section has been in the code. Well, as I read it, though, I thought that certainly looks like it meets the definition of a leaf blower so you might you might want to say excluding you know law and equipment or something. I want to just make sure we don't get lose focus on the intent I mean if somebody's blowing their leaf and making the property look more attractive and it's not at midnight, then I'm not sure that's what our focus or priority is. It's certainly parties and repetitive issues and things like that, I think, are more focused, at least from what I'm hearing. And again, unless they're mowing their lawn at 11 o'clock at night, which didn't happen very often, I guess it could be. But Mr. Drummond, I saw your. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. To add on to what Mr. Restmuston was saying on page four, section 10, section 11, lines 107 through 118. I'd like to propose that under number 10, instead of saying building before 7am, and in terms, sorry, the erection, including excavating demolition, all grace and repair of any building, should be before 8am, then after 6pm, weekdays, then before 9am, and after 5pm, on Saturday Saturdays and federal and state holidays. And then similarly on number 11, just pile drivers, hammers, etc. Say the operation between 8 p.m. and after 6 p.m. on weekdays and then before 9 p.m. and after 5 p.m. on Saturdays and federal and state holidays. The reason I proposed this is recently, you know, with all the construction, I'm sure, like myself, we all get complianced about construction noise. In ADM, it seems to be a more appropriate time because people are generally out of their house, kids are gone, and also, quite frankly, it makes it consistent with number nine, which is where it talks with the loading and unloading of any truck in the outdoors within 100 yards of a residence between the hours of 10 pm and 8 pm. So it makes it a little bit more consistent. I can understand the later time frame when loading a truck if you're moving, but in terms of the construction, it just seems to me that in the interest of neighborhoods, we would want to bump up that time a little bit. I thought you said 9 AM. Did you say 8 AM? You want to make it. There's 2 packets. There's 8 AM during the weekdays and then 9 AM on the weekends. Because it's 8 30 right now on the weekends. And you want to make that 9. I would propose making that 9. And the earlier one which says 7 AM to 6 PM, you want to make that nine. I would propose making that nine. And the earlier one which says 70m to 6pm, you want to make this. I would make it to 8am. Yeah. Yes. If I may, I think we're going to find that very, very difficult to enforce. Most of the, we have pretty much all we can do to keep people to 7am. For pile drivers and hammers? Well, I don't know that we've ever had a pile driver. I'm talking about the general construction. Item 10, not item alone. the construction in the city. Yes. A number of years ago and added the 830 AM is a compromise to try to allow people to get out and work but not too early if people were sleeping in and then tighten up the 7 AM. It used to be 6am. I believe so and it used to be fair. When I first came here the work was not permitted on weekends except with authorization from the building official and on Friday afternoons we were inundated with requests every Friday which was why we changed this to have specified times on Saturday and to eliminate it on Sunday. So the proposed addition was the federal holidays, but I think that with the construction industry would have some real issues with the eight o'clock start during the week. Mr. Mayor of Friday, with all due respect, my concerns with the neighborhood. I understand. Thank you. What's the remedy? What's the, I understand woods and grass and if it gets too long is the $50 for first defense 100, but if they violate any of the rest of this stuff, what's the penalty? Keep that report. I don't know where it would be. I didn't see. I saw there is. It's it's a misdemeanor. It's a violation of the noise ordinance. It would just be cited on a on the summons. Criminal summons. where it's a violation of the noise ordinance, it would just be cited on a summons, criminal summons. I mean, so there's a fine that goes along with that. We outlined the fine if the grass is too long, I didn't see. I think some coast somewhere in the town. Right. It's a Class 1 misdemeanor, but generally our approach is to ask them, inform them what the law is, ask them to cease and desist, and it's only if they refuse or they've incited. Okay. Is there any other questions or comments on item three? If not, we'll move item three forward then. We're now going to go to item number four, which is parking at commercial and commercial vehicles. That's me. That's why I stayed. I think I can make this fairly quick for you. I hope these amendments really correct two kinds of loopholes in the law. And occasionally when you get into statutory construction, you inadvertently create loopholes. There's two types. One is you have harmful conduct that somehow accidentally got slipped out and isn't captured in your prohibitions. And the other is you accidentally capture harmless conduct that really doesn't bother anybody, but it somehow got in the net. And we have both of those kind of loopholes in the current ordinance with regard to commercial vehicles. So basically the two fixes of these. First off, there's some vehicles that are included now that really don't bother anyone. Probably the best example are our plain unmarked standard looking cars that are provided as part of a compensation package. For example, you're the COO of ACME industries and they provide you a car for your use, but it's actually registered to ACME industries. That's a commercial vehicle under our current statute that doesn't bother anybody. No one knows the difference, but technically it's caused problems. This amendment eliminates that from being in the net. The second one is the more problematic one, and that is that there were some vehicles that were commercial in nature, look like a duck, walk like a duck, talk like a duck, but it wasn't included in a statute. And the reason they're problematic is because they tended to be unmarked panel vans and pickup trucks. And obviously unmarked panel vans and pickup up trucks. And obviously unmarked panel vans and pick up trucks could be commercial and could be private depending on the use that they're put to. We think in working with the city attorney that we've done a pretty good job of capturing the ones we needed to capture and defining what a real commercial vehicle is. They're the ones that have stuff hung all over the outside of. And they're parked across the street from someone's residence, and it just looks like a plumbers truck or a painter's truck. And it's a problem versus an unmarked panel van that doesn't look any different from the kind that somebody would rent it a place to move their kid to college or something like that. I think we've done a pretty good job of capturing the ones that we need to prohibit while not touching things like someone has a pickup truck that just has a toolbox mounted in the back. And on weekends they go hunting or they go help their buddy build a deck. I think we've done a pretty good job of that. So that basically summarizes what we've attempted to change in this ordinance. Questions? So Mr. Rasmussen? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. On the bottom of page one or in the near the bottom of page one, where you start to list the definitions of commercial vehicles, Dump trucks concrete mixer trucks and tow trucks over 12,000 pounds. Why wouldn't we or could we and I understand some of this may track state law so I don't know but couldn't we just delete the 12,000 pounds and prohibit dump trucks or any kind of trucks like that period. We could and you're correct in observing basically this is this just parallels exactly what the state code is. We we felt in terms of statutory challenge we were better off using the state statute that enables counties to prohibit commercial vehicles because it's tested ground legally. And so basically we just brought it in per se. I think the tow trucks, I think we get around most tow trucks between this language and the language with the 9,000 pounds, etc. I think we regulate that pretty well. And frankly, we don't get complaints about that. Those are not the vehicles that have been problematic in the past. Right. Okay. My other point is the panel vans. I know you made the distinction between, and I try to clean up in here, those that are clearly commercial and those that are not. But I still get a lot of complaints from people about panel vans, which you can't tell what they are. And I would throw out for consideration in that whether we could just prohibit parking on the streets all panel advance as assuming that they're mostly used for commercial type purposes. You know, anything that doesn't have windows on the side is not transporting people. It's transporting stuff. And I, you know, I question whether we need to, and so many of them are used for commercial purposes. There's no question about it. And yet they're not being licensed as commercial, so they get around it that way. And I would throw out the idea of just banning commercial ban's period. I think it's a clarification. Is that simply from the street or from you drive by in Soto-Lai every time you come to City Hall, two places that have at least two vans in their driveway. Right. And no markings on any van, but it's obvious what they're doing with the racks that are on top. The racks are empty, but it's obvious they're a commercial vehicle. In fact, your officer sits across the street from one of the houses and does radar on a regular basis. And you know, under our current ordinance can't do anything about it. So is that something? I mean, that is from within a one block area, there's several residences there that have changed. And I know we don't hold off on enforcement until the end here, but have changed the dynamic of any other house that's come on the market there because by the appearance of what's there, it seems like it's an allowable activity and you now have multiple houses that are doing the same kind of thing. Mr. Asmos Knight, I'd have to defer to the city attorney as to whether we could reach that far. I think our intent was if the vehicle didn't present any different profile, if the only difference was that Chevy Astro van has a window on the side and another Chevy Astro Van doesn't, it didn't have any markings, it didn't have any advertising, it didn't have any racks on it, it didn't have anything, any commercial tags, it didn't have anything that would suggest there was anything different about it other than one-head windows and one didn't. Number one, we're not getting complaints about those. We get complaints because people are concerned that you're running a business out of the home, but the vehicle itself is not the issue. It's the business in the home that's the issue. And so we felt like this was a reasonable place to draw that line. And of course, stuff like racks on it and things like that, make it a commercial vehicle. So our intent was if there was absolutely nothing different about it other than windows it wouldn't be included as a commercial vehicle. But Mr. Lehmann is waiting to weigh in. I think the chief is right. I mean what we were trying to do was strike a balance here and also put a not only a little more teeth into the ordinance, but also to enable the enforcement officers to have sort of a clear delineation of what you couldn't do. You know, I think we probably could try prohibiting panel vans. My suspicion is we'll probably have to come back and tweak it if we do that. Once we have a read of how many of them are actually being used for residential purposes. I mean, I think it's a very broad definition to use. But we can certainly try it. There's nothing to prohibit us from trying it at least and seeing how the enforcement goes. And I assume what you're saying is you could still park one under the ordinances as draft you could still park one in your driveway. It's the public street parking issue or more than one in a driveway that would be the extra way or public street. And I think the other concern is that you know potentially we expose ourselves to liability or to a suit if the allegation is that we're using a discriminatory manner. allegation is that we're using a discriminatory manner. And, you know, I think the more bright line it is and the more we use it consistently, the less risk we face in having to defend that. Because again, I've just not received complaints about that kind of vehicle. Well, but the way it's written now, or we're discussing, as long as you didn't exceed more than one it's either in your driveway or you're not parking on a residential street. You'd be okay but if you had multiple vehicles for you were parking on a public street. Right. That's where this would be. So we're where you have areas of course the one that would become I guess the most problematic would be where you have areas we have no driveways then if you have a resident is using one of those as a as a non-commercial vehicle all of a sudden they don't have a place to park their vehicle legally and that's what when I was mentioning about coming back and perhaps tweaking it later depending on how how it goes that that was an example of something that we might have to come back and revisit depending on how it goes, that was an example of something that we might have to come back and revisit, depending on how this goes. I don't think we have, again, because of the lack of complaints of these, frankly, I don't think we have a real handle of how big a problem or if this is a problem. Well, but I know a lot of people have concerns when they're multiple. Right. And clearly, your gut tells you, your eyes tell you, everything tells you they're there for commercial purposes. Right. Multiple of those already covered. You know, where we're going to get, where we're going to find loopholes is if I'm running a business out of my house, I have several panel vans that are registered to me or my wife or, you know, whatever. And clearly they're, they're getting, they're going around the process but I can see that being a real enforcement issue. But a real concern still never less than the community and that's the balance we're going to have to. Mr. Drummond? Yeah, I had to follow up with him. I mean, I guess the question is, is the intent here to get them off the street or is the intent to have them register pay people tax and do all those things that a business would do. In other words, the example of somebody who runs sale and escape in business, and they have a couple trailers. Do we register them in the city, make sure that they're tax payers and pay the fees and such. Words don't matter, we just don't want those vehicles on the street. I think that's the other issue that goes to the panel, the panel vans. It looks like to me under here, just real quickly, as I said, basically we're saying, like if you're a cab driver or for someone who uses this vehicle for your work, you can have one there. But it's more the issue of someone who could be running a business, but at their home, but they're not necessarily registered to be doing that. Right, and under the change that I guess Mr. Rasmussen is proposing, again, it would still protect the individual who has a driveway once to put one in their driveway. It's the multiple, if I understand what everyone's saying, it's the multiple panel bands that's the issue or that's a short answer. I mean, the concern that I have again is the areas where you don't have any driveways. But again, it may not be an issue. We'll just have to see how it goes. If that's the will of the council, we certainly can proceed that way. Well, and I'll tell you where you got a problem and we just demonstrated that on the screen up there is rental properties. They have three or four people living in it that are all bringing the commercial vehicles home with them. And now it doesn't feel very residential in nature. They may be three or four different individuals but they're all bringing their company, panel van or whatever home. But this would state that it's one per address or one per, in other words, if you're a tenant and you're on the lease and you can have up to three unrelated people plus the owner, would this allow for them to have four commercial vehicles? They're still only one. You count the vehicle per driveway. Okay. And it's for each dwelling unit per premise. For each dwelling unit per premise. Right. It's a traditional single family home that happens to be renting out a couple of rooms. They still will only be allowed one. It's a commercial nature. nature that I was saying. That is correct. And the only other issue I guess is this would not deal with obviously the situation where you have private streets and that's a different enforcement mechanism. I don't know if some of the apartment complexes at those parking lots or private streets or not. Again, I said that's not been a problem. Yeah, that hasn not been a problem. That has not been a problem. On the single family context, which is what everyone seems to be getting at here, this would address most of those issues. Mr. Mayor, I think you and Mr. Rasmussen had it directly on the biggest complaint we've had in the last two years. Our single family residences where every night you have a pickup truck loaded to the rafters with stuff. You've got two panel vans with racks and all kinds of plumbing equipment and ladders. I mean, that's what we're dealing with. It's not a white plain panel van. You can't even tell what's in it. That's just, that's not what bother people. It's the fact that it looks like a parking lot of a plumbing business. Well, but or I'll just say, though, and I think this is what Mr. if there's multiple pal vans, not one so much, but if there's multiple again, there's three or four people or eight or nine people living in a home and they all have a something that's not a traditional residential vehicle. I do think there's an issue on that and it's not a traditional residential vehicle. I do think there's an issue on that and it's not just that it's it's I'll leave it at that. I think that isn't issue. It's not a single family I would think you know a single family traditional family that happens to have five panel trucks. It's going to be very rare. We've just proven we've got a problem with rental properties where there could be all panel vans, they're all individually owned, their companies are giving them so much per mile or their contract plumbers or contract contractors or whatever and now your next turn neighbors got three four five of them. That is a problem. I'll defer to Ms. McMaw. She can correct me for a moment. But I think in the last three years we've only had one complaint that met that criteria where we had a house that had three plain white panel vans that were coming there every night in the concern of the library now. Okay, well, I'm just telling you, this is what we've worked. What we've worked is one and we were able to take care of that pretty quickly. They were running a business out of the house, and we moved them on. If I may. One thing I may suggest, because you mentioned the issue, we obviously don't want to be seen as discriminating or targeting or anything of that nature. But clearly this is an issue of keeping our neighborhoods in conformance with community standards, if you will. So one suggested might be that since we're talking about businesses, is it possible to, as part of this, require that they get a business license. Now, though, what we're trying to get at here is if you have multiple panel as the mayor was just saying, you're probably not, you're driving all around the community. It's not a home-based business. Is it one of those things where we can actually query as to whether they've got a, you know, a business license or not as well? Because my guess is the point is that they're not going to be having home-based businesses are going to have all these panel vans are coming from outside the area. We could, but I think there are really two separate issues. Okay. The rules for business licensing don't necessarily overlap neatly with this structure. So the suggestion I think would be that we, that we keep, it's a good suggestion, but I think we keep the two issues separate for now. There's enforcement mechanisms on the licensing side that get at a number of these problems as well without having to resort to this, these provisions. So I think there are two tools in the toolbox that work well together and I think keeping them separate. My recommendation would be that we keep them separate. keeping them separate, my recommendation will be this, that we keep them separate. Maybe just to broaden this discussion only because I don't think we address it in any of the other ones that has to do with commercial uses is, well, before I go on to that, just under the on page one where it talks about commercial vehicles and it defines them. Why are we so narrow in a definition of a commercial trailer? We say if it's a commercial trailer used for food or beverage, a commercial trailer used for landscaping and lawn care equipment, or a commercial for common or contract carrier. That's the only time it's considered part of this ordinance. But I can tell you there's a lot of trailers that are, you know, a handyman and it's full of wood and saws and hammers. And I'm trying to figure out why it's so specific. And in other words, if it's a trailer and it's used for commercial purposes, whatever that is, shouldn't it be incorporated into this section? I would suggest if it's a plumber, for example, and they got a big trailer because they're carrying 10-foot pipes and you know, you shade plastic fittings and they've got a trailer and it's attached to their car, technically it wouldn't, I don't think, fall under any of these three very specific categories. I don't disagree with you, Mr. Mayor. Again, I go back to. to tickle the Dragon's tail in a, in a, in a Dylan rule state where the state looks very carefully at what you're trying to do and whether you can do that. They've kind of said, these are the things that were very comfortable with you regulating. And so we brought into things that have kind of been, you know, tried and tested over time and there's a comfort level with that kind of regulation. Well, well, to answer your question, I think it's the same with the panel van. Could we stretch it? Because this isn't, this isn't dispositive on the city's authority. Could we stretch it to include another whole level of trailers or whatever, sure we could, but I think we run the risk of inviting further regulation and if we don't need to go there and you all were the better judge than I, but I'm just telling you, I'm not hearing a lot of complaints about that. If we don't need to go there, it tickles the dragon's tail unnecessarily to look like we're overreaching in terms of authority. And I'm just not getting a lot of complaints about those kind of vehicles, but I think you clearly could go there. Well, it is the intent, then, if this is the state law that help me understand law. It just talks about trailers for food, beverage, and landscaping and lawn care. I'll just suggest that we could walk within three blocks of where we're sitting right now, and I can show you commercial trailers that are no different than one loaded with ride lawnmowers versus plumbing, fixtures, and electrical fixtures, and all those things. And I just don't understand why they would only specify, too. Well, we never know exactly why they specify what they specify. This is what came from the State Code. But what I could suggest is we could take the fourth and fifth bullet points here and just simply say, again, this goes into the category of the panel vans where we may have to revisit it depending on how the enforcement goes, but just strike the fourth and fifth bullet points and to say any trailer or semi-trailer used for commercial purposes. And maybe say such as and use these as examples. So we're capturing them, but see how broad we can, you can make it. And I do think there's a lot of, there's as many trailers that are stack full of electrical products and pumping products is there are food and beverage products. I just tell you, I respectfully would suggest that. I think that the difficult thing to prove there or the thing we're going to have to prove is the use for commercial purposes. I mean, if someone has a little utility trailer and they fill a full of junk and every couple of weeks I haul out to the dump, we're not going to be able to touch it with, I'm sure, purposes. I'm sure. And that certainly wouldn't be the intent, I don't think. I think the mayor's suggestion of perhaps going to the broader definition, but then having the specific examples being included in that is not a limiting. We can work on that. We can work on that. We can see that this is not to take away a homeowner's residential use of anything. It's to take away a commercial use that's never been intended for a traditional residential neighborhood. And I don't know how to word-smith that, but that's in essence what we're trying to do. Well, still allowing a very limited commercial parking. You know, a single vehicle in the driveway under certain circumstances. Absolutely. Okay. We can tweak it and come back to you. Okay. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand. I understand Sure, when we get to enforcement, there will be other issues as well as you all want to get up and sit down and this sort of purpose, I'm sure it's comfortable. That's your pleasure. We enjoy your company anyway, so please. Thank you. Item five is the proposed ordinance to reinstate a rental occupancy inspection program. Covered most of this information in the PowerPoint, the state legislation would require us to designate a district that is in the process of deterioration due to the large numbers of rental homes in the aging condition of those homes and or apartments. The City Attorney's Office is drafted this ordinance to be in compliance with the state enabling legislation to allow us to conduct the program. The only comment I would say and I agree totally with, certainly I don't think any of us would disagree with the South West sector that was on there. I don't have my glasses 3000 and four I think it was. Yes. But could we not also make a case for whatever the number is on the North East, Quadrant 18%, if those don't in fact include, quote, traditional apartment buildings, I know there's, it'd be interesting to take out Foxcroft that are condos, because I think it includes condos in these numbers. That's correct. But you know, anything getting over 15% in a traditional single family setting seems to me like we'd have instead of just doing one, could we not go the extra step and incorporate pick a number, anything over 15% or whatever we think is reasonable. Now we absolutely could. My intent was that we would start with one district and add additional districts. I'm just suggesting why not start with two. We can, that's an inspection workload of 400. It just seems like two really stand out right now. Yes, I agree. The others are all in the 9, 8, 9 percent, but then you got an 18 and a 30. It just seems like there would be some rationale other than enforcement, which are in staffing and all things we'll talk about in a little bit. Yes. There would be some rationale to incorporate both of those sooner rather than like, smile on me. Yes, Mr. Wess, sure, Mr. Vice Chair, please. Instead of just going at one or two, we have to have a public hearing to declare these areas. Would there be any advantage to doing all five of the areas at one time? Does setting up the area require you to immediately follow with inspections? Or can you do inspections where you want to, based in or randomly, in any one of the areas we have designated? Because I think the issue is, I think it may be Mr. Meyer mentioned earlier, the issue is the semantics. We really want to declare the whole city at some point, and could we just do it now through the census areas, and then go about the inspections as we want to. I think we could do that, we would have to set up some policy as to how we were going to tackle the inspections in a fairway. But that would be it. That would just that would be an administrative. I think it would set a better tone for the city to for people to realize that they're liable to have inspections any place in the city any time, then to just target one area and start there and have and go around the city area by area. Would that also allow you on complaint-based issues to then enact whatever we're talking about and give you a little bit more leeway than in other words I hate for somebody and whatever it is the Northwest quadrant to have a very real complaint. And we say, G, sorry, we can't do the very same thing. We could do in the Southwestern one because we didn't declare it as quote, a segment. We would always investigate the complaints no matter what. And specifically, yes. And specifically, we're required to investigate a complaint from a tenant. Yeah, most of these complaints won't become tenants. Well, we do get complaints from tenants about condition. Yes. I would think apartment buildings would be more traditionally tenant complaint oriented, where residents base. We're conferring. That's not a good sign. residents based. That's not a good sign. Yeah, we're a good sign. When it's all the like. If you said there were about 100 units and box were cropped. So you took those out at that section on the right. We dropped down to that 9%. Maybe 10. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. This actually might... This might actually continue this line of comment. If I understand correctly, the previous rental inspection program provided that once somebody decided they were going to rent the house, they actually had to go and get a permit at that point in time. They had a certain period of time but they had to go get a permit then. No matter where their dwelling was within the city, they had to get it. Yes, that's okay. But now it's only those dwellings for which we have designated as one of those zones if you will. That individual has to do that. In other words, the other individuals who might be in zone 2, zone 3, they don't have to notify you that they're running the house out. No. No, okay. Because in section 3, it talks about notifications not as clear about that. It talks about each owner of a rental dwelling in a rental inspection district, shall file with a code of fish or written notice in the early 60 days. And I guess what I'm saying is if it's a rental inspection district, the purposes of notification that applies to the whole city. But for your purposes of actually going and inspecting them, that applies to only that one district. Am I? No, it's within 15 days we make reasonable effort to notify all owners in the designated rental district. Right, but I'm talking about page three of the actual with the owner. Right, that's what I'm saying of a designated rent to inspection district. That's what I'm trying to get at it. We're talking about specific districts here, but we just don't want people in the specific districts to notify you that they're renting their units. What everybody within this city to notify you that you're running their units, what everybody within this city to notify you that you're running those units, that they're running those units. Yeah, I don't believe we have the authority to do that. So we can't require somebody who is renting out their house to notify the city within a certain period of time, but we can require somebody who lives within that specific district to do that. Yes, however, the commissioner of the revenue can require them to notify them because of the business license tax. But it just strikes me that's a great example of why we need to expand the districts. Enforcement's a different issue, and phasing it is in a different issue. But there's teeth in this when we designated district that I think we need, not just in the north, the southeast or the southwest or whatever court and we're talking about citywide. I agree because it just seems to me weird for lack of a better fancy word that we would actually have enforcement in one area, but yet the other areas don't have to notify people that they're running the units out. Well it's weird in a small community when we have six square miles it's probably not weird for example in Fairfax County where there's 228 or not six or six square miles so I mean that that's the problem and the limit of small jurisdictions which I think is what we first tried to get them to address which now think is what we first tried to get them to address which now they've said we're going to wait and see see how you can best implement this and I'll just say it again I think the consensus over here that the best way to implement it is five whatever it's called districts. Once at one that then get implemented maybe over time, but that's at the describe administrative issue, not a policy. Because Mr. Mayor, if I may, I mean that would at least provide that they would have to abide by these regulations of notification. And because we're sitting up here talking about who's where and I mean, I know we've got the Commission of Revenue Statistics and everything. But I think for an enforcement standpoint it would certainly be helpful especially as we have seen this you know huge uptick in the number of rental units and our residential neighborhoods. Well can the action item here unless there's any objection as asked staff and city attorney and all of our powers to be to get together and see a way to do that as close as we can without of our powers to be to get together and see a way to do that as close as we can without pushing a wall that we shouldn't be pushing. Okay. Tickling dragons, I think. Tickling dragons, to use your phrase. No, his phrase. He's stealing his phrase. I've never tickled a dragon before. Okay, let's, is there anything else that Let's see, that was five, right? We're still on five? Yes, five? Yes. Okay, is there anything else on five? Well, the only remaining question would be whether to take on the apartments, but if we're going to attempt to do five districts for the single family homes, I would propose that we maybe defer that and add that later. I still think it's important to do. It's not to be safe in all of the things that are related to it, but I think in terms of our energy and focus, that new re-energized effort would be on single families. Is that the consensus? I would propose that once we get this in hand, that we would then come back and add the apartments. Okay. All right. Let's broaden the discussion. I think you did great work and the assistant and staff certainly commend you for that. And I think we're moving in the right direction. I want to bring up some specifics and I'm sure there's others and then talk about more general enforcement and how we're going to address that. But here's a, why don't you all just come up to the table? Instead of, please, Trish, feel free to come up, and that way we got all our trusted advisors here that we can have a conversation with. One of the things that I'm very confused on is this minor home occupation versus major home occupation. And I'm going to give you a great example. I know of a residential structure right now that evidently must come under a minor home occupation and never came to the council where they're operating a contract service out of the home. where they're operating a contract service out of the home. The first time a complaint came up, it was they were all parking these vans all over the grass. What ended up happening is staff educated them to gravel instead of grass. So I believe the gravel is probably in excess of the 25% if I remember the ordinance that we had on residential properties that you couldn't grasp or cement, they then put it up a big huge fence around it so nobody could see the gravel. There are at least four vans, commercial nature that park their every night and every weekend. I've got it every day this week. I've got photos of it, including the weekend at 6 o'clock in the morning. I know staff has every day this week. I've got photos of it, including the week and at 6 o'clock in the morning. I know staff has been to this facility. I bet just watching your expression, you can probably figure out which one I'm talking about. They have, I assume the homeowner is, quote, a dispatcher, where everybody shows up at 6 or 6 30 and all their vans. And there's got to be 2, 3, 4 of them. They get dispatched. They show back up in the late afternoon and then they either go home with their vans or what's happening now is over time they've just started keeping them there. Does that fall in a minor home occupation or would that fall into a major home? I'm using one specific example because there's no gray here but I'm using it also because I know of other examples that are probably more gray than this one example but if they're having multiple employees show up to the home and get dispatched in the morning and get dispatched in the afternoon I think we've addressed or addressing the commercial vehicle parking part of it. If I understood what we've got or what we will have, there can only be one that's permanently parked there, stays there at night. But does that constituting minor or a major home occupation? That constitutes an illegal home-based business. That is not permitted what you've just described in either category of home occupation. But in all due respect, I know staff's been there several times. What's the loophole that doesn't shut it down? And this has been going on two years and I've been involved in it. Okay. There are probably a number of factors to grapple with. And I don't have the full history of that particular property and truly the inspector can probably enlighten me in that regard. But a minor home occupation, if I can just start at the very beginning with the definitions. The minor home occupation is something that should be very limited to, let's just say for example, you have a computer or an internet business that you run from your basement. You have an office, a desk, a phone and so forth. You don't have any employees. You don't accept any materials to the home. There's no storage on the property. In essence, it doesn't change the character of the home and no one would know passing by that you had an office in your basement. Different from, now that's permitted by right. I mean, you can do that. You come to the zoning office, you fill out the paperwork, you sign your statements, you understand, you can't have any customers, no employees, and so forth. The major home occupation would be one that would allow for, let's say, a dentist office. And that requires a special use permit by City Council, so you cannot do that by right. So, and in that case, it is expected to be a professional business with not more than I think two employees, and I think they are supposed to be residents of the home, so you don't have outside employees. So those are the parameters for the two types of home businesses that are permitted. Anything outside of that is an illegal situation. Now on a number of fronts, I don't know what the occupancy has been in that home. What we find typically in a lot of these situations is that we can go out and address it, any violations that are found with one group in this year, and then six months from now another group is in, and they have started to repeat the violations that we thought we the tendency in these rental units tends to turn over. So while we speak to one group in this month and six months from now, when they've moved out and new group comes in, the new group doesn't know all the illegal things. They don't pass that information on, and so they continue to conduct the business. So we do have repeat offenders. We do have properties that are historically problem properties. This property doesn't fall follow any of those. Same owner, probably owner occupied. To my knowledge, there's not a multiple person at nighttime sleeping there problem. They're just running a business. And it's so obvious and so upfront. And what I say is, and what I'm trying to get at is, if the minor occupation, minor home occupation has loopholes to allow this to happen, then I just trying to get at is if the minor occupation, minor home occupation has loopholes to allow this to happen, then I just want to know that so we can tighten up the minor home occupation. If what you're saying is the scenario I just painted should not be allowed, even in our existing ordinances, we can have a different discussion. But I want to make sure there's nothing that I'm missing in the minor versus major versus the legal use in the scenario that I just outlined. Okay. Okay. Can I jump in? Yeah I don't want to talk specifics because I just got the answer I'm looking for but go ahead. Just to follow up I'm not going to talk specifics. The nature of that business and any business that goes on in the city of Fairfax. Chief Rapoport is definitely getting a handle on the fact that the problem with that business that you're speaking of or any business in the city of Fairfax is he has four vans or four panel vans or four trucks and they don't have signs on them and they they are registered in the owners name and they say I don't use it for my business if they have it behind a fence and I can't see it I have to see the violation in order to address it so if they hide it behind a eight-foot fence that I can't see what's going on here's I don't think the fence gate has been closed in two years. And I can, I mean, I drive by and see it and I'm not looking for it. But the problem is when you're talking about how, how are they actually running the business? They have a minor home and what happens is that they are saying this is- They file for a minor home. Yes they do. Yes they do. Yes they do. No employees can come to the house. That is correct. And that means that I would have to witness those employees walking to the house. I've sat by several houses in the morning in the afternoon and depending on if the commercial vehicle is actually a commercial vehicle. The actual running of the house or running of the business, it's one person running in office. There's no employees living in the house and it is a residence. Your question, your direct question is, is there a loophole in the minor home? There's a loophole in the fact that those vehicles are not considered commercial vehicles. So by the definition of what we've inspected, those businesses have to go by the definition of the minor home. They don't have employees living there. They don't have more than one commercial vehicle on the books, according to DMV. So you have to do all of your homework to make sure that those vehicles that are being used as commercial, are they registered in his name, her name, the owner's name, the son's name. Okay, but with the discussion we had earlier addressed that issue. Yes. That would give you additional key to the issue like that. And that's what I'm saying is the changes that he's made is going to help me have the teeth that I need in order to get him In violation. I have not been able to get him in violation Okay All right Thank you does that help you with Locations where maybe it's only two panel vans? Yes. We have the drive way. Yes. Depart the vans off the street. Yes. During the day, there's as many as eight or nine cars in the driveway again to keep them off the street, which I appreciate. But there's not nine different people living in the house. It's clear you know on any one time some of these locations have four cars maybe five cars but clearly not nine cars that they're coming they're loading up in these vans they're leaving and going to do their work. I mean you know I don't want to sit here and lead anybody to believe, you know, we're not supportive of somebody trying to have a small business, but it's where you cross the line and you're bringing people into a residential neighborhood and you've got multiple vans and you're doing all kinds of things that we're allowing are ordinances allow for you to get around getting yourself into trouble in other ways. And that's where the definition of commercial vehicle where Chief Rapoport had said that that's that was the loophole. That was the fact that they could put a white panel van in and say that if you ask someone do you use it for your business they're going to tell you know if it's registered him to a person personally. And it's really. We have a problem. know, we had a problem with identifying each one of those vehicles several locations in the city of Fairfax where they knew the loophole. They purposely went to DMV and registered them in those names. I have several on my list. The minute that this gets changed to only allow one commercial vehicle, but when, where do we draw our line? Do we draw our line where if it has to be in Freddie's landscaping to be considered commercial, like he said, if it looks completely normal on the outside, where are we going to draw our line? We have to be able to draw our line on when you say you're allowed to have one commercial vehicle on a lot, we have to be very specific on that, on how it's registered because I've tried to go after people like that and I have no teeth. Mr. Mayor. I'm sorry. If I could before we, I think that a common we're getting at is what we discussed earlier close that loophole. I think the answer is yes. Yes, we're talking about getting rid of that whole commercial discussion when it comes to panel ads. Okay, and so talking about getting rid of that whole commercial discussion when it comes to panel hands. Okay, and so that would be incorporated in the changes we'll see next Tuesday that we're going to start through the process. Yes. Okay. Was that? Well, on that specific issue, but I mean, the broader issue of enforcement, some of these changes are going to be great. They'll clearly give you the teeth that you need. But there are other things that we see on a regular basis, vehicles that are parked in the driveway that are visible from the street that don't have an inspection sticker. Or it has an inspection sticker that is clearly expired from a couple of years ago. It has a, that's a city personal property tax sticker. It has a city sticker or an inspection sticker that maybe has expired it might not have tags on it I mean what's the you know it used to be we couldn't go on the person's property sheriff's department could but the city police department couldn't go on the property I think we can now is that correct chief if you can see it on the property. I think we can now, is that correct chief, if you can see it from the road? Yeah, if you can see a violation, I mean, I think the state code changed a year or two ago to kind of, to broaden what was permissible to have on your property. And now you can have a vehicle that you're, if you're actively restoring one vehicle, you can have another kind of scrap vehicle that you're salvaging parts off of you can have a vehicle that's concealed by a privacy fence or some other kind of screening so the legislature actually relax the standards if you will you someone argued just trying to be accommodated to people who had hobbies and things involving vehicles but if we can see the violation will go on and we'll inspect it. For an unoperable vehicle, the issue is unoperable, not registered, inspect it all that. It's can you start the vehicle? Is it a functioning vehicle? Or if you're working on the vehicle and you're restoring it, it doesn't have to have, it doesn't have to have a current inspection, things like that. So, I mean, we're pretty aggressive. I think you saw in the stats earlier, we've probably done double this year, what we did last year. We're pretty aggressive about it. How long before we get some of these changes enacted before we can begin to see more of a difference? You know different you know the house on University Drive and I won't give you an address, but it's been on under construction for three years four years I mean vehicles parked out front No grass at all dump trucks parked on the yard Vehicles parked without tag had one day have tags, next day they don't have tags. How long before we can begin? That's what's frustrating, not just us, but that's frustrating if you have to live next to it. How long before we can begin to see a visible difference? Well, the ones that are under construction as I said we now have the authority to put a three-year time limit on the permit. There is some question as to whether we can apply that to permits that were already in existence. The general consensus is that we can begin the three-year time limit either when the permit is issued if it was after May or beginning with May of this year, which was when it was allowed. Is that something new? Yes. Oh, that's right. That's the one we're asking. We never have it. We've never have it. It's dialogue for multiple years and we had an offsite with Senator and a couple of other folks over the years and we couldn't find a way to do it. But that's something new. Well, that is new. It was part of- Deperman, you start construction, whether you're owner occupied or construction company. Yes. You have three years to finish it. You have three years to finish it as I said. That was a city initiative. The problem with it is that there really is no tool to use at the end of the three years. That's the next. It doesn't really specify what we're going to do with them at the end of the three years. So. Is that allow us to make it up ourselves? I don't know. I don't know. It was, I said, right to decide what we're doing for years, or is that a state? We're going to be in enrichment discussing that next week. And my proposal would be to say that in complete construction is one of the factors that you can consider in declaring something to be blighted. And then we would have to use the blight abatement tool which under that we tell the owner that they have 30 days to provide us with their plan to cure the blight. It doesn't necessarily mean that we demolish the house. It means that the owner has 30 days to get respond with a plan. The plan may be that over the next two months they'll complete the work or some whatever we determine. We evaluate their plan and decide what's reasonable with their plan. If they don't provide a plan, then we provide a plan and we take that plan to the Planning Commission and City Council and carry it out. That can be demolition, which we have done or it can be we finish the work and assess the lien against the property. But it is a new tool. I'll give you another example. We did a burn exercise on the house at the corner of, I think, first and walnut, or maybe a second and walnut. That house, his two houses next to it, you know, pour water and they grow kind of houses, I guess, whatever you call prefabs that they're putting in, you know, the house on the corner, you know, we secure it, we spray paint on the side of the house that it's secure, you put boards all over it. Well now it's blighted. How long do the residents have to look at that kind of stuff? I mean, we, we, it was a house that at least had windows in and had a door on it. Yeah, okay, it was a little unsightly as they were doing some construction. But now it looks worse as a result of what we've done. But yet, nothing's happening with it because the owner is supposedly waiting for some check from somewhere to have the money to be able to take the house down. Why don't we burn it down to the ground and then at least you don't have a ugly building sitting there? Well, I do agree with you. We actually did not burn in that house. We did use it for training over the summer in the spring. I believe it was for some of our new hires. Subsequently, it was normally when we do that. And if we're going to do that to a house, we want to have some assurance that the owners ready to take it down right away. In that case, what we did to the house was not as extensive. I believe Fairfax counties's urban search and rescue team came and used the house after that. And they're the ones that put the markings on the outside of it because I don't believe those are our markings. I mean, don't get me wrong. It's a great program. But any time I've seen you do it, the houses come down within two weeks after the time that you've done, and typically after you've done an exercise. I mean that's just there's you know example after example I mean the house on cedar that we tore down the the front house and they left a little shack in the back and it's been overgrown and somebody this weekend or within the last several days put so much trash out on the street there's actually one lane closed and you have to go way out around onto the other side. I don't know if that's the owner that did that or it was our contractor that did that. That's our contractor that did that. And the brush was picked up this afternoon. So we left it there and so we paid to remove it. We're going back against these people. I mean, that's probably two truckloads worth of stuff that was sitting in. They took about two-thirds of it this afternoon, which was one full thrust truck load. But that was an enforcement action. We had posted the property and said it needed to be cleaned up. We had our contractor go and do it. When the 10 days expired, he did it over the weekend and the city crews picked it up today. The building in the back, at the time that we demolished the house in the front, the building in the back was in violation of the zoning ordinance, but it was not deteriorated to the point that we could declare it to be blighted. About 15 to 20 days ago, I drafted and the City Manager signed the letter declaring that to be preliminary. A preliminary determination of light that's been sent to the owner. We have not had the response yet. So in about 10 days, we will, if we don't hear from him, we will be developing a plan which will include demolishing that one. Okay, I guess it just seems like we've got to come up with a plan that keeps the residents in the loop as to what's going on with the property. I mean some kind of communication, I mean I don't know how many people knew what was going on around that site over the last several days. I knew I couldn't tell the difference whether it was City Cruise or it was the owner, he finally found him and got the family to do something or it was a contractor and the contractor left stuff behind for the city to clean up which happens on a fairly regular basis. It seems like we need to do some better job of being able to communicate with the neighbors immediately around that property to let them know the status of it. And we need to be more proactive on some of these things to keep them moving along. That's great. The House is going on first street. Thank God. That's about time. We let the neighborhood know the House is going. I know the House is going. But I mean, if we follow that, then made sure everything is satisfactory to the neighbors around there I mean that's my point It's getting in there needs to be an end where we go back and we do the follow-up to make sure that people know What's been done and what's going on and if changes need to be made to prevent it from happening again that we're doing Those type of activities. That's one of the things I think this missing well the house on first streets been gone for over a week and we did work with the contractor to get that done. And as I said, in most cases, we really do try to schedule our training activities so that we know that the building is coming down very soon after that. The property on the cedar that you were speaking of, it's been a long-term problem and I know that my inspector has been in continuous communication with several of the neighbors of that house in that process. I don't mean to just pick on two properties. I mean, I could probably walk you through any neighborhood in the city and show you a house in different areas that have been a concern. And I know you're not, I don't mean to apply, you're not doing a job. I know you are, but it's very frustrating when we see it, when neighbors see it, and it just looks like nothing's happening. And you see a notice posted on the door and two weeks later, another notice is posted on the door, but the grass isn't cut. Papers pile up. I mean, that affects curb appeal for a lot of people, and it sends a signal to people in the rest of the neighborhood and people that drive by. And I just, I mean, that's everything we tried to deal with when we created the libelable task force, and we looked at all these different issues to affect how much of your yard can be put into asphalt, so you're not parking cars all over at the grass ordinances, everything that we've done, it just seems like we've slid backwards here over the last several years and it's frustrating. So Mr. For commercial vehicles to so I can point that just a second, or not commercial vehicles vehicles. If a car is in a driveway and I'll take it from a different angle, when and it's not been moved in a year, months, let's say months. Certainly if it doesn't have city stickers, even if it's in a driveway, then it's quote, falls into the category of a junk vehicle, is that correct? I don't believe so. Yeah, I don't. I can't question. You have a van with flat tires and hasn't moved in years and has expired everything. But if it's I don't believe a driveway. I don't believe this. I don't believe the city sticker is a factor in operability. Yeah, the key factor is operability. Can the vehicle be started and moved? If you can start it and move it afoot, then it's probably not going to be covered by the statute. Because the statute is there to attack inoperable junk vehicles on a piece of property. And that's the legislative construct that the legislature came up with as it focuses on operability, not licensing, sticker, status kind of thing. Okay. I was around when we did the junk vehicle in the 80s and I got tell you, that's a different interpretation than I thought we were getting. I mean, if there is a vehicle seen by the street, I guess you're saying if it's got flat tires, then we might have an angle at it. But if the tires got air in it, and it has no city permits, no license plate that's expired, any safety inspection. It looks terrible. It clearly quote is a junk vehicle that just storing on the property. We're saying if they can get in it, turn it on, move it, even though it's never been moved for ages, then we wouldn't have any enforcement over. I'd have to go back and I can't quote you verse in scripture and on exactly what the requirements are. I'm just saying the best of my recollection is it's generally focused on operability and that's distinguished from what's on your property from what's on the street that what's on the street is almost the exact opposite. Is the street to 72 hours and has- And tags and inspection and I mean, it's got to have all the sticker stuff to be on the street. But if it's out of gas and it hasn't been moved in two weeks, the statute doesn't look at that. It just looks at is it properly registered in license and all that. And if it's on your property, it flips the other way around. And as I said, that was even broadened in the last year or two. You can now have a vehicle that's clearly junk on your property. And you can say, you know what, I restore old MGs. And that one over there, this junk I'm just cannibalizing that for parts and as long as you're actively doing that you can have that piece of junk on your property too. I thought we changed that. We had this big huge knockdown dragout. Somewhere since I've been back on the council and a very prominent citizen who happened to live in the Westmore community went ballistic because you could not repair vehicles on your property. You're saying the state somehow, since we passed that, threw it out? I have the same recollection you do that we made some changes in the last ten years. I'm going to tell you we did. Yeah, so we'll look at it. Well, neither of us have a committed to memory. Well, but I'll just say this is exactly the problem. We know that problem exists, but even our 18 here doesn't know the right enforcement much less the people who go out into the field. That's a problem. And I guess part of the spirit of this dialogue is to refocus on the issue. And if anybody didn't think the thing that I just described is not a problem in the city, give me an hour of your time and I'll drive you all over the city and I can find five in any given community without even trying. Well, in defense of my folks, Mr. Mayor, I think that don't impose my limitations on them. The people that do this every day, if they were sitting here, they could tell you specifically what it says because they're very good at it and every complaint we get we investigate and they apply the law very strictly to it. My limitation is I can't relate it to you as well as they can so they're doing the job. Here's what I think we need to do on the junk vehicles get an interpretation of exactly what it is so we understand it as well as opposed to the people out in the field who can understand it. Again, what I'm trying to figure out is if the examples that I can show you are allowed, then we got a problem with our ordinances that we need to tighten up if we can and the state will allow us. And that's the frustrating part for us as we can't figure out if there's a loophole that allows it, or if it's a lack of enforcement, and in the community, if they talk to three different people on the city staff, they may very well get three different answers. And that's the frustration that gets built up a lot. So let's just check out. What this really all comes back down to is enforcement. And here's my take, and this is no offense to anyone person or anyone group of people. We have one zoning enforcement person who works their soul off and gives us every ounce of energy. Any one employee can give us, but there's one. And we've gotten, in some cases, we've got the police department that are responsible for enforcement and we know that's a challenge staffing situation with no immediate solution in sight. We have this list where there's five different numbers to call depending on what the ordinance is in the laundry list of things that we talked about, one of the things that you, in that list that have enacted is that you got department heads kind of doing a dual role and things like that. My sense is we need to re-energize that whole process. I can tell you if there's a violation you see on the weekend and I've been involved in the inner, the inside the beltway team for a long time. I wouldn't begin to know who to call. Typically, all the fault if it's really bad and call you as the city manager, but that's not necessarily the answer either. And I, I saw always the answer. Good answer. Good answer. But, but the system has to be bigger than that and it has to be broader than that and you know whether it's political signs or commercial banners or advertising that if you know if our one employee is on duty that weekend it probably gets addressed but if that one employees not on duty police department can drive by it public works can drive by it I can drive by it, I can drive by it, other people can drive by it, but we're one staff person deep, unless I miss something, we've identified this as a huge priority with no money to address it. And so I guess what I would challenge is are there creative ways to expand that team, to bring in other people, do we need to take more frequent community bus trips like we did that was referenced on the we did it again not that long ago a couple years ago. I think is the last time we did it. I know we did it during the level of task force. I can't remember why we did it, but I can tell you my frustration and I know my colleague shared is there's examples that we see weekend and week out, month in and month out. We think it's in violation. We're not sure it's in violation. And the process just gets mired down and then there's either a reaction or an overreaction, but there's no steady baseline. And I don't have the answer to it as we sit here. I don't know if staff has the answer to it, but we have very limited resources to do a very big job. Is there a way short of more staff, which that may be the only answer, and that's certainly fair, but is there a way to expand the disciples so that it's more than one person or multiple people who already have 10 other job descriptions? And this is way down the list of priorities. Is that rhetorical? You know, that's rhetorical, but it's actually, whether we have the answer denied, it's an answer, I think is desperately needed. I mean, we try to approach things interdisciplinar-in an interdisciplinary fashion because we know one department can't do it all. And all of these folks work pretty well, trying to back each other up and, you know, synergize whatever our efforts are. I know it's frustrating in the community. I think part of our problem is that some of these issues are so complicated. I mean, just in this discussion, somebody watching this on TV, heads got to be spinning about all the definitions and all the little hoops that the city has to go through to get. They don't have to go. They don't watch TV to be confused. This whole bias is I have a feeling. I mean I understand what you're saying. And so our efforts to kind of communicate how to get a whole of a problem is so complicated. I think it gets lost in transmission. And so several stories do get out there on the street about what is and what isn't legal. And I think though to the person on the staff, we're willing to do whatever it takes, to make sure that this is perceived as an effective program. I think the thing was most striking to me getting out in the streets over the last couple months is what I see is where there's a pocket of it that starts to expand. If there's one rental property that's really treated poorly, then the next house falls that way and the next house falls that way. the next house falls that way. And suddenly you have a whole section. And I can show you one, two, and three different examples in the green acre community alone, where that has to be what's happening. We're finally the traditional families give up, they sell their property, another investor buys it or the same investor that now has two or three in the block. And what was one isolated problem now becomes multiple problems. And I know it's difficult. I don't know how to do it, but I view this as a fight for the heart and soul of the future of our residential communities. And I don't know how to dress it without giving you tools. I know we don't have a lot of money to give you tools. And so the question is, is there something in between that would be creative that would give us those tools? As I'm sitting here thinking and we've all given examples. I'm warning if the morning of September, whatever the date was the 27th where we're already. Devoting most of the day to it, could we get back in one of the city vehicles and all go as a team and just try to all come up with examples. And again, I don't want to be critical, but my issue is I just want to know where there's a loophole or not versus, I don't know if I'm communicating it, but I can't figure out if it's an enforcement problem or lack of loophole without showing an example and letting the folks that have probably been there 50 times, explain why they can't do what they're doing summer to the discussion on the dialogue that we just had, where we as policy makers can try to give more tools in the toolbox, but I just give this sense and I think its evidence is doubling. I don't think it's foreclosures. foreclosures is a fairly new phenomenon. In the last six months, we've got 30, which is pretty small percentage. Certainly if you live next to one of those 30, could be a big deal. I don't think that's what's driving the doubling of complaints in the last six months. I just think our neighborhoods are changing and we may not be on top of it. Mr. Mayor, I think the answer is certainly a little bit of all of those. After the last bus trip that I was on is when we started the code enforcement team because we recognized that kind of a lack of synergy was one of the issues. And I think that was effective in quickly resolving most of the places that were identified on that trip. And then the outcome or the outgrowth, I should say, the outgrowth of that initial experience was we realized that there were some loopholes and submit efficiencies in a way we did things. And I think you've heard Chief Wilson describe some of the corrections that were made following that, trying to, you know, it was taking us, it was taking us almost three months to get a law and cut back three or four years ago. I mean, we've now substantially shortened that because of internal processes in a way we work together. And we've also looked at with the City Attorney sharing some of those joint enforcement things. And what we found that some of those can be shared, but there's some of those that can't be shared. There's statutory authority things so that if we have a lack of police officers, we can't just make somebody in parks and rec at police officer on the weekends. And if there's a lack of zoning enforcement capability, we can't just make a police officer a zoning. It's a statutorily appointed position. And so we have struggled to where those limitations occurred to kind of reprioritize. So if a complaint comes into the code enforcement team, but Trish is the only one that can deal with it, she sometimes has to shuffle her priorities because she's the only one that can deal with it. As much as I might have three police officers that are available to go out and do it, they don't have the authority to do it. She's the only one or Chief Wilson's building inspector is the only person that has the authority to do that. And so at some point, you run up against all those summer loopholes that we've tried to close, some are the complaint process, but some truly are just limitations and resources and we've tried to close some art, you know, some are the complaint process, but some truly are just limitations and resources, and we've tried our best to manage them. And I certainly appreciate that. I would just suggest there's a difference between research and enforcement, where maybe there's other people with more resources that can do the research versus now finally said, yet we think there's a violation. Now we've got to send a police officer out to write the ticket. And I think there's some room in between. But I'll give you a great example, which is part of the awareness as I started to think through this whole issue. Fourth of July, Mr. Assistant, you and I had a discussion with that. Small example, small issue, but I'll, I think there's room to expand it. Political parties had put signs up and down the route 50 quarter, Fourth of July night. And it was a Thursday night, I think. I remember I may have been in Friday night, I don't know. And every intersection, there was a police officer, direct in traffic, and there was a public works person with their truck with the little cones that they were putting out and every intersection up and down route 50 from Fairfax High School to 123. Four days later, every one of those signs were still there. And that was stimulated discussion with Mr. Sissenis. If we've got this one for all and anybody can pick up signs, honestly, at every intersection there was a team of police, and in every one of those intersections there were public works, as I went right up from Fairfax High School all the way to Chamber of Drove, but four days later because it was a four day weekend, those signs were there Monday morning. That to me is a lack of what I'm talking about, which is just anybody could have done that. And it wasn't just that weak. And there was, I don't even remember what it was, maybe it was fall festival or whatever. Small thing, but I guess that's why I said I think we just need to re-envocus the energy and explain to new people as they come on that they can do that and let the word go out. We know there's going to be weekends with problems or if there's somebody who's clearly violating the sign ordinance on the weekends or the blue ordinance on the weekends, I'm guessing more than one person could stop by who says I'm with the city, you can't do that. Short of writing a maticate and still get the same in result. I'm guessing in many cases, I sure would be worth trying. It's frustrating that I can't do it. We can't do it even though we're seeing it. We got to pick up the phone and call somebody who can do it. And if it's only a police officer, or I can't get a police officer without going through the number or it's only zoning but they're not working that weekend that there's not a bigger team that could do those kind of things. I think there is. It's certainly in this list of things. I just think we've lost some of the focus and energy to do it. We have probably beat this discussion pretty good here. I think, and again, thank you very much for the work you did on the ordinance changes to tighten it up. Certainly, I think there's more tools in the toolbox once we do this. I would like to suggest that maybe that morning, since we're dedicating the whole morning to do it seven o'clock kind of a deal deal and Mr. Siss can get a bus. And when we're done at nine o'clock, we have our 10 o'clock, whatever, back it up from whatever our first event is. So we have two hours to do it. And those that can make it great and those that can. I think we've all dedicated that day to it anyway. That might be a chance in the near future, just sort of get answers to some of our issues that we don't understand why they're not enforceable. Okay? Thank you. Appreciate it. We are now moving on to our last item, which is an update on the Blenheim Interface Center. Why don't we take a five minute break? We just lost half the council. We'll just take a five minute break, Mr. Assistant, and then we'll come right back. Problem. Mm, try it. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go home. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna go back to the place where I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do to the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do it. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to do it. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go music I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to go to the We are missing two. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to do it. We're back on TV. We're now down to our last item, which is a discussion of the status of Blinem Interpretive Center. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Before we really get into the details of the discussion, Dr. Jones, I'm sorry. Martin, Dr. Martin. You're thinking of our guests coming up. Yeah. As asked to do a five or six slide advertisement for the to bring you up to date on the construction and tell you a little bit about what's going to happen about the opening of the facility. And okay, I would just ask that the average time to be short. I'll ever get on re members of council. ed in 30 at night or whatever it is. So understood. Go through those. I mean, I'd get to the big issue, which is the purpose as opposed to the commercial, but it is. The visuals actually relate to some of the issues that we'll be discussing. And I'd like to recognize the store at Fairfax City Inc. who was instrumental in the vision along with City Council in the conception design and development of the whole. Okay, we're getting to the commercial project. And their president David Pumphrey is here and also past president and current chair of the Blenheim committee. Miss Hildi Carney is also here and I wanted to recognize them. We have a proposed grand opening of October 25th, that's in eight weeks. The image on your screen is our new interpretive center on the side. It's a very simple building, but ingeniously designed. The construction schedule is about a 14-month schedule that started last winter, and on the slide on the left you can see how close we are to the neighbors. Uh, and the image on the right, the vista toward the house, I will show you another image of that, that is critical to the design. And these are as the walls went up this past winter. The roofing is a key element of this building. Our architect is Glawi and Holmes out of Richmond, Virginia. They're award-winning architectural firm. They were the reason that we chose the design team and in conjunction with the Blenham Committee, one of the key aspects of this building is a glass roof this reception area in exterior sighting. And that was Glauven Holmes' idea. And you can see the unification of the indoor and outdoor. You can see the trees through the roof. The other very important vista from this reception area is toward the house. The image that I showed you earlier with the walls going up, you can see directly the house as you can from the multipurpose room, which we'll show you shortly. This is a really key design concept. You see the same concept currently at other state of the art facilities like Mount Vernon. If you've entered the Mount Vernon and interpret the new interpretive center, you see an expansive glass overlooking the site. And this building frames the interior of the site. It actually looks across to grandma's cottage and to the house in a triangular manner. And we're very proud of this building and gloving homes. We think it's a candidate for some award possibilities in its class. The roof system in both the multipurpose room on the right and the exhibit gallery on the left. Those are the two parts of the building on either side of the reception area are very similar to the new library building and they are natural exposed timbers almost identical to the current library. And the multipurpose room, which you see on the right is 920 square feet. The total building is about 3,809 square feet. Multi-purpose room has an occupancy capacity of 68 and the building total 138. So last image, we have a planned proposed grand opening for eight weeks from now. Open house included 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and one week later we have our first fundraiser. Dr. James Roberts in junior professor Madras at Virginia Tech author of numerous award winning books including a 900 page biography of Stonewall Jackson, which has one eight national awards will be speaking. I'll note that. This is not what we're here for tonight. I'll do respect, send us an email on that. Okay. I mean, we're here to talk about shortfall and funding period. That was going to be real short. That was it. I didn't know we'd get to it at the end. So that was a revenue producing. Chris why don't you let me use the topic. We had a construction contract on this job. Unfortunately, like every other project, capital project we've done in the city for the last number of years, things arose during the construction process that had to be done, which has driven our cost higher than what the amount of money that we had. However, with this project, we are lower, both from a percentage and a dollar cost, than we are on any other project that's been built. And a vast doctor, Martin, to identify savings in his department. He's done that to the tune of some $70,000. The remaining amount is, I don't like to say it's modest, but it's not a great deal of money considering the sums we deal with about $79,000 is the remaining. We're going to need that to complete the project and we recommend that for your approval. That's it. men that for your approval. That's it. So the list of walk us through the summary of it. If you'll look. Go ahead. On the reverse of the cover page, the summary is the contractor has additional billings of some $94,000. The design architect contract is over by about 16,000. Soils and materials testing that was not part of the original contract was 25,000. There was a utility issues on the front part of the property that was not identified as a problem early on. Virginia Power for 12,000 and there was some interior wiring that needs to be done. So that's 148,000. The savings are identified and the lower part of the page there. And then on the following page is a detail of just that first $94,000, which breaks down even further the amounts that have caused that cost to be exceeded. These are all monies that have already been spent? Yes. I mean, just explain to me the process for those of us who have built buildings, you see when somebody is going to go over their contracted deal, they come to you before they do it, and they say we want to spend $33,390 for to remove the dairy barn foundation and soil replacement. Is that okay? And then somebody sits and says, it is or yes it is. And I think in discussion with my colleagues, part of the frustration is this is all after the fact. When we were doing the police department, when you got overages and we sat down and we looked at them all before they were ever built for the most part and knew them up front and either said yes or no. We're now being asked to sign off on something that quite frankly while we can all make whatever comments we want. They've already been expended. Well, some of these items, I would say that that's true. Some of the other projects that we've done, we've approved overages as we've gone through them and we've brought them to you at the end of the contract. The council did participate in some of these decisions, not all, driving some of these additional costs. Which ones did we participate in? The trees. Chris, which one was the, we redesigned the whole project. It was originally going to be a lot larger and we had to downsize it that that drove additional design fees. When we had the discussion to downsize it and to redesign it and all the things we did was the amount at the end of that discussion $2.3 million $69,000. That's where we were and and quite frankly I remember a number that was not just a little bit less than that. It was substantially less than that. But obviously, I'm all wet in terms of my memory. But I don't remember it being a $2 million building. I thought it was a million dollar building. But... Well, it was the entire site development cost plus the building. I mean, we're... We had to do a lot of things over there. Okay, but that was part of our discussions when we were messing around with 500 square feet of something and whether to add it or not add it and I thought that was a contract. The $2.6 million or whatever the end point three. And I would say that the site work. The site work utilities, I would estimate roughly half, although we got a lump, some bid on that amount, but the building was not estimated at two million. It that included all the site work and utilities, roadways, et cetera. You can all that was part of the original discussion. Yes. Yes. Mr. Greenfield. I'm not trying to nitpick here, but it says change exhibit room, window sizes, add window screens, electrical change fixtures, to accommodate design changes. This is something that's happened recently. Windows weren't put in correctly? The windows design lies conflicted with the exhibition design of using the interior wall space the size was changed slightly and screens were not included in the budget. That was that issue. I mean, that's $21,000 of our fault or their fault. 2021, let's go. Well, 4700 and I'm just a little less, a little more than 21. But the two items that change exhibit and then the electrical, those are just two items. Those are things that we missed or things that they did incorrectly. Those were things that we added or changed as a result of exhibition design. The who and how they added it. I mean, again, the frustration is we're being asked to approve $72,000 or whatever $94,000 of changes that change the exhibit area to change the more power to do with no discussion and now doing it retroactively. And I think that's where we're trying to get just to understand how, you know, my frustration is a year ago this time we sat with the community and said we're going to add in trees and if it can't be done before winter we're going to straighten out the road appearance of the thing and that was going to be our first priority we spent a lot of time in a lot of energy in the community and the front of this building from the street presence looks lousy there were were never trees planted. There's huge stormwater drainage pipes that have been sitting on the property that are visible from the street. So I've got a lot of frustration over what I think we committed to the community of Yerga that we never did. That doesn't necessarily have to do with the $94,000, but I'm trying to summarize what I'm hearing, I think, an individual member's counsel to get to this. The bottom line is we're probably wasting a lot of time and energy because these monies have already been spent. But now back during the budget discussions, we did surface the issue that we were over on the contract. Walk us through that, Chris. When we signed the contract, we did not allow for a contingency and the contingency is typically 5 to 10 percent. It could be more. I think you heard earlier 5% was budgeted for the community center. When we signed the contract we did not allow for a contingency for this project. And that was in our discussions of cost. Did we allow for a contingency at the council level? No sir, in our initial discussions we cut that out in order to bring the total cost of the project. Council did or the committee on advisers on your own cut it out. In the discussion with the council, because this was all at the same time we were building city halls and schools and very detailed discussion on contingencies, you're saying that during this discussion with the Council, when we were talking about what this project is going to cost us, we knowingly cut out all contingencies at the Council level, and that was part of our dialogue. It's in the master plan, the 2003 master plan, and the reason was to get the cost down to something we thought we could do. And we meaning the Council on that dialogue, not, not staff and others. Mayor, I can't give you the details. It was so long ago. I know we went. Uncle, the project was designed in 2003. We waited four years to build it. We didn't get, we didn't have updated construction costs. We built as much building as money we had. And we tried to get squeeze it in without a contingency. We thought we could get by without one. We thought we could get by without one and we can't always. Okay, so where we are is it we have to allocate what's the amount? Is it the 72,000? There will be a budget. Seven of our appropriation resolution. The next meeting I assume. And whenever. I mean, we don't have to do it. We'll try to find, we can try to find other cuts. If that's what I think the thing is frustrating and spirit of all of the budget discussions were we're pouring over pennies and dimes and $3 million shortfalls. Here's a fairly substantial one that just kind of got laid on us here. And we didn't really have any feedback or prior knowledge and boom. Here's $72,000 request and no, by the way, it's already been spent. I think that's the frustration you're probably hearing for the discussions I've been. Mr. Drummond. Yeah, let me echo the mayor's comments in terms of sort of my personal sentiments. I guess where I'm frustrated is, let me go, let me say first off, I am very supportive of HFCI and his short resources department, and someone who can transfer family back days back to Jamestown. I certainly appreciate history. But we just saw this presentation before zoning about how we need more enforcement tools. It's about $90,000 a year to fund an additional zoning officer with a vehicle. $90,000. That to me, the other respect is more priority to do is to look at the other options. The other thing that I want to do is to look at the other options. The other thing that I want to do is to look at the other options. The other thing that I want to do is to look at the other options. The other thing that I want to do is to look at the other options. The other thing that I want to look at the other options. The appropriate funds. I think we need to look at either finding more private resources, either cutting future resources as alone. Other matters that we can take, because as a priority, I cannot in good conscience support this while we're asking our police department and our fire department to make cuts. Because the number one duty is of council is to protect the city and provide the resources for our police fire department and a certain wood neighborhood. So this is not against this statement is I'm making is not one that's made lightly. I've given a lot of thought to it. I talked to a lot of people. The reality of it is these changes were made after the fact that it's $70,000 in the grants and even things. It's not a whole lot, but as Mr. Mayor said, we're pension pennies right now on the budget. So I would argue that we need to look at some other alternatives for us before we just write a check. And I think we might have, I correct if our moms are just in but do we have some time on this or do we have to figure out a solution you know by next week? No I think we can take some time and I'll be glad to bring other alternatives before you. I understand that they're always competing priorities and times like this before you. I understand that they're always competing priorities in times like this and I was present for the work sessions that were held as a private citizen. There was an intense desire on the part of the council to keep this project to the original dollar amount that had been provided by the consultant. What happened was that there was a delay on the approval by the council and in those intervening months, if not years, cost raw materials went up significantly and the contingency plan was not affordable at the time the contract was let. I do think, I understand the frustration, I understand the frustration that everybody shares about this and if this hindsight is always 2020, if this project had been started earlier and completed on an earlier schedule, probably wouldn't be in this situation. But every project, every capital project that I've witnessed in the city in the last few years has had a difference between the initial estimate and what it turned out to be. I mean, high school is $8 million. It does happen. It doesn't mean that there's necessarily been poor project management. 3.9% on a project of this magnitude is probably not that significant. I understand the timing of this. I also would note that HFCI has already contributed $68,000 to the project some more. I appreciate the City Manager's comments that he's gonna continue to look at this and I would welcome his input on that. However, I do think that once the project is finished, I think it will be a significant addition to the city's profile and programs and it should not be viewed as something that was done at the exclusion of public safety or public services of any kind. The Budget Committee has not come to any conclusions yet as to its recommendations and I believe that we'll be able to resolve both this issue and our current budget challenges in a way that Moves the city forward in all of its programs I'm just going to respond to that by just simply saying I don't take exception to anything you said. But if we waited four years to let the contract and every one of those projects you talked about whether it was linear or Fairfax High School, before we dug one ounce of dirt we knew what the overaches were going to be. We had revised contracts whether they were delayed or not. In this case, it seems to me if it was as a result of waiting four years, which is what I heard you say in Mr. Assistant said earlier, then when we signed the contract, we should have had a discussion that said four years has gone by. I think we all would have gotten that and understood that and said this project, assuming what you're telling me if HFCI put $68,000 and we're really over $120,000 plus but between that contribution, now the shortfall is the $70,000 or $80,000. There is a difference. Maybe not be substantial when the end of the day when we're talking about whatever it is $72,000 but there is a difference in this process. And both of those schools, and at one time it was $12 million. We knew that before we started the projects. When we were over with police department, which we knew because we delayed it by a year, because we talked about moving it from city hall to the police department. And a year later, we were told what it was going to cost in those terms and in those dollars and we had a chance we cut out a roof, we cut out several things to make sure. So it's not as simple as boy we screwed up because we took four years to get this project. That's not what we're talking about here. These are projects after the contract was led where we either added things or learned things or changed things that we weren't aware of that now after the fact we're being asked to sort of bless and to authorize. That's my frustration. They all may be very worthwhile. It may make a better project. All of those are good concerns. We didn't have that opportunity to participate in the dialogue. We're asked now after the fact, not is it unfolded. That's my frustration, Mr. Rasmussen. I just wanted to say that, you know, we were very generous. We need to, hey, it just came on. You know, we've always been very generous with all of our projects, particularly the schools with giving contingencies to the contracts. And it was just really unrealistic for all of us, both staff and counsel, not to have put a contingency in here. Because if we'd have put merely a 3% contingency in here, we wouldn't be having this discussion tonight. It's down to 3% of the contract. And yes, everybody's right that we maybe should have known about it earlier, and maybe we could have taken some of these things out. But in the final analysis, I think we're all a little bit to blame for not throwing a contingency in there and being unrealistic and not doing that. Well, you're making the assumption the council took out the contingency. I haven't given that up yet. No, I can't imagine when we had this discussion that we wiped out the contingency and didn't understand that was gonna be a problem. I'm not saying that we wiped it out. I'm not sure who did, but we certainly were aware of it when we signed the contract or when we approved the contract. I guess I'd like to see that, but maybe. I don't know, Rob. Any other dialogue? This is a cross. I don't know if I can see that, but maybe. I don't know, Rob. Any other dialogue? Just a question. I just look forward to Mr. Sissons analysis of what options we may have opened to us. This is a lesson for us all to learn from. And I too am very frustrated that we're in a position where our backs are really to the wall. We, the money spent, we owe the contractor. We're going to have to dig it up from somewhere. The timing is terrible. And the timing is terrible. Anyway, Mr. Sisson, beyond just taking a draw on the general fund, what what do you where do you see this money coming from? Well that's why I'll get back to you. Okay. If you have any suggestions. I'll sleep on it. Thank you. We would, but it probably get a level and already three million dollars we're wrestling with, much less than other 72. That's the issue is this is bigger than this. This added to it. You know, it's sort of like when you know everything and it's in front of you, so you start planning for it and right out of left field comes an additional problem. We dealt with it when we found out on the county that we owed $1.2 million. We dealt with it on the schools and that's the frustrating part. Now this is an internal operation. We can't blame it on the county. We can't blame it on sales projections from the state. This is us. And this is right out of left field that this came from. And I think that's what the frustration here is. Well, it was my understanding that this, and I haven't gone back and looked at the table. It was my understanding that this did receive some discussion at the budget time where we did notify the council that we were over on this contract. Oh, yes, that was were over on this contract. Yes, that was clearly in the budget discussion. I thought it was 500,000 at the time. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought 78 was. Well, it was very nice. No, I don't think that's apples and apples. I think we said that if we were going to do the house and grandma's cottage, it would be over by half a million dollars. But there were elements of the existing work that we were over with as well. In Mr. Rivera from Marion, let me clarify one thing. I point it with discussion and starting this off, was that clearly this is gonna have to be funnier. I mean, everybody's been paid. We just gotta fund this thing thing the work has been done correct Well, we haven't we're we're in other words wrong today is what works been done or what hasn't been done right But what work hasn't been done or what work? Could we cut back? Anything we could cut back or have this work already been all of these items have been either Conmissioned or paid for. So the issue really is to this cross point and the one that we made before in starting discussion was what other alternatives are there besides the strong and the general point. I think it's a frustration that I personally go and just again we're asking the police department, the department to make cuts. We're having discussion with zoning. The reality of it is this is $72,000 if we had it somewhere else, I personally would prefer that we use it to get another zoning officer. But clearly that's not the option of when we're facing a $3 million deficit. So are there other options that we in the community can work together? I'll try to. Yeah, I know. I'm just saying, I think that's at, if I can speak from this cross to myself, that's what we're trying to come across too. What alternative is going to we have? And you guys are the math wizards. So, let's see what you can do. OK. I'm not sure exactly where we are, but I guess we're waiting back some additional information from the minister's system before we move forward. Okay, that's the last item. Work session to drive.